Becoming a moral phenomenologist, or: why philosophers might want to engage with social science, or do a bit themselves

[This is a guest-post by Lisa Herzog.--ES]

I am a philosopher, and last year I went on a research trip to Ecuador and Columbia. Yes, you haven’t misread, and this is not The Onion. Let me explain how this came about, and why a philosophers can engage with social scientific research, and even engage in it themselves, a little bit. I do not hold that all philosophers should do this. But I argue that for addressing certain questions, it makes sense. I would like to share my experience and encourage people who do similar things to get in touch – you must be out there, somewhere!

I work in a research project in philosophy on ethical agents in financial markets. It was initiated by Axel Honneth and is based at Frankfurt University; my office is at the Institut für Sozialforschung. This already gives away part of the story: Frankfurt has, of course, a great tradition of critical interdisciplinary research. For this project, Honneth found a partner: a bank that has an explicit mission to support economic development. Its headquarters are in Frankfurt, but it mostly works in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. It started out doing microfinance, at around the same time when Yunus started the movement in Asia, but has now turned towards financial small enterprises, because they take it that this is more promising for supporting sustainable economic improvements for the worst-off.

Before having the good luck of being hired at this project, I had already started empirical work: I was interested in ethical agency in organizations, I wanted to write about it, but I felt I had no sense of what it was like to work in a complex organization. The books I read about it did not give me a feeling of real understanding from the inside. So I threw myself into a series of interviews: I bought a recording device, ordered books on methodology from the library (most of them turned out to be distinctively unhelpful), and reached out for interviewees, starting with friends and acquaintances, and then using a snowball system. I asked all kinds of questions: what are the moral aspects of your job? What are the challenges? How do you relate to your professional role? The answers to these questions were interesting, but what was even more interesting was when interviewees opened up and started to tell their own stories, ask their own questions, and tell me about their doubts and uncertainties.

The project on ethics in financial markets began similarly: I had conversations, mostly with one manager, himself a sociologist by training, who told me about his years of experience in the bank, the struggles, the joys, the challenges, his search for moral narratives to pass on to employees. He arranged meetings with other managers and employees, and opportunities for listening in on training sessions. And he said: ‘you have to see it on the ground.’ My first trip was to Eastern Europe, with a tight schedule of conversations with employees in different roles, accompanying them when they met customers and listening in to courses they taught to newly recruited members. The second trip was the one to Ecuador and Columbia. We had planned a third trip, to Bolivia, but it turned out that some important legal chances in the country’s financial system, the consequences of which I would have wanted to explore, were delayed, so we had to postpone the trip.

Why on earth would one want to do such things?

In a sense, the idea of the project was to get a fresh sense of how finance could work in a morally responsible way, without being distracted by the financial crisis and its aftermath, and by economic theories that had turned out to be blatantly wrong. It nicely tied in with my questions about organizations. In both cases, the idea was that practitioners have a kind of “expertise” on practical moral questions that philosophers can learn from.

A second motive was to explore what is possible. The neoliberal agenda of “there is no alternative” breeds fatalism. But there are people out there who make a real difference, and learning from them can inform our thinking about what a just society could be. There is now a lot of talk about “feasibility” and “non-ideal” theorizing in political theory, but my sense is that this talk is often abstract and theoretical, and does not engage with the concrete examples of how improvements might happen (on this see the work of sociologist Eric Olin Wright, who has collected lots of interesting cases).

So – how did it go?

First, I am hugely grateful for having had these opportunities. I have learned a lot, not only philosophically, but also as a human being. Lots of people told me their stories, sometimes very personal stories, of engagement, successes, disappointments, and struggles. I am full of admiration for many of these people. It puts the “contributions” philosophers can make into perspective: yes, we can make contributions, for example when writing for a broader audience or participating in public discussions, but we usually do so at very little risk for ourselves. I keep wondering about how philosophers could better connect to other people’s struggles. I am confident that we can improve the cooperation with practitioners and activists, and I continue to search for some such possibilities.

Philosophically the most important insights concerned what one might call the “moral phenomenology” of finance and organizations. I am not done reflecting, analysing, and writing about it, but here is one example that very quickly led to an article. What struck me in how the bankers I interviewed talked about their clients was the role of trust. So I started reading philosophical theories of trust (notably Martin Hartman’s great book), and also theories about conventional finance (notably the work by Katharina Pistor, that I had stumbled across independently). And at some point, an argument developed about how trust has epistemic and moral dimensions that are relevant for credit relationships, but which are crowded out of the modern financial system because the epistemic dimension is outsourced to markets and rating-agencies, and the moral dimensions are replaced by trust in legal mechanisms to ensure compliance. Understanding this helps understand what went wrong in the financial crisis, or so I argue.

Why is this “philosophy”?

A reaction that I often get is: oh, how interesting that you do this other stuff, the subtext being: this is not philosophy. Part of me wants to say: so what, as long as it is interesting and relevant? But another part of me digs in its heels and says: hang on, what kind of conception of philosophy do you have? If you think that there is a realm of ideas out there, and that we should think very hard, from the armchair, in order to uncover the true “joints of reality”, then it does not make much sense to do what I do. I do not believe in this picture – it’s too “Platonist”, for my taste, at least with regard to moral and political questions. But arguably, it underlies a lot of what is going on in philosophy.

If, in contrast, you are an Aristotelian, or Hegelian, or pragmatist, or what have you, you think that ideas are embodied in what is out there, in the world. Then more experience is better. Even if you don’t think that, you may grant that we often do not have epistemic access to certain truths, and that more data can help us to gain such access. As I mentioned earlier, one way in which this is important is to probe the boundaries of what is feasible with regard to institutional solutions that make the world a better place. As such, empirical research is particularly important for economic questions, because the abstract models of economics textbooks can be highly misleading in that respect.

One important task of philosophers is to explore the contingency of so much that we take for granted. To do this, we need alternative perspectives. One way is to turn to the history of philosophy. Another is to turn to experiences from other cultures. This can mean intercultural encounters – which I’d love to engage in, but haven’t done so far – but, sometimes the “culture” of a different academic discipline can already be quite eye-opening; reading around in social scientific research, or doing some bits of social scientific research oneself, can make a huge difference, in my experience.

I’m not suggesting that this is what all, or most philosophers should do. I am sure that in other areas of philosophy this would play out very differently. I am sure that we also need people who do the pure armchair job, if only to show whatever logical or conceptual inconsistencies other folks have produced. But I want to rest my case that it makes sense for answering certain questions, and – yes – I think it is philosophy!

Comments

[Michael Deckard]

I really love this post and think that all philosophers should do such work. How did going to Ecuador and Colombia really contribute in a meaningful way to the philosophical and ethical question that you were asking?

[Matt]

"The second trip was the one to Ecuador and Columbia."

A trivial point, but I assume this must be "Colombia", not "Columbia", unless the trips was to the Upper West Side. (I note this only because I'm originally from a place in the US where, if you said you were going to go study at Columbia, most people would think you were going to South America, not the Ivy League, which they mostly never think about, so the switch here seems funny to me.)

[Jackie Taylor]

With Matt: it is Colombia.

The Colombian artist Fernando Arias has some great art about this all too common mistake.

http://www.fernandoarias.org/