I know it's been over six months since anyone has posted in here, but I can't think of a better forum for the title question, which I've been thinking about for a little while now. Maybe someone else will have a thought.
For the past year I've been a paralegal at a law firm that specializes in plaintiff-side class actions. I wanted a legal job after graduation because I was having a minor law-school-v.-grad-school guilt attack. The final nail in the coffin (about two weeks after I started...) was a conversation I had with one of the attorneys. He wanted me to find and print out several cases for a brief he was writing, and he handed me a sheet of paper with the citations highlighted. He said, "I just want these ones -- they're the decisions that go in our favor. I don't care about any of the others."
I was genuinely shocked. Even though he knew about other cases which argued against him, he only wanted the ones that were on his side. That was when I first realized how law really works: because someone is paying you to argue for them (or for my firm, because you only get paid if you win), you really only consider your own side of the argument. Of course you have to anticipate what the other side will say, but attorneys don't deliberate on what the right answer is. If an attorney suspects that the other side is right, they are not allowed to switch -- the thing to do, at that point, is to try to distract the judge's attention from your weakness and focus on the stronger points of your own argument. The judge is the only one who gets to truly consider the merits of both arguments, and the judge is the only one who is free to choose sides.
To me, this seemed like the antithesis of good philosophy. To practice good philosophy, one should ideally consider both sides of an argument, and pick the one that seems more defensible --
before writing a paper. One should feel free to switch sides mid-career if the evidence is compelling. The thing I have always loved the most about philosophy is the importance of clarity and logic in arguments, but it is also important that those methods be used in a genuine search for answers. Law, as practiced by attorneys, is an exercise in the first without any of the second; it seemed to me at best boring, and at worst dishonest.
But more recently, as I've spent more time around lawyers (and more time around economists), I am wondering whether the way law is practiced might actually be a more effective and more efficient way to find answers. For one, both sides have a clear incentive (their livelihoods) to support a certain position. It follows that good lawyers will try hard to win, and judges, sitting down to decide, have access to the best possible arguments on both sides of a debate. For every question, the interests of both sides are represented.
By contrast, in philosophy, positions come in and out of favor. Certain constructs or viewpoints go for decades without being seriously considered, just because everyone is free to choose which side to argue for and which assumptions to make. Groups who share certain assumptions become closed off, rather than debating with those who disagree. "Progress" in philosophy is only ever relevant within very narrow subfields; the entire discipline has nothing to ground it and nothing to ensure that unpopular positions are discarded for good reasons.
None of this seems to happen in law. What would it be like if debates in philosophy proceeded more like law -- with pre-assigned sides, and with an independent incentive to win?
Of course, you could argue that the philosophical community is sufficiently large that, over time, these problems will self-correct as people's curiosity leads them to argue for different positions. But I wonder whether a system that provided a formal detachment between people and their arguments, leaving us freer to switch sides, as well as providing a guaranteed counterpoint to any argument we tried to advance -- might produce better arguments, and maybe even better philosophers.
