Being Responsible for our Concepts
Love, friendship, gender, race, heresy: we have concepts for all these phenomena. But what are these mysterious creatures we call concepts? Well, they are tools, but of a different type than hammers and screwdrivers: they are mental tools. However, the mental nature of concepts doesn’t make their effects less important for our lives. Quite the contrary, in fact. We use concepts to represent the reality surrounding us and to think about it, and the more our conceptual repertoire is rich, the more our abilities to reason, understand, imagine, and desire are enhanced.
But there’s even more. The role of concepts is not limited to represent reality; they are (at least in part) constitutive of it. For example, consider the variety of professions one can do. Arguably, the possibility of being a lawyer, a teacher, or a blogger has some kind of dependence from the existence of the corresponding concepts. This is not to exclude that, say, the concept of ‘blogger’ could have been introduced to keep track of some already existing phenomenon. Though, even in that case, introducing the concept would seem to crystallise that phenomenon, to make it “a thing”.
Given all this, there’s an essential point that can’t be ignored. We ought to be responsible for our concepts. We’ve just seen that concepts are tools, of a particularly potent kind indeed, and the way we use tools brings consequences with it. As you can employ a screwdriver to fix a wobbly table or to hurt other people, so concepts are capable of improving people’s lives or make them worse, of tracking down injustice to denounce it or generate oppression. Concepts can have good and bad consequences, and people have got to be responsible for the concepts they possess and the use they make of them.
Let’s make some examples. Consider again the concepts I listed at the beginning: love, friendship, gender, race, and heresy. Do they look morally on the same level? Of course they don’t. The first two seem to have overall good consequences. They allow us to describe certain positive feelings and to create relationships that are meaningful for our lives. On the other hand, using the concepts of race and heresy seems to have mostly negative effects. In different contexts, they serve to force people into categories that are taken to allow for discrimination against them. Finally, the concept of gender appears more bivalent: people can use it to express their identity, but it can also become a source of cultural oppression.
Sometimes concepts seem to be intrinsically bad (like that of ‘race’ perhaps), but most of the time it’s a matter of how we use them. Again, it’s the same for standard tools. Hammers aren’t morally problematic per se, even though one can use them to kill people. Conversely, I find a little bit hard to think of atomic bombs or rifles as intrinsically morally neutral. In this sense, keeping the concept of race in our repertory is not much different from keeping a rifle in our basement. If we have it, sooner or later we might end up using it to hurt people. Being responsible for our concepts requires us to polish our conceptual repertoire from intrinsically bad concepts (eliminating, or perhaps changing them) and be careful about the use of the others.
Fair enough, you might think, but what are we supposed to do concretely? Well, half of the work is to ask the right questions. Instead of accepting and using the concepts that our societies and cultures give us acritically, we should question them. What are the moral, political, social or psychological consequences of using this concept? Does it ameliorate the life of people? Could it be used to generate injustice? How likely? Has it been historically used in oppressive ways? All these are questions that should concern us. The other half of the work is to change our conceptual practice accordingly. Moreover, particularly dynamic people can try to achieve more significant results, putting their efforts to change bad conceptual practices on a social scale. All this requires to endorse an active attitude towards not only concepts but the reality itself. Asking not only how the world is but how it ought to be, is the first step to actually change it for the better.
Originally published at https://www.philosopheelings.net on October 6, 2020.
