Writing Philosophy for the Public is a Moral Obligation

Abstract

Writing philosophy to be read by people who are not professional philosophers ought to be central to the work of professional philosophers. Writing for the public should be central to their work because their professional end is to produce ideas for use by people who are not professional philosophers. Philosophy is unlike most disciplines in that the ideas produced by professional philosophers generally have to be understood by a person before they can be of any use to them. As a tool for delivering philosophical ideas to the public, writing philosophical works is invaluable. The need to write philosophy directly for the public should be clear regardless of one’s conception of the value of philosophy, since writing directly for the public is in the spirit of all the most popular modern philosophical movements. 1. The centrality of work written for the public Writing philosophy to be read by people who are not professional philosophers ought to be central to the work of professional philosophers. Yet there is a tendency within the discipline to view such work as peripheral at best, and irrelevant at worst. As will be argued, writing for the public must be central because the professional end of philosophy is to produce ideas for use by people who are not professional philosophers. The argument takes the form of an appeal to the moral obligations of professional philosophers. That there are such things as moral obligations will not be argued for, nor will I argue for any particular normative moral theory, as these issues are beyond the scope of the paper. However, if we both accept that there are moral obligations and adopt any popular normative theory of moral obligation, we will be compelled to conclude that writing for the public should be central to the work of professional philosophers.