Viewpiont

In addition, what philosophers are talking about is stuff that affects us all. “For example, do we have free will or not? If we didn’t have free will then we’d have to completely reform the justice system.”

What’s the point of doing philosophy?

This is one of the things that I've always found interesting, and more than a little confusing, about the free will debate. If people don't have free will, whether or not they believe that free will is real isn't really up to them; many people would still have the sense that others' decisions are freely made, and thus would be amenable to interventions, like jail or corporal punishment, designed to alter people's behaviors.

It's one of the strange things about the debate over free will, that somehow the understanding that people don't have free will could be a catalyst for people to willfully change how they see others. Which, I don't think I need to say, sort of presumes that free will is, in fact, in play.

But then, I'm not a philosopher. There may be something in the formal education that philosophers receive that addresses comments like mine. But still, it seems a strange thing to presume that there is some proof out there that would convince people, but not require them to be able to will themselves to change their viewpoints.

Perhaps this is why I find philosophy so interesting. It's a completely different way of looking at life and the world. When I was growing up, for instance, I understood the search for "meaning of/in life" mainly as a punchline... some guy would have climbed a mountain to find someone living in a cave, and they'd learn something either blatantly obvious or completely nonsensical. Either way, it rendered their whole effort moot. Coming to understand that this was a serious pursuit among philosophers was something of a surprise.

In any event, I don't typically find philosophy to have the sort of everyday relevance that's spoken of in the quote at the beginning of this post, but it's still an interesting field for all of that. Of course, "interesting" isn't the same as "useful," but that can be said of a lot of things.