I was recently sent an article entitled ‘The Great Debate’ – A scholastic reading, written by a friend of mine, Allen Keller. The article can be accessed here: Allen Keller: ‘The Great Debate’ — A scholastic reading. I offered to write a review of the article and hopefully offer another perspective in this conversation. As a disclaimer, I did listen to most of the debate between Candace Owens and Andrew Wilson. Like Allen, I checked out on Candace Owens long ago when she began to dive off the deep end with her conspiracy theories and obsession with Erika Kirk. I also had not heard of Andrew Wilson prior to the debate. Overall, I found the debate quite comical at times, but I believe, like Allen, that there is room for concern in Owens’ performance.
In his article, Allen assesses the recent debate between Candace Owens and Andrew Wilson concerning the death of Charlie Kirk. Allen criticizes Owens’ inability to argue, stating that Owens “meandered through various reasons why the official story didn’t make sense to her”. In particular, Allen is concerned with Owens’ “shallow responses” to Wilson’s demands for positive evidence for her claims. Several examples from the debate follow, displaying that Candace was unable to provide any such evidence and rather reverted to emotional, defensive eruptions in response to Wilson’s questions. On the other hand, Allen has a much more positive view of Wilson, commenting that he was struck by “how clearly Wilson spoke and how disciplined his thinking was”. Allen’s central argument is that Owens’ performance in the debate is indicative of the impression that Kantian philosophy has made in the modern world, namely a subjectivity that “whatever a person thinks is in fact what is”. He concludes by cautioning his readers that Owens’ performance displays the decline in our society, but Wilson’s excellent use of good reason and discipline offers us a way forward.
I believe there is much to appreciate about Allen’s article. First, Allen provides several examples of Owens’ “meandering” through Wilson’s demand for positive evidence. Owens was clearly emotionally charged in the debate, and the examples show that she struggled to make a clear, logically valid argument. I think Allen’s assessments of Owens and Wilson are accurate. I also appreciate Allen’s accurate identification of the problem that Owens represents–that Kantian subjectivism has created a world in which feelings and emotion supersede the “world of objective facts”. I will have much more to say on this in the following paragraphs. Finally, Allen quite creatively applies Scholastic categories to his analysis in a practical manner. In particular, he demonstrates that Owens’ “arguments” are categorically not reasoning, but, in terms of Scholastic logic, might be signified by the term “simple apprehension”. I will have more to say on this, as well.
As I was reading Allen’s article, I was reminded of Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion on Emotivism in his book, After Virtue. According to MacIntyre, Emotivism is “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”1 In other words, Emotivism is a theory about moral judgement in which one judges the meaning of a good moral action to be roughly identical to “I approve of this; therefore, you should do this”. This radically subjectivizes moral judgement such that there are neither true nor false moral judgements, only what our own feelings and attitudes say. Thus, all disagreements between rival arguments cannot be rationally reconciled. How, then, does one convince others that a moral action is good? According to MacIntyre, Emotivism obliterates “any genuine distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations” such that people are to be treated as a means to an end rather than an end in and of themselves.2 Thus, the Emotivist must persuade another through manipulating them into feeling the same way they feel. As MacIntyre says, “The sole reality of distinctively moral discourse [to the Emotivist] is the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preference and choices of another with its own.”3
I believe the debate between Owens and Wilson showcases how Emotivism has pervaded our society. Candace Owens makes few (if any) rational arguments in the debate, but leans heavily towards showing that her moral judgements must be good by attempting to emotionally manipulate Wilson and the audience. The most prominent example given by Allen is the following exchange between Owens and Wilson:
“Yeah, but do you have positive evidence?”
“I’m answering the question as I feel like I want to answer it…” said Owens.
“Other than your intuition and how you feel about things, do you have any evidence Israel was involved in killing Charlie Kirk?” Wilson persisted.
Notice that Owens’ response to Wilson is a textbook example of an Emotivist appeal to feelings. Wilson rightly picks up on this in his response to her, “other than your intuition and how you feel about things, &c.” Owens’ strategy is not to argue from logical coherence or to form reasonable arguments, but to manipulate her audience through her feelings into agreeing with her.
Allen’s integration of Scholastic categories becomes helpful at this point. Drawing on the distinction of “simple apprehension”, he demonstrates that Owens’ responses are not a result of reasoning, but rather “more akin to merely perceiving or observing”. In other words, Owens is taking a set of observations and drawing conclusions about them without demonstrating rationally how those observations are logically related. It is, in Allen’s words, how we arrive at a world in which 2+2 does not have to equal 4.
I agree with Allen’s overall assessment of the Owens-Wilson debate. I believe he correctly identified the problem with Owens’ tactic and successfully defended a scholastic interpretation of the problem. He is right that Owens’ performance in the debate reveals a problem in the popular culture of our society that the typical American does not know how to form arguments or appeal to good reason. I think that Allen’s argument could be strengthened by integrating MacIntyrean concepts of morality and rationality, which coheres nicely with his theory. Therefore, I would point Allen to MacIntyre for further evaluation.
The Scholastic Anglican 