Kwame Anthony Appiah: belief

Transcript context

…You write a column for the New York Times called “The Ethicist,” and you give people ethical advice. To what extent do you think advice in any context, including that, is mainly a placebo? That people feel they’ve gotten advice, they feel stronger, they feel more confident. They may go ahead and do what they want to anyway. You’ve benefited them, but advice is something other than actual advice. Honestly, the main thing I think I’m doing in the column is helping everybody except the person that wrote the letter to think about some ethical question, which is for them not likely to be an urgent one in the way it is for the letter writer. For the letter writers, of course I don’t give advice that I think will do them any harm, but I’m not usually feeling that the advice I’ve given them is either (a) very different from what they would have done without my advice, or (b) really, truly satisfactory because if I were in the business of advising, as opposed to writing an advice column, which is not being in the business of advising, I would want to know more in almost every case about their situation. If they came to me with the question, the first thing I’d say is, “Tell me more about this. Tell me more about that,” and so on. But the convention is that the letter is all I get, and while the fact checkers at the Times do call people up to make sure that everything in the letter is true, they don’t allow me to ask them questions. I think that in real life, a lot of the function of advice is actually the one you identified. It’s just being a sounding board. It’s listening. The person’s going to do something, but it’s helpful to be heard. It’s helpful to articulate the problem for yourself. The advice function — the thing that the advisor says — may not be hugely important. There’s some evidence that people who know just a little about financial literacy do worse than people who know nothing at all because they then think they can go out and make investments, but until they know a lot, that may be counterproductive. Do you ever worry about that with advice?…

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