How to Think Like a Philosopher by Julian Baggini;

Author:Julian Baggini;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

KNOW WHAT MATTERS

He is a man of intelligence, but to act sensibly, intelligence is not enough.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, Crime and Punishment

Philosophy frequently flirts with pointlessness, and every now and again the flirtation turns into a deep affair. Such moments can suffocate the will to live. I remember one such low when sitting through a lecture based around a paper entitled ‘Housecleaning and the Time of a Killing’. Its first dry-as-dust sentence reads: ‘Judith Jarvis Thomson has pointed out that there is a difficulty in specifying the time a killing takes place.’ Here’s the so-called problem.

Say Bugsy shoots Babyface. Babyface is rushed to hospital, the cops chase Bugsy and shoot him dead. A few hours later, Babyface dies. So when did Bugsy kill Babyface? Not when he shot him, because Babyface hadn’t yet died. But not when Babyface died, as Bugsy was already dead, and how could a dead man kill someone? So it looks like there is no time when the killing took place. But there was a killing. How could such an event have taken place at no time?1

If you’re intrigued by when Bugsy killed Babyface, it could be because you enjoy logic puzzles, which is fine. For me, however, the problem is obviously generated by language. There is no fundamental puzzle about what has happened and when. You can describe the timeline of events completely. A problem only arises if you insist that somewhere on this timeline we have to locate something called ‘the killing’. If you do that, it’s then a matter of who can suggest the most plausible way of doing so. Jarvis Thomson, for instance, proposes that actions can have among their parts events that are not actions. So the killing is an event that extends over time from the shooting to the dying.

But there is only a problem to be solved if we make the baseless assumption that every time we use an event noun such as ‘a killing’ it must refer to an event at a determinate time. Not everything we refer to with an event noun has precise time boundaries. The Enlightenment did not begin at a precise time on the day in 1651 when Thomas Hobbes published his Leviathan, in part because there is no specific second when a book can be said to have been published. ‘Publication’ is not a discrete event but a process with an indeterminate beginning and end. There is no need to agonise over when exactly Bugsy killed Babyface when we know everything that happened and when. This looks like a classic category mistake: language has tricked us into thinking a killing is an event at a determinate time when in this case the word is being used as shorthand to describe something that unfolded over time.

I could be wrong about this. Maybe there is a good reason why we need to be able to be more precise about when actions such as killings take place, and it’s not obvious to a metaphysical bumbler like me. But

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