Philosophy Shouldn't Be a McMansion

What Star Wars, Suburban Home-Building, and Derek Parfit teach us about having too many cooks in the kitchen.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker may not be the worst film in the franchise, but when it comes to the many ways a Star Wars film can go wrong, it is unrivaled. At least two very significant events that structure the meaning of Star Wars are simply undermined and contradicted, with no explanation. The redemption of Darth Vader rest on him killing the emperor. The significance of Rey’s journey rests on the fact that she is a nobody gaining power through mere faith and effort, not inheritance. Contradicting those plot points undermines the significance of the antecedent stories entirely. Important characters from the previous film are written out almost completely (Rose Tico), which turns out to be a common theme in the Star Wars cannon. Entire planets, concepts, and characters are introduced early as though they will have significance, but play no role in the story subsequently. Conflicts seem to be completely fabricated with very high stakes, requiring side-quests, only for those conflicts to be resolved and the stakes turning out to be only illusory (C3PO and his understanding of the inscription on the dagger, and needing his memory erased, but no matter, his memory can be restored). And don’t get me started on the Palpatine plotline.

The Rise of Skywalker is a particular kind of bad; it is bad in a myriad of completely ad hoc ways. The George Lucas prequels Episodes I-III, on the other hand, are bad in completely coherent and systematic ways. Whereas the George Lucas prequels are bad as a result of the particular vision of their creator, The Rise of Skywalker is bad because it is a kind of Frankensteined creation of two directors, four writers, an opinionated big studio exec, and the influence of millions of fans constantly criticizing, often rightly, particular choices in how the serialized narrative was unfolding. The Rise of Skywalker was a classic case of production by committee; too many cooks in the kitchen. It was “note soup” as they say in Hollywood.

There are interesting ways in which creative work goes awry when it is subject to too many cooks in the kitchen. Songs become overwritten, music becomes overproduced. McMansions become, well, this:

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When something is bad because it is created by committee, it is bad in very distinctive ways. It is bad in very busy ways. It is very common for individual creations to be ingenious, atrocious, and everything in between, but committee-led creations lose out on this variety. If committee-led creative works succeed, they succeed at satisfying the right people without satisfying anyone particularly deeply. The typical McMansion is not the over-designed atrocity you see above, but is also never a work of timeless brilliance. Instead, it is more like the home you see below.

This house has brick, and stone, and shingled siding. It has sharp angle and wide angle rooflines, and wide windows and narrow windows and tall windows and short windows. It has every architectural feature to satisfy every possible taste. Creation by committee is neither McDonald’s, nor Le Bernadin, it is the Cheesecake Factory.

In analytic philosophy, the figure of Derek Parfit looms quite large. Parfit published two tomes, the first of which, Reasons and Persons, was written by and large monastically. Parfit was famously someone who locked himself in his small room at Oxford for hours on end thinking about philosophy, ate the exact same meals of cold raw vegetables and yogurt daily, partook in the occasional philosophical conversation, and only philosophical conversations, with other Oxford colleagues and students, but by and large spent his time alone working through what he considered the most important issues in philosophy. When my friend the writer Larissa Macfarquhur first read Reasons and Persons-and she was not an analytic philosopher or trained in analytic philosophy- it made her think, “what have I been doing with my life that such an incredible, thought-provoking piece of work could have escaped me all these years?” Larissa wrote a famous profile of Parfit for the New Yorker that is widely read to this day. The ideas in Reasons and Persons play a significant role in the most influential philanthropic movement of the 21st century coming out of secular ethics, effective altruism. Within philosophy, it created at least three fields entirely that has since sparked long debates, the metaphysics of personal identity, population ethics, and time-bias. All three have been major contributors to cognitive science, neuroscience, religious studies, demography, and economics.

The other tome Parfit wrote, On What Matters, was famously written, by and large, by committee. It makes up three volumes, each of which is about 500 pages. When I was a graduate student in the mid 2000s, Parfit sent a manuscript of what at the time was supposed to be the follow-up to Reasons and Persons, a reasonable-length piece entitled “Climbing the Mountain”, to influential philosophers around the world. Because I was at Princeton, many of the faculty there received a copy. It turns out almost every important figure in analytic philosophy around the world received one. Parfit asked all of them to critique his manuscript, which in analytic philosophy meant offering objections to any and all theses, to subject the manuscript to every possible attack it could face. Philosophers seldom ask other philosophers for critiques on style, readability, and prose. But finding omissions and weaknesses in arguments, that is our bread and butter.

Parfit’s ambitions were grand; he wanted to develop a moral philosophy that all possible moral philosophies would agree with. He was, like Einstein, attempting a grand unified theory of the universe, only it was the moral universe. What he got back from the most critical philosophical minds in the world was a list of objections and attacks so long and detailed that, in order to respond to them all, he needed more than five times as many pages as his original manuscript. He worked to finish his detailed responses right up to his death, in 2017.

Compared to Reasons and Persons, the reception to On What Matters within philosophy, and most definitely outside of philosophy, has been underwhelming. The book is not bad. It isn’t The Rise of Skywalker. Fifteen-hundred page tomes in philosophy are never bad in the sense that narrative fiction series or epics are bad. Philosophy books are not aesthetic but alethic objects, productions aimed at stating and defending true statements and claims, rather than trying to tell a story or inspire an emotional reaction. By the standards of philosophy being influential, On What Matters is certainly influential. Very important people read and respond to it; it is on graduate syllabi at the Harvards, Princetons, NYUs, and USCs of the world, at least it was for a year or two. If someone is writing a dissertation on whether morality is real or fictitious, they will need to cite it. It is hard for Parfit not to be influential in whatever he publishes; the fact that Parfit argued for something means many people take it seriously in the same way that Barry Lam saying something means no one will take it seriously. But as highly anticipated and epically ambitious as On What Matters was, it did not execute. Reasons and Persons was revolutionary. On What Matters was pedantic.

There are some in philosophy who take its goal of being alethic and not aesthetic very seriously. You can see it all over their writing, and you can see it in the kind of articles that journals publish. Most articles read as much more pedantic than revolutionary because the review process prior to publishing looks a lot more like what Parfit did with On What Matters than what he did with Reasons and Persons. What philosophy reviewers, commentators, and readers do, what we are trained and rewarded to do, what we are asked to do by journal editors, is try to find every last problem in a submission. What problem do we have with what you said, why you said it, and do we think someone else already said it, which is a big problem? The job for an author of a professional philosophy paper is to survive this deluge of problems, as only survivors get published. No one is ever worried about whether anyone gets any joy, inspiration from reading our work. Sparking curiosity is an afterthought. Like the most typical McMansion, what matters is that it is built, passes inspection, and sold at a high enough profit margin.

There is a good reason to treat alethic activity this way. The wisdom of crowds hypothesis is that the collective opinion of independent strangers about non-obvious matters is more reliable than that of individuals. Markets of millions trading on information are better predictors of the future than individuals. Think about medical science. Which one is likelier, that a single genius physician who comes up with treatment XYZ for COVID for his 20 patients, 19 of whom fully recovered, actually found the best treatment protocols for COVID, or that hundreds of thousands of independent physicians across many different countries using XYZ, ABC, and DEF randomly, all end up converging on treatment E and F, got the best treatment protocol? The reasonable go with E and F.

In philosophy, if the wisdom of crowds holds true, the more independent people read and object to your work, and the more you tailor your views in response to them, the likelier you are to have gotten closer to the truth. If philosophical work is primarily alethic rather than aesthetic, the truth about moral realism, or the mind, or the nature of knowledge, is likelier to come from the totality of what all people who have thought long and hard about it say about it, in response to each other, than from the mind of any one of those individuals. If you take the totality of philosophy written by everyone and use a large language model and then ask it “what is the truth about moral realism”, that answer is likelier to be true than all of the individual contributions. Without knowing the contents of the works whatsoever, On What Matters is likelier to say true things than Reasons and Persons.

But here is another fact about philosophers. We respond to peer-reviewed academic journal articles that read more like “note soup,” overly engineered to survive fussy reviewers, like we react to McMansions and the Rise of Skywalker. Why? Knowing the wisdom of crowds hypothesis, representative sampling in statistics, and the epistemic power of independent convergence, we should treat note soup as superior products, the result of the very procedure that produces superior alethic products. Why is On What Matters not celebrated more highly than Reasons and Persons?

It has to be that philosophy, at least some of it, has an irreducibly aesthetic aims connected with certain aesthetic emotions. These aims are at odds with creation by committee. Good philosophy inspires in the way good art does. Parfit inspired curiosity in Reasons and Persons with thought-experiments that people still teach and think about. They even make for important plot points in Dr. Who and many other science fiction stories. On What Matters on the other hand, sought to eliminate curiosity by seeking to settle every question the curious reader might raise. Good philosophy is supposed to offer insight into the inner life, the thought and mental procedures, of the individual producing it. When that inner life is significantly different, or significantly similar, to yours there is a pleasure in your confrontation and engagement with such a mind, such an “other,” as humanities people love to put it.

The view of philosopher as auteur explains why individual philosophers have such a problem with reviewers who are too fussy. They, the philosophers, have a vision for the direction of their paper, how it unfolds over time, its epistemological arc if not its narrative ones. An auteur’s omissions are intentional, not accidental. They are necessities for the story being told, not problems to be rectified by stating more and more. But omissions are the most powerful weapon of fussy reviewers. An omission can be fatal to an entire project. If it is not fatal, it must be rectified in the next draft, on pain of never appearing in print. Fussy reviewers, we think, just want to rewrite our papers in their own image, to follow their own inner lives and senses of epistemic satisfaction, which are different from ours. The desire authors have to see through their own vision of a paper, against the recommendations of peer reviewers, makes less sense if the aim of writing were solely alethic. It makes perfect sense if it were partly an artistic act.

I’m a pluralist enough about aesthetics and philosophy to think there is no categorical rule saying that all committee-created work must be worse than individual, auteur-created work. This just has to be false. There have got to be examples of committee-created work that is great, on both aesthetic and alethic dimensions. In podcasting, my other job, the most collaborative/committee-created work is famously the best, hence your Radiolab and This American Life, compared to say, my show which is the work of one person, where I occasionally splurge and hire an editor to give me notes. I’ll put my best episodes up against many Radiolab and This American Life episodes, but on average, their work, with teams of 10-20, are far better. Their best episodes are far and away better than my best ones. Similarly, the rise in collaborations and co-authorship is a positive in academic philosophy. I’m not trying to defend individual genius against group work. Group work can be much better. Not all group work is creation by committee.

But on the other hand, consider this practice; philosophers who are aiming to find the right answer to their question simply write out their best attempt at answering the question, and then submit it into a system where a hundred other philosophers review and rewrite those ideas, culminating in a collectively written paper that no one in particular authors. Throw in a little ChatGPT in there, and you have a product that is likelier to be true than the original draft, by the wisdom of crowds. Why shouldn’t we just practice all philosophy this way? Let’s make every journal The Economist.

As far as I can tell, if there were an economically feasible way to do this with science, we would (and do actually. In some fields, science is just one big global collaboration aimed at finding the truth. A lot of discoveries have no heroes.) Instead, my guess is that not many philosophers would participate in such an endeavor. Whatever is of value to what philosophers do, it is not solely alethic. For many, it may not be alethic at all.

My friend and one of the philosophers I admire most, Kieran Setiya, had a podcast where he asked other philosophers about their greatest fears. In one episode, Kieran attributes a lot of paralysis, typically called “writer’s block” to the fear of being wrong. Some philosophers don’t produce because they’re afraid their ideas are wrong. For myself, being wrong isn't in the top five of my greatest fears. If I had to psychoanalyze myself and rank my most prominent fears, they are:

1. Being Basic/Uninteresting.

2. Being an unknowing rip-off of someone else.

3. Being ignored.

4. Being humiliated.

5. Having bad reasons for believing something.

If I had to characterize 1, I’d say it is an irreducibly aesthetic value. Interestingness is a property of a conscious experience of a particular piece of work, the manner in which the work holds the conscious attention and colors their experience of the propositions being entertained. Interestingness is not a property of the work itself. One of the biggest killers of interestingness is having a boring mind. But a close runner-up is too many cooks in the kitchen.