Usefully Bad Advice

I got some pretty bad advice recently regarding my dissertation.

It was from a peripheral reader, who I don’t think would mind my saying so here. =]

This reader thought my dissertation’s tone was too irreverent, in a way that was likely to turn off other readers. Instead of talking so much about assholes, why not write more about what Aristotle, Hobbes, and Nietzsche have to say about well-being and self-interest? Surely these important historical figures shaped the philosophical literature on well-being long before Derek Parfit (my primary foil) came along.

On one level: Fair enough. There’s definitely more scholarly historical work to be done in this area, and while you know I love Nietzsche, the more I learn about Aristotle and Hobbes, the more I appreciate how their real views are also much more nuanced and interesting than their simplified classroom versions, where Aristotle = The Golden Mean and Hobbes = The War of All Against All.

With that being said, I think this is bad advice for me.

But it’s usefully bad advice for me.

Before we try to get there, do we agree where we’re trying to go?

Most people’s advice is highly autobiographical. They are trying to tell you that they made this mistake, and they just wish they’d done X instead, or they experienced this success, and it’s all because of Y.

And if only they’d known Z sooner! Oh man, you have no idea.

When folks give you advice like this, the right thing to do is almost never to just throw it away or ignore it.

Game designers often say that when players complain about some aspect of the game, you should ignore their proposed fix (because they’re not game designers) so you can listen to their concerns (because they are players). They’re probably right that something feels off.

First, the platitudes: I am definitely aware that some academics confuse seriousness and importance, and wouldn’t like any version of a dissertation about assholes. And you can’t really outrun that. Some people won’t like what you’re doing, no matter what it is! There will always be haters, so all you can really do is try (as far as you can) to pick which ones.

But these are the shallow, more obvious lessons.

To go deeper, I need to consider where this advice is coming from.

And it’s true: If I want to be a scholarly Historian of Philosophical Thought, one whose thoughts are taken very Seriously indeed, adjusting my tone is great advice for becoming one!

If that were my goal, it really would be worth exhaustively reproducing what each Canonical Great Thinker has thought along the way. Maybe 400 footnotes engaging with the background literature really wouldn’t be enough—the footnotes would have to become the dissertation.

But what if I think the current state of the well-being literature is disastrously confused, and we need a pretty radical refresh?

Maybe now you can start to see how an irreverent, out-of-the-box approach might be an interesting strategy! Indeed, if the ideological assumptions I’m worried about really are deeply baked into the Canon, a harsh or even openly mocking tone can be a really useful tool to help us look at accepted truths again a bit more critically.

I try not to sound that aggressive in my dissertation.

But I did learn this trick from Nietzsche. =]

I don’t think my tone is generally turning philosophers off to my work. I’m conferencing and publishing at a very healthy rate. Each time I do give a talk or publish a paper, there always seems to be one hater who thinks that what I’m doing is fundamentally confused or dishonest or off-track, and that’s great! Write a real response paper with your name on it and we can go back and forth.

I’m reminded of Paul Feyerabend’s Preface to Against Method—there’s an irreverent philosopher if there ever was one—

In 1970 Imre Lakatos, one of the best friends I ever had, cornered me at a party. ‘Paul,’ he said, ‘you have such strange ideas. Why don’t you write them down? I shall write a reply, we publish the whole thing and I promise you — we shall have lots of fun.’ I liked the suggestion and started working.

I think the positive questions I get at Q+As, the great follow-ups at conference dinners, and even chats with my friends prove that many folks do appreciate how I’m trying to get at old questions in new ways. If I can do that in a more accessible or engaging tone, I can even try putting out more public-facing work (apparently career suicide until quite recently).

As a bioethicist, I might even be able to talk to medical doctors who have spent a comparable amount of time internalizing their own jargon- and norm-laden subspecialties, and have read about as much philosophy as I’ve studied anatomy.

So when I get the advice to tone it down, I shouldn’t just ignore it!

I should go, what kind of person would give that advice?

Do I want to be more like them, or not?

• If I do, that’s great! Let’s start doing more careful historical work for a narrower, more devoted audience.

• If I don’t, maybe I should lean into my irreverent, conversational tone even more. After all, it’s a powerful signal that I am NOT that other kind of philosopher, at least not right now!

What kind of philosopher am I? One just getting started! And in a relatively young and amorphous field—Bioethics—that seems so disjointed and confused, but also so open to novel interdisciplinary possibilities, that I really do have a lot of room to try new stuff out and see what happens.

So that’s what I’m gonna do for a while, and we’ll see how it goes. I’m drafting an eBook over the next couple weeks that I’m sure you’ll hear more about soon. And since it’s written for a non-academic audience, you’d better believe I’m trying to write something incisive but fun.

By repurposing usefully bad advice instead of letting it go to waste, I can gain a little more confidence and clarity about the kind of philosopher I am trying to be. And ‘incisive but fun’ is not a bad start...