At a banquet dinner in honor of Adam Smith's 300th birthday I ended up sitting next to the local Head of the Chamber of Commerce of the Fife (the region that includes Smith's birth-place, Kirckaldy). She complained that despite the economic recession and unemployment there were still plenty of jobs that could not be filled. I suggested maybe her members should pay higher entry-level wages; she insisted that the difficulty was finding conscientious people in her depressed area. On her telling too many kids did not have the bourgeois virtues of steadily showing up on time, being dressed in representative fashion, and good manners to engage customers. We found some middle ground that the area needed better vocational training (the banquet was hosted at Adam Smith college).
I was reminded of this because recently, Marcus Arvan proposed the following sales-argument to recruit more philosophy majors:
The thing, though, is this: the assumption that seems most causally responsible for all of this -- the assumption by students and their parents that a philosophy major is a "bad deal" -- is patently false. Philosophy majors:
- Enjoy some of the highest salaries of all majors, higher in fact than most majors (e.g. business, nursing, etc) traditionally associated with jobs and industry,
- Have the best med-school-acceptance rate of all college majors, and
- Have some of the highest LSAT, GRE, and GMAT scores.
In short: we are useful, and we give students and parents what they want -- they just don't know it. If parents and students did know how useful a philosophy degree is, we just might be able to steer more students our way, have more majors, more donors, and more academic jobs.--Marcus Arvan
Jason Brennan, who teaches ethics, thinks this is unethical:
Though it's not Arvan's intent, he's defending what are rather straightforwardly bad business ethics practices here. Alas, I see this all too often among my philosophy colleagues. It's bad. They should feel bad about doing it. And they should stop....here's the rub--it's not okay to sell something by saying that it causes X unless you actually have good evidence that it causes X. It doesn't matter, even a bitty bit, that most philosophers sincerely believe studying philosophy makes people smart. They have a basic business ethics duty not to sell something unless they have sufficient evidence that this belief is right.
Now in fairness to Arvan, he never claims that "philosophy makes people smart" or that studying philosophy is causally efficacious in producing high test scores (salary, etc.) As Arvan puts it: "Causation is hard to pin down with all of this stuff. What we do have is some good statistics on our side, and -- or so I say -- good reasons to sell our discipline using them." (Brennan also cites this.) Brennan is adamant in response:
As I like to say in comparison, if pharmaceutical companies did this--if they sold drugs sincerely believing and claiming these drugs cured some diseases, but didn't actually have good evidence that the drugs cured the diseases--we'd say that drug companies were immoral. They wouldn't be guilty of lying, per se, but rather negligence in advertising. And that's what I see in droves among philosophy departments, among people who ought to know better.
I find myself in rare agreement with Brennan.
Even so, I wonder what would be wrong with just advertising the facts as such (with an ominous-sounding-disclaimer that correlation does not equal causation); one economic purpose of advertising is making information available. In some circles it might help the discipline to be more widely known as associated with a variety of success. Such association is not without dangers, of course; I am not very eager to have philosophy be understood as a kind of technocratic-epistemocratic union card (rather than, say, the party of humanity, justice, etc.). Moreover, such association might scare away all sorts of people who would find philosophy enriching, stimulating, even meaningful to their lives and situation. There is more to life and philosophy than high test-scores and a high income, after all. I take it that Brennan urges us to 'sell' philosophy properly. But I was a bit taken aback by Brennan's concluding thoughts.
The other problem with Arvan's response is that there is a significant empirical literature on this very question, on why certain majors earn more, on the relationship between IQ and earnings, on IQ and chosen major, and so on. The most charitable thing that I can say on his behalf from the literature is that picking a hard major signals to employers that you are smart and conscientious, and so can help you get a job. Beyond that, though, there is little evidence that it's really preparing you for the job or helping to make you smarter. (Google "transfer of learning," read the results, and weep.) So, we can't use the existing patterns to justifying trying to get more of the middling or dumb students to major in philosophy.
Right now, the people who major in philosophy tend to be conscientious and smart. Being conscientious and smart, they tend to be successful after college. That doesn't give unconscientious, not-so-smart students any reason to major in philosophy.
Let's leave aside the conceptual and empirical problems with the IQ literature. (I can heartily recommend Glymour on the Bell Curve; in addition one can doubt that 'smart' is a genuine kind-term.) Again, I find myself agreeing with Brennan! But I would hasten to add that what's good for the conscientious and smart may also be good for the conscientious as such. The emphasis on smart-ness may, in fact, make philosophy less-than-welcome to the conscientious as such (who are, in fact, very desirable to employers). Moreover, in the best educational settings students teach other inside and outside the class-room (I use electronic discussion boards to do so); so then it would be good for the conscientious to hang out with at least some smart folk (assuming -- for the sake of argument -- that studying philosophy is good as such).
Moreover, it might well be good for the conscientious and smart to hang with the conscientious and maybe slightly less smart. For, the very smart are prone to a whole bunch of biases that range from expert over-confidence to tacit biases that are hard to root out (among the too-confident). And, so, maybe as philosophers we should be less focused on smarts, and maybe more keen on the conscientious?
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