poke, I agree that michael vassar misread you, but I think his last paragraph is concrete engagement. If you’re worried that moral philosophers are too abstract, I would stress the moral deliberation of political philosophers. The Enlightenment, eg, the abolition of slavery, seems to me a pretty clear-cut case.
Here are the possible objections I can see:
I have the timeline wrong and the philosophers jumped on a bandwagon
1b philosophers reflect the elites, but it takes time for elite morality to affect the world
we only remember the philosophers on the winning side
moral deliberation is a good guess about which way society is going to go, but philosophers have no impact (but this suggests that the masses are doing moral deliberation!)
poke, I agree that michael vassar misread you, but I think his last paragraph is concrete engagement. If you’re worried that moral philosophers are too abstract, I would stress the moral deliberation of political philosophers. The Enlightenment, eg, the abolition of slavery, seems to me a pretty clear-cut case.
Here are the possible objections I can see:
I have the timeline wrong and the philosophers jumped on a bandwagon 1b philosophers reflect the elites, but it takes time for elite morality to affect the world
we only remember the philosophers on the winning side
moral deliberation is a good guess about which way society is going to go, but philosophers have no impact (but this suggests that the masses are doing moral deliberation!)