[1999]

I guess if you count logicians as philosophers then philosophy is useful. It is probably just "ethics" that deserves my scorn. If ethicysts were really out there studying good and evil in the world, one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police.

[woodruffw]

> one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police

Just to set aside the fact that "being murdered" is a terrible metric (do you gauge marine biologists by their diving skills, or astrophysicists by their ability to survive in a vacuum?): a good many philosophers were either murdered or narrowly avoided being murdered in the World War II and/or the Holocaust. Any profession that includes a doctrine of skepticism tends to be among the first targeted for persecution, even if that persecution doesn't involve literal acts of murder.

Ethics involves more than just doing good or bad -- it involves figuring out what we mean by "good" and "bad" to begin with, whether these things correspond to actions, individuals, or outcomes, whether they have respective orderings, and so forth. All of these questions lend themselves better to prolonged thought and discourse rather than sample sizes and expensive scientific instruments.

[1999]

I chose the 50-year interval to make it difficult since the last 50 years have been pretty stable and comfortable in anglo countries, relatively speaking.

Here is something ethicists could analyze that would really help convince me that they are taking it seriously: given the cost, the years from your life, the job prospects, and the success percentage, is it ethical to accept someone as a doctoral student specializing in ethics? Maybe they could study different universities and see which make the cut and which don't.

I agree that skeptics are persecuted so if I see group that ought to be skeptics but no one is trying to persecute them, I wonder.