158. SOCRATES WEPT - On Resisting The Unexamined Life

I had some interesting conversations with students this week about first principles. How, once you unpack the thing you are talking about you might realise that you no longer believe what you thought you did, or might even be having a different conversation entirely.

It was a series of student-direct philosophy lessons where they got to pick the subject. In the first one students wanted to discuss the ethics of banning obese children from being able to buy fast food. The argument given was that eating fast food is bad for your health, obesity is an indicator of bad health, habits form when you’re young, so already unhealthy young people should be prevented from eating more and more of this damaging junk food so the problem can be nipped in the bud before it becomes habit and the health risks manifest.

Immediately objections were raise.

Obesity, by itself, is not necessarily an indicator of poor health. It is also incredibly subjective. One person’s overweight or obese may be another person’s reasonable weight. Supposedly objective measurements, such as BMI, have been questioned by some, and, importantly, there are many other health problems which can be exacerbated by fast food that are not visible in the way that weight might be. If our principle is that we must protect people from the evils of fast food and poor nutritional health, why only the overweight? Why not the diabetic or the person with high blood pressure? In fact - isn’t junk food unhealthy for everyone? If the principle is that we must protect people from the evils of fast food and poor nutritional health, why not all people, not only young people, and only supposedly obese young people?

In fact - if the principle is that we must protect people from the evils of fast food and poor nutritional health, why stop at fast food? People eat fairly unhealthily at home too, without having to go to a fast food restaurant. Perhaps all unhealthy food should be banned for all people?

Eventually the conversation led to the realisation that the principle (that we must protect people from the evils of fast food and poor nutritional health) was not a principle that could be upheld without clashing against other principles (such as the principle that we have personal autonomy over what we choose to eat, or the principle that we can choose to risk our own health if we want to, or the principle that all people should be treated equally and certain groups shouldn’t be given burdens or restrictions not placed on others, etc.) And that each of these principles also raised further questions (what even is healthy food in a world with as much processed, preserved and mass produced food as we have? Should food just be seen as nutritional fuel or is there an aesthetic element that banning junk food is ignoring?) Philosophy, as I tell my students, is often about problematising our every day thinking. Unpicking and unpacking to reveal the hidden assumptions beneath the surface. We begin by thinking we want to ban a harmful product being sold to a group we believe it is harming the most and we end realising that we are all potentially being harmed and that we are only adding further disadvantage and harm to this already harmed group rather than protecting them.

This happened again later in the week with a class who wanted to discuss abolishing private schools. The arguments against such schools were unsurprising: private schools give unfair advantages to those who attend them nor afforded to those who don’t. These advantages are usually the result of already having financial advantages that allow parents to pay the fees, or at least certain social or cultural advantages that have allowed them to excel at entrance tests or achieve scholarships, etc. Furthermore, by attending the private school, those able and high achieving students who do well in such entrance tests are also taken out of the pool of students within the state school sector, depleting the overall quality of students in comprehensive schools and further giving advantage to those in the private sector.

The arguments are familiar, and were boiled down to an overarching principle of equality: private schools should be abolished because such schools lead to inequality in educational outcomes.

However, I ran a thought experiment with the class. I asked them to imagine a world without private schools, without grammar schools, without any opt-out and universal attendance within the state education system. “Would such a system lead to educational equality?” I asked.

Suddenly we realised that, so long as schooling in general was aimed at terminal examinations which are not designed for equal outcomes, that it would not lead to educational equality to abolish private schools because schools were not in the business of equality. Schools, aimed at examination success where the exams in question have grade boundaries made which ensure there is no 100% pass rate at the highest level and are specifically designed to differentiate and divide students into ranked grades of A*-U or 9-1so that they can be further unequally divided and differentiated within an unequal job market, are simply not intended to ensure equal opportunities for their students. At best, they ensure a level starting point from which inequality will be doled out, but even then the individual alchemy of student and teacher, time of day a lesson takes place, mood on the day, and a range of other x-factors are no guarantee of equality of education, and that is before we take into account the unequal family backgrounds, access to resources and so-called “cultural capital” each student brings to the table.

If our principle is one of equality we would not educate within the current system at all.

Which brings a further question of principle - is total equality desirable? Should our principle be one of equality?

Discussion then ensued about how some equalities were desirable while others weren’t. People liked the idea of being able to enjoy difference and uniqueness in their lives, but acknowledged that such inequality maybe shouldn’t happen around life’s necessities such as food, water, shelter, warmth…which then led to further thought of first principles: what defines one of life’s “necessities”?

Again: we thought we were discussing the abolition of private schools, but in the end we might have been discussing the need to abolish the entire kind of society we currently have and think of something utterly new.

Which, in its way, is a perfect metaphor for what good philosophical discussion can do: give us glimpses of something utterly new and hitherto unthought of that might be able to replace the unthinking norms we accept without examination.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

My new book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. If you liked this post and appreciate what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book.  Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com