Your Teacher, The (former) Smoker: What "Critical" Means
Note: When I originally wrote this last spring, I was still a pack a day smoker. I quit early in August . =)
I often explain "critical" to students using the old cliché "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
Critical, to me, has meant being able to go through a source's ideas or their analysis of something and "separate the baby from the bathwater"—in other words, by using other sources to modify their ideas, to discredit the bad ones, and to extend the good ones, we rescue and nurture the "baby" (the good ideas) while getting rid of the "bathwater" (the bad ones). It means not accepting or rejecting wholesale what anybody has to say, but rather picking apart their ideas and their analysis in order to identify what's most useful.
In other words, we are not really interested so much in who is "right" or "wrong." We are interested in how "useful" their ideas might be for understanding whatever our current research is looking at. An author might be completely wrong about something, but still have ideas that are useful for understanding something else. So we modify un-useful ideas (by combining them with the ideas from other sources!) to make them more useful, we reject completely useless ideas, and we take useful ideas and try to extend them or apply them to something new.
Being "critical" can also mean carefully questioning the definitions of key terms, and the assumptions being made by an author. It can involve carefully re-defining certain terms to make them more useful—and then applying them to make sense out of something. For example:
This afternoon I was standing outside of the Golda Meir Library having a cigarette, waiting for my conferences with my face to face students to begin. A man walked up to me and offered to pay me a dollar for one of my cigarettes. I told him, "No, you can just have it. Here." I pulled out my pack of cigarettes, gave him a smoke, and handed him my lighter. He lit the cigarette, and then offered me the dollar again, crumpled in his hand. "Here," he said, "cigarettes are expensive these days. Are you sure you don't want this?" I replied, "No, that's all the more reason. Thanks though." He walked away, and I silently congratulated myself for my act of charity.
But then I began to have second thoughts-- was that really an act of charity? What if he was an alcoholic, and I just gave him a free beer? Was I really doing him a favor? Does that count as "charity"? Or was it something else?
Imagine that this claim, that giving away a cigarette to a smoker, a.k.a. a nicotine addict, was something one of your sources had said. You would summarize their story, and their seemingly innocent assumption that this counted as an act of "charity." Then you might start, in your essay, by asking the very same questions I just asked of myself. Is that charity? Or are you really contributing to a serious harm? We might have to start to answer that question by trying to define first for ourselves and our audience what "charity" really means- does it just mean giving away something for free, or does it necessarily imply that this act *benefits* the recipient of your generosity? As I am writing my essay, I write that "charity" necessarily implies a benefit to the recipient-- that if there is no benefit, it is not charity. I may well have looked up and cited a source or two discussing "charity" in order to develop this definition (defining key terms). Now that we've established that we can only evaluate the truth of this claim by examining whether or not giving this man a cigarette really counts as a "benefit"-- we have the basis for the next paragraph of our essay.
So we start by writing our next paragraph discussing the perceived benefits, to this man, of giving him a cigarette. He was in the middle of a withdrawl fit, commonly called "jonsing." He really felt he needed a cigarette, enough to offer to pay for one. In the short term, I alleviated his suffering by giving him that cigarette, and he probably felt grateful (we imagine) for receiving it. We conclude this paragraph by arguing that from the man's perspective, this probably counts as a "benefit" and is therefore actually an act of "charity."
But now we move onto the next paragraph, and we take the discussion even further. People don't always know what's best for them, or even if they know it, don't always do it. We describe in our paragraph the analogy with the alcoholic, and giving them a beer. We argue here that the alcoholic may or may not imagine it as a "benefit," but that any outside observer will *not* consider this a "benefit," but rather see it as causing more harm in the long run. We might even consider quoting or citing some sources here which seem relevant to this analogy of alcoholism to cigarette addiction.
Now we have to evaluate if this analogy is really valid: is nicotine addiction really as serious of a harm as alcoholism? Should the "harm" done really be weighed as seriously? We might argue that the "harm" in giving an alcoholic a beer is far more serious, and that the "harm" in giving a smoker a cigarette really doesn't outweigh the benefit which the smoker perceives. But our sources seem to say otherwise-- if being an alcoholic only harmed the alcoholic, perhaps we would say go ahead. But the alcoholic harms others around them, their family, their friends, through their alcoholism. The smoke harms others just as surely through second-hand smoke. So we conclude that the individual's definition of "benefit" vs. "harm" is not the only thing at stake--there is a collective well-being to consider.
So does the collective well-being outweigh the individual's liberty? Does the smoker have to right to be a smoker, does the alcoholic have the right to be an alcoholic? Because if so, doesn't that mean that we ought to leave the definition of "harm" versus "benefit" up to the individual? Or should the collective wisdom be allowed to define "harm" and "benefit" for everyone?
Now we discover that this is really a seriously complex ethical question, which has at stake in it the fundamental question of how far an individual's liberty extends in the face of the collective well-being and collective judgement. Perhaps now we have to consider redefining the notion of "charity"-- that charity cannot simply benefit the individual recipient, but that "charity" itself also implies that the benefit to the individual must necessarily *also* be a benefit to society-- that giving that "benefit" to the individual *also* benefits society in general. With this new definition of "charity," we conclude that in fact, giving the man a cigarette, was *not* an act of charity, but rather something else.
This was just *one* idea from *one* source, taken through a series of increasingly refined examination of the assumptions and definitions which shaped that author's perspective. We ultimately conclude that the author was wrong to consider this an act of charity, and further conclude, that as much as it might seem hypocritical, the charitable act would have been to deny the man a cigarette, out of concern for his own health as well as the collective health of society.
But this act of "critical" inquiry might not even be over now-- because we also need to wonder then, if this reasoning can be applied to the idea of banning smoking altogether. It is one thing to say that it isn't "charity" to give a man a cigarette, but does it necessarily follow then that banning it for everyone, regardless of what any individual wants, is a social good?
So the last act of being critical here is to examine the limitsof what we've really done here.
We've established that it isn't charitable-- based on a new definition of charity. But our reasoning here has not even begun to address the balance between individual liberty and the social good, and where individual liberty can be abridged for the social good. That means, in our paper, we either have to acknowledge that our reasoning so far hasn't taken us far enough to be able to answer that, or else we then need to bring in sources which discuss this balance between the individual good and the societal good, and to engage with their ideas in *exactly the same way* as we just engaged with your instructor's non-chalant claim that giving a man a cigarette constitutes an act of charity.
There are other ways to be critical-- including being critical of entire sets of ideas or claims at once, working with multiple sources' ideas at once. The above examination is just a simple example of one version of what "critical" might look like. . . Fundamental to the idea of "critical" is the examination of definitions, assumptions, key terms, and the questioning of those things in order to get at ever better definitions, better assumptions, and better ideas.
-Adam
