I liked the article, and broadly agree with it that the purpose of philosophy is primarily about presenting and fleshing out and exploring facets of various positions.

(WARNING: The following paragraphs jump off the deep end with some fairly putative ideas, so if you don’t like rambling then ignore)

One thing I think is interesting is when the outworkings of bedrocks clash in extremely important ways. The ideas of philosophers often don't matter all that much, e.g. arguing about whether numbers are Platonic is probably purely an academic question. But some arguments do make a difference, with the most obvious examples in ethics and politics, e.g. Peter Singer has had a fairly large impact on the world while in the past Wollstonecraft or Aquinas or Confucius might be picked out.

Importantly, I strongly suspect ideas matter not only in shaping our mature, rational thought processes. I think they also influence what our bedrock ideas are themselves. I don’t think we recognise just how malleable people are. As an example, the vast majority of people today at least pay lip service to the ideal of equality. I think in most this is a bedrock view. And I consider it a bedrock view that is instilled in people rather than one that all people naturally tend towards. In the past, the idea of subjugating other tribes, nations, women, slaves, etc. was often not even seen as a problem in need of justification. Perhaps we think that subjugation is simply more subtle or directed in different ways today, but at any rate people feel guilty about doing it openly in a way that they wouldn't in the past. It seems the average bedrock has changed: an ideal has "won", or at least gained ground, in such a subtle way that we don't even notice the victory, that we see it as somehow natural (which I’m all for, to be clear!).

Over the centuries, cultures will continue to evolve and bedrocks will continue to change. And I think philosophers have a very important part to play in choosing not only how we understand the outworkings of bedrocks as this article talks about, but also in choosing which bedrocks dominate our culture in the future. We talk about educating children in morality. In reality, we indoctrinate. I don't mean that in any negative way, but merely to contrast what's really happening with what is meant by education: we often aren’t teaching children facts about the world (except in an esoteric, constructed sense), we're teaching them how to interpret the world and how they should feel about it. I think indoctrination is utterly crucial for ensuring a good society. We need to indoctrinate kids into the idea that sharing is good, that we shouldn't enjoy violence, that other people matter as much as ourselves, etc. And if someone wants to tell me that this isn’t what we’re doing, that children have a natural inclination towards kindness – yes, they do. But they also have a natural inclination towards cruelty. Humans have competing inclinations, and the choice is which ones we emphasise through encouragement.

Where this gets very interesting is that the power of indoctrination is far stronger if it’s seen as actual education. If we teach people not only to see murder as wrong, but to see it as unquestionably wrong; if we teach them to see things as wrong in an eternal, objective sense, rather than let them imagine that the reason they think it’s wrong is because that’s how they’ve been taught. Indoctrinated people who don’t know they are indoctrinated are far less likely to break their programming. So the questions I find really interesting are: Am I willing to pretend I’m not indoctrinating to empower my ideals? When I teach any children I may have, how will I present to them the moral lessons I give? And if I ever enter academia, will I be open about my desire to not only attempt to describe the world, to not simply figure out the outworkings of intuitions, but to actually shape the most fundamental ways we see things in any minor way I can? Have other people asked these questions before and decided that they would pretend the question doesn’t exist in order to empower their ideas? I honestly don’t know.