After many years of vacillation, I finally subscribed to the Hastings Center Report. Volume 46, number 5 arrived today. My subscription also gives me online access. I like this periodical not only because it keeps me up to date on issues and topics in medicine and biological research, but because it shows that philosophers have a role to play in clarifying concepts, identifying fallacies, and uncovering hidden assumptions. One thing philosophers do not have is evaluative expertise. What I mean by this is that the mere fact that x is a philosopher gives x's values no additional weight (beyond that of any randomly selected person).
If you think this is incorrect and that philosophers, as such, do have evaluative expertise, then please tell me where in my graduate education I was supposed to learn what is valuable and what is not, because I must have missed that course. What I learned in graduate school were technical skills such as conceptual analysis. When you come right down to it, philosophy is just logic. Different philosophers apply their conceptual skills to different areas, such as medicine, law, science, art, and religion. Some philosophers pretend that, in addition to technical skills, they have evaluative expertise. You can see why they would want nonphilosophers to believe this. It gives them power. If people think that philosophers have evaluative expertise, then they (the people) will look to philosophers for guidance about how to behave. I share Peter Winch's view that "philosophy can no more show a man what he should attach importance to than geometry can show a man where he should stand."
