Complaint to Press Council re: Holmes on Waitangi Day

The New Zealand Herald gave me another response to my complaint regarding Paul Holmes's inflammatory Waitangi Day piece, after I had told them that I was dissatisfied with their first response. While this second response was far longer, it simply re-iterated the position of the Herald and its Weekend editor, David Hastings, that clearly Holmes was aiming at one small band of Māori protesters, rather than making inflammatory remarks about Māori as a whole. For the second time they made no reply at all to the substance of my complaint: that is, they made no attempt to explain the paragraph where Holmes seems to take aim at Māori as a whole with racist invective ("No, if Maori want Waitangi Day for themselves, let them have it... and work out new ways of bamboozling the Pakeha to come up with a few more millions") and no mention at all of the discriminatory standards I indicated in my complaint. Given that they have twice had the opportunity to respond to my complaint, and have twice not done so, I made recourse of a complaint to the Press Council.
For those keeping score at home, here's the summary of my complaint that I needed to give in my complaint:

The New Zealand Herald, in its Weekend edition of 11/2, published an opinion piece by Paul Holmes titled 'Waitangi Day A Complete Waste'. To summarise my complaint (see my correspondence with the paper for the fuller version), I want to highlight three points on which this piece is objectionable, all three to do with discrimination against Māori. The first concerns racist invective, the second two discriminatory standards applied to Māori.

The first point is that Holmes straightforwardly makes inflammatory remarks aimed at Māori in the following paragraph: "No, if Maori want Waitangi Day for themselves, let them have it. Let them go and raid a bit more kai moana than they need for the big, and feed themselves silly, speak of the injustices heaped upon them by the greedy Pakeha and work out new ways of bamboozling the Pakeha to come up with a few more millions." Notice that the group indicated is simply 'Māori', not some group of individuals. There is no way to read this passage other than in the obvious way, as an attempt to alienate Māori from Pākehā.

 Secondly, in his response to the protesters at Te Tii Marae, Holmes makes a number of claims which are conditional on them being Māori, and discriminates against them accordingly; in particular, that the protesters can't be taken seriously until larger social ills affecting Māori are addressed. The manner in which Holmes does this is inflammatory in the extreme (to quote: “...never mind the hopeless failure of Maori to educate their children and stop them bashing their babies“), but even if it weren't, it would place a different standard on Māori protesters than on Pākehā. Holmes tries to pin a set of troubles on the protestors merely because they are Māori, using their ethnicity as a way to dismiss their claims.

Thirdly, Holmes uses a different standard to judge the standing of Māori in New Zealand than he does Pākehā, by making the status Waitangi Day contingent on the actions of a small section of Māori, whereas presumably Anzac Day is not contingent on the misdeeds of small segments of Anzac soldiers acting as such.

NZ Herald's Response to complaint re: Paul Holmes

I received a response to my complaint from the editor of the Weekend Herald, David Hastings. The response was very much in line of those other complainants have received. I won't post it here, but Hastings ran the line that Holmes was clearly targeting the small band of protesters at Te Tii Marae, not Māori as a whole. He pinpointed the examples of Holmes talking about "Maori fringe self-denial day" and "that's what it looked like the other day" as examples. 

Those who read my complaint will notice these aren't the parts of Holmes's piece I picked out. I responded to Hastings with the following:

Dear Mr Hastings

Thank you taking the time to respond to my complaint.

I, however, have to admit that I am disappointed by your reaction. It is certainly possible for someone to start on one issue and slide to another one during the course of a piece – in fact, this is the shape large amounts of prejudiced invective takes. Furthermore, even if the parts of the article you cite did refer to the protesters rather than to Māori as a whole, those are not the parts I drew your attention to. I concentrated on the clearest example of invective aimed against Māori as a whole, the section starting with “No, if Maori want Waitangi Day for themselves, let them have it.” You have said nothing about this section. Nor have you said anything about the different standards Holmes uses for judging Māori and Pākehā. Thus, you have made no response to the substance of my complaint.

I took the trouble to look through previous Press Council rulings on discrimination, and have found examples where they have upheld complaints where a piece started off indicating one section of a population, but then went on to make defamatory statements of the population at large. One I have at hand is 1092 GRANT HANNIS AGAINST NORTH & SOUTH – it is not a perfect analogue (the piece in question is not an opinion piece, and issues of accuracy are also involved), but it shows that the Press Council is willing to uphold complaints against pieces which starts off with qualifications about who is being targeted, but then go on to make wide-ranging discriminatory statements.

With that in mind, I must press on my complaint. Do you and your paper have some further response to make? I await your reply with interest.

Yours sincerely,
Marinus Ferreira

Complaint re: Paul Holmes on Waitangi Day

This Saturday the weekend edition of the New Zealand Herald published an opinion column by Paul Holmes (someone with a chequered history) which was, to put it plainly, racially motivated hate speech. This was the letter of complaint I wrote to the editor. If you wish to do the same, his name is Tim Murphy and his address is tim.murphy@nzherald.co.nz.

Dear Mr Murphy

I wish to lodge a complaint with your paper on your decision to publish Paul Holmes's opinion column 'Waitangi Day a complete waste' in the Weekend Herald 11/2. I appreciate that this is an opinion piece, and thus held to different standards than most reporting, and that under freedom of speech you are entitled to publish even pieces that could reasonably be called ignorant and stupid. Nonetheless, Holmes's piece has crossed into hate speech, in that he is inspiring tensions between Māori and Pākehā by extrapolating, from one small protest against a particular act of government, a racially driven conspiracy by the former against the latter. This goes past any protection afforded to the press - no amount of balancing views or public agreement with this sentiment can excuse this incitement against racial tensions. I ask for an apology by Holmes and your paper, and to have the piece retracted or suitably modified.

The part I want to draw your special attention to is this declaration:

"No, if Maori want Waitangi Day for themselves, let them have it. Let them go and raid a bit more kai moana than they need for the big, and feed themselves silly, speak of the injustices heaped upon them by the greedy Pakeha and work out new ways of bamboozling the Pakeha to come up with a few more millions."

On the face of it, this is straightforwardly race-baiting. Holmes has called for New Zealand as a whole to abandon celebrating what is now the national day in order to distance ourselves from an offensive party, that party being Māori. The only possible defence for this would be if Holmes meant the Māori protesters he highlighted earlier, but that reading simply isn't available. Firstly, there is no qualification in this declaration - those he rails against are indicated simply as Māori. Secondly, placing this quote in context does not help at all. In order to motivate his dismissal of the protestor's claims, he runs through a litany of societal ills that Māori face. I won't go into the accuracy of his claims, and noting only in passing that the inflammatory fashion Holmes does this in is already grounds for a valid complaint: calling Māori a race of child-abusers who don't educate their children is beyond the pale, but that is exactly what Holmes does. I'll pass those serious worries by and indicate another one - that Holmes's case on the protesters is conditional on them being Māori, otherwise these complaints simply wouldn't make sense. This means he discriminates against the protesters on the grounds of their ethnicity - Holmes finds the protests objectionable in part because the protesters are Māori, and has used your paper for his racially charged invective. This is unacceptable, and it demands you immediate action.

There is a more subtle bigotry at work here as well. Holmes proposes that Anzac Day take the place of Waitangi Day. But presumably Holmes is unworried by the fact that a great many ANZAC soldiers have, acting as ANZAC soldiers, performed heinous misdeeds - the massacre at Sarafand being a clear example - and that it would be easy to find examples of child abusers, terrible parenting, and similar ills among the ranks of the soldiers he lionises. To hold the heritage of the Anzacs hostage to the misdeeds of the few would be abusive muckraking. But that is exactly what Holmes wants us to do with Māori and Waitangi Day - because of what he believes is a lunatic fringe, we should stop celebrating this moment where Māori and Pākehā were united into one nation. Because Holmes has claimed that Māori membership in the spirit or identity of New Zealand is contingent (i.e. contingent on addressing certain social ills as a group), whereas that of his Pākehā great-uncles isn't similarly hostage to the misdeeds of their fellow Anzacs, he is discriminating against Māori because they are Māori. Again, this is the type of racism for which there is no place in our society, and which you have every duty to stamp out immediately and decisively.

I will not burden you with a discussion on most of the content of the piece, though none of it reflects well on Holmes. Monday I submitted a letter to the editor through the usual channels, but I have supplemented it with this complaint in order to ensure that the matter came to your attention. I am not passing a comment on the material you have published. I am accusing your paper of gross misjudgement in giving a platform for incitement to racial tension and discrimination, and demand that you give this and similar complaints attention appropriate to the seriousness of the matter at hand.

Yours sincerely,
Marinus Ferreira

Transplanting Ricardo's result on rent to worker's wages

Having been introduced to the philosophical interest of classical economics through Robert Paul Wolff's Understanding Marx and his tutorial on Ricardo, I was prompted me to think a little deeper about Ricardo's results, in particular a very striking one about how rent paid for land plays no part in determining the price of agricultural goods. I've been trying to determine whether the result applies to worker's wages (and their conditions more widely), and if so, how. If it does, then that would mean the wages paid to the workers, the costs to maintain working conditions, and other expenditures paid to the benefit of workers is not factored directly into the cost of production, but is a dividend paid to the workers out of the profits, just the way renting land is under Ricardo's theorem. I am at the moment uncertain about whether this is misguided, or whether it's in fact something that is acknowledged in Ricardo and Marx, and how best to understand it.

As a bit of throat-clearing, it's worthwhile to sketch out the terms of Ricardo's theorem. When cultivating agriculture, we can simplify the actual state of affairs to the point where there are two things you as someone in the market for land are looking for: how productive the land is (that is, how much of value can be raised on it) and the cost of renting it. You make a profit by making use of a productive process on a piece of land so that the value of what is sold on the market is higher than the costs that went into running that process and the cost of renting the land. However, the price corn is the price of corn, no matter where it is grown, and similarly for every product (milk, eggs, bananas, foie gras, whatever). There is a wrinkle here, that many things are considered better if they come from a particular area or are produced in a certain way - sparkling wines from Champagne, for instance. But the price of that good - sparkling wines from Champagne of such-and-such quality - is constant, no matter the cost any individual farmer might incur to produce it. So, since manipulating the price is out of the reach of all but the largest producers (who we aren't considering in this simplified case), what the producer has to work with to try and wrangle a profit is by trying to rent as productive land as possible for as little as possible. The first ones to try and rent the most productive land can do so for a song, since in the absence of other demand the marginal price they offer is still better for the land owner than earning nothing. As more and more producers go for the most productive land, the price of rent increases, until it reaches the point where the renting the second most productive land instead becomes worthwhile, because its lower output is more than compensated by cheaper rent. Then, as more producers stream to the second most productive land, it's price rises, and people start renting the third most productive land instead, and so on. Provided there is always cheaper land available somewhere, no matter how unproductive, the price of renting the next acre of land tends towards zero. But the price of corn, or eggs, or sparling wine form Champagne of such-and-such quality, remains the same, and that price is one which is profitable even on the least productive land. Since the cost of renting that land tends towards zero, so does its contribution to the price of corn. But only the cost of the least productive land plays a part in setting the price of the product, so the contribution of the cost of rent on the price of the product tends to zero. Thus, rent plays no part in the price of the product, under our simplifying assumptions. Any money paid to the landowners is like a dividend, a piece of the profits which are gifted to them because of their privileged position.
Now to get to the real action. It's clear that there are strong analogues between the land-rent and the employment-cost cases. Just as with land, we can distinguish between workers based on their productivity, and like some land is cheaper to rent than others there is a grading of workers based on the cost of employing them - globalisation, if nothing else, has seen to that. Also, the price of the goods the workers manufacture is constant no matter how costly the production is. Once again there is the issue of higher-quality (and correspondingly more expensive to produce) goods fetching higher prices, but like with fine wines we can account for that by pointing out that goods of such-and-such quality fetches a certain price on the market, irrespective of the particular manner of production. We thus get a similar slide down the grades of workers - a producer figures out that there is more money to be made by paying slightly less productive workers significantly less to do the same work, and so on to the bottom of the pay scale. So far, this is just like the land-rent case.

The only salient difference I can see is that the cost of employment doesn't bottom out at zero, unlike land-rent, because if nothing else the workers need to have the means for subsistence. Then, the impact of the cost of employment on the price of a product wouldn't tend to zero, but instead to whatever the minimal cost of living is for whatever period of time the employee is hired for. This, as far as I understand it, is Marx's own view, which leads him into his discussion of the customary cost of living. I think the most pointed response to this is to point out that while workers need to eat, it is by no means a necessary truth that their employers will be the ones to foot the bill. If they can pass that burden on to someone else, the productive process would continue unabated, and their profits would be larger. This happens in actuality - consider for instance the use of prison labour, which is often unpaid and rarely at market rates, or the pernicious tendency to make more and more use of unpaid interns in what would otherwise be relatively well-paid entry-level professional roles. These people with zero or marginal income from their work are a very small proportion of the workforce, so their impact on the labour market is minimal given that there are very few producers who have the opportunity to exploit their existence. The point, however, is that this shows that in principle workers on zero or marginal incomes are possible. Since there would have to be a lot of shuffling of our social order in order to turn this from a rarity to something commonplace, that possibility might not be very immediate, but it is chilling. And, no matter the actualities of what people get paid for their work, it shows that, in principle, the economic arrangement of capitalism is not geared in order to provide in any way at all for the sustenance of workers. The race to the bottom of working conditions we are now living through should be an object lesson in the same.

How does this fit into the classical economics of Ricardo and Marx? In one way, very nicely: it seems to put even more of a point on something classical economics makes quite clear already - that the interests of the owners of the means of production and of the workers are directly opposed. They are competing in a zero-sum game of who gets what proportion of the profits of the productive processes, and the cutting-up of the pie has nothing to do with what went into baking it. But in another manner this result, if it holds, is at odds with some of the views of especially Marx. If I understand the result correctly, it would mean that labour can't really be a commodity, and employing a worker isn't like buying their alienated labour. I myself have never been exactly happy with those terms of Marx's analysis (though his point is clear enough) since I rank as very literal-minded even among analytic philosophers and I cannot take him at his word about the commodification of labour. The price of labour under Marx is the cost of sustenance for the individuals providing the labour, but I do not see why that cost is supposed to be inherent to the wages they received. Certainly their employers aren't buying their food and houses for them, and work done for free has all of the creative power that Marx identifies for labour. Correspondingly, there seems to me a mismatch between the costs Marx identifies for labour and what employers pay for. Marx is right that at the very minimum of justice employers will pay enough for people to live off, and live off at at least their customary standard. But I do not see why justice is inherent in the production process, in the same way fuel and tools are. That seems very optimistic.

Instead, payment for labour is a dividend given to people in a position with the sufficient privilege to demand it (where small privileges lead to small dividends). I understand how the terms of classical economics, from Adam Smith through to Marx, shows labour's place in the lattice of goods along with grain, iron, and all of the rest. But instead of seeing human labour as one commodity among others, I think it is more perspicacious to see the economy as a shared human product, with each person drawing from it the dividend that society has allotted them. This would, for instance, make very good sense of the increasing tendency of the very highest earners in our society to not be owners of enterprises, but ostensibly get their wealth as payment for services rendered (people like hedge fund managers, who are as a class second to none regarding wealth), and how often people who do much of the most undesirable work are frequently badly paid - cleaners, garbage men, sewerworkers, and so on. If I am right about the above result, that the cost of no good depends in principle on the cost of employing labour, that seems to be the only analysis available.


I am perhaps getting ahead of myself, heading into territory of trying to interpret formal results mapped onto decidedly unsimplified realities, but these are the directions issues like those I raise above guide us into.

Why it matters that we support gay marriage

Anne Russell is a personal friend of mine. She has recently published an opinion piece where she has admitted being confused and maddened by how stridently LBGT people argue for equal recognition of gay marriage, an institution she believes everybody would be better off without. I found her case to be deeply unconvincing, and here is my piece in response.

Anne Russell has recently argued that gay people, and others who don’t fall in the mainstream of heterosexual monogamy, shouldn’t feel compelled to campaign for gay marriage, and that we are all better off without the institution, gay, straight or otherwise. There are serious problems with the case she makes: a number of simple matters of fact on which she is mistaken which undermines many of the points she is trying to make, and, more importantly, it is very unclear how the various things she says are supposed to come together. It is unclear in the extreme why anything about the sexual orientation of Russell or her intended audience is supposed to matter if the point is that marriage in its own right is undesirable. That whole issue is simply a monstrous red herring, one with very serious consequences discussed later in the piece.

First-off, there are a number of claims Russell makes with great confidence but that nobody should believe. She claims that most New Zealanders have come to acknowledge that life-long monogamy is neither practical nor desirable. For Russell’s point to go through, she needs the latter, more striking claim. And there is simply no evidence for that. While the marriage rate is steadily decreasing (and about a third of marriages end before the 25^th anniversary, more than half of those before 13 years), that doesn’t mean people are giving up on long-term monogamy. It is estimated that around two in five people in long-term partnerships are so de facto, without legally formalising their relationship. Pointedly, about a third of all marriages being entered into today have at least one of the couple be a divorcee. If anybody would be clear on why long-term monogamy might be a bad idea, it would be these people, yet there is one divorcee willing to give the institution another go for every two wide-eyed newcomers to the altar (all of these figures are from Statistics NZ). This is not a decisive case against Russell’s point, but it is far stronger than the case she can make for it. We must conclude that her claim that marriage is now largely seen as undesirable is pure obiter dictum on her part, and she doesn’t have the standing to make it.

She goes on to say that marriage is soiled by its history as a capitalist institution which began in order to trade women as property, and should be abandoned accordingly. This is false in every detail. Marriage and its analogues (long-term monogamous relationships which are the foundations of households) exist throughout all of human history, whereas capitalism began at the earliest in late 18^th century Britain. Nor does marriage depend on private property. Russell needn’t have looked far for an example, since traditional Māori society held property in common but had, for the most part, marriages like described above. Marriage doesn’t treat spouses as property in any strict sense, and never has: marriage partners have never been bought on the open market, nor does one resell them, nor are they a fungible commodity – that is, one spouse cannot be replaced by another the way you would pints of milk. (There have been societies where you buy concubines, but in I don't know of nor have succeeded in finding any where this trade in domestic sex slaves was done to the exclusion of marriage between people of the same social status, which is what is at issue).

What happens instead is that a marriage changes a person from belonging to one household to belonging to another (or, in more recent times where people don’t live with their family till they marry, officially recognises such a move). This has often historically lead to some fiercely restrictive circumstances for women given that men were the lords of the household and had considerable power in that role, often to the great harm of the women. But that relationship isn’t an ownership relationship. Russell has made the mistake of thinking that all such transactions are property transactions, and has accordingly missed the most deep-seated and important aspects of the culture she is critiquing. Reasons of space stop me from giving similar attention to other claims Russell makes, but the errors discussed here critically undermines her case as a whole. In conclusion, there might be serious reasons to question the institution, but not the ones she gives.

The purpose of Russell’s piece seems to me muddled in the extreme, something exacerbated by her later acknowledgement that if she were to vote on the issue she would do so in support of gay marriage. If the point was to have us reconsider the institution, she has failed – her case is misinformed and ill-conceived, and she doesn’t seem to herself understand marriage or its place in wider society. And we need to carefully consider the role marriage plays to do justice to the issue. Russell points out that many of the benefits attached to marriage –commitment, children, family ties – are not its exclusive province. But that goes both ways: when she complains that marriage also engenders jealousy, dissatisfaction, and prompts infidelity, we shouldn't confusedly identify them with marriage either. In both cases what Russell is talking about is simply the consequence of long-term intimate relations people have – whatever their sexuality, whatever the institutions in the background. 

What is at stake is LBGT people's ability to at all participate in our way of life (one, thankfully, which New Zealand secures through its legislation on same-sex civil unions and de facto relationships). That is why Russell's endorsement of the pernicious nonsense that gay people shouldn't try to be too much like straight couples is misguided and can only be harmful. LBGT people also have commitments, family ties, and the prosaic concerns of hearth and home. The fight for gay marriage is a fight in order to not close to these people the avenues our culture allows for the maintenance of their home affairs – if you're LBGT, not allowing gay marriage is to undermine your ability to look after you and yours. For that reason Russell's comments show a remarkable lack of sensitivity for other people's struggles, and can only make mischief. Accordingly, she should instead be content to live and let live.

Rest in Peace - Peter Goldie

Today I received sad news about the passing of Peter Goldie, a philosopher who specialised in the emotions, personality and aesthetics. I quote the short announcement by some of his colleagues that they sent out:

Peter Goldie 1946-2011


We are very sad to report that Peter Goldie died of cancer last night after a brief illness.


Philosophy was Peter Goldie’s second career. Before training as a philosopher he had a twenty-five year career in the City of London, culminating as the Chief Executive Officer of a public company listed in the FTSE 100. In 1990 he switched direction, studying for a BA at University College London, and then a BPhil and DPhil in Oxford. After that he was a Lecturer and then Reader at King’s College London, before moving to Manchester in 2005 to take up the Samuel Hall Chair in Philosophy.


He first became well-known for his monograph The Emotions 2000. On Personality followed in 2004, as well as a number of edited works in ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Shortly before he died he sent his publishers the final typescript of his book The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion and the Mind. He was also pleased last week to see an advance copy of a collection he edited with Elisabeth Schellekens, The Aesthetic Mind.


Peter had a distinctive philosophical voice and range of interests. His death is a great loss to philosophy and his friends.


Matthew Kieran
David Papineau
Elisabeth Schellekens

Goildie's book on the emotions  (The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration) is my favourite on that topic - with its precision and clarity mixed with a broad scope and sensitive eye to the issues, I believe it is the best book on the subject by an embarrasing margin. I had the good fortune to meet with Goldie a number of times when he was an academic visitor to the University of Auckland. He was gracious and tremendously pleasant in conversation, drawing on a fine wit and a deep appreciation of literature. He took great care to spend a lot of time with the graduate community here, offering us lots of feedback and encouragement. Here is a video of the public lecture he gave for the occasion, and here is a radio interview he gave, for those of you unfamiliar with his work. This is a large loss to the philosophy community, and I offer my sincere condolences to his friends and family.

The problems of the problems of philosophy

Very often in philosophy getting clear on what the question is is one of the hardest parts of answering it. I set out to write something on the way I do philosophy, because the question of how we should approach it is one of the most difficult and bitterly fought of all philosophic debates. So, it should have been no surprise to find that I got stuck doing so. In the spirit of better blogging – making shorter posts more often – and in order to do these issues justice, I'm splitting the discussion into a sequence of posts. Here is the first one, on why philosophy problems are especially difficult.

Philosophy is a strange and often frustrating field of study. One of the more amusing examples of this is the observation that the quickest way to get two philosophers to disagree is to ask them what philosophy is. The podcast PhilosophyBites, where they have philosophers do short interviews introducing their research, has an episode where they play back all the answers they've received to the question 'what is philosophy?', and a surprising number of the responses are simply laughter. Faced with how large and far-ranging the scope of that question is, and how little traction you have to begin to answer it even after a lifetime as a professional philosopher, laughter is one of the few responses available. How could you begin to answer it?

A professional philsopher has a great deal of experience to fall back on, but that is exactly the problem – all of the experience of a career in philosophy points towards how difficult answering that question is. This is because there does not seem to be any stable position to build from, and the longer you are in the game, the more levels of uncertainty become apparent. To put it bluntly, everything is controversial. It is not clear what philosophy is about – traditionally, it's about the big, ultimate questions like 'what is the meaning of life?', but nobody seems to be able to say what those questions are about, or what would count as an answer. Also, it is not obvious how philosophy should be done – much of the most bitter fighting in the field is about that very question, and the most spectacular examples of where things have gone wrong is where a movement arises who tries to impose a certain method to philosophy, and then crashes and burns.

This drives many observers up the wall with frustration, and more than one person, after exposure to philosophic argument, concludes that the field is hopeless – a bunch of highly educated people spinning their wheels in the mud, going nowhere. If there is nothing which philosophers can agree on, after all of that talk, then it is easy to wonder what the point of the exercise is. Even if we take as read that all the issues above are not going to be solved soon, there are at least two answers to the worry that philosophy is pointless. The first two puts the issue into perspective, and the third is what I base my own approach on, and is the focus of this series of posts.

The first response, which is not to be underestimated, is that something we have learnt from philosophy, and learnt in spades, is what doesn't work. This doesn't seem like much comfort. We certainly aren't going to come to any interesting discoveries by a process of elimination, since we aren't choosing among a restricted set of options. But many approaches which we have discovered to be wrong have turned out to be mistaken for deep and far-reaching reasons. This is especially important since a large amount of classic philosophic problems are attempts to make sense of where it seems our common sense provides contradictory answers. Finding out which approaches lead to inconsistencies in one of these cases is a warning about the extent to which we can take commonsense answers for granted. Knowing what doesn't work might not help us to grasp the truth, perhaps, but it does allow us to avoid error. There are mistakes we can avoid simply by thinking about matters carefully enough, and we'd be doing something wrong to blunder on regardless.

This observation leads us to the second answer to the worry that, in the face of widespread disagreement, it isn't the case that each answer is as good as another. Not everything is up in the air all at once. Each approach might have its problems, but they are specific problems – they also have things which they handle well. Philosophy might not have provide all the answers, but it does give us a tremendously fine-grained understanding of the problems. This is the motivation behind something philosophers are apt to say – one of the most annoying utterances in a supremely annoying field- that 'this might be wrong, but not for that reason'. And, again, this gives us the tools to avoid errors we would otherwise be vulnerable to. This is something which becomes clear when we look at the failures of philosophic research programmes, when people propose a new way of doing philosophy, and why they have come undone. There were the successes of that programme which got people excited about them, or at least which motivated the attempt, and how many of them survived the failure of the programme is very instructive.

Finally, what I take to be the most important observation – but also the most controversial – is that philosophical issues are exactly the most difficult, uncertain ones. Philosophy is the 'too hard basket' for human knowledge. Normally, people aren't as fastiduous about how they try to answer questions as we are in philosophy. They pass the buck, as it were, on what the exact answer is to certain fundamental questions – what the limits of their methodology are, for instance, or whether certain fundamental assumptions are warranted. These issues which are passed on to someone else still need to be addressed. And philosophers are at the end of the chain – they will get stuck into the problems other people would rather avoid. But there is no quicker way to make grievious errors than to make commitments which turn out to be mistaken.

If I am right on this last point, then we should expect also that once an issue really does get settled, philosophers will stop being interested in them. And I believe this is the case. A lot of this can be explained psychologically – it takes a certain type of person to be attracted to philosophy, the type who is not afraid of getting into nitty-gritty which other people find difficult and boring, and correspondingly finds easier-going fare less interesting. That is undoubtedly true of many people in the field, though I hesitate to generalise too much. But I believe this goes deeper than that. If I am right about that, then we can say something substantive about how philosophy gets done.