Changing My Mind: Reflections on a Quarter of a Century of Research

At the end of this academic year I will have been a University Professor for 25 years.  A quarter of a century of time seems like a sizeable amount of time to reflect on how, with respect to substantive research topics and issues, I have actually changed my mind.  I spent the morning walk reflecting on this issue, and decided I would limit myself to the 5 most noteworthy things that I have changed my mind on.  Below is what I came up with.

Change #1:  Methodological Presuppositions

25 years ago I was a committed Rawlsian, in the final year of completing this doctoral thesis at the University of Bristol.  At that time if you had asked me what the primary objective of an aspiring political philosopher ought to be, my answer- following the example of the icons in the field at the time- would be to formulate and defend a theory of justice.  And the key elements of developing/defending one's fav theory of justice would involve:  

(1) priming the moral intuitions and convictions of prominent contemporary philosophers in my field in the 1990s (the fanciful terminology/justification employed at the time was "reflective equilibrium") 

AND 

(2) canvassing the extensive literature written by Anglo-American political philosophers since the 1970s on the topic, taking care to delineate the increments of changes, objections, counter-arguments, etc. of the various interlocutors.

Reflecting back on this time of my early career, and the discipline at the time, I now see that epistemic project as armchair naval gazing.  It did not require the political philosopher to actually learn or know anything about the real world-- what causes advantage/disadvantage (outside of these things being influenced by "the basic structure" of a closed society)-- or to draw an any interdisciplinary knowledge (the one exception being "pareto optimality" and incentives).  

Over the course of the early to late 2000s I shifted from being an ideal theorist to being a non-ideal theorist.  This represented a significant change in my mind.  It represented a change in the way I conceived of myself as a philosopher.  Constructing a grandiose theory of justice, predicated upon one's uncritically accepted moral intuitions, and formulating it via appeals to abstract and idealized assumptions no longer held any appeal to me.  It struck me as a very uncreative process intellectually, as well as very naive and lacking substance in terms of what it actually contributed to emancipatory knowledge.  This "The Emperor has no clothes" moment in my career created something of a perceived career crisis for me.  It was much easier to get published working within the accepted, mainstream research paradigms of the discipline.  Publishing my work on non-ideal theory was significantly harder, especially in the late 2000s before non-ideal theory had become more fashionable.  Reviewers committed to the orthodoxy of Rawlsian ideal theory did not appreciate the criticism that the whole ideal theory project was flawed.  Whole careers and areas of research were build on the abstraction and idealization of ideal theory.  It would take a long time for the discipline to pivot and redefine itself.  In the meantime, I still had to find venues to publish my research.  I was fortunate that I was able to pivot and adapt and find a way to do the research I was passionate to do, and have faith that that research would, eventually, find a publication venue.  So this first major belief change involved changing how I saw myself as a philosopher, and who I was trying to write my research for (e.g. other specialized political philosophers or a more broad audience).      

Change #2:  The Substantive Conviction  

In the early 2000s I started doing research on genetic diseases and advances in the biomedical sciences (e.g. gene therapy).  At the time I initially approached this research in a "top down" fashion.  This means that I started out with strong egalitarian and prioritarian convictions, and I let those convictions determine the kind of arguments I would make with respect to the duty to alleviate the harms of the genetic lottery of life.  So my papers from this early stage of research (this, this and this) reflect this "top down" approach.

However, as I started to learn more about the actual science (e.g. evolutionary biology, the complex interplay between genes and environment, the costs and risks of gene therapies, etc.) I realized that this "top down" approach was very limited.  Gene therapy, for example, was still an experimental intervention.  It was risky and costly with yet unknown efficacy in humans.  For a philosopher to proclaim substantive conclusions - that gene therapies for rare, early onset disorders is a stringent requirement of justice- seemed naive and aloof.  Of course it would have been easy for me to invoke the "ideal theory" proxy and just say I am functioning at the level of ideal theory where messy empirical constraints like costs, risks and efficacy do not arise.  But if one can assume that medical innovations are costless, risk-free and 100% efficacious then one is no longer working within the confines of the world as we know it (but rather some fanciful utopia).  And if that is the case, why not just assume away all genetic diseases and health disadvantages? Oh wait, Rawlsian ideal theory does that as well!  I hope you appreciate my dilemma. Indeed, the Emperor has no clothes!  

By the mid-2000s I also encountered the field of science that was then known as "biogerontology".  Scientists were calling for more research on the biology of aging, in the hopes that the rate of aging could be slowed and humans could enjoy more (healthy) life.  At first my intuitions about altering the rate of aging were something like the following:

Calling for the development of medical interventions that extend the human lifespan by slowing aging is analogous to calling for tax breaks for millionaires.

In other words, as long as the world continued to have the problem of persistent early life mortality, any suggestion that we should alter aging to confer more longevity on those fortunate enough to survive into late life seemed, at best, a distraction and, at worst, morally insensitive if not offensive.

My view on this substantive judgement has changed significantly.  Public health problems should not be tackled sequentially, let alone conceptualized that way.  We need not eliminate all childhood mortality in the world before we get serious about tackling cancer or Alzheimer's disease.  Furthermore, childhood mortality has been diminishing for decades, while the chronic diseases of late life now account for most deaths in the world and are a growing challenge for developing countries.  

Most children born in the world today will survive into late life and suffer the chronic diseases of aging.  So over the course of about a decade of research I ended up becoming a strong advocate of rate (of aging) control.  This change in conviction resulted from shifting from a distributive justice framework that treated health like wealth, to a public health framework that champions cost-effective measures of preventative medicine that transcend the "War Against Disease" mentality of early public health pioneers.  This transformation in conviction only occurred because I was open to insights from demography, biogerontology and public health.  I never would have changed my mind if had to doubled down on my initial intuitions or searched for guidance in the contemporary theories of justice that are oblivious to population aging and science innovation.

Change #3:  Focus:  Well-Ordered Science

In the early 2000s if you had asked me what governmental decisions would have the most significant impact on the life prospects of a population I would have said it was really the political economy and the decisions around taxes that influence the distribution of wealth and income.  While I still view that as important policy decisions, I now see that perspective as very narrow.  Of course if the fiscal policies implemented by a government are so disastrous as to undermine the economic viability of a country then everything else is vulnerable as there will be little capacity to invest in healthcare, education, science, etc.  But of course in ideal theory no country has any national debt! And in ideal theory there also wouldn't be popular disdain for income taxation, or mismanaged public funds, or risks of capital flight (society is closed after all) etc. But I digress! 

For the past 20 years I have been telling my students that no other area of government decision making will impact their life prospects as profoundly as science policy.  How much research funding is invested in basic scientific research, which questions and aspirations different areas of science prioritize trying to answer, etc.  These are the questions to tackle.  So one of the biggest changes in my mind over the past 25 years has been a shift in what needs to be studied.  And the determinates of "well-ordered science" remain a much neglected field of enquiry.  And the impact of this will be felt on issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic, to future infectious disease outbreaks, how we combat chronic disease risks, climate change, AI, etc.

Change #4:  Focus II:  Virtue Epistemology 

In the early 2000s the most important question I thought ethics and political philosophy should tackle is:  How should we act?  Today I think it is much more important to ask a prior, epistemic question, "What should we believe?".  My interests in virtue epistemology have emerged in various projects of mine of the past twenty years.  It is a topic I wish I had more time to explore and devote serious time to writing about.  I am in the final stages of a major research project that applies this framework to the study and engagement with the canon of political philosophy.  So I will save elaborating on this in greater detail once that project is out.  

Chapter #5:  Focus III:  Interdisciplinarity

The writing an academic undertakes exists within a complex ecology of ideas and professional norms/expectations.  There are professional incentives (e.g. getting published, tenured, etc.) and norms and conventions (e.g. conference themes, potential collaborators, etc.) that can shape, temper or constrain one's intellectual curiosity.  25 years ago my intellectual outlook was much more insular.  I looked only within political philosophy for both the questions I would ask, and the answers to those questions.  While the discipline still informs my teaching, writing and research, it is simply one toolkit among many others I rely upon when working through my ideas.  

One thing I have learned by substantively engaging with research from medicine and science is that philosophy and political theory can be both a liberating and constraining force on one's mind.  There is so much to read and stay abreast of in academia, and the more specialized one becomes in a niche intellectual endeavor the harder it can be to shift back to an "all-things-considered" perspective.  Engaging with other disciplines has, at least for me, been extremely pivotal in my intellectual development.  What I believe, the topics I address and where I publish my research all reflect this.  If I had to boil this down to one change in my mind from 25 years ago it would be this-- I have much more intellectual humility now than I did in the past.  Well, at least I think I do!  This humility stems largely from the realization that, at best, one can only shed some light on a small part of a much more complex and intricate normative issue.  This humility can influence both the methodology one employs in the argumentation one develops, as well as the force and content of the conclusions one arrives at.

I have been very fortunate to have enjoyed 25 years of writing and thinking about fascinating topics, while working in different departments (Philosophy, Political Science and Public Policy) and universities and countries (England, Scotland, US, Türkiye, as well as Canada).  I am just as passionate about the next 25 years of research as I was about the past 25 years.  I hope I can write an updated post in 25 years about how I have changed my mind with respect to the beliefs and convictions I hold today.

Cheers, 

Colin