David Egan Philosophy

I’ve really enjoyed running online philosophy classes over the past few years. It feels almost criminal that I can earn money for talking about philosophy with curious and thoughtful people. Unfortunately, like crime, online philosophy doesn’t pay. Or at least, the revenue stream has been tenuous enough that I haven’t felt confident in the long-term prospects of the business.

Nor have I felt entirely discouraged. Continuing with the business for a few more years and trying to grow it has certainly been one option I’ve considered quite seriously. But I’ve also been exploring a couple other options. Finding a more reliable salary from a university has been one of those options, although one that’s constrained by the scarcity of secure jobs in academic philosophy—a standard job posting gets about two hundred qualified applicants. A third option that I’ve started to explore quite seriously in the past year is to change careers entirely and retrain as a nurse.

So when the opportunity to take up a position at Koç became available, I had to decide between that and two other very palatable alternatives: carry on devoting the bulk of my energy to the online philosophy business and enrolling in nursing school.

How do we arrive at decisions? Most of them are small and happen quite quickly: I’ll make a plan with friends for the evening, I’ll order food off a menu, I’ll decide whether to work from home or take my work to a café.

Much rarer are the kinds of decisions that will affect the whole course of a life. The decision I faced this spring would determine where I’d live, what sort of work I’d do, what sorts of people I’d spend time around, and how I would direct my energy. The differences between the options I was considering was also vast. I faced a big decision at the age of eighteen about which university to attend. But in that case, I was choosing among a range of superficially similar options: whatever choice I made, I was going to end up pursuing an undergraduate degree at an Anglophone university. In this case, the whole shape of my life would be different depending on what I chose.

I did all the things you might expect me to do. I drew up a list of pros and cons. I had long conversations with wise friends and family members. Following the advice of one wise friend, I built a spreadsheet with a weighted list of priorities and ranked how well each option would satisfy them.

I found these deliberative practices helpful but not because they settled the matter. They had the form of decision procedures, the last one in particular, but I don’t think that’s the role they played in my deliberations. They didn’t yield an answer that I could then confidently follow. Nor would I have wanted them to.

A decision procedure is a more or less sophisticated algorithm that narrows a range of possible options down to one. The simplest version is a coin toss. You assign each of two options to one side of a coin and then allow the random chance of the coin toss to settle the decision.

A coin toss allows for only two options and gives each option equal weight (well, not exactly, but never mind that for now). More sophisticated decision procedures take many more options into consideration and allow for more sophisticated weighting. This sort of complex algorithm has particular prominence among utilitarian philosophers, who aspire to act in the way that will bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Effective altruists, for instance, want to make sure their charitable donations will have the greatest positive impact and have devised sophisticated tools for determining how much well-being each donated dollar can buy.

The tools deployed by effective altruists are sophisticated but the goal is simple: maximize well-being. Each option they consider—each NGO, charitable foundation, or other potential recipient of their largesse—is assessed according to how effectively it will meet this goal. A common metric is the quality-adjusted life year or QALY: a combined measure of the increase in a person’s lifespan and an increase in their quality of life. Find the organization that will buy the most QALYs per dollar and funnel your money in that direction: that’s the essence of the effective altruist’s decision procedure.

The decision I faced had a couple added wrinkles. First, the goal was nothing like so clear. I don’t want just one thing but many things. I want work that feels meaningful to me. I want opportunities to explore and discover new things. I want a certain degree of material comfort. I want to be near friends and loved ones. I want many things but I also don’t want them equally. I want work that feels meaningful and I want work that pays well, but the fact that I pursued a doctorate in philosophy in the first place suggests that meaningfulness matters more to me than pay.

This is the thinking behind my friend’s weighted spreadsheet. It allows me to list many desiderata and to assign different degrees of value to different goals. Assigning precise numerical values to life aspirations will inevitably be a bit crude, but the hope is that it will bring some added clarity to an impossibly nebulous decision.

Some added clarity, yes, but not a decision. A spreadsheet can’t make a decision for me. Nor can any of the helpful friends or loved ones I mull this over with—in fact, they’d be acting unhelpfully if they did try to tell me what to do. No matter what clarifying measures I take in mulling the decision, the decision is ultimately mine and mine alone.

And that’s because of a further wrinkle. With both the effective altruist’s QALY metric and my more complicated weighted spreadsheet, the values are treated as fixed. There are these things I value—meaningful work, opportunities to explore, material comfort, and so on—and it’s just a matter of figuring out, through the haze of uncertainty, which option will best satisfy those values. But my values aren’t fixed. Part of what I was deciding on was what to value.

Accepting the job at Koç was definitely “on brand” for me. In my life so far, I’ve prioritized adventure, discovery, and richness of experience. This job provides ample opportunity to satisfy my intellectual curiosity as well as throwing me into a new life in one of the most intriguing cities in the world. But part of what drew me to nursing was the way that it called different virtues to the fore. A life as a nurse would require compassion and humility. And not just require these things—working as a nurse, day in and day out, would undoubtedly train me in compassion and humility. I would become a different person, with different values and different virtues, in following through with that decision.

We all become different people as our lives unfold no matter what we do. The choices we make don’t just reflect settled priorities. They also shape those priorities, reinforcing past choices or laying down new patterns. When I contemplate what life as a nurse might be like, it’s not just my activities and routines that I imagine being different. It’s my very self that I imagine being different.

A coin toss or a spreadsheet can’t make such decisions for me. But they do help in a different way, by temporarily taking the decision out of my hands and allowing me a certain distance on the decision. I’ve found coin tosses helpful in the past partly because I learn something when the coin comes up heads or tails—in my relief or disappointment, I catch a glimpse of what I wanted all along.

The spreadsheet, in effect, was a more sophisticated coin toss. In telling me what to do (the spreadsheet recommended the job at Koç, in case you’re wondering), it helped me see the decision from a certain distance, to assess whether its outputs aligned with what I really wanted. Where the outputs seemed a bit askew, it prompted me to reassess the weight I placed on different values.

But in the end the decision was inalienably my own because the life it was shaping was my own. Part of what’s unsettling about a big decision like this one is that it makes me keenly aware of the contingency of who I am. There may be some core personality traits that I’d have no matter how my life unfolded. But a large part of the person that I’ve become has been a product of decisions and events that, had they gone otherwise, would have shaped me otherwise. Like an impromptu speech, my self is something I’m making up as I go along. 

1. Mice have longer sperm than elephants. And longest of all is the sperm of a species of fruit fly. (source)
2. More books are sold in the United States each year than movie tickets. (source)
3. According to a recent poll, nearly a quarter of Americans want their home state to secede from the Union. (source)
4. The ancient Greek legal system used neither imprisonment nor corporal punishment as penalties. Imprisonment was out because a city-state didn’t have the logistical means to maintain a long-term prison population. It’s less clear why corporal punishment wasn’t used, but probably because the aim of punishment was to settle a dispute rather than rile up feelings of outrage that might flare up again later. Penalties almost always involved some combination of fines, banishment, disenfranchisement, and death. (source)
5. The word “girl” was originally gender-neutral, meaning a young person of either gender. (source)
6. The muscles that close the mouth by pulling the lower jaw upward are much stronger than the muscles that open the mouth by pulling the lower jaw downward. Opening the mouth mostly just involves relaxing the mouth-closing muscles and letting gravity do the rest of the work. As a result, astronauts in zero gravity find they need to exert a surprising amount of effort to open their mouths. (source)
7. Finland has 5.6 million people—and 3.5 million saunas. (source)