159. TAKING STUDENT SILLINESS SERIOUSLY - Lightning McQueen and the Importance of Battling Deepities
The philosopher, Daniel Dennett, famously coined the term ‘deepity’ to describe those seemingly profound questions which aren’t profound at all. Things that sound philosophical but are just an illusion of deep thinking. One problem with the internet is the speed with which such deepities can travel, faster than the speed of thought. It sounds profound, you ‘like’ it or share it on, and it’s only later that you think about it a little harder and realise it’s nothing.
Like garbage washing up on the shore of a polluted sea, the Philosophy classroom is often where a lot of these deepities come to rest as students, impressed by their apparent wisdom, share them with the one person they think will be equally impressed: their Philosophy teacher. Often those students are soon disappointed, even angry, when that teacher is not impressed at all and, instead, pops the bubble of the illusion and exposes its emptiness.
This happened to me this week in a Philosophy classroom. My students wanted to discuss the philosophical question of whether Lightning McQueen, from the Disney/Pixar movie, Cars, as a sentient car, should have to buy life insurance or car insurance.
Although I have actually never seen the movie (not quite true: it played in the background at a family restaurant on Guernsey that I once ate in, but I haven’t paid attention to it beyond background images) I could see why the question seems to have philosophical merit. Lightning McQueen is an entanglement of two normally unentangled things: a car and a person. And the insurance question brings that entanglement up to the forefront so it seems like a serious dilemma.
Unfortunately for my students, the only philosophical merit of the question was being able to use it to show how philosophical skills can protect us from deepities.
I asked my class not to give their opinions on the question, but to analyse it. Break it down into its component assumptions and ideas and see if the question is worthwhile. Without my guidance they themselves saw that to answer it we’d need to know for sure what car insurance and life insurance actually are, as well as what constitutes a car and a life. They would also need to know what the requirements are for insurance: is it necessary or merely optional?
Immediately I was able to discuss the fallacy of the false dichotomy with them. If, for example, we discovered that one could have both car and life insurance, or happily have neither, then there are more options available to us than the false dichotomy presented or life or car insurance. It is always important to look beyond the presentation of an either/or disjunction if the answer could be ‘both’, ‘neither’, or option C, D, E, F, G, etc…
When we then dug deep into what life and car insurance actually are, the students could see just how false (and un-deep) the dichotomy presented was.
Life insurance being the insurance one usually gets to provide a beneficiary with some financial security following their death (often where that person is the main income-earner in a family, or where they might leave debts and expenses behind which would be a burden for those who outlive them), and car insurance being the insurance we get to protect our cars, and the cars of others, if this expensive personal item is stolen or damaged (or we damage someone else’s in an accident), we could immediately see that the two things are not mutually exclusive. That there is no either/or. One can, and often does, possess both life insurance and car insurance. If Lightning McQueen is worried about loved ones facing financial hardship in the event of his death, then he should get life insurance. If he is worried about affording the costs of damage to another vehicle, or himself, in a road traffic accident, then he should get car insurance too.
We then discovered car insurance is not optional in the UK if he wants to actually drive on the roads. While he can go uninsured if declared off-road (if he wants to stay parked on his drive and not move) he will need car insurance. Life insurance, however, is optional. Many people don’t have it. So, again, the dichotomy is false. Lightning McQueen might have no choice but to buy car insurance, while purchasing life insurance is entirely at his own discretion.
The deepity wasn’t deep. It was an empty question.
However, I tried to make it deeper by pointing out that a world where car-people like Lightning McQueen had to get car insurance to freely move around while human-people like us could walk around without it would be a potentially unjust world. A world where a targeted group of people had an additional tax on their lives just because of the particular group of people they belonged to. How the deepity might, in such a world, allow us to start making a case that car-people like Lightning McQueen should be freed from the inequitable burden of car insurance on their lives that non-car-people don’t have. But at this point the class were no longer interested. I’d ruined their fun by analysing the profundity away and taking their silliness seriously. To be honest, they never really recovered from the revelation that I hadn’t seen Cars.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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