Open Minded Ethics

The Open University Ethics Centre and The Royal Institute of Philosophy are delighted to present

A Public Day Conference on Happiness
Saturday 14 April 2012, 10.00 – 18.30
Dr Williams’ Library, Gordon Square, London

Provisional timetable

10.00–11.15
Professor Timothy Chappell
“Can doing philosophy make us happy? Should it?”

11.30–12.45
Dr Chris Belshaw
‘Pleasure, happiness and the evil of death’

12.45–13.15 Lunch

13.15–14.30
Professor John Cottingham
“Happiness and the meaning of life”

14.45–16.00
Dr Julian Baggini
“The Politics of Happiness: Is well-being the business the government?”

16.15–17.30
Dr Alex Barber
“Hedonism’s dead cat bounce”

17.30–18.00 Closing discussion

First things first: there shouldn’t be compulsory prayers as part of the formal business at the beginning of council meetings if somebody on the council objects to them. (There shouldn’t be compulsory anything, neither prayers nor the absence of prayers. If there are non-compulsory prayers and nobody objects, then why ever not?)

There is a but, though, which gets bigger and bigger the more you think about the National Secular Society’s successful action in the High Court today. The but can be summed up in the words: “Why this battle, why now?”

It’s so important–is it?– that other people should not engage in acts of worship in front of you, that it’s worth going all the way to the High Court about it? It’s so important–is it?– that the National Secular Society has to fix on *this* as its headline campaign? Our Daily Hate, the thing we should be angry about today: it’s this, and not (say) the Syrian government’s open and merciless massacring of its own people?

You might call it a point of principle, I suppose. And principles matter, certainly. And of course I don’t know, myself, what kind of prayers the other councillors were practising in in front of the complainant, Mr Clive Bone. Maybe his apparent horror and revulsion at the idea (the idea!) of people praying in front of him had some basis in reality. Maybe they were speaking in tongues, handling snakes, levitating, or going into ecstatic trances, activities which, while harmless enough to others (apart from the snakes; and the levitating, if you go too high), might certainly cause a certain amount of perturbation in a a detached observer. But I doubt it. I’m prepared to bet a reasonably large number of jelly babies that the prayers involved were more Jill Archer than Jerry Falwell.

Here’s the thing, though: while I’m perfectly willing to give way on the point of principle, there seems to me a different point in the offing, a point about virtue. What does it say about me as a person that I make such issues as banning the aforementioned prayers my central preoccupation? Or in the case of the NSS’s employees, presumably my career?

There is always more than a touch of the puritan about the crusading atheist. (Historically, I suspect this is no accident at all.) And we all know what puritans do. They are motivated by what they take to be their own idealism, but what can seem to observers like little more than self-righteous spite, to sweep away the woolly well-meaning mix of inherited flotsam and jetsam that ordinary amiable people muddle along with, and replace it with something to which they like to apply words like “dictated by reason” or “rational”.  

Now “reason” and “rational” are important but also dangerous words, and no one under a certain non-chronological age (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095a7) should be playing with them.  To deploy them accurately and correctly for moral purposes in a historical vacuum is not possible. But that, unfortunately, is exactly what rationalist puritans always seem to be trying to do.  They always fail. What usually ends up happening instead is that their replacement for the inherited flotsam and jetsam is something that more or less overtly serves their own own interests (this certainly happened under Cromwell). What always ends up happening is a great deal of more or less completely brutish destruction of good things that the “rationalists” have no serious or credible idea whatever how to replace (everyone knows this too happened under Cromwell, indeed under both Cromwells, Thomas and Oliver).

Just the other day the same puritan rationalist spirit–a harsh critic might call it self-important philistine destructiveness parading in the robes of reason–was visible in the protests of a previously unknown group called “Republic” against the proposed celebrations of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Interestingly enough, in fact, it wasn’t just the same puritan rationalist spirit; in many cases, it was actually the same people.

Anti-monarchism is a view I used to hold myself; I abandoned it for two reasons. The first was that I became an anti-monarchist (in about 1994) in a spirit of Rousseau-, Carlyle-, and Belloc-inspired enthusiasm for the republicanism of the French Revolution; but I gradually came to see (by about 1997) what a large number of French revolutionaries were themselves aware of, above all Mirabeau, namely that a republic need not be the same thing as a state with no monarch, and that republicanism is therefore not the same thing as anti-monarchism. (I’m still a republican, in the sense of believing in the liberty, equality, and fraternity of all citizens before the law, and in believing that the government only has the right to exist or act pro rem publicam, for the public good.) The second is that, the more I think about it, the more wanting to abolish the monarchy for being an irrational, anachronistic, old-fashioned, and “irrelevant” (to what?)  institution comes to seem to me like wanting to abolish my grandmother on the same grounds. Some things that we derive from the past are, simply and quite properly, given–part of the scenery; to want to alter them on grounds of reason itself looks like an abuse of reason.

The moral is that rationalism, in the sense in which some use the word (of course we should contest this usage), is never the same thing as, and sometimes the opposite of, reasonableness. There is nothing more unreasonable than the inability to know how to apply reason; there is nothing more irrational than the reasonableness of a fanatic.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-16980025

What is the point of a humanities education? The question bears within it a familiar rhetorical mistake, the mistake of misplaced concreteness: the curse of the definite article, as I call it.

“The” point? There doesn’t have to be a THE point. There might be lots of points. And mightn’t it be a bit condescending for one grown-up to pontificate to other grown-ups about why they’re doing what they themselves chose to do? Maybe they have some clues about that themselves? As you teach students in the humanities and the years roll by, you quickly realise how many different agendas your students are chasing in their studies, and how very valuable and worthwhile most of those agendas are– even if they would never have occurred to you yourself.

But if there is one theme that emerges as recurrent– perhaps particularly so at the Open University– it would have to be the theme of seeing people’s eyes opened, as their studies go on, to ways of thinking and seeing the world that they could never have dreamed of when they started. Humanities education is transformative. It’s life-changing. It really is. It is, as my own nearly-university-age daughters would say, SO not just about getting a well-paid job. You don’t read Anna Karenina or learn about Heracleitus in order to be able to work in a bank. You work in a bank in order to be able to read Anna Karenina and learn about Heracleitus.

Tony Blair tended to classify this sort of profound personal awakening under “social inclusion”, and he was absolutely right that the purely socio-economic aspect of what education, especially humanities education, can do is a vital social good. Universities exist to invent new ways of splitting atoms and dry-cleaning clothes, sure. But they also exist to give everybody in our culture actual and real access to– well, to our culture. Could this be the most important, and the most egalitarian, thing that any university anywhere is capable of doing?

It follows that attempts to make humanities education in universities harder to access for those with less money are to be seen as a dangerous and damaging attack on our cohesion as a society. That, I think, was one of the thoughts that was bothering the Oxford academics who today passed a motion deploring the government’s higher education policies, including and in particular its proposal to raise undergraduate fees– a motion for which I would happily have voted, were I still teaching in Oxford myself.

I wonder if the motion was supported by Anthony Grayling, who I believe does still teach at Oxford? It’s hard to square his initiative in Bloomsbury, which he calls The New College In The Humanities, with any such concern for social cohesion. Who is going to be able to pay fees of £18000 a year? Well, quite a lot of people probably; everybody wants to be in London, and lots of the people who want to be in London have lots of money to be there. But– 18 grand for courses that they can get for half the price elsewhere, from institutions with much longer track records and (with all respect to Professor Grayling, whose work I have long admired) much longer and more impressive arts and humanities faculty lists– Birkbeck, for example, or come to that The Open University? And there’s an ethical worry too: should anyone be happy to sign up for a venture that (if it succeeds) threatens, by the inexorable working of market forces with which we are all so familiar, to drive up prices everywhere else as well?

Beyond these questions, I myself feel some perplexities about the coherence and shape of the syllabus that I gather is on offer at the NCH. The venture is advertised as being all about teaching students to think for themselves. Yet it includes compulsory courses in practical ethics with Peter Singer, no less, and also in something called “science literacy”. One wonders, just a tiny bit, how open-minded these compulsory courses will really be. As far as the “science literacy” goes: will all sides of the many debates among scientists and philosophers of science about what science is, where its boundaries are, and what counts as unquestioned orthodoxy in science– will all these views really be heard? What will happen to dissenters, i.e. people who disagree with (say) Professor Dawkins? Given what Dawkins usually does (or tries to do) to those who have the temerity to question his opinions– I speak from personal experience–the mind, to be honest, does boggle a bit at the possibilities here…

I wonder too at some of the prospects envisaged by the syllabus. Apparently philosophy is to be taught at the NCH by Steven Pinker. Who then will teach the evolutionary psychology, since Professor Pinker will be busying himself away from his home subject? Why, in any case, are distinguished scientists like Professors Pinker and Jones and Dawkins enrolled on the teaching staff of a college in the humanities? (Imagine the hullabaloo if their humanities colleagues decided to try their hands at, say, inorganic chemistry.)

All of these, of course, are questions I raise merely in a spirit of gentle inquiry, since for my own part, naturally enough, I’m sitting on the fence. I’m keeping my options open, because I think I’ve spotted a glaring gap in the NCH’s coverage of the humanities. To be brutally honest, I’m just waiting for Richard Dawkins to phone me and offer me the founding Chair in Theology.

*Title nicked from a Guardian comments blog. Really, it was too good not to reuse.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the
garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

T.S. Eliot’s great poem of 1930, Ash Wednesday, is a poem full of anguish and the aftermath of anguish; of failure, and the consequences of failure; of death and the shadow of death.

As Heidegger famously pointed out, death and failure are of all things perhaps the things we like least to think about. Like a little girl with her fingers in her ears chanting “La la la, not listening”, our culture is very busy avoiding any thought of either. Frenetic liveliness and the worship of celebrity are the things, we think, for us. But “suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood”. Enoch Powell, I think it was, famously pointed out that every political career ends in failure, and this is not just a truth about politicians.  One way or another, deserved or undeserved, lucky or unlucky, both failure and death come to all of us eventually. The question is what, if anything, we are to do about that.

If Eliot supplies an answer to this question in Ash Wednesday, it is a highly equivocal one: “teach us to care, and not to care”. It is not as if failure and death do not matter. Of course they matter. But we cannot let ourselves merely be trapped, as our society (and I include in that the way we do philosophy in this society) rather seems to be, in the worship of success and busy liveliness; for these things are as fragile as we are ourselves. Everywhere we succeed (including our moral successes), there was always a good chance we were going to fail (the Christian name for moral failure being sin); maybe it was only a matter of luck, perhaps of moral luck, that we didn’t. A certain resignation, a certain irony perhaps, and an ability not to be controlled either by our triumphs or our disasters: that is a necessary part of the wisdom that we need to live as well as humans can. One name for it might be humility.

This morning I attended the Scottish Episcopalian service of the imposition of ashes, the ancient ceremony that gives its name to Ash Wednesday and marks the beginning of the period of fasting and penance that the Anglo-Saxons named Lent (from the springtime lengthening of the days that happens during it). “Remember that you are dust,” says the liturgy for this service, “and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin, and be faithful to Christ.”

The sane refusal to set ourselves up, however well things go for us, as icons of success and glory of the kind that the world hungers for to feed its own forgetfulness of mortality, is connected for anyone who (like me, and like Eliot) is a believer with icons of a different sort of failure and death: the image of what happened on the cross to Jesus of Nazareth. That failure and death was, of course, only the beginning of a story which continues. But there is no resurrection without crucifixion, no Easter without Lent: those are the Christian ways of expressing what the great pagan-Greek poet Aeschylus summed up in two pregnant words pathei mathos, “there is no wisdom without suffering”. A more foreign thought to the spirit of most contemporary philosophy it would be hard to imagine; but whose fault is that?

Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

The English language is a beautiful and subtle thing, or at least it was till [insert your preferred moment of moral-panic apocalypse here]. Just as it is still possible to do the gag that involves pointing at a government building and asking “How many people work there?”– reply: “About half of them”– so it is still, just about, possible to ask “How much does Mr Important earn?” and get the gratifying response “About a quarter of what he gets”.

Too many people these days will miss this gag, because they use “earn” as if it were synonymous with “be paid”. However, like that old philosophers’ shibboleth refute/ rebut, the earns/ makes distinction is still just about alive.

What the earns-to-makes proportion is for Stephen Hester

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12682395

or Bob Diamond

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12663730

I am of course not in a position to say.

But I am in a position to ask (a) what on earth could you do that would make you deserve that much money? (b) what on earth would you do with over £6 million per annum? and (c) what exactly is the relation between these sums and the £5500 per household that it cost Britain to bail out its banks, including and in particular RBS,  less than three years ago?

I have friends who have friends who feel personally aggrieved because they can’t quite afford a private helicopter. I have friends who have friends who have to think before they buy a pint of milk. I’m no egalitarian, and I would say, to paraphrase Tony Blair, that I’m quite relaxed about people being seriously rich.

But I’m a whole lot less relaxed about people being seriously poor, and also about public services that are broken and which, apparently, we can’t afford to fix. To go no further, look at the strains on the UK’s pension and education systems. Isn’t there something wrong here? Shouldn’t the super-rich feel a bit more of an imperative to contribute to the common good, rather than spending their lives amassing what they cannot possibly live long enough to spend?

You know those online forms the airlines do, where you book a plane and the form has “purpose of your journey” as a Required Field? Nuts they drive me. Victor Meldrewish they make me come over all. This is a purchase, a business transaction, not the start of a beautiful friendship. Why the hell should I tell the airline why I want to go to wherever it is? Are they proposing to tell me the answers to any impertinent questions I feel like asking them?

A while back I perfected my technique with these Required Fields. Where you get an “other” option and a strip to write in, you just click on “other” and write “mind your own bloody business” in the strip. What about the cases where you have to choose between Business, Leisure, Family Matters etc? As a matter of casuistry, my view about lying is that others have a general right to hear the truth from me, but people can do things whereby they forfeit that right. Forcing me to answer intrusive questions is one such thing. So faced with this sort of Required Field, I simply return any answer, provided it’s false. This dilutes the quality of the information that the company is collecting from us for free via this field. If enough others did the same, it would completely junk that information, and then it wouldn’t be worth the company’s while to press us in this way.

Meanwhile the 2011 UK census approaches. Every adult in the country will shortly be asked politely to fill in a form in which they bare all to the government. Every aspect of your life is of interest to the authorities. They want you to spill the beans.

“Asked politely”, did I say? Oh no, wait, it’s a legal requirement and you get fined £1000 if you don’t fill it in. I don’t know what the penalties are for supplying false information, but I expect they’re not peanuts.

The sheer insolence of this exercise, this casual assumption of the right to get us to spend our time providing them with whatever information they care to ask for, is simply outrageous. These days market information is a valuable commodity; it is, for example, the foundation of Facebook’s business. The government is not proposing to pay us for the market information we’re being forced to give them, but just you watch– before you know it they’ll be making a fast buck or two selling it on to the private sector. And are we really to suppose that the government don’t already have rather a lot of information on us? Or, given modern information-gathering techniques, that this is even an effective way of finding out? It’s not just in its patronising authoritarianism that the census looks like a hangover of 1930s national-government nanny-statism. The whole idea of the census is outmoded. Like one of the government’s other favourite wheezes for justifying intrusiveness– the absurd and iniquitous TV licence, with the positively Eastern-bloc culture of legalised snooping that it has created–it should simply be scrapped.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the state is there for the citizen, not the citizen for the state. How dare they treat us like their servants.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2011/03/graduating_for_the_21st_centur.html

“Developed economies are already highly dependent on universities and if anything that reliance will increase.”

So why cut them?

Ooh, a spot of controversy:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12645719

There are, of course, cases and cases here. If you approach the cashpoint in all innocence and it sprays you with money, that’s one thing. If you approach a cashpoint knowing that it’s been spraying other customers with money and because it’s been spraying other customers with money, that’s quite another.

It’s the former kind of case I’m thinking of in what I replied to Tom Geoghegan when he emailed me yesterday.

Lots of ethical thinking goes via analogies, so here’s the analogy I have particularly in mind: If some absent-minded professor walks down the street carelessly dropping his money all over the place, I say he forfeits (or can forfeit, depending on circumstances) the right to his money through his carelessness.  Someone who picks it up and takes it is acting within his rights;  someone who chases the professor shouting “Hoy, you dropped something!”  is acting with supererogatory kindness, acting as what Judith Jarvis Thomson would call a Good Samaritan.

I’m thinking of the cash-machine case in the same way. If the banks don’t take adequate steps to protect their own money, that’s their lookout and our good fortune.

Moreover (a) the banks are using *our money* to prevent this sort of thing from happening, (b) the banks are incredibly rich, and (c) the banks do all sorts of things themselves that make it a bit hypocritical of them to come over all moral about out-of-control cashpoints. (There is definitely a smell of ideology in the air when the banks appeal to morality to control ordinary citizens’ behaviour. How about their own?) (a-c) are factors that strengthen the case for saying what I said.

Mind you, if a cash machine spat money at *me personally*, I would walk straight into the bank and say “I believe this is yours”. Why? Not because I think I would do wrong to take the cash, but because I have too much self-respect to scrabble at cash. I want to be free of the compulsion to take every penny I can get, because I think rapacity is an unattractive and enslaving character feature. (Isn’t it one of the most unattractive things about banks?)

PS Ooh, would you look at that: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12663730

To insult someone else’s religion– to disparage it with the intention of offending and wounding– is not nice manners. But bad manners is exactly what it is: it falls under our duty to be courteous and respectful to others. It is not, and cannot reasonably be made into, a matter of legal prohibition, any more than any other sort of bad manners.

By contrast, to question someone else’s religion, or to express your doubts about it, is, as a matter of courtesy, perfectly permissible. If I say (as I happen to think) that there is no reason to believe in Islam, and expand on my reasons for that opinion, which have to do with being my deeply unimpressed both by the Qu’ran, and by Mohammed; or if I say (as in fact I do here http://www.magd.ox.ac.uk/chapel-and-choir/this-terms-sermons ) that I think that Jesus was/ is the Son of God; then provided I do so courteously and reasonably, no one has any grounds for complaint against me. Not even at the level of manners, never mind at the level of law.

There are, of course, some ancient and intractable difficulties here. The central doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism all disagree in crucial ways. When a Christian describes Jesus as the Son of God, a Jew or a Muslim may well think of this as blasphemy (just as the Christian may see the denial of this belief as blasphemy). When a Hindu describes that debonair adventurer Krishna as in some sense a representation of the divine nature, the Jew, Christian, and Muslim may all think the Hindu is blaspheming.

Given these differences, the only sensible legal approach to blasphemy laws is not to have any. If God is God, and the kind of God to smite “blasphemers” down, then let him do his own smiting. And let us not give any legal handle to the kind of bullying of religious minorities, such as Christians and Ahmadiyyas, that goes on in Pakistan.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12644082

How lucky we are in the west not to need the daily courage that Shahbaz Bhatti (RIP) showed in his campaign against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

If you want to know what blasphemy really is, just look at murder.

The emblematic technology of the eighteenth century was the spinning jenny; of the nineteenth century, the railway train; of the twentieth, the machine-gun and the tank. The century of the industrial revolution, then the century of the bourgeois revolution. (“Bourgeois” is a term, by the way, that it would be nice to redeem from the long taint of Marxist contempt.) After these, the century of the state, the century of the Cultural Revolution. The twentieth century was the age of totalitarian indifference or actual hostility to the life and the dreams of the individual: the age of Stalin and Pol Pot, Nuremberg rallies and 1984, worldwide; and even in Britain, the age of the patronising hectoring of the Pathé newsreel, the age of ration books, conscription, and national governments.

What then will be the emblematic technology of the twenty-first century? It would be nice to hope that it will be the internet and the mobile phone, and that accordingly this will be the century of the revolution of the individual. Liberal individualists like me are bound to be both delighted and exhilarated by current events in Egypt and Jordan, and recent events in Tunisia and Iran. It does begin to look as if a new Berlin Wall might be slowly starting to crumble: the Berlin Wall, the automatic assumption of the impossibility of change, that for far too long now has trapped the Muslim world in various conditions of archaic Islamic-clerical fascism, or in some cases, just of fascism. What if our easy and culturally condescending preconceptions about the Muslim world—that they like that sort of regime, that they’re “not ready for democracy”, the rest of the usual cant—were now to be disproved as decisively as the old-style cant about the communist world and all its peoples being a “focus of evil” was disproved in 1989?

If that does happen—and at this stage it remains a big if—the mobile phone and the internet will have played a decisive part in making it happen. Different possible ways of living are psychologically nearer and more visible now to more people outside the liberal democracies than they ever have been before. More and more people in more and more parts of the world are wising up to the possibility of saying to their politicians: “Stop pontificating and ordering us around, and instead do the job that we elected you for (or should have had the chance to elect you for). Shut up and fix our sewers.”

It is that constant vision of the possibility of real individual liberty, mediated above all by the internet, that is now shaking the corrupt old ways of autocracy in Egypt in demonstrations based, as the demonstrations in Teheran were, either on organisation by tweet and mobile phone, or (when the flailing state steps in to black-out coverage) on habits of organisation acquired in the world of the mobile phone.

Of course important worries remain about what the alternative to President Mubarak and the other ramshackle regional despots might look like. And 40 years of agnosticism about the gospel of socialism makes me habitually cautious about saying this. But on this occasion I’m going to say it anyway: Vive la révolution.