There is a saying in ethics: you can’t get an “ought” from an “is.” Descriptions of the world as it is do not reveal truths about the world as it ought to be. Even when descriptions of real-world conditions suggest that something is seriously wrong — that our actions are causing unintended and avoidable harms to ourselves, to others, to our common environment — reaching agreement on how we ought to change our thinking and our behavior, and then putting these changes into practice, is hard. Efforts at reform may fail again and again, but we need “is” to understand how to get to “ought.” In health care work, describing and reflecting on current conditions can shed light on persistent ethical challenges. Palliative care workers who focus on the relief of suffering and other goals central to the care of the sick observe and experience many such challenges daily.

In the United States each year, 2.5 million people die. Because cause of death is often a condition typically associated with age, Medicare billing-code data offers a reliable way to understand where older people were, day by day, as they approached the end of their lives. A recent article by Joan M. Teno, health services researcher at Brown University, and her team, published in JAMA in February 2013 and subsequently picked up by the media, compared samples of Medicare patients who died in 2000, 2005, and 2009. Each sample included nearly 300,000 patients, all of whom had a medical diagnosis of cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or dementia for the final six months prior to death. This data suggests that these patients were hospice-eligible and their deaths were not unexpected.

Digging into the data, the researchers found that over the course of this nine-year period the percentage of patients who died in hospice increased. However, these hospice referrals tended to come only after dying patients had spent time in the intensive care unit. That is, the intensity of treatment near the very end of life first spiked sharply upward. As Teno and her co-authors explain, “Site of death, as noted on a death certificate, only provides information on where a person was at the moment of death,” while understanding the end of life as an “experience” involves looking at all places of care, the transitions between these places, and when and why these transitions occurred. They conclude that, even with more frequent referrals to hospice and the expansion of palliative care programs in hospitals over the period they studied, “the notion that there is a trend toward less aggressive care” may be unfounded.

Reading Joan Teno’s careful research and analysis in this article and others, I am reminded of the technique of Jan van Eyck, the 15th century northern European painter who was the first master of the new medium of oil painting. Analysis of van Eyck’s works reveal that he applied layer upon layer of translucent paint to create the impression of light that shapes space and reveals surface and texture. (The Getty Museum has created this public website of images from its recent documentation of van Eyck’s “Ghent Altarpiece.”) It was not a quick or simple way to work, but it built up the light. So, too, does the science that describes, day by day, layer by layer, the complexity of the end of life in our society, and that suggests the complexity of the work needed to change this experience. If the picture that emerges from this study — of the ICU as the route to hospice — troubles us, are we willing to think and act differently? And how much earlier in the journey?

Nancy Berlinger is a research scholar at The Hastings Center. With Bruce Jennings and Susan M. Wolf, she is the author of The Hastings Center Guidelines for Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care Near the End of Life: Revised and Expanded Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2013). Learn more at HastingsCenterGuidelines.org.

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The fifth of May 2013 marks the bicentenary of the birth of the Danish philosopher, theologian, and man of literature Søren Kierkegaard. He will be celebrated in Copenhagen and around the world. What estimate should we form of him today?

Kierkegaard did not doubt his mission: ‘I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be . . . to every person’s interest, whether he be a Christian or not’. Christianity, he contended, entailed belief in an interruptive event (an Incarnation of God) which does not fit the normal flow of history. The Enlightenment had been a blow to the Christian claim. Politely suggesting that any such ‘historical’ religion was the business of theologians, Kant treated the biblical saga of Fall and redemption as but a mythical expression of human self-understanding. In his wake, Hegel reduced Christianity simply to ‘concepts’ and thought these concepts a mere stage in human development, while Feuerbach pronounced Christian doctrine a projection. As a student, Kierkegaard witnessed the advance of scholarship that sought to explain biblical texts in terms of their setting of origin.

Cognisant that the notion of an Incarnation, a God/man, is to reason paradoxical (a contradiction in terms), Kierkegaard advocated relating to it out of the passion of subjective inwardness that is ‘faith’. We should recognise, however, that he held to pre-modern suppositions that made such a notion, if not rational, at least conceivable. Living a century and a half after Newton, Kierkegaard had little sense that nature and history form an inter-related causal nexus; that events are one of a kind, predictable and repeatable, there being no one-off occurrences. He was, in the parlance of the day, a ‘supernaturalist’ not a ‘naturalist’, believing in miracles. God is conceived to be directly behind each and every happening, such that just about anything can transpire.

For Kierkegaard, pressing directly on our world, the eternal is bound into each moment in time. It is within such a context that the human being is held to be a synthesis of body and spirit, through his very nature made for divinity. Thus Kierkegaard commented that, while it is true that (as Aristotle had said) a plant gives rise to a plant, a man to a man, ‘by this nothing is explained, thought is not satisfied … for an eternal being cannot be born’. Within such a context, once more the idea of Incarnation acquires plausibility. Was it the subsequent Darwinian revolution that led humanity to conceive of their nature otherwise?

Kierkegaard’s outlook had social implications. Far from uncaring, his former professor remarked: ‘It was typical of him to want to look after precisely those people whom the public did not value’. Nevertheless, in view of eternity, our present existence becomes for him a ‘meanwhile’. Thus he considered it of more importance that a beggar behave beautifully, mindful that, disturbed by his presence, others may be led to question God’s goodness, than whether the man live or die. He advises that a charwoman should not aspire to be called ‘Madame’, given that the world is but a stage on which we act our roles, while before God she is anyone’s equal. No wonder Hegel had averred that ‘the eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world’. His disciple Marx was five years Kierkegaard’s junior.

In his Works of Love, a spiritual classic, Kierkegaard entreats us to love and respect each ‘other’ as God loves us, never assimilating that other person to self. Horrified by the advent of democracy, ‘government by the numerical’ as he quips derisively, he was nonetheless quick to take advantage of freedom of the press to attack a complacent establishment in both church and state. He writes sarcastically of the ‘distinguished corruption’ of those who flee from one distinguished circle to another, taking care lest in the poor they should meet another human being. If today in celebration of their famous son the Queen of Denmark will parade from church to university, it was not ever thus. Rather, it was a motley crew of students and the poor who accompanied his funeral cortège from that same church to grave. These things are far from simple.

Fearing in his blacker moods that his authorship, penned in a minor European tongue, might lie undiscovered, Kierkegaard remarked of his fellow countrymen: ‘I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric; my literary activity… a sort of hobby [like] fishing and such’. Would he could but know of the affection and respect in which in our day he is held by those who will gather to celebrate his bicentennial. His work is translated into languages from Korean to Hungarian. An eclectic and imaginative author, Kierkegaard is considered the Ur-father of existentialism, the originator of dialectical theology and (on account of his style) the progenitor of post-modernism. Regarded by many Danes as the greatest prose writer of their language, his provocative authorship in equal measure engages and delights.

Confronted with one who in terms of the span of history lived so recently yet whose thought-world is so foreign, we are brought to recognise the remarkable revolutions that we in Europe have undergone. Fascinated by steam engines and hot air balloons, Kierkegaard (inconsistently) did not much like the march of history, thinking scientific progress to distract man from his true ends. To step into his shoes is a startling revelation as to differences in presuppositions. What, however, would seem to make little sense is to contend that Christians have always proclaimed ‘faith’ in the face of ‘reason’, failing to consider the context that made the object of such a faith thinkable. From this it does not follow that we should not think out how today we had best conceive of that dimension of reality that is ‘God’.

Daphne Hampson holds doctorates in history from Oxford, in theology from Harvard, and a master’s in Continental Philosophy from Warwick. The author of Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought, she has for many years engaged with the Lutheran tradition, in particular the work of Kierkegaard. Author of Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique, you can find more about Daphne Hampson by visiting her website.

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By Gary Kelly

A recent book on the essayist William Hazlitt calls him the ‘first modern man’. If he was, perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft was the first modern woman. By ‘modern’ I mean someone with ideas on how to cope with what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ‘the consequences of modernity’. These include frighteningly accelerated, seemingly uncontrollable change; heightened risk of all kinds, from food supply through epidemics to weapons of mass destruction and ecological catastrophe; increased dependence on ‘abstract systems’ of unknowable complexity, from banking to government, medical science to the economy; greater migration, voluntary and involuntary, across countries and continents, classes and cultures; and, in meeting these challenges, increased dependence on ‘pure’, supposedly unselfish relationships in private and social life and on a flexible yet stable, self-reflexive and adaptable personal identity.

Wollstonecraft lived through the onset of modernity as Giddens defines it. She observed personally, analyzed incisively, and looked beyond one of modernity’s major initial crises, what many then saw as the greatest social and political cataclysm in history. She saw the blood of the guillotine on the Paris pavements and protested, at her peril. More, she understood this cataclysm from the situation of her sex, what she called ‘the wrongs of woman’, and protested, despite the peril.

Wollstonecraft certainly opposed unmodernity — the ‘Old Order’, the ancien régime — and promoted modernisation, but like her daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, she understood its costs, especially to the marginalized and powerless. Among other things, Frankenstein gave powerful mythic form to a vision of modernity as human catastrophe. Wollstonecraft tried to envisage a modernity that would benefit all, from which women and other marginalized groups would not be excluded and by which they would not be victimized.

To this end, as a self-educated, militantly independent young woman, she set out to become what she called the ‘first of a new genus’, a ‘female philosopher’. Many at the time would have derided this phrase as an oxymoron, but by it she meant a comprehensive social, cultural, and political critic, what we now call a public intellectual, representing women in particular and thereby all of the exploited and oppressed.

As a ‘female philosopher’ Wollstonecraft communicated her vision of modernity, responding to the prolonged crisis of her time, in a wide range of writing including education manuals, novels, criticism and essays, political and social polemic, historiography of the present, and political travelogue. Part of this political and cultural work required both modernizing these forms, reinventing them better to serve her vision of modernity, and inventing a new form of discourse, that of the ‘female philosopher’ rather than of the intellectual woman as some kind of ‘honorary man’. So radical was her invention, so modern, that still today many find it confused and confusing rather than ahead of its time, and perhaps ahead of ours.

Hazlitt knew Wollstonecraft’s circle of radical reformers, intellectuals, artists, writers, and publishers and what they tried to achieve. He circulated among such a circle of his own, one that included Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as artists and intellectuals, modernizers of all kinds, in contending interests. Hazlitt’s liberal views, increasingly celebrated in recent years, owed much to those of Wollstonecraft’s circle, with their zeal for social justice, modernization of institutions, political reform, democratic access to the arts, and concern for human value in all aspects of life, of all forms of life.

Notoriously, however, Hazlitt did not attend to Wollstonecraft’s feminism; in fact, many today see him as a misogynist. Yet I think Hazlitt’s distinctive, celebrated, and modern-seeming style, with its sharp declarations, vivid illustrations, sudden turns, personal tone and reference, lyrical passages, sarcasm and satire, owed much to Wollstonecraft’s. At the least, it was a later correlative to hers.

Wollstonecraft, much more than Hazlitt, was relegated after her death to the margins of literature and public discourse, perhaps for similar reasons; perhaps the first modern woman and man were too ‘strong’ for what became an influential Victorian and early twentieth-century consensus. Wollstonecraft was rediscovered by successive feminist movements, most recently in the 1970s; Hazlitt has received renewed attention in the past decade as a public intellectual for what Giddens calls ‘late’ modernity, and others ‘post-modernity’, our age of crisis, of ‘recession’, and ‘austerity’, and worse. In this we need all the help we can get. We could do worse than renew a conversation with the first modern woman.

Gary Kelly is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has edited Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary and The Wrongs of Woman for Oxford World’s Classics, and published a book on her radically innovative style of thinking and writing, Revolutionary Feminism. He is General Editor of the ongoing multi-volume Oxford History of Popular Print Culture.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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For many years, answering polite enquiries about my current book project was relatively easy: I could explain that it was about Milton, or the Bible, or Renaissance art and architecture, or the decorative arts, or whatever might be the topic, and the conversation could happily proceed to more interesting subjects. For the past few years, however, I have had to say that I was writing a book about ornamental hermits in eighteenth-century gardens. A few – very few – interlocutors have been able to say “ah yes”, either because they were good at bluffing or because they actually knew a little about garden hermits, but most have assumed politely that I had fallen off my trolley and was descending from cultural history into incoherent mutterings.

The hermitage at Brocklesby Park is of the type known as a root house.

I became interested in the subject some 40 years ago, when I chanced upon Edith Sitwell’s essay on “Ancients and Ornamental Hermits”. The idea of keeping an ornamental hermit in one’s garden was entirely new to me, and I certainly could not afford to engage one, but I did resolve to learn what I could about this phenomenon when I had time to do so. A professional career intervened, and so the idea marinated in my mind for decades before I could clear the space to undertake the requisite research. Finding the hermits and their hermitages was challenging, as ornamental hermits tend not to appear in the usual records, and hermitages are often overlooked in architectural histories. Mere facts, however, can often be uncovered by the dogged researcher. Understanding the phenomenon of the garden hermit has been a much more difficult task. At one level, ornamental hermits seem merely frivolous, but their existence hints at a complex and serious strain in Georgian culture.

Garden hermits were variously real people, automatons and wholly imagined people who had perpetually stepped out for a minute, leaving their eyeglasses and a book on the table of the hermitage. The most substantial material remains of these hermits are their hermitages, which are scattered across Britain and Ireland. At Brocklesby Park, the Lincolnshire seat of the Pelham family, the hermitage is of the type known as a root house, and what seems to be the original furniture survives inside, including a table made from a bole, a rustic hermit’s chair formed from branches, and four visitors’ chairs carved out of solid tree trunks. At Killerton, the Devonshire home of the Acland family (now National Trust), there is a luxury three-room hermitage known as the Bear’s Hut (which once accommodated a pet black bear brought from Canada); one of the rooms is the (imaginary) hermit’s chapel, which has a full-length lancet window inserted into a shaped tree trunk and fitted with Netherlandish painted glass panels.

The Bear’s Hut at Killerton.

Aspiring hermits could advertise their availability for employment. Similarly, landlords could advertise for hermits, though as Lady Croom (in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia) comments, “surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence”.  One of my favourite hermits is the Reverend Henry White, whose day job was that of rector and schoolmaster at Fyfield, near Andover (Hampshire), but whose vocation as a young man was that of hermit to his brother Gilbert White, the author of The Natural History of Selborne. Henry was, like Gilbert, a naturalist and diarist, but he also happily donned the costume of a hermit to entertain Gilbert’s guests while they munched on the cantaloupe that he grew in his garden. In the summer of 1763 Gilbert White entertained the three daughters of an eminent physician at Selborne, and Henry the Hermit was regularly in sociable attendance. When one of the sisters had to leave, Henry lamented her departure in verse:

The hoary hermit in his calm retreat,
No longer safe from her resistless charms;
With trembling hand, dim eye, and faltering feet,
Sighs out his dotage o’er her snowy arms!

Henry so enjoyed playing the part of the ornamental hermit that he had himself painted in front of the hermitage; the painting now hangs at Dunham Massey, a National Trust property in Cheshire.

The fashion for the ornamental hermit has faded, but we still have human figures in our gardens. Indeed, one of the figures had has filled the void left by the ornamental hermit is the humble garden gnome, which has for many years suffered the ignominy of exclusion from the Chelsea Flower Show (gnomes are far too working-class for Chelsea), but nonetheless embodies a quiet dignity that recalls its heroic past as a human figure in the eighteenth-century landscape garden.

Gordon Campbell is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University of Leicester. His books for OUP include Bible: The Story of the King James Version, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought, and The Grove Encyclopedia of Northern Renaissance Art. His most recent book is The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome.

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Physicalists like me think everything in the world is ultimately physical, and that the physical facts provide for all the facts, including consciousness. But how should we conceive of the link between physical and mental? It is helpful to think in terms of descriptions. Descriptions in the vocabulary of physics can specify everything physical that there will have been; and physicalism commits us to the view that truths in that vocabulary specify everything that there will have been. But those truths use a very restricted set of concepts. What about truths in terms of different conceptual schemes, for example those of other sciences such as astronomy, biology, and psychology; or of more or less unscientific specialities such as history and art; or of everyday language? Physicalists must hold that those truths are redescriptions of a reality describable in terms of the narrowly physical vocabulary: of parts or aspects of the same vast swirl of matter and energy. A pebble is an aggregate of atoms and subatomic particles; if you have the aggregate, you have the pebble. So if we say there is a pebble at a particular place and time we are redescribing what could have been specified in terms of the locations and states of particles. Similarly (we physicalists must hold) mental truths such as ‘Victoria loves Albert’ are redescriptions of parts or aspects of what could have been specified – though much less intelligibly – in terms of the locations and states of particles.

Although those points are familiar, it is not generally recognized what they imply about the physical-to-mental connection. Saying it is necessary is not enough: even dualists can accept that. One popular approach is inspired by Kripke. According to ‘a posteriori physicalism’, physical truths necessitate mental truths on account of a posteriori necessary psycho-physical identities. Unfortunately this approach doesn’t work if we take those points about redescription seriously. If mental truths are redescriptions of a reality specifiable in narrowly physical terms, then the physical truths (I regret having to use this expression) ‘logico-conceptually entail’ truths stated in terms of non-physical vocabularies: it is impossible for broadly logical and conceptual reasons that those narrowly physical statements should have been true and those non-physical statements false. Although this logico-conceptual entailment thesis allows physicalism to be only contingently true, it contrasts sharply with the usual kind of a posteriori physicalism, which is not even sufficient for physicalism (and is actually inconsistent with it if I am right).

You might object that there are no analytic connections from physical truths to truths about experiences. But semantic rules can determine that a given description specifies a certain item and also that this item qualifies for a certain redescription. That means there can be logical and conceptual links between the descriptions as wholes even if there are no analytic links.

In opposition to the Kripke-inspired a posteriori physicalism mentioned earlier, David Chalmers and Frank Jackson argue that physicalists should maintain that mental truths are derivable a priori from the totality of narrowly physical truths. That approach differs significantly from the one I recommend, and I think it too is mistaken. Physicalists must maintain that while the link from physical to mental is logico-conceptual, it is not necessarily knowable a priori.

That may strike you as paradoxical. How can phenomenal truths be logico-conceptually entailed by narrowly physical truths if not even a being with superhuman cognitive powers could infer them a priori from the latter? But logico-conceptual entailment depends solely on logico-conceptual facts, while a priori inferrability depends additionally on epistemic facts: a crucial difference. The logico-conceptual entailment thesis is compulsory for physicalists, but there are no good reasons why they should also hold that the facts about what our experiences are like can be inferred a priori from the narrowly physical facts. Indeed there are powerful reasons to the contrary, as vividly illustrated by Jackson’s famous example of Mary. You may suspect that all this only brings out an inconsistency at the heart of physicalism, but it doesn’t.

The key consideration is that any satisfactory explanation of consciousness will include an explanation of our special epistemic position with respect to our phenomenally conscious states. It is only by actually having experiences that we learn what it is like to have them; and we do that without having to know the underlying physical or functional facts. We have developed special concepts for describing experiences from our own point of view even if we are ignorant of those underlying facts; which explains a sense in which phenomenal concepts float free of physical and functional concepts. So (I argue) physicalists can consistently endorse the logico-conceptual entailment thesis while denying the a priori entailment thesis.

That conclusion depends on the controversial assumption that there can be a physicalistically acceptable explanation of consciousness. Many people are so impressed by intuitions about zombies and transposed qualia that they believe that merely physical truths cannot logico-conceptually entail phenomenal truths, in which case physicalism and functionalism are sunk for that reason alone. I think they are wrong, but I have not been attempting to defend physicalism here, only to suggest how physicalists should conceive of the relation between physical and mental truths.

Robert Kirk is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, where he worked for 33 years. His first degree was in classics, but he was inspired to switch to philosophy by reading Quine’s Word and Object.  Kirk’s books include Relativism and Reality: a Contemporary Introduction, Zombies and Consciousness, and his latest work: The Conceptual Link from Physical to Mental (OUP, 2013).

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It is well known in the history of psychology that Descartes was an early thinker on what we would now call classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning, which he referred to as “reflex”. Most authors writing on the subject cite two of his works and one letter to make the connection clear: his Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method), 1637; Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul), the last of Descartes’ published work, completed in 1649; and finally his letter to William Cavendish, 1st duke of Newcastle, Friday, 23 November 1646.

However, another much earlier epistolary reference seems generally to be missed: his letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, dated 18 March 1630. What is particularly interesting in this earlier letter to Mersenne is Descartes association of sound (in this case the sound produced by a violin) to the ‘reflex’ response of dogs. As a precursor to Pavlov, and the Pavlovian dogs experiment, it is interesting to see Descartes constructing what is a remarkably parallel experimental test — albeit, in Descartes case and as far as we know, a thought experiment only.

“Secondly, what makes some people want to dance may make others want to cry. This is because it evokes ideas in our memory: for instance those who have in the past enjoyed dancing to a certain tune feel a fresh wish to dance the moment they hear a similar one; on the other hand, if someone had never heard a galliard without some affliction befalling him, he would certainly grow sad when he heard it again. This is so certain that I reckon that if you whipped a dog five or six times to the sound of a violin, it would begin to howl and run away as soon as it heard that music again . . . .”
– René Descartes to Marin Mersenne: Monday, 8 March 1630.

It is striking just how similar Descartes’ theory on ‘reflex’ is to Pavlov’s theory of ‘conditioning’. Just as in Pavlov’s conditioning experiment, performed two hundred and seventy one years after Descartes’ letter outlines his theory of ‘reflex’, the two stimuli necessary for conditioning, the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli, are paired causing the ‘planned conditional response’. In Descartes’ letter, the planned conditional response is fear. In Pavlov’s experiments, the planned conditional response is the saliva elicited by hunger.

Further, in both examples, the conditioned stimulus is linked to sound. For instance, Descartes’ stipulates that if “you whipped a dog five or six times to the sound of a violin, it would begin to howl and run away as soon as it heard that music again”. Pavlov’s experiment nearly three hundred years later also requires an audio-based stimulus to cause the planned conditional response. For Pavlov’s dogs, the sound of the ringing bell would come to represent feeding time and would cause the dogs to salivate in anticipation of sating their hunger. For all animal lovers it is fortunate that Descartes’ experiment remained a theory, discussed in letters to friends, while Pavlov carried out the conditioning experiment in practice.

One of the great advantages of analysing a complete corpus of letters is that it provides the broader matrix of thoughts and exchanges between a range of thinkers as they formulated their theories using their own system of social networking. This small example of a shared experimental construct between Descartes and Pavlov does not provide an entirely new perspective or discovery missed by previous generations but it does provide nuance and depth of structure to our narrative of the history of psychology. Indeed, it suggests that further explorations, with the aid of search facilities across a wide collection of correspondences, may greatly enrich our understanding of the past and how we think of these things in the present.

Robert V. McNamee is Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project. Daniel Parker is Publicity Assistant for Electronic Enlightenment.

With 60,647 letters and documents and 7,476 correspondents as of October 2012, Electronic Enlightenment is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. Students and the general public alike can search the Electronic Enlightenment site according to period, location, historical event or historical figure. The Electronic Enlightenment Project is centred on recreating what might be thought of as the world’s first great social network, the exchange of letters before the development of other, rapid means of communication.

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When friends heard that I was working on a book on insults, I typically had some explaining to do: “It is not a book of insults; it is a book about insults and the role they play in human society.”

They would go on to ask whether, in my research, I had come across any good insults. Indeed I had. In the process of doing research, I had not only read every insult anthology I could get my hands on but categorized the insults I found there, the way an entomologist might spend time collecting and categorizing beetles.

And what, they would ask, was my favorite insult? I would explain that I didn’t have a favorite—not if by favorite they meant an insult that I liked better than the others. This is because I disliked them all! Indeed, in my book I argue that the world would be a better place if we could curb our insulting tendencies. But having made this point, I admitted that there were some insults that I found particularly interesting because of the cunning manner in which they inflicted harm on their target. In particular, I was intrigued by secondhand insults.

To understand how these insults work, it is first necessary to understand behind-the-back insults. If Al makes disparaging remarks to Bob about Charlie, who isn’t present, Al will have insulted Charlie behind his back. By doing this, Al might be able to hurt Charlie’s social standing, without Charlie knowing about the insult and therefore without the danger that he will retaliate.

Bob can react to Al’s attack on Charlie in a number of ways. He might join in the attack. He might chastize Al for attacking Charlie. Or he might instead react to Al’s attack by telling Charlie what Al has been saying. Bob’s motives for doing this might be laudable: he might want Charlie to know what is going on so he can defend himself against Al’s attacks. Alternatively, he might report the insult simply because he knows Charlie will be upset to hear about it.

Reporting the insult allows Bob, in effect, to insult Charlie without himself being the author of that insult. Furthermore, if asked why he passed on the insult, Bob can defend himself by claiming to have had Charlie’s best interests in mind: he needed to know what was being said about him! His insult, in other words, will have what CIA operatives call plausible deniability. Charlie’s day will be ruined, but it will be Al, not Bob, who is ultimately to blame. This is a textbook example of what I call a secondhand insult.

There are even more subtle ways to inflict these insults. Suppose Diane invites Elsie but not Frances to a party. Suppose Elsie, on the following day, calls Frances to ask why she wasn’t at the party, and suppose she makes this call not because she wants to know why Elsie was missing: she already knows that Elsie wasn’t there because she hadn’t been invited! Then why make the call? So Frances will know that she hadn’t been invited and thereby experience the pain of having been slighted. This behavior sounds catty, but such things do happen.

Secondhand insults interest me because they show just how ingenious people can be in their use of insults as a means for raising their position on the social hierarchy. If only this ingenuity could instead be used for the good of mankind! More generally, one of the best ways to immunize ourselves to the insults that others might inflict on us is to withdraw from the social-hierarchy game.

For one last example of a secondhand insult, allow me to quote entertainer Oscar Levant. When asked whether he ever read bad reviews of his performances, he replied that he didn’t have to, inasmuch as “my best friends invariably tell me about them.”

William B. Irvine is professor of philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He is the author of A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt — and Why They Shouldn’t, and before that of A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.

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“In the end,” says Goethe, “we are creatures of our own making.” Although offered as a sign of optimism, this insight seems to highlight the underlying problem of human wrongdoing. After all, in the long sweep of human history, nothing is more evident and palpable than the unending litany of spectacular crimes. Most spectacularly of all, these properly codified public wrongs include genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity.

After Nuremberg, after the Holocaust, one might have expected a far-reaching change in human conduct, a welcome reduction of egregious harms occasioned by both new knowledge and new law. Yet, let us look around us at the present moment. The views are not encouraging. Look at Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo. Let us try to figure out the presumptively democratic but also riotous ethos sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. Not to be forgotten, there is present-day Iran. Today, its faith-based leaders openly declare a determinedly genocidal intent against Israel. Let us also consider Cambodia, Argentina, Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.

War and genocide are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes, war is simply the optimal means by which an intended genocide can be most efficiently carried out. How has an entire species, miscarried from the start, scandalized its own creation? Are we all potential murderers of those who live beside us?

What about slavery? In every form and permutation, this “natural” crime continues to grow, insidiously but without evident disguise, in Mali and Mauritania, and in other more conspicuous places. Shall we recall the murderous diamond mines of Sierra Leone and Liberia? And let us not forget the ever-widening radius of human child trafficking, an ancient and medieval practice, now especially visible in Nigeria and Benin.

Where is civilization? These devastating crimes are still far-flung and robust. Paradoxically, they are flourishing even now, in the “developed” and thoroughly “modern” 21st century.

For as long as we can identify the tangled skeins of world history, the corpse has been in fashion. Today, on several continents, whole nations of corpses are the rage. As for the international community, it stands by as it has so often, incredulously, with self-righteous indignation, sheepish, yet also arrogant, simultaneously calculating and lamenting its own self-reinforcing impotence.

Why? The answer has several intersecting levels, and several overlapping layers of pertinent meaning. At one level, certainly the one most familiar to political scientists and legal scholars, the basic problem lies in the changing embrace of power politics. Representing a transformation of traditional political realism, the relentless deification of states has finally reduced billions of prospective individuals to barely residual specks of significance.

In such an world, wherein the “self-determination of peoples” is a weighty value, sanguinary executions of the innocent must always be expected and applauded. Moreover, such executions, sometimes a thinly disguised or expressly secular form of religious “sacrifice,” are heralded defiantly as “sacred.” To prevent terrorism, genocide, and crimes against humanity, nation-states must first be shorn of their presumed sacredness.

Before even this can happen, however, individuals must first be allowed to discover alternative and equally attractive sources of belonging. Somehow, humanity must finally conquer the continuing incapacity of individual persons to draw true, vital, and existential meaning from within themselves.

Although generally unseen, the core problem we face on earth is the universal and omnivorous power of the herd in human affairs. This power is based upon individual submission. Ultimately, the problem of international criminality is always one of distraught and unfulfilled individuals. Ever fearful of having to draw meaning from their own inwardness, most human beings, like a moth to a flame, will draw closer and closer to the nearest collectivity.

Whatever the gripping claims of the moment, the herd spawns contrived hatreds of dissimilarity that can make even mass murder seem warm, welcome, and reasonable. Fostering a persistent refrain of “us” versus “them,” it encourages each submissive member to ceremoniously celebrate the death of “outsiders.”

The overriding task, then, must be to discover the way back to ourselves as persons. Understood in terms of the contemporary prevention of genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity, we are thus commanded to look beyond ordinary politics, and toward a determinedly worldwide actualization of authentic persons.

At its source, the unrecognized but critical human task is to migrate from the Kingdom of the Herd, to the Kingdom of the Self. In succeeding with this very nuanced and unambiguously grand movement, one must first want to live in the second kingdom. We must fix the fragmented and fractionated world at its most elementary individual source. Then, after so many millennia of brutishness and exclusion, we could do whatever is needed to enable our fellow human beings to find sufficient comfort and reassurance outside the segregating and always-potentially murderous herd.

Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. He was born in Zürich, Switzerland. Dr. Beres is Professor of Political Science at Purdue. He is a frequent contributor to OUPblog.

If you are interested in this subject and want to learn more, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies is the first book to subject both genocide and the young discipline it has spawned to systematic, in-depth investigation. Thirty-four renowned experts study genocide through the ages by taking regional, thematic, and disciplinary-specific approaches. The work is multi-disciplinary, featuring the work of historians, anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers.

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Listen to Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?

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Twitter Competition
We also asked you to let us know on Twitter who your favourite philosopher is and why. The competition is now closed and we received over 150 entries, which you can view on Storify. We can now reveal the winning entries,  as chosen by Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds!

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites (OUP, 2010) and Philosophy Bites Back (OUP, 2012), which are based on their highly successful series of podcasts. You can also follow @philosophybites on Twitter.

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James P. Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His latest work, From Rationality to Equality, publishes in February 2013. His previous publications include Three Challenges to Ethics (OUP, 2001), The Triumph of Practice over Theory in Ethics (OUP, 2005) and Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? A Debate, with Warren Farrell (OUP, 2007). He is past president of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division).

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As a teacher I have sometimes offered a million pounds to any student who can form any one of the following beliefs: that they can fly; that they were born on the moon; or that sheep are carnivorous. Needless to say, I have never had to pay up.  The Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass might have been able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, but that is a feat few of us can match. In fact, it is doubtful whether the formation of belief is under voluntary control at all. Adopting a belief seems to be more like digesting or metabolizing and rather unlike looking or speaking—it seems to be something that happens to one rather than something that one does.

But unlike digestion or metabolizing, the upshot of belief-formation has a direct impact on how we behave. Although we don’t always act in accordance with our beliefs, it goes without saying that what we believe plays a huge role in governing what we do. More importantly, a rational person ought to act on the basis of their beliefs; indeed, failing to act in light of one’s beliefs is a form of irrationality.

In and of themselves the two claims that we have just examined—that belief-formation is involuntary and that a person’s beliefs justify their actions—are unobjectionable. Trouble looms, however, when we put them together. From Francisco Pizarro to Tomás de Torquemada, and from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Anders Breivik, history is littered with the carnage wrought by the actions of sincere but misguided individuals—people who have regarded the superiority of their religion, race or ideology as legitimizing actions that we regard as horrific.

How should we regard such individuals? If the formation of belief is involuntary, then, one might think, we cannot justifiably condemn them for holding the beliefs that motivated their actions. Can we condemn them for acting on those beliefs? Arguably not, for how else is a person to act if not on the basis of their beliefs? But if we cannot condemn them either for forming their beliefs or for acting in light of their beliefs, what grounds do we have for condemning them at all?

Some might be tempted to respond that we don’t have any grounds for condemning such individuals, and that those who act on the basis of their sincerely held beliefs shouldn’t be denounced for what they do, no matter how awful their deeds. We could, of course, continue to regard such agents as legally responsible for their crimes, but—according to this line of thought—we have no grounds for holding them morally guilty for the actions that they carry out in light of their convictions.

Although some might be happy to settle for this solution, I suspect that for many of us it is a response of last resort—a position to be adopted only when all other avenues are exhausted. Are there any other avenues available to us?

Perhaps we were too quick to embrace the idea that belief-formation is always involuntary. Although it is clear that we cannot simply decide to adopt any old proposition that is put to us, it doesn’t follow—and it may not be true—that we have no intentional control over what we believe. For example, it is surely plausible to suppose that we have some control over whether or not to subject our beliefs to critical scrutiny. One can deliberate about whether or not to believe those propositions that are open questions for one. And if deliberation lies within one’s voluntary control, then perhaps one can be justifiably blamed for failing to deliberate appropriately.

Perhaps so, but does this solve our puzzle? I suspect not. For one thing, I very much doubt whether the beliefs that motivated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Anders Breivik were ‘open questions’ from their point of view.  Instead, I suspect that they regarded them as self-evident truths, claims no more deserving of critical scrutiny than the belief that 2+2=4 or the belief that there is water at the bottom of the ocean. Moreover, even if they were guilty of failing to subject their beliefs to the kind of scrutiny that they should have, that failing would surely be relatively minor rather than an instance of gross moral turpitude of the kind for which we are inclined to hold them guilty.

So, how should we resolve this puzzle? I don’t have a full solution to offer, but here is one line of thought that I find tempting. Although belief-formation is responsive to evidence, it is also influenced by desire and motivation: how we take the world to be is heavily influenced by how we would like the world to be. And one of the central sources of belief in the superiority of one’s religion, race or ideology is surely the desire to dominate one’s fellow human beings.

And here, perhaps, we can see the hint of a solution to our puzzle. What the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds and Anders Breiviks of this world are guilty of is not the fact that they have voluntarily adopted unjustified beliefs, for we have seen that it is doubtful whether their beliefs were voluntarily acquired. Rather, their guilt lies in the character traits that their beliefs manifest. Our condemnation of them is justified insofar as the beliefs that motivated their actions were grounded in intolerance, arrogance and self-aggrandizement.

Tim Bayne is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He has taught at the University of Canterbury, Macquarie University, and the University of Oxford. His main interests are in the philosophy of psychology, with a particular focus on consciousness. A native of New Zealand, he divides his time between Manchester and Geneva. His is the author of Thought: A Very Short Introduction .

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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 Image Credit: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, upon capture. Taken by U.S. forces when KSM was captured  [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Peter W. Sinnema

Self-help isn’t what it used to be. At least, its early renditions were cast in a style alien to the contemporary ear.

The concept was first named (and voluminously expounded) by Samuel Smiles in his 1859 best-seller, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. Erstwhile apothecary, railway secretary, newspaper editor, and biographer, Smiles’ birth in Haddington, Scotland marks its bicentennial on December 23. If this populist Victorian sage is worth remembering for anything, it must be for his original self-help book, translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Croatian, Czech, Arabic, Turkish, and various native languages of India within his own lifespan, and purchased by more than a quarter-million readers by the time of the author’s death in 1904.

Smiles’ own moral and professional diligence embodied the cardinal virtue of his homespun philosophy: perseverance. He outlined his gospel of “energetic individualism” in refreshingly simple terms, encouraging humble mechanics and beleaguered artisans to own and cultivate the “power of self-help, of patient purpose, resolute working, and steadfast integrity” as they struggled to improve their lot in the new age of mass industry. Smiles promoted self-help as practiced or habitual independence, a disciplined husbandry of the inner man “effected by means of … action, economy, and self-denial.”

Given that Smiles published his aphoristic opus at a time when the nascent welfare state was represented by the grim apparatus of the workhouse—that infamously unpleasant asylum for the destitute reorganized under the oppressive Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834—present-day readers may be taken aback by the animosity with which Smiles condemned all “help from without”: states and statutes could do nothing to “make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.” Smiles denied the power of institutions to ameliorate individual vice and ignorance, and in anticipation of Margaret Thatcher’s notorious declaration that “there is no such thing as society,” he regarded nations as nothing more than aggregates of individual conditions. The remedy for social evil and decay thus resided “not so much in altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and stimulating men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and independent individual action.”

Smiles ran with his self-help idea for some forty years, enjoying social and commercial success with books on related themes such as Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880). Dying only three years after the state funeral of Queen Victoria, Smiles was quickly typecast as a spokesman for the worst hypocrisies of his era. In his socialist masterpiece The Ragged-Torusered Philanthropists (1906), Robert Tressell lambasted Self-Help as bourgeois propaganda “suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties,” while more recently E. J. Hobsbawm added Smiles to his list of “self-made journalist-publishers who hymned the virtues of capitalism” (The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848: 1961). Surely these are justifiable indictments of a man whose best-known work opens with the parsimonious bromide, “Heaven helps those who help themselves”!

Before we relegate Smiles’ invocation of self-mastery and laborious endurance to the dustbin of history, however, we’d do well to recall the singular contribution made by his account of “indefatigable industry” to our contemporary culture of self-help. True, Smiles’ highly repetitive and at-times cumbrous tribute to the “spirit of self-help” can read like a naïve, even perverse plumping of mere doggedness in the face of a hostile world. But then, repetition is of decisive rhetorical importance for Smiles, just as it is for any effective self-help author of the twenty-first century.

Smiles’ secular hagiography of “labourers in all ranks and conditions of life, cultivators of the soil and explorers of the mine, inventors and discoverers, manufacturers, mechanics and artisans, poets, philosophers, and politicians” derives its affective grit, its capacity to inspire and reform, from iterative structure. Self-Help’s biographical exemplars (there are literally hundreds of them, from Charles Abbott and Peter Abelard to John Ziska and Francesco Zuccarelli) are invariably martyred—to unsympathetic wives, malicious priests, ruthless state functionaries, failed technologies—but ultimately to the requisites of gripping narrative and readerly pleasure. In the end we want to emulate these suffering stalwarts because, as Smiles himself pointed out in his revised 1866 preface to Self-Help, the redundant plotline of affliction-perseverance-success “proved attractive … by reason of the variety and anecdotal illustrations of life and character which it contains, and the interest which all more or less feel in the labours, the trials, the struggles, and the achievements of others.”

Even the most erudite self-help guru must embrace the compositional obligations of repetition and (auto)biographical exemplarity that originated with Smiles. Kathleen Norris’s moving exploration, at once recondite and unsentimental, of the acedia that grips our Western culture, the spiritual torpor that is self-help’s universal, symptomological object, is a case in point. Her study of the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today,” driving millions to the bottle or the therapist’s office, acquires its poignancy from her insistence that the pressing question, “Why care?” can only be answered “by relating [her] personal history with acedia, telling stories from … infancy, childhood, and adolescence” (Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life: 2008). Norris’ self, exposed, diagnosed, and at least partly healed through the telling of personal history, is the modern-day version of Smiles’ paradigmatic, self-motivated individual in expectant pursuit of “elevation of character, without which capacity is worthless and worldly success is naught.”

Peter W. Sinnema is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. His teaching and research focuses on Victorian literature and culture. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. A bestseller immediately after its publication in 1859, Self-Help propelled its author to fame and rapidly became one of Victorian Britain’s most important statements on the allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Image credit: By Samuel Smiles (d. 1904) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Listen to Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?

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Twitter Competition
We’d like to hear who is your favourite philosopher. Pick your favourite philosopher and let us know why in a tweet (140 characters or fewer), incorporating the hashtag #philosophybites. We’ll be monitoring your suggestions from @oupacademic and @philosophybites. The competition closes on  10 January 2013 and our top five entrants will receive a copy of Philosophy Bites Back. The winning entries and a selection of shortlisted tweets will be posted to OUPblog in January 2013, and may well also appear in the next book in the Philosophy Bites series. To get you started, here are a few ideas:

TIM CRANE: Descartes. Not because what I think what he said was true, but because he was incredibly clear in his vision of things.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Nietzsche has a fascinating metaphysical structure to his thought, writes beautifully, and has a sense of humour.

RAYMOND GEUSS: Thucydides. My favourite philosopher because nobody else thinks he’s a philosopher, but I think he is.

BRIAN LEITER: Oh Fred. Nietzsche. I call him Fred. Because he’s a great writer, and he’s more right than wrong about most of the things he has views on.

GALEN STRAWSON: Kant. Every time I hear the words the Critique of Pure Reason I involuntarily salivate.

Good luck!

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites (OUP, 2010) and Philosophy Bites Back (OUP, 2012), which are based on their highly successful series of podcasts. You can also follow @philosophybites on Twitter.

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This recording of my lengthy interview with H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992) has been resurrected from my audio tapes and given new life. Dusted and digitalized, the result is something quite beautiful. Here is Hart in his own words recorded in 1988, reviewing his life, his work, and his significance. The interview presents Hart as three individuals: legal philosopher, interviewee, and critic. The recording adds another dimension to our understanding of Hart that must be incorporated into our collective memory.

Within the English-speaking world, Hart is frequently regarded as the twentieth century’s foremost legal philosopher. He revived the moribund discipline of jurisprudence, re-orientating it so that the qualities associated with analytical philosophy in the second half of the 20th century — rigorous standards of rational argument, clarity and lucidity, a preoccupation with subtle conceptual distinctions, and a sensitivity to language and its logic — were applied to the investigation of the most fundamental concepts of law and to major public issues, notably, the complex relation between law and morality. As a colleague, teacher, mentor and author, Hart exercised a profound influence, an influence that extended to the “real world” and “real issues”. From the late 1950’s onwards, he championed a new humaneness in punishment, speaking and writing for a right to abortion and against both the death penalty and the prosecution of people because of their sexual preferences. His exploration of the balance between the modern welfare state and individual liberty — in particular, the legitimate use of state power to impose standards of private morality — produced an eloquent and highly influential manifesto for modern political liberalism. As Tony Honoré, his close colleague at Oxford, put it, “He was the most widely read British legal philosopher of the twentieth century and his work will continue to be a focus of discussion.”

The present interview with Hart took place in his rooms at University College, Oxford, on 9 November 1988. The interview delineates the particulars of Hart’s life and work: his background, early education, and undergraduate studies; learning law, practising at the Bar, and journalism; working in military intelligence; the early years as a philosophy don and the principal philosophical influences that shaped his work; and the state of Oxford jurisprudence in the 1940s and 1950s. It then addresses Hart’s work and ideas between 1945 and the 1980’s: his appointment to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford; the Hart-Fuller Debate and his year at Harvard; the writing of Causation in the Law and The Concept of Law ; the 1950’s, the Cold War, and the 1960’s; “The Hart-Devlin Debate”; and what Hart called, “the Thatcher world”. The interview also illuminates Hart’s work beyond legal and political philosophy — the seminars to Labour Party groups on closing loopholes in the tax law; and the duties he undertook for the Monopolies Commission (1967-73) and the Oxford University Committee on Staff-Student Relations (the “Hart Report”, 1968-69). The interview includes Hart’s assessment of Bentham, Nozick and Dworkin, a general discussion of the virtues and limitations of sociology, sociological jurisprudence and analytical jurisprudence, of legal education, and the relationship between university legal education and the legal profession. A succinct summary of Hart’s contribution to legal philosophy brings the interview to a close. The interview is published verbatim — save for one brief comment by Hart that he asked me not to reproduce. Whilst the ordering of the interview was broadly chronological, the too-and-fro of conversation meant that subjects were returned to or introduced out of sequence.

The interview was one of a series that I have undertaken since 1986 with leading British legal scholars as part of an on-going research project mapping the history of modern English legal education and scholarship. Nicola Lacey’s illuminating biography of Hart used this interview as one of its main sources, and an edited version of the interview, excluding the material on legal education at Oxford, was published in 2005. Since its publication, the interview has been frequently cited. It was one of the main sources used by Brian Simpson in his Reflections on ‘The Concept of Law’. Simpson told me that he listened to the audio tape of the interview again and again as he was writing the book, and that hearing Hart’s voice inspired him in his struggle to complete it during his final battle with cancer.

At the time of the interview, Hart was 81 and physically frail. But he was one of the cleverest people I have ever met. His mind was sharp, and he tended to respond quickly and very clearly. Once the interview was under way, we both started to relax and enjoyed what became a friendly but challenging exchange. The interview reveals an unpretentious, reserved man, concise, diffident, and with a wry sense of humour. He talks of the enormous intellectual stimulus afforded by his visit to the United States in 1967-7 at the invitation of Harvard University, the pleasure he derived from his membership of the Monopolies Commission, and his outrage at the policies of the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher. The intellectual, moral, and political underpinnings of his work are apparent. Likewise, his limited intellectual interest in law and legal education, his elevation of the value of a philosophical approach to legal material, and his suspicion of sociology and the sociology of law are evident, as is his preoccupation with challenges to his work, in particular, by his successor in the Oxford chair, Ronald Dworkin. Also apparent is a poignant tension between intellectual confidence and self-doubt about his legacy.

At the end of the interview, and with the tape recorder switched off, Hart continued to talk about a variety of topics. He encouraged me to learn Italian, so that I could read the work of the Italian legal and political philosopher, Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004). Hart said that he knew, and corresponded with, Bobbio; and that Bobbio was the contemporary legal and political philosopher he most admired and related to. There was also more talk that evinced Hart’s sensitivity to criticism; and his preoccupation with writing an “Answer to Dworkin”, as Hart called it. Hart concluded by saying that I was free to publish the interview, and that he had no wish to review or revise it.

H.L.A. Hart on Childhood and Early Career
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H.L.A. Hart on Major Philosophical Influences
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H.L.A. Hart on his Early Philosophical Work
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H.L.A. Hart on his Harvard visit and Fuller Exchange
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H.L.A. Hart on the Major Works
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H.L.A. Hart on Dworkin and the Nature of Legal Philosophy
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H.L.A. Hart on Public Work
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H.L.A. Hart on Analytic Philosophy and Legal Scholarship
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H.L.A. Hart on his Political Views, Legal Education, and Legacy
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I feel sure that the importance of the interview rests primarily in the fact that you hear Hart’s voice, both his vivid cadences and also aspects of his character that other work on Hart tends not to evoke. Part of Hart was confused and diffident. Part of him was confident, acerbic and somewhat intolerant of anything beyond his own approach. Yet he was always open to argument and persuasion. These contradictions are the essence of his complexity.

It is in listening to Hart’s voice that we can get closer to Hart. There has been much critical analysis of his ideas — most recently in the context of commemorating the 50th anniversary of his landmark work, The Concept of Law. The images of Hart derived from his scholarship, diaries and other sources, including photographs, and from his personal relations, as a teacher, mentor, colleague, husband and friend, have generated multiple discourses in which commentators have appraised Hart the jurist and Hart the person. In the interview we hear Hart in conversation. As he and I speak about Hart’s ideas and the evolution of his life, there are interruptions, hesitations, and awkward silences which, like a work of scholarship or a diary entry, can be interpreted in many ways. One can imagine the conversation, the glances back and forth between the legal philosopher and his interviewer. Nervousness and unease are apparent; but so are authority and certainty.

The wider availability of this recording will generate new opportunities to understand and assess Hart’s personality and scholarly reputation. The poet, Sylvia Plath, wrote in her journal, “Recreate life lived: that is renewed life.” In bringing Herbert Hart’s voice to us now, this interview will do just that.

Professor David Sugarman, FRHistS, is the Director of the Centre for Law and Society at Lancaster University Law School. HLA Hart was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. He authored The Concept of Law, one of the seminal works of English-language jurisprudence. He passed away in 1992.

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Below, you can listen to Marian Stamp Dawkins talk about the topics raised in her book Why Animals Matter: Animal consciousness, animal welfare, and human well-being. This podcast is recorded by the Oxfordshire Branch of the British Science Association who produce regular Oxford SciBar podcasts.

Listen to podcast:

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Marian Stamp Dawkins is Professor of Animal Behavior and Mary Snow Fellow in Biological Sciences, Somerville College, Oxford University. She is the author of Why Animals Matter: Animal consciousness, animal welfare, and human well-being; Observing Animal Behaviour: Design and analysis of quantitative data ; and the forthcoming Through Our Eyes Only?: The Search for Animal Consciousness. She was awarded the 2009 Association for the Study of Animal Behavior medal for contributions to animal behavior.

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Young children take to painting, singing, dancing, storytelling, and role-playing with scarcely any explicit training. They delight in these proto-art behaviors. Grown-ups are no less avid in extending such behaviors, either as spectators or participants.

Provided we have a generous view of art, one that includes appropriate mass, popular, folk, ritual, and domestic practices as well as the esoteric professional art of specialists, we all engage routinely and often passionately with art. Consider, for example, the absorption of teenagers in popular music and the extent to which it contributes to their sense of self-identity. The same continues throughout life. We are interested in TV shows, movies, novels, music, dance, and the plastic arts. In fact, almost everyone has expert knowledge about some genres of art and a broad understanding of others. Many people participate creatively as amateurs both in high art forms and in more quotidian ones, such as potting, making clothes, adorning their environments, and so on. Moreover, the art of skilled professionals often receives sophisticated appreciation involving high levels of cognitive and emotional engagement.

In other words, nothing could be more natural than our attraction to the arts. Indeed, we might suspect that their ancient origins and the universal spread of art behaviors, along with the interest and deep satisfaction to which such behaviors give rise, indicate that they are a touchstone of our biologically-framed and culturally-inflected human nature. Note that the earliest known European cave art dates back more than 35,000 years to a time when the climate was very harsh and life must have been hard; art has been ubiquitous since then or earlier.

"Meercatze" rock carving in Libya. Photo by Luca Galuzzi (www.galuzzi.it), 2007. Creative Commons License.

But now consider these same behaviors from the perspective of the Martian anthropologist. How exotic and bizarre they must appear to be! He puzzles:

They tell or enact stories about people who have never existed and yet, knowing this, they find those stories deeply stimulating and emotionally moving. They find it intriguing to view paintings of bowls of fruit but don’t spend much time gazing at actual fruit bowls. They attach catgut to plywood, scrape it with horsehair, and enjoy the noise, though many other sounds do not appeal to them in a similar way. They amuse themselves by exaggerating their normal form of locomotion by swaying, jumping, spinning, and weaving patterns in groups.

Our sporting practices and spiritual rituals would be similarly perplexing to the alien visitor.

Those of us who share some of the Martian’s amazement are bound to wonder how the arts became so important to us. They permeate our lives and consume our energies, resources, and time. Of course they are often a source of pleasure. (Though recall that we are frequently drawn to tragic dramas and to stories and music that are sad; also that much art is of unrewardingly poor quality.) Yet we may wonder just why they are enjoyed.

One possibility is that art served humans’ evolutionary agendas for reproductive success, because evolution often gets creatures to do what is in their genes’ interests by making the pertinent activities intrinsically pleasurable. Art behaviors might have been directly adaptive; their adoption was responsible for increased reproductive success and the relevant propensities were passed to future generations. For instance, art might have bonded individuals and sustained their values in ways that benefitted their reproductive chances compared to those of art-impoverished people. Alternatively, art behaviors might have been incidental by-products of other adaptive capacities, such as intelligence, curiosity, and creativity. Many such theories have been advanced and there is considerable disagreement about what the arts are alleged to have been adaptations for or about the adaptations to which they are alleged to have stood as by-products. The comparative evaluation of these various, often conflicting, positions is challenging but well deserving of close attention.

And when that is done, it remains to consider if the arts serve similar or related evolutionary functions in our modern context. Perhaps as by-products they went on later to become adaptive in some new way. Perhaps as adaptations their evolutionary advantages came to be negated by changes in the human social and physical environment.

We can say at least this much: even if art behaviors are near-universal when taken together, they are so complex and varied that each individual person expresses them in a subtly distinctive fashion. Some people love novels, others are mainly interested in movies, a person who is insensitive to poetry might be a fine dancer, etc. We can also observe that, unlike other universal behaviors that are mastered relatively cheaply, such as bipedalism, art behaviors involve significant costs and ongoing commitments. These two facts together suggest that these behaviors can serve as informationally rich signals about fitness-relevant characteristics of those who display them. That is sufficient to show an important link between art and evolution.

Stephen Davies is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He is the author of The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2012) and he blogs at artfulspecies.

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By Philip Sheldrake

“Spirituality” is a word that defines our era. The fascination with spirituality is a striking aspect of our contemporary times and stands in stark contrast to the decline in traditional religious belonging in the West. Although the word “spirituality” has Christian origins it has now moved well beyond these – indeed beyond religion itself.

What exactly is spirituality? Unfortunately it’s not easy to offer a simple definition because the word is now widely used in contexts ranging from the major religions to the social sciences, psychology, the arts and the professional worlds of, for example, healthcare, education, social work and business studies. Spirituality takes on the shape and priorities of these different contexts.

However, in broad terms “spirituality” stands for lifestyles and practices that embody a vision of how the human spirit can achieve its full potential. In other words, spirituality embraces an aspirational approach to the meaning and conduct of life – we are driven by goals beyond purely material success or physical satisfaction. Nowadays, spirituality is not the preserve of spiritual elites, for example in monasteries, but is presumed to be native to everyone. It is individually-tailored, democratic and eclectic, and offers an alternative source of inner-directed, personal authority in response to a decline of trust in conventional social or religious leaderships.

If we explore the wide range of current books on spirituality or browse the Web we will regularly find that spirituality involves a search for “meaning” – the purpose of life. It also concerns what is “holistic” – that is, an integrating factor, “life seen as a whole”.  Spirituality is also understood to be engaged with a quest for “the sacred” – whether God, the numinous, the boundless mysteries of the universe or our own human depths. The word is also regularly linked to “thriving” – what it means to thrive and how we are enabled to thrive. Contemporary approaches also relate spirituality to a self-reflective existence in place of an unexamined life.

How is spirituality to be supported? The great wisdom traditions suggest the adoption of certain spiritual practices and it is this aspect of spirituality that attracts many contemporary people. Forms of meditation, physical posture or movement such as yoga, disciplines of frugality and abstinence (for example from alcohol or meat) or visits to sacred sites and pilgrimage (for example the popular practice of walking the “camino” to Santiago de Compostela) are among the most common. The point is that spiritual practices are not merely productive in a narrow sense but are disciplined and creative. A commitment to the regularity of a spiritual discipline like meditation gives shape to what may otherwise be a fragmented life. Many people also experience their creative activities in art, music, writing and so on as spiritual practices. Classic practices are all directed at spiritual development. Thus, meditation may cultivate stillness or attentiveness but the great religious traditions such as Buddhism or Christianity also relate such practices to personal transformation – whether in terms of personal ethics or increased social responsibility. Over time meditation may facilitate a growing freedom from destructive energies that inhibit healthy relationships. Such a growth in inner freedom makes us more available and effective as compassionate presences in the world.

It follows from this that, as the great traditions emphasise, spirituality is actually concerned with cultivating a “spiritual life” rather than simply with undertaking practices isolated from commitment. It offers a “value-added” factor to personal and professional lives. So, for example, in a variety of social contexts spirituality is believed to add two vital things. First, it saves us from being purely results-orientated. Thus, in health care it offers more than a medicalised, cure-focused model and in education it suggests that a holistic approach to intellectual, moral and social development is as vital as acquiring employable skills. Second, spirituality expands ethical behaviour by moving it beyond right or wrong actions to a question of identity – we are to be ethical people rather than simply to “do” ethical things. Character formation and the cultivation of virtue then become central concerns.

Finally, is spirituality simply a passing trend? Current evidence suggests a growing diversity of new forms of spirituality as well as creative reinventions of the great traditions. The language of spirituality continues to expand into ever more professional and social worlds – for example urban planning and architecture, the corporate world, sport and law. Most strikingly there are recent signs of its emergence in two contexts that have been especially open to public criticism – commerce and politics. Equally, the Internet is increasingly used to expand access to spiritual wisdom. So, on current evidence, spirituality appears to be less of a fad than an instinctive desire to find a deeper level of values to live by. As such, it seems likely not only to survive but to develop further into many new forms.

Professor Philip Sheldrake is currently Senior Research Fellow in the Cambridge Theological Federation (Westcott House), Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, and a regular visiting professor in the United States. He is also a member of the Guerrand-Hermès Forum for the Interreligious Study of Spirituality. For over twenty-five years he has been a leader in the field of spirituality as an interdisciplinary area of study. He is author of a dozen books, including Spirituality: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, November 2012).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credits: Yoga session at sunrise in Joshua Tree National Park – Warrior I pose. Photo by Jarek Tuszynski, 2008. Creative Commons License. (via Wikimedia Commons); Buddhist monks meditating on Vulture Peak. Photo by unknown Wikimedia Commons user. Creative Commons License. (via Wikimedia Commons).

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By John Fletcher

In 1744 Voltaire produced for an edition of Mérope a “Lettre sur l’esprit”, which he later incorporated after corrections in later editions of the Dictionnaire philosophique under the article “Esprit.” In it he attempted to define the nature of wit in the following terms:

Ce qu’on appelle esprit est tantôt une comparaison nouvelle, tantôt une allusion fine: ici l’abus d’un mot qu’on présente dans un sens, et qu’on laisse entendre dans un autre; là un rapport délicat entre deux idées peu communes; c’est une métaphore singulière; c’est une recherche de ce qu’un objet ne présente pas d’abord, mais de ce qui est en effet dans lui; c’est l’art ou de réunir deux choses éloignées, ou de diviser deux choses qui paraissent se joindre, ou de les opposer 1’une à 1’autre; c’est celui de ne dire qu’à moitié sa pensée pour la laisser deviner.

(What we call “wit” is either a fresh analogy, or a delicate allusion: sometimes it’s the use of a word which is presented as having one meaning, but which the reader is invited to understand in another; sometimes it’s the subtle linking of two ideas which have little in common; it can be an unusual metaphor; it’s the quest for something which an object does not at first reveal but which is intrinsic to it; it’s the art of bringing together two separate things, or of dividing them where they appear linked, or of setting one against the other ; it’s a way of revealing only half of one’s thinking in order to let the reader guess the rest.)

What Voltaire here refers to as the art of presenting a word in one sense, while allowing it to be understood in another; of establishing a connection between ideas which at first sight have little in common; of bringing out unremarked relevance; of linking different notions and separating analogous concepts; of implying more than is explicitly stated: this, surely, is not simply a definition of wit in general, but of irony in particular. When Voltaire said “esprit,” he meant exactly what we now understand by the term “irony.”

Voltaire at his desk with a pen in his hand. Engraving by Baquoy, ca. 1795.

Voltaire’s speciality is what I call “double irony” and it works by springing a surprise on the reader. In Candide, for instance, we learn that the servants suspect that our hero was the son of the baron’s sister and a worthy gentleman of the neighbourhood whom she refused to marry because his genealogical tree had been swept away by the ravages of time. The reader thinks that this is simply a jibe at aristocratic snobbery. But then we see that Voltaire has a surprise in store for us: the lady did not let her snobbery interfere with her sexual appetite. Normally, though, his genius is not for such complexities of paradox. Simplicity of attack was his ideal: he intended that his irony should be transparent and that the point should not be obscured. His butts were the religious fanaticism and obscurantism of the clergy and the arbitrary injustice and cruelty practised by the state’s political masters. He prefers the relatively straightforward devices of using words like bonté (goodness), or héroïque, or honnête in the opposite of their usual senses, and of ironical concessions, such as “although he was young and wealthy, he knew how to curb his passions,” or “the master was a philosopher withdrawn from the world, who cultivated wisdom and virtue peacefully, but who nevertheless was never bored” (my italics). But he is not averse to showing his hand freely, as in Zadig: “He looked upon men just as they were, as insects devouring each other on a tiny atom of mud.”

On the 318th anniversary of his birth, let us salute the great ironist who who wrote (clearly showing his hand again): “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Even as I write, terrible atrocities are routinely being committed around the globe by those who have been made to believe absurdities: we have never needed Voltaire’s wit and wisdom more than at this moment.

John Fletcher is emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of East Anglia and senior research fellow at the University of Kent. He translated Voltaire’s Pocket Philosophical Dictionary for Oxford World’s Classics. He wishes to acknowledge the generous help of Orla Fletcher in compiling this blog post.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Modern science has spawned revolutionary breakthroughs in the essential meanings of space and time. Still, such major breakthroughs in human consciousness remain distant from the often overlapping worlds of diplomacy and international relations. This disregarded distance is dangerous, and, potentially, catastrophic. In the Middle East, especially, there is ample room for needed reconciliations between science and diplomacy. Much of the relentless struggle between Israel and its neighbors is about space. Largely overlooked, however, is that this conflict is also about time. For one reason or another, scholars and policy-makers have typically ignored the palpable impact, both real and potential, of chronology.

Here, time could be power. For example, the intangible idea of felt time, or time-as-lived, which contrasts with humanity’s uniformly accepted idea of clock time, has its intellectual origins in ancient Israel. Already rejecting measurable chronologies as nothing more than a sterile linear progression, the early Hebrews approached time with remarkably advanced intellectual sophistication, with the notion of time as a qualitative experience. For them, time was understood as subjective, inseparable from any personally-infused content.

The Jewish prophetic vision was one of a community existing under a transcendent God and in time. Oddly, the significance of space — today, of course, we must speak politically and strategically, of land — stemmed exclusively from something markedly theoretical and impractical. The nexus of sacred events that had allegedly taken place within ancient Israel’s divinely-delineated boundaries had little or nothing to do with protecting the Jewish Commonwealth.

Western wall in Jerusalem. Photo by Wayne McLean. Creative Commons License.

For present-day Israel, the space-time relationship has two core dimensions, both of which now need to be better understood, in Jerusalem, and also in Washington. First, further territorial surrenders by Israel would reduce the amount of time Israel has left to resist catastrophic war, terrorism, and conceivably genocide. Second, any such surrenders, especially when considered together or synergistically, could provide added time for Israel’s existential enemies to await an optimal, or ideally perfect, attack opportunity.

For Israel, the strategic importance of time can be expressed not only by its nuanced relationship to space, but also by its undimmed role as a storehouse of Jewish memory. Perhaps, by conscientiously recalling the immobilizing vulnerabilities of Jewish life in the world, Israel’s leaders could better prepare to step back from what must appear alarmingly as a very bad dream. To be useful, this eye-opening nightmare would need to recall a perilous sequence of national compromises and forfeitures. “Yesterday,” warned Samuel Beckett in his legendary analysis of Proust, “is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably a part of us, heavy and dangerous.” At times, the poet may offer better ideas than the military strategist.

Iris palaestina. Photo by MathKnight and Zachi Evenor. 2010. Creative Commons License.

If, however, it would seem that this apocalyptic time horizon were authentically “long,” Israel’s policy response could be substantially less urgent. On behalf of its indispensable security, Israel could then choose to rely more upon the relatively passive and problematic strategic dynamics of deterrence and defense.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a suicide bomber is afraid of death, so afraid that he is enthusiastically willing to “kill” himself (or herself) as a means of overcoming individual mortality. With this tactic, whether in Gaza, or Sinai, or Lebanon, certain terrorists will judge themselves able to reorient chronology from an intolerable and inevitable personal extinction, to a glorious and divinely-promised life everlasting.

This chronologic conceptualization has notably serious implications for foreign policy and peace. Accordingly, Israel could benefit from “decoding” a growing and pertinent mindset, one that would somehow identify “suicide” with eternal life. The suicide bomber sees himself or herself as a religious sacrificer. Israel must learn how to change a widespread enemy understanding that closely links heroic “martyrdom” to a conquest of time.

Moreover, Israel must reluctantly acknowledge that there can even be “suicide states.” Today, the most obvious candidate for any such a fearful designation would be Iran, especially because this nuclearizing country is expressly committed to an apocalyptic narrative of Shiite Islam. A suicide-state could be perfectly rational, so long as its considered expressions of mass-murder and absorbed retaliation were both presumed to be gainful.

Jerusalem’s immediate policy response must be to somehow convince prospective suicide bombers, both individuals and entire states, that any intended “sacrifice” of Jews or of the Jewish State will never elevate them above the fixedly mortal limits of time. For this to work, however, would-be enemy sacrificers will first need to be convinced that: (1) they are not now living in profane time; and (2) that every sacrificial killing of “infidels” is an actual and consequential profanation of their one true faith.

This sort of persuasion will not be easy. It may even require the cooperation of certain leading Islamic clerics. For his part, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will need to acknowledge enemy perceptions of space and time as utterly meaningful core visions, adversarial ideas that are preeminently religious and cultural in nature. Only then, when Israel finally understands that enemy notions of space and time are not genuinely political or jurisprudential, could Israel find itself on the correct path to Middle East peace.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is author of many books and articles dealing with war, terrorism, and international law. He was Chair of Project Daniel, which presented its then-confidential report on Israel’s Strategic Future to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on 16 January 2003. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, Professor Beres lectures and publishes widely on issues of Israeli security, strategy, and deterrence. He is a regular contributor to OUPblog.

If you are interested in this subject, you may be interested in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, edited by Craig Callender. As the study of time has flourished in the physical and human sciences, the philosophy of time has come into its own as a lively and diverse area of academic research. Philosophers investigate not just the metaphysics of time, and our experience and representation of time, but the role of time in ethics and action, and philosophical issues in the sciences of time, especially with regard to quantum mechanics and relativity theory. This Handbook presents twenty-three specially written essays by leading figures in their fields. It is the first comprehensive collaborative study of the philosophy of time.

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PB. The initials are not exactly as familiar as, say, BBC or NPR, but we’re not operating in a massively different environment. PB: Philosophy Bites.

Time was when to broadcast on the radio (or the ‘wireless’) you’d have to seek a license for permission to use a teeny weeny portion of the radio frequency spectrum. Broadcasting was time-consuming, bureaucratic, and above all expensive. It required staff and costly equipment and it was possible only with the support of highly-trained studio technicians and engineers.

No longer. The Philosophy Bites podcasts are recorded on a five-inch tape recorder in various offices (usually in Oxford or London) and edited on a laptop in a small (and unkempt) bedroom in North West London. Since it was launched five years ago, it’s had 15 million downloads. It is heard all over the world – in San Francisco, Tokyo, London and Sao Paolo – and its followers include professors, journalists, farmers and at least one American soldier stationed in Afghanistan (thanks for your email, Sir).

My background is in broadcasting, though I have an academic post. PB co-founder, Nigel Warburton, is a bona fide academic and makes successful forays into the media. We’re both passionate about philosophy, and Philosophy Bites tries to combine our skills and interests. But we’re essentially dependent on the knowledge and eloquence of our interviewees: we’ve conducted 200 interviews now – and by far the most rewarding aspect of our PB experience has been the free education we’ve received from some of the most significant philosophers in the English-speaking world.

And we have some advantages over traditional media. We can focus on our niche, the stuff we know about; we can post interviews when we like, and our interviews can be as long as we like – and as long as they deserve to be. There’s no red tape, and we’re not saddled with the broadcasters’ procrustean burden of cutting programmes to finish exactly on the pips at the top of the hour.

All this poses a threat to traditional media. If an increasing number of specialized podcasters cover their specialized topic as well or better than any general broadcaster can manage, audience figures for the powerful players will be slowly chipped away. They’ll probably have to focus on areas in which the minnows can’t compete — newsgathering, say, or live sporting events. But it’s good news for listeners — Philosophy Bites is part of a new landscape of content, provided by enthusiasts. CNN, BBC, NBC, ABC, and CBC will all survive, thankfully. But for the miniscule world of philosophy, another set of initials is on the scene: PB.

Here are a few of our most recent podcasts:

Or you can search the full back-catalogue, categorised by month and by topic.

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites (OUP, 2010) and Philosophy Bites Back (OUP, 2012), which are based on their highly successful series of podcasts. You can also follow @philosophybites on Twitter.

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Some years ago I wrote a book on abortion that espoused women’s legal right to choose abortion, which was later cited in Roe v. Wade. It should have made me popular with feminists, but it did not and for one reason: I also argued that abortion is an ethical choice, and that not all abortions would necessarily be good choices. Trained as a philosopher, I pointed out that a traditional part of morality is deciding how to make good choices in the shaping of one’s life. No, I was indignantly told — the choice of abortion is a “personal choice” which needs no ethical justification, by either the woman or anyone else. That’s what women’s freedom is all about.

His Master's choice. (ca. 1932-1934) Arents Cigarette Cards. Source: NYPL.

I thought about those exchanges recently when I started to notice how choice seems to have become the all-purpose ethical term, used by liberals and conservatives, right and left. It is used by the left to defend gay marriage, almost any and all procreation choice, and the right to choose end-of life-care as one sees fit, including physician-assisted suicide.

“Choice” was used by the right to object to the requirement that everyone take out health insurance as part of the new health care legislation. People should be free to make their own choice about buying health insurance (though they lost out as a result of a recent Supreme Court decision). Mayor Bloomberg lost out last year on a proposal to tax people’s choice of sugared beverages, and came under fire this year for his proposal for a limit on their serving size (the ban was recently approved by the New York Board of Health). The beverage industry waged an all-out war against his proposals, citing people’s right to their own choice about how they care for their bodies.

Paul Ryan has been the leader of Republican efforts to reform Medicare by expanding the role of choice in deciding what kind of health insurance to buy under his plan to subsidize the program. But there is a twist in that instance about choice. The aim of that reform is to expand the range of choices not only in the name of freedom but also to control costs — putting “skin in the game,” as the saying goes. But it is well known that forcing money choices on patients often keeps them from doing things important for their health. The Republicans also rejected any feature in the drafting of the Affordable Care Act that would impose pressure on physicians to accept the results of good medical evidence from research. They should be completely free from government interference and allowed to make their own diagnostic and treatment choices.

Quite apart from the political use of the word, “choice” has also been a recurrent feature of the marketing of new medical technologies. Many are introduced in the name of expanding patient choices. Prenatal diagnosis for women at possible risk of a disabled child was introduced in the name of choice, putting no pressure on women one way or other to accept the procedure. But as a result of social pressure and in the name of responsible parenthood, it is almost as routine now as taking a pregnant woman’s blood pressure. A variety of new genetic tests can now determine someone’s likely medical future, including the possibility of Alzheimer’s and just about every other potentially lethal disease. No one will be forced to make use of that information; it will be a matter of choice, it is said. But if the history of new technologies is any guide, it will soon be considered ethically irresponsible not to make use of them.

What is to be made of the invocation of “choice” as a popular tool for winning a political battle — or of rejecting “choice” as the right way to win an ethical struggle? It depends on the other side of the coin. I believe public health trumps choice in the sugared beverage battle. Is it legitimate to use the word choice as a euphemism for unpopular causes? I don’t think so. Paul Ryan is using it in a way that hides the gradual reduction of Medicare benefits. Euthanasia supporters are either hiding or sugar-coating their policy goals. When new technologies are introduced in the name of choice should we believe it? Well, only if you want to ignore lessons from past technological innovations.

That’s all I choose to say for now.

Daniel Callahan is President Emeritus of The Hastings Center and author of the forthcoming book, The Roots of Bioethics: Health, Progress, Technology, Death (Oxford University Press).

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Whatever our faith-based differences concerning immortality, death has an unassailable biological purpose — to make species survival possible. Nonetheless, we humans need not always hasten the indispensable process with utterly enthusiastic explosions of crime, war, terrorism, and genocide.

In universities, where intellectual direction and fashion are now largely determined by numbing mimicry and raw commerce, our students need to learn something truly primal: An individual’s personal success can make genuine sense only if the larger world itself has a foreseeable and successful future.

This planet, reflecting its myriad constituent parts, faces stubbornly insidious problems. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” once observed the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, and “everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Today, expanding global deterioration and chaos is more a symptom than an actual disease. Virtually all world politics hides an inconvenient truth. This is the ubiquitous and determined unwillingness of individuals to seek meaning and comfort within themselves. In consequence, our upcoming presidential election will have no real bearing on the basic issues of human survival. Neither candidate truly understands the inner meanings of world politics. And neither candidate has it within his conspicuously cultivated capacities to ever discover these vital meanings.

In the end, says Goethe, we depend upon creatures of our own making. Ultimately, what is needed to fix a broken planet must lie far beyond the fragmented unities and feuding tribes of life on earth. Only when we are finally allowed to see ourselves as a single species, can we humans seriously entertain any credible hopes of progress and survival. In principle, well-intentioned emphases on diversity need not represent a contradiction of our overriding species singularity, but these would require an explicit and prior affirmation of diversity itself as an intermediate step toward eventual human solidarity.

In one form or another, tribal conflict has always driven world affairs. Without a clear sense of an outsider, of an enemy, of an inferior, of an “other,” most people will feel altogether lost. Still drawing our critical sense of self-worth from membership, in the state, or the faith, or the race — from what Freud, borrowing from Nietzsche, had insightfully called the “horde” — we humans cannot satisfy even the most minimal requirements of coexistence.

The veneer of civilization continues to be razor thin. Our entire system of international relations is rooted in a deeply etched and endlessly recurring pattern of horror. The sanitizing name that we assign to this pattern is “history.” Perversely, within this seamless litany of harms, it can be fully “rational” to defile and destroy those who have the temerity to express different beliefs and affiliations.

This calculated destructiveness has been most evident, of course, whenever one “tribe” encounters another that seeks distinctly alternative paths to immortality. It becomes a fundamental problem in world politics, because in this broadest possible realm of human activity, there can be no greater power than power over death.

Seeing requires distance. In our current frenzied rhythm, breathlessness is de rigueur. The cascading horror of life on earth creates a deafening noise, but it is still possible to listen for more transient sounds of grace and harmony. To begin, however, we must first pay close attention to our most intimate human dispositions of empathy and compassion. In the concluding analysis, these private feelings are considerably more important to species survival than the comfortingly tangible expressions of science, industry, and technology.

With regard to human durability, the politicians and the professors are both grievously unprepared, and manifestly wrong. From a survival standpoint, the critical time for science, modernization, and globalization is pretty much over. To survive together all of us must soon learn to rediscover a life that is detached from tribal manipulations, unfounded optimism, and contrived happiness. Indeed, it is only in the midst of this suddenly awakened human spirit that we may finally learn something beyond the suffocating clichés and banalities of American presidential politics.

“The man who laughs,” understood the poet, Bertolt Brecht, “has simply not yet heard the horrible news.” Too many still laugh amid the incomprehensible global triumph of incommunicable pain, death, and decomposition. We humans still lack a tolerable future, not because we have been too slow to learn what can make us successful as individuals, but because we haven’t yet begun to learn that such success is always contingent. In the end, success must always depend upon much wider and interpenetrating patterns of human progress.

“The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature,” wrote the Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “No element can move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.”

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is Professor of International Law at Purdue University. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, he is the author of many books and articles dealing with world politics, law, literature, and philosophy. He is a regular contributor to OUPblog.

If you are interested in the subject of the philosophy of death, you may be interested in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, edited by Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson. In 21 essays from leading philosophers, the handbook explores the current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline, from the metaphysical questions over the nature of death to normative ethics.

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Image credit: Broken Icy surface caused by ice breaker in frozen water. Photo by Orchidpoet, iStockphoto.

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In a series of videos, Corvino explores issues such as: Why marriage? (Why not civil unions?) Is gay marriage a threat to religious freedom? Is homosexuality unnatural? Are people who oppose gay marriage bigots?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch the full playlist of videos where John Corvino answers common questions about marriage equality and homosexuality.

John Corvino, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. As “The Gay Moralist,” he was a regular columnist for the now-defunct 365gay.com, as well as a frequent contributor to pridesource.com, The Independent Gay Forum, and other online venues. He has contributed to dozens of books, and is currently completing a book entitled What’s Wrong with Homosexuality? for Oxford University Press. An award-winning teacher, he has lectured at over 200 campuses on issues of sexuality, ethics, and marriage. Some of his writing and video clips of his lectures are available at www.johncorvino.com. John Corvino and Maggie Gallagher are the authors of Debating Same-Sex Marriage.

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By Keith Grint

Some of my more radical academic colleagues remain inordinately sceptical of the role of individual leaders set against the tectonic plates of economic systems, social classes, genders, political alliances and ethnic groups. To suggest that individual leaders might make a difference is to place an unwarranted responsibility upon mere actors when the real issue is ‘the system’ — whatever the system is. However, I want to suggest that we look again at permission-giving as just one aspect that encourages or discourages followers from specific acts. Let me turn to an apocryphal story from the Korean War to illustrate this. As in the Second World War, the American Army (like the British army but unlike the German army) removed discretion at the lower echelons and deposited most  knowledge and decision-making within the officer corps. As a consequence when Allied troops landed on D-Day in Normandy German soldiers targeted Allied officers as the most effective way to immobilize the invaders. In the Korea War little seemed to have changed; when American soldiers were captured their North Korean captors frequently resorted to torturing American officers — since the ordinary soldiers seldom had significant information — and as a consequence American soldiers were required to strip their emblems of rank if capture looked likely. This left the North Koreans with a problem: how to determine the officers amongst a group of captured US soldiers? The result, according to the apocryphal version of events, was that one enterprising North Korean interrogator demanded that all the American soldiers in his charge remove their trousers — at which point everyone looked at their officer for permission to strip.

This ‘permission-giving’ aspect of leadership is a critical, and critically under-rated, aspect. In Neil Mitchell’s book, Agents of Atrocity, he argues that leaders make a crucial difference in the occurrence, or prevention, of human rights abuses through their permission-giving. Thus rather than assuming that context determines the actions of leaders he suggests that leaders always retain a degree of choice in both their, and their followers’, actions. In effect, some leaders allow or even encourage their followers to engage in mass rape and murder after conquest while others actively prevent it. The most interesting case is Oliver Cromwell. In the English aspect of the English Civil War the pillaging of captured cities was common on both sides until the rise of the Parliamentary New Model Army, under Cromwell. That group was specifically forbidden from engaging in the rape, murder, and looting that hitherto had been commonplace. In contrast, when Cromwell led the army into Ireland he didn’t actively prevent any such brutality, and the consequences were the sacking and butchery of Drogheda and Wexford.

Note here that the critical point is how leaders and their followers are not driven into bestial behaviour as a response to a bestial situation; on the contrary, and in sharp contrast to contingency theory, what people do is a consequence of the choices they make, albeit constrained choices. This being the case we might look afresh at whether we should focus on the provision of material sustenance in areas of conflict — water, food, money, jobs, security and so on — or turn instead to the ideological aspects of life. We know historically that people in terrible material conditions don’t automatically revolt when food is short or jobs are scarce. They revolt when an alternative appears viable to a terrible present. We can see this captured in the history of slavery. It was probably common to almost all forms of prior human society and is usually linked to terrible material circumstances, but revolts aren’t a permanent or ever present feature of slave history.

When we apply this to other aspects of society it becomes clear just how important leadership is in its permission-giving — or withholding — capacity. Public assaults upon the Jews in Germany were significantly increased once Hitler had publicly denounced Jews. At the same time racist statements in public in the UK are now much rarer than they used to be because the leading role of the law and the political establishment has rendered such comments beyond the pale. But we do not need to wander into the political arena to notice the importance of permission-giving. According to the Guardian, the Queen’s adoption of the Stocky Heel shoe is responsible for the surge in demand and we only have to watch whatever Kate Middleton is wearing to see sales of the same dress race out of the shops. Permission-giving even affects suicide patterns with copy-cat suicides common.

Might it be then, that a hugely important aspect of leadership is not so much what ‘the situation’ or the ‘system’ determines or facilitates but what individual leaders permit or prohibit through their active or passive leadership?

Keith Grint is Professor of Public Leadership at Warwick Business School. He is the author of Leadership: A Very Short Introduction (2010).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about.

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According to ancient Jewish tradition traced back to the time of Isaiah, the world rests upon thirty-six just men — the Lamed-Vov. For these men who have been chosen and must remain unknown even to themselves, the spectacle of the world is insufferable beyond description. Eternally inconsolable at the extent of human pain and woe, so goes the Hasidic tale, they can never even expect a single moment of real tranquility. From time to time, therefore, God himself, in an expansively sympathetic gesture designed to open their souls to Paradise, sets forward the clock of the Last Judgment, by exactly one minute.

There are several discernible meanings to this extraordinary tradition, one of which may offer some redemptive hope in relieving our sobering nearness to global catastrophe. Soon, we will have to create the unique conditions whereby each and every one of us is personally able to feel the excruciating anguish and dreadful portents of the Lamed-Vov. Then, we will be able to take the necessary steps back from defilement to sanctification. Faced with the ultimate choice between life and death, between “the blessing and the curse,” then shall we “choose life.”

How could we hope to endure, both as individuals and as nations, if we were to feel, with the same palpable pain and sorrow, the immeasurable distress of all others? Shall we imagine that the more-or-less consuming empathy we now display viscerally toward our closest relatives and friends could be extended, much more generally, to the very broadest possible radius of human affinities? Or perhaps, without the suffering Lamed-Vov as intermediaries, we couldn’t even begin to survive such a protracted torment.

There exists a pertinent dilemma, a most unenviable paradox. To survive as a species, we must first survive as individuals. But the most glaringly evident requirement of species survival – a sine qua non that calls for much deeper and wider expressions of human empathy — could simultaneously render each individual life unbearable.

Sometimes, truth emerges through paradox. To survive, must we all have to first experience the terrible dizziness of the existentially irremediable? How shall we respond?

In the end, meaningful redemption is the core expectation of all societies on earth. The Swiss psychologist, Carl G. Jung, once remarked that “Society is the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption.” To redeem the whole world, he understood, we must unhesitatingly call forth certain indispensable metamorphoses. But, the “success” of these transformations would also place us squarely within a new and equally destructive trajectory of harms. It may be hard to understand that an imagined death can somehow sustain life. Still, all things move in the midst of death, and an individual life must always be recognized as an intended part of a larger whole.

It is unlikely that we may ever actually have to face up to this dilemma. After all, evidence abounds that the human capacity for empathy seems fixedly limited, and that for all practical purposes, we will need to construct our best global survival ideologies with substantially less ambitious assumptions in mind.

In the Jewish tradition, there are vital elements that appear to warn us against taking on too much of the suffering of others. Although Jews are certainly obligated to feel such suffering, to learn from, and be elevated by such torment (Toras Avraham), they must also guard against too much empathy. That is, strong feelings could occasion their own personal destruction. We may yet learn, from the instructive legend of the Lamed-Vov, not only that empathy is essential, but also that too much empathy is beyond human endurance.

Truth can emerge through paradox. It may also emerge from an awareness that, sometimes, reason alone is incapable of revealing to us what is most important. Such a keen awareness was deeply embedded in the thought of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who, in the dreadfully serious matter now before us, would urge us to seek not “concepts of truth,” but “truth itself.” This is a strange, but still consequential, distinction.

In the fashion of his thoughtful Swiss colleague, Carl G. Jung, Sigmund Freud spoke frequently of “souls.” He understood that a mystery of eternity always hovers meaningfully above and beyond the temporal world. The deepest reality of human love and empathy, he already knew, whether or not as determinable manifestations of God’s love, can never be adequately elucidated through science, by rigorous analysis, or by consciously systematic thought. Rather, Freud argued, it may be discovered in virtually every element of our day-to-day reality, including even that which is manifestly impure.

To Rabbi Kook, a Divine redemption must finally be undertaken by and through the Jewish People. An integral part of such redemption must inevitably be a greater awareness of indispensable human unity. This therapeutic awareness, if undimmed, should ultimately give rise to the light of loving kindness, and ultimately, to forgiveness. In turn, a “lofty” soul is needed to first generate a greater awareness of human unity: “The loftier the soul, the more it feels the unity that there is in all.”

We may all learn from Rabbi Kook that empathy and hence justice can bring forth a vast healing, and that such feeling “flows directly from the holy depth of the wisdom of the Divine soul.” Rabbi Kook’s thinking doesn’t stand in any stark or self-conscious opposition to rational investigation, nor does it intend to oppose pure feeling to raw intellect. Instead, it identifies a usefully creative tension, between an abstract and too-formal intellectualism, and a distinctly promising form of reason, one that lies well beyond the normal limits of utterly abstract investigations.

Influenced and informed by Buddhism, Kook envisioned humankind with a natural evolutionary inclination to advance and perfect itself. The course of this human evolution, he surmised, must be directed toward a progressively increased spirituality. In the final analysis, he understood the Torah as a concrete manifestation of Divine Will here on earth.

In consequence, at some point, the people and State of Israel must play a cosmic and redemptive role in saving us all. This mending role, however, will be contingent upon first fulfilling many challenging expectations (mitzvot), fulfillments wherein the redemption of Israel can produce the redemption of all humanity. Here, Jewish nationalism is presented as much more than a highly-valued secular ideology. It is, rather, represented as a fully sacred phenomenon. This representation is worth bearing in mind by both Jews and gentiles, indeed, by all those who might intentionally be dismissive of Israel’s special place among the nations. As goes Israel, so shall go the world.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is interested in special connections between traditional Jewish sources and Israeli security affairs. He is the author of ten major books and several hundred articles dealing with international relations and international law. Professor Beres was born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of the War, the only son of Viennese Jewish survivors. He is a regular contributor to OUP Blog.

If you are interested in the subject of Jewish philosophy, you may be interested in The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought by Willi Goetschel. Examining the thought of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Cohen Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Margarete Susman, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, and others, Goetschel highlights how the most philosophic moments of their works are those in which specific concerns of their “Jewish questions” inform the rethinking of philosophy’s disciplinarity in principal terms.

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