Philosophy, the broad and the broader.

Get your pens out, but make sure you get your vocal chords ready too. It’s time for a deeply philosophical discussion. And what does a philosophy discussion consist of? Overestimation, arrogance and typically a disregard for nuances. Broad overestimations backed by arrogance pave the way for many wonderful theories on the meaning of life, the meaning of law, or even family. Give someone enough money and enough freedom to think of something, and he will.

Everything in life is situational, everything typically requires some different or extra thought, as the factors are never the same. That’s why law is as complex as it . One sentence for every crime would be completely unfair and unjust, we’re more progressive than that. That’s what ethical philosophy and philosophy fail at: nuances. Specifics.

It would be absurd to write a theory that comprehensively and inclusively covered everything, that would take more than a life time. It’s much easier and much more convenient to be broad and absolute, so you don’t have to do the busy work of actually applying it to every circumstance. Yup, that’s right, some philosophy is just lazy (and it’s not even just the religious stuff, it’s anything that abdicates responsibility of actually putting a real effort into explaining something).

Real life application of moral theories may arise various issues, but that’s not important to academia. What’s important to academia is maintaining said theories, and discussing the merit of each theory, instead of wholly dismissing them for being overly-broad and absolute to the point of unrealisticness and uselessness.
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If something is broad and vague enough, it’s not as if you can disprove it, but that doesn’t give it automatic credibility. That just gives it a mask of being useless to the point of irrefutability (even if its uselessness is enough of a criticism on its own).

Example: I’ll weirdly be looking at one of the most reasonable – and most popular, at least in the West – theory/ideal for how laws should be made and how government should function. Utilitarianism! “The most pleasure, for the most amount of people” is the rudiment of this theory. This is way too simplistic, it doesn’t really address why minorities should be catered to or protected. It certainly promotes the best conditions for the majority, but what’s there to stop the majority? Should every situation be negligent of the statistical irrelevant and ignoreable?

Perhaps even more importantly, what is pleasure, and what is good? These are merely vague notions, and you’re left to work that out on your own for every circumstance. If you’re left with so little, why not do to the rational thing and look at every situation for what they are: individual situations. That doesn’t mean you have to neglect a broader ideology you have, but it means a lot of ethics and philosophy are inapplicable and not always practical. I wish the academic world would be more honest with themselves.