Offended By Questions

What if we stopped pretending we already know everything?

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Kermocrates, deep in thought. Do questions give you ‘the ick’?

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So look, philosophers are people whose job it is to entertain the sorts of questions that might upset or unsettle people. ‘Can you be vegan and pro choice?’, they will ask one another. Meanwhile, if you asked someone eating an Impossible Burger at a pro-choice rally this question, you are likely to be punched in the face. I don’t want to ask ‘Can you be vegan and physically assault a philosopher asking you unsolicited questions?’ but you get where I’m going.

Asking philosophical questions is a different exercise to the sorts of questioning we do in other areas of life. In a philosophy context, it’s understood that entertaining a question or proposition — kicking it about or holding it in your hand to gauge its mass — is not at all the same as endorsing it. This is why a philosopher might ask “What constitutes a just war?” or “Should parents have the right to sell their children?” or “Do future generations have rights?” and then calmly go home and eat their dinner without anyone in the room getting upset or reporting them as being at risk of selling their children. In philosophy, a question is value neutral.

It would be really very strange if one philosopher were to respond to another with rage or distaste when asked ‘If you are stuck at the bottom of a well, and someone at the top shoves another (totally innocent) person down the well, are you morally justified in using the ray gun you happen to have in your pocket to vaporise that falling person in order to save your own life?’

While the vast majority of people will focus on the example when presented with this question, and judge the parameters of the thought experiment before attempting — usually — to wriggle out of it, philosophers understand that the example is not the point. It’s just a compelling and simple elucidation of the mechanism that lies beneath it. This isn’t a question about well diameters or ray gun engineering. It’s not a question about whether there happens to be a dirty old mattress conveniently sitting with you at the bottom of the well, or even better, a large trampoline. It’s a question about moral rights and moral duties. The example is not the point; it’s there to give that deeper question form, engaging stakes that will invest us in really considering the answer and, because life is short and the working day long, a little bit of flair. A background in academic philosophy can turn you into the person in the room who says things that feel controversial to the listener but not to you. Because if what you’re saying is logically sound then why would it upset anybody? That wouldn’t make any sense…

Philosopher Joseph Heath wrote a wonderfully interesting article on this on his Substack recently, in which he cites the very Robert Nozick thought experiment on wells and ray guns and moral duty above. Nozick writes about it in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Heath argues that the way philosophers engage logically in questions that would be emotionally volatile or considered automatically provocative in other contexts renders them vulnerable to cancellation in the wider world. He cites several examples in his article. On reading, I was reminded of New Zealand based philosopher Jamie Whyte, whose career in politics was destroyed back in 2014 after he was asked whether the state should intervene if siblings wanted to marry one another or conduct consensual sexual relationships.

This is precisely the sort of radioactive question philosophers casually think about without an automatic disgust reflex or a sudden urge to get themselves away from a politically unsavoury or dangerous topic as quickly as possible. They just consider the framework beneath the question rather than focusing on the narrative jacket its wearing. They think about the implications of the principle in question and how it might be considered with all these in mind.

Whyte responded that he didn’t think the state should intervene (though he also suggested it was so unlikely that siblings would want to marry one another as to be almost an irrelevant issue) and the result was horror. Chagrin. Very much a disgust reflex. Whyte was (incorrectly) interpreted as saying something insane like ‘incest is great and I fully endorse it. All siblings should marry one another!’

Yet his response wasn’t an endorsement of sibling marriage. Whyte clarified his reasoning by telling the New Zealand Herald "I don't think the state should intervene in consensual adult sex or marriage, but there are two very important elements here - consensual and adult… I wonder who does believe the state should intervene in consensual adult acts?"

He even added the human (non-philosopher) bit to address the disgust which would lead most of us to instinctively reject the question without even considering it — "I find it very distasteful. I don't know why anybody would do it but it's a question of principle about whether or not people ought to interfere with actions that do no harm to third parties just because they personally wouldn't do it."

There it is. Incest was the (very unsavoury) example. What the question was really about was a universal principle of when it is acceptable to intervene in the choices of others. None of this mattered to those who were horrified by Whyte’s response. He made it outside the context of a philosophy seminar and in the world of everyday discourse, where entertaining a question is presumed to be precisely the same as affirming it. We hear the question and we get what you might term ‘the ick’ so our inclination to think deliberatively disappears. We become solely reactive.

It can be challenging to ask questions — even less bizarre ones than that last example (and I must stress that the question was directed at Whyte in that instance - he did not march into the room and raise the topic). In everyday scenarios, we often trust reflexive disgust or discomfort. They serve important roles in our wellbeing and survival. Yesterday, I bit merrily into a slightly yellow pear that had been sitting in the kitchen until it got a bit too comfortable. My mouth was filled with a gush of slimy, powdery sludge. The odiferous, turning, on-the-cusp-of-fermenting flesh of the moribund pear was instantly interpreted by my brain as ‘BAD’! ‘Spit it out, you fool, lest we revisit the meal we ate four hours ago!’

These instincts serve us. I had an unsettling feeling about a Substack subscriber a couple of years back and ignored it. He had a habit of leaving slightly odd comments on articles. Nothing at all egregious — just a bit off. He had also sent a couple of emails and DMs that I didn’t answer. Nothing overt, but they had that tone many women will recognise — a suggestion of admiration for my work tinged with something like contempt. Sometimes online, a small minority of men will engage with me this way — ‘I like what you do but I need you to know that I’m smarter than you’. It’s a tone, an esoteric insinuation, a vibe. It seems irrelevant, like someone working out their historic relationship with their deceased father next to the desk I just happen to be working at. Generally, I’ll ignore it.

One morning, when I woke up to over ninety Instagram DMs that this guy had sent me through the night, things became less esoteric. I realised the importance of at least considering this sort of ‘something is off with this person’ instinct seriously. It can be incorrect, and it isn’t necessarily a revealed truth (though it may well be, especially when you chomp enthusiastically into a rotten pear) but it is input that can be valuable in the course of everyday living.

It’s a form of cognitive shortcutting — this can be be either assembling or misassembling patterns based on our experience and presumptions. So the signs of ‘weird dude being weird may constitute a threat’ might be incorrect (since not all weirdness constitutes a form of threat) or it may be correct (eg shouting drunk man in this pub is moving in a way which experience tells me suggests imminent physical aggression). There are scenarios when we don’t have time for the deeper and more involved thought process or the risk of giving someone the benefit of the doubt is much higher than the risk of incorrectly assuming they are some sort of threat. Sometimes you have to get yourself hence and think about it later.

There are many more scenarios where we do have time to think and it would help a lot to do it. Most scenarios, really, but we often rely on this instinctive composite form of pattern recognition as a substitute for active thought anyway. We can mistake a strong feeling for a rationally formed idea and those are very much not the same thing.

We often take cognitive shortcuts because thinking deliberatively is harder and more involved. Perhaps you intensely dislike a coworker because she reminds you of your mother-in-law, or take against your friend’s new boyfriend because he looks a bit like your cheating ex. I have an automatic aversion to very drunk people because I grew up with an alcoholic father. It is a distaste which I have to think into submission because I know that not every person who currently happens to be drunk has an alcohol problem and even if they do, it’s none of my business. I’m bringing my own prejudices — literally — to the party.

It’s useful to be aware of the cognitive shortcuts we do take and to focus on actively applying deliberative thought when it might enhance our decision-making and idea-forming process. I wrote about the differences between intuitive and deliberative thinking in some depth in my book, Some Of Our Parts, in the chapter on autism and neurodivergence. You can read that chapter here, if you’re curious.

Intuitive thinking happens much faster than deliberative thinking and tends to reflect normative biases — it outsources the hard stuff of coming to a conclusion through careful logical processing, instead relying on received knowledge which reproduces the thinking of those around us and doesn’t really challenge our preexisting assumptions. My small nephew, who dislikes broccoli with a seething intensity evoking Marlon Brando’s performance in Apocalypse Now, was virulently against peas for a long time based on the fact that they too are green. He was thinking intuitively but since he doesn’t talk I have given him an internal monologue:

“The green stuff I had before was unpleasant, therefore this green stuff will be unpleasant. So I will die on this hill. I’m not eating it. I will pretzel up in this high chair. I’ll scream! Do you think I won’t scream!? I’ll trash this place. I’ll ruin you all. I’ll do anything to keep from eating this pea!”

*opens his mouth to shriek, at which point his dad pops two peas in there*

*nephew, chewing* “… oh actually that’s quite nice.”

While philosophers are just as guilty of engaging in intuitive thinking as everyone else — it is, after all, a very necessary and helpful way of moving through many aspects of being alive and keeps rotten fruit out of people’s mouths with a decently high success rate — they tend to be good at approaching questions deliberatively when merited. It helps, I find, to try and consider questions value neutral even though some questions, in some contexts, are not. A question is only a threat to those who presume the answer is implied in the asking, or who fear what may happen when a person is encouraged to think deliberatively. Questions are a threat to people who view them as an ideological loyalty test rather than a good faith intellectual exercise or a route to truth. How would the world be if we stopped pretending that we already know everything?