Civic Health Talks

The series of talks I organised is now done. I recorded them, with their question-periods; click on the talk titles below to listen or download.

1. Derek Edyvane, 'Civic Health & Civic Vitality'
2. Sam Clark, 'Good Work'
3. Kerri Woods, 'Solidarity, Vulnerability, & Civic Health'
4. John O'Neill, 'Living Well Within Limits'

I'm glad I did this, even though it was quite a lot of work and stress - I'd slightly forgotten what it was like to fret about whether anyone's going to turn up to the play or gig I'm promoting. Thanks again to all the speakers.

Civic Health Lectures

I've organised a series of public talks on the idea of civic health:


Civic health: four public lectures on living well together

What is a sick society, and what would a healthy society be? What relations does civic health require between citizens? What must citizens be or do or have to live well together? What does the current civic health agenda in politics have to say about these questions, and is it adequate?

Visiting and local philosophers will reflect on these questions in this series of free public lectures, organised by the Department of Politics, Philosophy, & Religion at Lancaster University and funded by the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Schedule:
1. 730pm, 9 May: Dr Derek Edyvane, University of Leeds: ‘Civic Health & Civic Vitality’
2. 730pm, 16 May: Dr Sam Clark, Lancaster University: ‘Good Work’
3. 730pm, 23 May: Dr Kerri Woods, University of York: ‘Solidarity, Vulnerability, & Civic Health’
4. 730pm, 30 May: Professor John O’Neill, Manchester University: ‘Living Well Within Limits’

Venue: The Storey, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster

Free & open to all

Teaching and writing this term

I’m teaching two related courses this term: PPR309 Practical Philosophy: Capitalism as an Ethical Problem (final-year undergraduate) and PPR459 Ethics & Governance (MA). Links go to module guides. I plan to write the first draft of a book about capitalism out of this teaching, and will post draft chapters here as I go.

A sketch of a theory of responsibility

(Mostly inspired by discussions with Garrath Williams and Matt Matravers.)

1. There is no such thing as responsibility. That is, there is no thing, responsibility, out there in the world for us to discover or describe or respond to. Holding responsible is a thing humans do: an institution or practice. And we can do it in many different ways, or, perhaps, we could choose not to do it at all.

2. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to choose between different practices of holding responsible. Norms for those practices include causality and human flourishing, which set limits on the kinds of practices we ought to adopt, and ground reasons for and against particular practices.

3. Causality, unlike responsibility, is out there in the world. Some things really do cause other things, in the sense that but for the first, the second would not exist or have happened. To hold someone responsible is normally to assert causation, and a demonstration of lack of causation is a good criticism of an attempt to hold responsible. This means, for example, that a good reason against holding a witch responsible for an illness is that the alleged witch did not, in fact, cause the illness.

4. Human flourishing is also out there in the world. I can remain neutral here about what exactly flourishing is, and insist only that – obviously – some people’s lives really go better than others’ do, regardless of what we choose to say or do about it. Flourishing is normative for our practices of holding responsible in the straightforward consequentialist sense that the right practice is the one which best promotes flourishing. This means, for example, that the current punitive practice of the UK and US should be abandoned because of its disastrous results. It’s not that people in prison aren’t really responsible for what they did: there’s no such thing as being really responsible, only a practice of holding responsible. Rather, holding mostly poor, wounded, badly educated people responsible in a way which legitimates locking them up for long periods of time is bad for those people, and not good for the rest of us. So we should stop it.

Ethics lectures: Mill 2 and 3

Here and Here.

Ethics lecture: Mill 1

Here.

Ethics lecture: Kant 2

Here.

Principia Ethica & Professional Philosophy

G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, which was first published in 1903, has had an extraordinary influence on twentieth-century moral philosophy. One of its ideas - the naturalistic fallacy - provoked Stephenson, Ayer, and the other expressivists, who provoked the growth of metaethics into a vast and elaborate field of professional philosophical concern.

This review isn't about that field: I want instead to make some ideological or sociological remarks on Moore's project and legacy.

As I read it, Principia Ethica is an attempt to found an autonomous form of moral philosophy, immune to being absorbed by the sciences, especially biology (which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was bullish post-Darwin) and psychology (post-William James). This explains several odd features of the text and its reception: the extraordinary vitriol it directs against Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill - neither of whom could have cared less whether what they were doing counted as philosophy in Moore's idiosyncratic sense. Its firm assertion of distinctive, non-empirical methods for philosophy: intuition, self-evidence, and the method of absolute isolation. In person, as John Maynard Keynes records in his fascinating memoir 'My Early Beliefs', Moore's methods were expressed as pantomimes of extreme disbelief that anyone could possibly disagree with him. Finally, the cultish character of Moore's school at Cambridge, also described by Keynes.

Moore won: in the twentieth century, philosophy became professionalised in university philosophy departments, jealous of their distinctive subject-matter. Philosophers' research was funded on models borrowed from the sciences, along with that word, 'research': I work in philosophy by reading, thinking about, talking about, and writing it, but I'm not sure I do research. Philosophy's superstars were  the magicians of the abstract and technical - like metaethics - and their work appeared in obscure, overpriced professional journals; popularisers and amateurs were looked on with suspicion, however many books they sold. (There's a fair amount of exaggeration in this picture, I admit.)

Was this a good thing? Obviously I owe my living to it, so I'm not disinterested (I'm no superstar, but I've published in several of those overpriced journals). But with that caveat, I'm in two minds: on one hand, I think philosophy should be public and accessible. It's a shame that some of the smartest people in the field never talk outside it, not least because there's obvious public interest in the questions philosophers work on, and if the smart people don't publish for that public, they'll look elsewhere (to weak sauce like Alain de Botton, for example). On the other hand, the realistic alternative to professional philosophy right now is probably not a utopia of high-level public discourse; it's the replacement of philosophy with self-help (The Secret, for example), leavened with the occasional philosopher kept on staff by a wealthy patron: think of Thomas Hobbes's faintly embarrassing dedication of Leviathan to Francis Godolphin.

Commenting elsewhere: eating fish

Erik Loomis, in passing in a post about the destruction caused by tuna fishing:

how did fish become not meat? Whether Catholics or quasi-vegetarians who occasionally eat fish, how did we make a distinction between the dead flesh of a land animal versus the dead flesh of an ocean animal? It makes absolutely no sense.

Me:

It makes sense if, like me, your problem with eating meat is complicity with the suffering and premature death of creatures who understand themselves as selves over time, make plans, recognise other individuals, and love their children. ‘Fish’ is too broad a category to make judgements here, but I think it very unlikely that tuna have those capacities, and very likely that pigs do. So I’m OK with eating tuna but not pigs.

That doesn’t answer your main point about the destructive impact of fishing technology, which has given me pause. But the distinction between fish on one hand and cows, pigs, etc. on the other does make sense.