Do philosophers make the world a better place? Thoughts from the late John Gardner (Oxford)

I posed the question back in 2013, and thought I'd re-up the late John Gardner's interesting answer at that time (and invite reader thoughts/reactions):

I'd be the first to say that the world is a better place - constitutively - just in virtue of containing more good philosophy, and more good philosophers. But I take it that the questioner is asking about making the world a better place instrumentally by his or her work, owed to to the dissemination of good ideas in it. Beyond helping students and other scholars to solve puzzles or to frame arguments, I do not believe that my philosophical work has any significant consequences via such dissemination and I do not intend it to have any. I do not intend it to have any, partly because I suspect that any consequences it would have, if it had any, would be really bad. Not because it is bad philosophy (though maybe it is) but because philosophy (in my subfields: moral, political, legal) is ripe for abuse. It is better not to have any effects than to have predictably unwelcome effects through the kind of people who are likely to put my work to use. On the very rare occasions when I have seen my work used by judges, policymakers, journalists, etc. - what Andrew [in a comment above] callled 'intermediaries' - I have very much disapproved of what they did with it and wished that I had managed to keep it much more secret.

Digression: Fortunately the UK Research Excellence Framework, while it laboriously measures the extra-academic 'impact' of research, doesn't require that that impact be for the better. If one's research happened to be a constant inspiration to blood-sucking alien life-forms intent on enslaving humanity (not true of mine, but clearly true of some in my immediate vicinity) that would still qualify as an impact so long as the aliens took the trouble to record their debt to one's research. In fact, correctly documented and corroborated, that would be a top-ranking research impact in the REF, as it would have great 'significance' (apocalyptic) and 'reach' (intergalactic).

Back to main line of thought: If I reflect, as I occasionally do, on whether I could be putting my brain to better use, I console myself with the thought of how little any of my standard comparators ever contributes instrumentally, at least in net terms, to making the world a better place. Lawyers and politicians and religious leaders and journalists and NGO people all like to think that what they do has good consequences for humanity, but I doubt whether most of them are (in the round) doing much more good than ill by their work. And I doubt whether any instrumental good they do, in the round, is particularly closely related to whatever good they may have intended to do. So their example does not encourage me to change my intentions in a more instrumentally do-gooding direction. (Although maybe there is constitutive good in their acting on good intentions.)

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