LibCon today has a link to a poll commissioned by the FT showing that around 60% of those questioned agreed that it was wrong for companies in the UK to avoid tax, despite its legality, while only 15% disagreed. This, as the FT points out, is good news for UKUncut and their anti-tax avoidance campaign (though their focus seems to be shifting to banks at the moment).

As now seems to be inevitable every time UKUncut is mentioned, a LibCon reader’s left a comment on the post trotting out the usual line that we all avoid tax to one degree or another, (by having ISAs, for example), so it’s absurd to criticise companies when they do the same thing as everyone else but on a larger scale. The argument here is basically that questions of degree are irrelevant: anything anyone does to reduce the amount they pay in tax is tax avoidance, and given that no one has any problem with that, UKUncut can’t consistently criticise the likes of Vodafone, Boots and Philip Green for what they do. This is an argument employed time and again by opponents of UKUncut (many of them in comments threads on LibCon), and it was also used by Jeremy Paxman in his discussion with the group’s spokesperson on Newsnight the other week (see about 1:50 onwards in this clip).

This is crap. More specifically and less vulgarly, it’s the continuum fallacy, also (according to Wikipedia) rather wonderfully known as the fallacy of the beard. There’s nothing inconsistent in holding both that someone on a modest income who puts a few grand by in an ISA for a rainy day is acting perfectly ethically and that a company which registers itself in Switzerland to reduce its tax bill by hundreds of millions of pounds is doing something wrong. It is, as Wikipedia points out, exactly as stupid as claiming that there can be no such thing as ‘a heap of sand’ because you can’t specify how many grains of sand you need before they become a heap.

Some individual tax avoidance probably should be condemned (as Philip Green has been – though targeting every well-off plumber who takes payment in cash under the table when they could afford to pay the tax is probably tactically unfeasible), and maybe some corporate tax avoidance shouldn’t; where and how the line should be drawn is an extremely tricky question. But the mere fact of that question’s existence doesn’t undermine UKUncut’s case in the slightest.

Straight-up racist that sucker was simple and plain,

Motherf**k him and John Wayne.*

Chuck D’s immortal rhyme more or less sums up my attitude towards Martin Heidegger in my more polemical moments. Heidegger was a Nazi. Whilst countless others of his generation fled, spoke out and resisted, he happily worked away under the regime. This fact should colour how we think about him. I don’t believe that it could not, and am suspicious of those who claim it can’t. However, this odd article on Comment is Free raises a peculiar thought. It apparently endorses the following idea:

He calls for the books to removed from the shelves of philosophy departments and rehoused under the history of Nazism. This is eminently sane. Being and Time deserves its place alongside Mein Kampf – as the work of a dangerous and deluded mind.

Unfortunately the iron law of Comment is Free, that all posters have to operate like cheap point scoring computers rather than rational commenters, has taken over, and no-one is really engaging with this idea. It is wrong, though not for the facile reasons most of the posters suggest. Heidegger’s arguments are not Nazi philosophy. This is different from the claim, which I am sympathetic to, that Heidegger’s philosophy was compatible with, even friendly to, Nazism. What I am saying is that Being and Time was not the official philosophy of the Nazi state. There is a stronger case for saying that Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which became elevated to the official philosophy of the Soviet Union, being bracketed under the history of communism. An even stronger one for Stalin’s wretched Dialectical and Historical Materialism. But Heidegger wasn’t used in this way. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics was not ‘the Nazi take on Kant’, his lectures on Plato and Aristotle were not ‘how fascists should see the ancients’. Heidegger’s work is philosophy, and whether good or bad, should be seen as such.

Personally, I would have Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in a philosophy section (as my library does), and couldn’t care less what happened to Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Heidegger’s work, too, belongs in the philosophy section. I do not feel able to make decisive judgement on whether his work gave ammunition to fascists, as I have only recently begun to engage with him. I have my suspicions, and cannot but read his early work without thinking about what he went on to do. Nonetheless, this itself is a philosophical question. Removing Heidegger from the philosophy section dodges it, rather than clarifying it.

*50 Third Estate points to the first person to tell me who Chuck is actually referring to.

Guest post by Carl Packman

Islam is enemy No. 1 of much contemporary criticism, either by the angry EDL men on the street, to new atheists asserting that Islam is incompatible with Enlightenment societies, to critics such as Nick Cohen and David Aaranovitch’s’ with their claims to present Islamic bad boys (and girls) as the real threat to leftist sentimentalities.

But many of the targets taken by the above miss the mark, leaving the perception that Islam itself is the enemy. But this shortfall does not render left wing opposition to Islamism impossible.

It seems at first an odd place to start but our solution here can be found with Freud. At a time of massive vulnerability for European Jews, it would have been easy for many to resign themselves to victimhood and group together under the pretext of their hitherto shared history. However in 1939, between being robbed and forced to emigrate from occupied Vienna by the Nazi’s for being Jewish and partaking in one of the disciplines they referred to as ‘Jewish science’ (psychoanalysis), Freud decided to pursue the subject of the historical arrival of monotheism (which he attributes to Moses’ being an Egyptian priest of Akhenaten, and not, as is commonly assumed, his being originally Hebrew). As such, in a letter he told Arnold Zweig “Moses created the Jews” and, in his last substantial book Moses and Monotheism stated that “it was not God who chose the Jews … but Moses”. Matthew Sharpe, author of the book Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real noted that ‘Freud did not attempt to restore or reassert the ‘purity’ of Judaism against its detractors. He offered a demonstration that Moses, Judaism’s law-giving Father, was already impure: an Egyptian stranger’ (p. 246). By doing this, Freud observed that everything we thought we knew about Jewish history grounded inaccurately. Freud enjoyed the benefit of achieving two things, firstly producing a philosophically adept justification for the mental utility and historical genesis of monotheism (for Freud, monotheism revealed the end of object worship, and the beginning in belief in the absent, an astonishing mental accomplishment), and secondly undercutting everything the Nazi’s thought they knew about Judaism, even if this was to undercut the knowledge of the Jews themselves. And after all there is no better tool for defeating critics than to show that everything they know is wrong.

The way in which to utilise this tool for Islam is clear. In order to undercut criticism of Islam from the unpalatable voices, while maintaining an opposition to Islamic fascism, one must champion Islam’s alternative, forgotten or disavowed history, and then ask questions as to why this has been disavowed, and by whom.

Professor Ali A. Allawi in his LSE seminar In Search of Islam’s Civilisation noted that political Islam post-1976 (a time of relative freedom in Iraq he states) disavowed its ethical dimension, preferring to appease the status-quo by being rules based and not ethics based. A compulsion for corruption soon crept in to fill the gap, attempting to predicate itself on purely Islamic measures. The relationship between Islam and capitalism, for example, had to overcome some treacherous boundaries with regards to what was ethically sound in the religious system. The result being that Islam dressed elements usually frowned upon – the banking system for example – into palatable products (halal banking). Ironic, really, that what Allawi situates as the genesis of Islamism – rules based Islam and not an ethics based Islam – was the attempt to forge an Islamic version of a model many would attribute to US-styled capitalism. Strange to think that the Middle Eastern anti-Imperialist movement might have been grounded by a sly attempt to create capitalism with an Islamic face.

The events of the 1970’s in the Middle East changed Islam in a way that has not been significantly altered ever since (which is rather hard to accept given the severity of events that have since taken place, but what I mean is simply Islam has continuously been on the defensive since the seventies – after Iraq/Afghanistan nothing has changed, only maintained), and it is worth remembering this point when promoting a counter-hegemonic version of Islam, though this merely satisfies the political body of Islam. Where are we to address Koranic issues? Crucial information should be sought from Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, Sudanese liberal reform figure and believer in a version of progressive Islam, expressed in his book “The Second Message of Islam”. For Taha, we should be reminded that the Koran had been revealed in two locations, firstly in Mecca where Muhammad and his followers were minorities, and in Medina where the city was brimming with Jews and Pagans. During his verses in Mecca, Muhammad promulgated a “peaceful persuasion,” whereas in Medina the verses are filled with rules and intimidations. The Medinan verses, the first message(s) of Islam, were directed to a whole community of early believers and not Muhammad alone, according to Taha. These messages were a sort of ‘historical postponement’ as George Packer puts it in his New Yorker article on Taha. It was the Meccan verses, the second message of Islam that would represent, for Taha in his revisionism, the perfect religion, an acceptance of equality and freedom that, in seventh-century Arabia, Muslims were ready for. This provided his grounds for a progressive Islam, or at least a return to Islam in its truest form, since disavowed in its Medinian emphasis on rules based Islam.

Examples of Taha’s revisionist spirit can be found in today’s Iran; one particular person held in high regard is Grand Ayatollah Sanei who recently called Ahmadinejad’s presidency ‘illegitimate’ and ‘against Islam’. He is outspoken on matters such as the prohibition of nuclear weaponry in Islam, equal status for women (which, surely, must include not banning them for being too good at motor car racing), equality for non-Muslims and well known for issuing a fatwa against suicide bombing. Another well known example is Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montarezi, recently described in the New York Times as ‘an adversary the state has been unable to silence or jail because of his religious credentials and seminal role in the founding of the republic.’ He too questions use of the term Islamic government when it is referred to the one in his homeland.

What might initially be problematic about this counter-hegemonic revision is that it seeks to find the best in Islam and disavow the bad bits. The question remains; are the bad bits Islam’s problem? The answer is of course yes, but the way around it is not to simply bracket what is good and bad Islam, but, rather, what is and is not Islam. What has been said about Freud’s work on Moses is that it is largely speculative. Where the Islamic counter-hegemonic history does not fall short to this problem is that it has legitimacy both in its textual revision, and in its ethical methodology (that is to say both historically and practically).

Why might this be helpful for critics of Islamism? Simple, what Freud did show with his work on Moses is that the enemy cannot have reasonable grounds of criticism without a reasonable understanding of their enemy. By restoring a lost history for the Jews, Freud was able to throw off course Nazi criticism of Judaism. Equally, the way in which we are legitimately allowed to criticise Islamism is by taking a fuller understanding of what Islam actually is. This is where cohorts of New Atheism, particularly Sam Harris in his book The End of Faith, fall short. His arguments tend to perceive the true expression of Islam to be in Islamism, and very often purposefully conflates the two, describing good Muslims as not practising their religion to its proper end. Another example in Michel Onfray’s book The Atheist Manifesto, he waxes that ‘Islam is fundamentally incompatible with societies that arose from the Enlightenment’. How do these criticisms stand up with the ideas printed above? They describe an Islam that is rules based, which itself has erroneous groundwork, and so are by no means prepared for the counter-hegemonic history of Islam, which is not merely equal in its legitimacy to fundamentalist Islam, but rather destroys any legitimacy fundamentalist Islam claims to hold.

Carefully applied, the counter-hegemonic history of Islam may well be the vital tool needed for the left to maintain their opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, enemies of Islam who conflate Islam with Islamism, and portions of the left who sing about moral relativism with their fingers in their ears.

Two events, at each end of the last week here in London, have highlighted the real range of activities and viewpoints of the left community in this country. The 7th annual Historical Materialism Conference, held last weekend at SOAS and Birkbeck, offered a fantastic opportunity for over 700 attendees from around the world to discuss Marxist theory. Today’s actions of “The Wave” followed by the beginning of a 48-hour climate camp in Trafalgar Square represented the cutting edge of British lefty activism. The question is, then, why can one not find the same faces at both events? Why are our theorists disinclined to involve themselves with activism, and why are our activists not engaging with the theoretical debates that surround the issues they wish to tackle?

At the Historical Materialism conference, there were literally hundreds of papers given, on topics ranging from political economy of the current crisis, to climate change, to aesthetic debates in the 1990s, to the poetics of containerisation. Despite this being a conference focussed on Marx’s thought, and on later Marxist thought, there can be no doubt about how great a level of heterogeneity there was in the viewpoints expressed, nor of ongoing polemics that occasionally bubbled to the surface. The atmosphere was lively, and unusually for a bunch of academics, the attendees were all serious about changing the world. Let us not get this wrong, despite the Marxist tradition often being highly intellectual, there were no punches pulled about the necessity of the forcible overthrow of the status quo. When on the first night, a Canadian academic gave a paper on the use of historical materialism is social scientific study to aid social democratic ends, he was absolutely taken apart, and the conference ended with Frederic Jameson arguing that we have to make the choice between Socialism and Communism.

Today’s “The Wave” march was equally heterogeneous. Finding myself marching with everyone from the Socialist Workers’ Party, to the Lib Dems, to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (who happen to act like a rather right-wing pressure group most of the time), with everyone kitted out in blue garb. Everyone was coming together to make what they see as necessary political demands. Of course, the climate camp taking place later in the day was rather less diverse, with attendees being a range of hippies, students, recent graduates, and NGO workers. The Wave, itself, is of little political interest, it was not particularly left-wing, and the demands were broadly reformist, but this is not the case for climate camp.

And yet, climate camp is a heavily anti-theoretical environment. One finds oneself surrounded by the most conservative discourses on nature, in which people consider the rolling back the industrial revolution. Both nature and creativity become a fetish, in the here-and-now climaxing most ingloriously in a hedonism whose claim to make demands for the future are, with the creative obsession and the throwing away of history, held firmly and problematically in the present. Maybe I give the climate camp a bad press. They do amazing work, and get the sort of media attention most Marxists could never dream of. Nonetheless, as an urbanist of sorts, and as a modernist, I can’t help feeling slightly uncomfortable about banners that say “Nature doesn’t do bail-outs”. Somehow I think that, “Humanity shouldn’t do bail-outs” would be more appropriate to the cause.

And yet the academic Marxists have their problems too. Surrounded by the most erudite and eloquent debates on theory, a session on Israel and anti-Semitism was banal at best. The imposition of a Realpolitik was awkward and confused. The one time in the weekend when I felt that this was really being addressed was in a fantastic session on “Apocalypse Marxism”, with one of the papers being given by a PhD student at University of California Santa Cruz who also happens to be involved in the ongoing student struggles across California. Maybe the collaboration of theory and praxis are going better elsewhere

Amongst the book stalls at the conference, the SWP’s seemed rather out of place, with its emphasis on popular Marxism and Trotskyism not quite hitting the spot. The problem is, for many Marxist academics, that left-wing activists seem inherently dogmatic. Academics would often rather be debaters than involve themselves in the sort of demagoguery needed to run a vanguard part.

The challenge to integrate theory and praxis has been long-discussed, and it is perfectly possibly that my judgment is clouded by the demise of Adorno at the hands of May ’68ers, and their slogan of “Adorno as an institution is dead.” I see their legacy in climate camp. I see it in the lifestylism that allows placards that read “you can’t eat meat and be an environmentalist” or in any challenge to capitalism at the point of consumption.

If we carry on as we are, any revolution will not be theorised, and yet we cannot afford for this to be the case. Maybe we can analyse this split in terms of Marx’s famous final thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In its popular, although incorrect, interpretation this is a call for activism, to throw out philosophy. The other interpretation is that Marx demands a philosophy that itself changes the world. But take with it the argument that philosophy should be immanent to all elements of human existence, and you have a fine argument for a ground in which philosophers must partake in praxis, and activists must at the same time critically examine their status rather than simply assuming it. And yet to simply make this argument is not enough, as we must start to think very carefully about how these two important elements of the left can be integrated, and in fact must be integrated, to effect any real change.

Guest post by Tendai. N

Philosophy has an unfortunate reputation outside the world of philosophers. And even people who understand themselves to be philosophers are often poets more than anything else. One reason for this is a lack of understanding about what philosophy is, and does: there’s a belief that philosophy is the name given to a Sunday afternoon’s pot-addled meditations; or the name given to “what you feel strongly about”.

To make my starting assumptions clear, I suggest the following description of philosophy. I take philosophy to be a form of inquiry, whose method0logy is based on rational argument, logical rigour, and the ability to absorb counterexamples. A philosophical claim, like a scientific one, is capable of verification or falsification, and possibly capable of observation. You can have good philosophy without speculation about what’s behind the universe. That’s so 19th century. Philosophy, in short, is something you do, not merely something you read or feel.

Foundations of good political philosophy

On the face of it that would sound like an ideal method for arriving at political positions: reason, logic, and general applicability are attractive characteristics for a political idea. But obviously political and moral philosophy (two sides of the same coin) runs into unique problems. The most glaring difficulty is that they relate to the choice of values. Individual lives are incommensurable, so many of their values are incommensurable too. How, then, do you justify telling somebody what to want to do?

The weakest attempts to persuade on those lines make reference to such vague and made-up things as “duty”. I’m not being flippant in calling duties “made up”, but I’m drawing attention to the problem of treating what are essentially social fictions, as things that were ‘read of universe’. To paraphrase one philosopher I admire, “we are not conscripts in the army of virtue, we are volunteers”. In other words, the only reasons that enjoin action are personal ones. We are not in all cases, to be required to act as though we were not ourselves. It is, after all, a requirement of liberty to only make minimal demands on the will of an unwilling other.

One attempt to get round this is to presume that we all want to be rational. But cognition is not magnetic, rationality is not normative – I may well have no reason to want to be rational. I’m not going to stop smoking, drinking or eating copious amounts of shortbread because it’s rational to stop. Reason is only applicable in so far as it allows for your chosen goals, and, possibly, in selecting those same goals. But I imagine 70% of our lives have nothing to do with reason, and don’t need to.

OK, we might say, then “do as we say because justice requires it”. This seems a stronger argument for requiring action. In our societies, with their rigid and uneven allocations of power, unpredictable shifts in those allocations, there is a “something for everyone” appeal in a good theory of justice. In the absence of perfect future knowledge, justice as a value is basically in everybody’s best interests. Regardless of their respective weaknesses, I think this is something Cohen, Rawls and Nozick address with exceptional insight.

Objectives of good political philosophy

So we at least have a way, in principle, of arriving at a scheme of values. Should political philosophy stop there? The trouble is that a programme of values may take no account of where it must operate. And this is one point on which many philosophers who dabble in politics fail miserably, and a key reason why they are not often taken seriously.

One of the reasons why Marx, Hayek and Dworkin are so successful in gaining influence on institutions and their agents, is because they take into account (and give an account of) how institutions in society work, and make decisions. There is a tendency in ideological discourse to speak as though our “duties” trump the social mechanisms that will allow us to fulfil them i.e. “moral duties are more important than the law”. They may or may not be, but that offers no advice on how to achieve those ends in a law-constrained society.

For political philosophers to be taken seriously, they must not only prescribe values impartially, but they must also understand what it takes for an official or institutional agent to take and implement a decision: that to close Guantanamo Bay one must overcome a mountain of paperwork, and the resistance of unwilling institutions. Norman Geras, in my opinion, is an example of the sort of philosopher who does this well. This practical aspect of political philosophy is, I think, too often ignored by philosophers and intellectuals. If they can give useful analysis on these sorts of issues, then they become infinitely more useful.

Conclusion

I don’t think philosophy is merely opinion – it’s not an alternative form of self-expression. And philosophers should resist the temptation to use it as a prop for their personal inclinations. I won’t name names, but the left suffers from political commentators who do just that. This is often coupled with an unpalatable cynicism and contempt for society, the West, and the politically uninterested. It causes liberals to be taken less seriously, and is a waste of intellectual energy better used in providing workable ideological and practical programmes.

As a liberal I am perhaps naturally inclined to the rational. The magic of reason is in reducing the risk of error, and the time spent being held back by error. To this extent, philosophy can be a powerful ally to those in power. And that’s at least one good reason to do political philosophy well.

Interview by Dan Swain and Lorna Finlayson

"Revolution isn't rational anymore, but a breath of fresh air would be"

Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of Mind and Logic at University College London. Since 9/11 he has written several books on the subject of terrorism and war, most recently Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War, and has become a vocal advocate of the right of the Palestinians to a state, and to the means of achieving that state. We interviewed Honderich following his paper at Cambridge University’s Moral Sciences Club – their anachronistically named answer to a departmental seminar – where he laid out his views on Zionism, neo-Zionism, Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing that support for the Palestinians includes acknowledging their right to terrorism. The discussion was mostly cordial, though it was clear that most of the philosophers and students present were sceptical.

Honderich is, in fact, very critical of the institution of academic philosophy and its role in politics: “The contribution of the overt and the more common covert conservative political philosophy is the same. It is to pretend that the political tradition of conservatism, as in the case of New Labour as much as the Conservative Party past and present, does actually have an arguable principle of what is right and wrong to support the self-interest of an economic and social class. In this, the tradition of conservatism in general is different from the tradition of the Left and of old Labour. Liberal political philosophy, as in the case of John Rawls, escapes the viciousness of conservatism, but lacks resolution in thought, feeling and action, and seemingly always will.” His interests haven’t always been in this area – and he continues to work, for example, on the philosophy of consciousness – but he sees a connection between a wider commitment to philosophy and his recent focus on politics: “These interests arose more or less accidentally, but maybe less accidentally than I have supposed. I take it that all decent philosophy is a concentration on — not sole ownership of — the logic of ordinary intelligence. That comes down to clarity, usually in the form of analysis, and consistency and validity, and completeness. What goes with that has to be generality, and truth as against convention. Any philosopher aspires or pretends to aspire to that logic, whatever his or her area.”

“I wouldn’t come now.”

The observation that New Labour is now firmly within the tradition of conservatism is clearly a saddening one for him. He calls the old Labour party “the great party of humanity and civilization in British history”, and the reason he came to Britain from Canada: “I wouldn’t come now.” But what about the hope over the Atlantic, Obama? “Chomsky, the great reality-judge of our age, is not hopeful. I myself think we can still expect more from Obama than from anybody else you could have dreamed would be president. Certainly I haven’t given up. The plain fact is that he is the president of the most powerful of the hierarchic democracies. Its national strength, it seems, is or contributes greatly to the power of the economic and social classes near and at the top. Surely it is also clear that as an astute and morally decent politician, so appallingly superior to our criminals against humanity Blair and Brown, he is judging what is possible and going forward in that rationality.”

For Honderich the modern democracies presided over by Obama and Brown are profoundly hierarchic. We ask what he sees as the alternative: “The alternative is real or realer democracy, of course, where not only two heads are better than one and more heads better than two, but the heads are equally free in expressing their judgements and wants. The question brings back to mind Colonel Rainborough’s moral truth in the Putney Debates in the time of the English civil war. ‘Really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he….’ Are there tanks in those army barracks somewhere around Pimlico? I think some successor to Rainborough should think on him, and on our society, where not only the poorest but at least the six bottom economic deciles are being cheated of fuller lives. He should arrange for his tank to break down in Parliament Square for a while, only long enough for our political class and the telly to become aware of it, and then take himself back to the barracks, and also take his punishment for his civil and other disobedience. Revolution isn’t rational anymore, but a breath of fresh air would be. It might have a little effect on our coming election . Maybe remind some of our low politicians that the response to a question isn’t an answer, that selling isn’t their proper line of life, that the House of Commons isn’t the Student Union in Oxford, and that our elections shouldn’t be Afghanistan with drapery.”

Turning to the questions of terrorism. Words like terrorism, radicalism and extremism have developed a strange currency in recent years. As we are learning, one can be a domestic extremist merely for attending a demonstration or going to the wrong meeting. Honderich is struck by the speed of this development: “It has surprised me that transparent terminological means, such as persuasive or loaded definitions, or indeed the pretence of actual definition, have been so successful in the forming and manipulating of public feeling and opinion. This has something to do, presumably, with a new and larger role of the media in society. The effect is more pervasive than supposed, far wider than the effect of such organs as The Daily Mail.”

Precision in terminological definitions is crucial here. ‘Zionism’, defined as the project of establishing a Jewish state in 1948 and within those borders, is a project Honderich defends. It was justified in part by the horrors of the holocaust, he says, and the reality of that state now requires the defence of it. He is an implacable enemy of what he calls ‘Neo-Zionism’ – “the taking from the Palestinians of at least their liberty in the last 5th of their homeland”, and is critical also of ‘semitism’ – “the prejudice in favour of Jewish people right or wrong.” Whilst justifying the creation of the Israel, and therefore a commitment to what is commonly called a two-state solution, is a common (though far from universal) opinion amongst the Palestine solidarity movement, one of his reasons for it seems odd. In Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War… he attaches considerable significance to the question of whether the Palestinians were ‘fully a people’ in 1948, arguing that they were, but that it was reasonable to believe otherwise on the basis of the best information available at the time. Why is this so important? “I have the feeling that you have hit on the weakest point in that book, as some others have. But I still stick to it. The Principle of Humanity, in short, is that we should take rational steps to get and keep people out of bad lives — with bad lives defined in terms of deprivation of the great human goods, these being length of conscious life, bodily well-being, freedom and power, respect and self-respect, the goods of relationship, and the goods of culture. A people not organized into a state and society, I take it, not well-defined as a group, are not open to a kind of insult, a kind of disrespect. They are also less likely to have already achieved the other great goods. That is a beginning of a reply.”

"As for the pro-Palestinian student occupations, I am absolutely for them"

Over the past few years the question of Palestine has played a controversial role in universities. There is anger over the government’s requests for lecturers to spy on students, the way in which Islamic societies are being monitored and clamped down on, and controversy over strategies for delivering solidarity. There has been much concern over the desire of the government to channel funding towards such ‘key issues’, with terrorism being a primary one. Honderich puts this in perspective: “In a society as morally stupid as ours, nearly always a stupidity owed to ignorance and the success of keeping people in that ignorance, I am tempted to have the feeling that research funding should not be at the forefront of our concern. The cosmeticism of New Labour comes higher. So does not forgetting about the estate agents and the private schools along with the bankers. So does Noam Chomsky not having a Nobel Prize.” What about two of the most controversial solidarity strategies on campuses? “I have not myself joined the academic boycott of Israel, which so to speak has left me with a bad conscience as well as a good one. The main difficulty, as always, is a factual one. Same as with terrorism. Will a boycott serve the end of the Principle of Humanity and more particularly the cause of the Palestinians? There are arguments both ways, but maybe I am moving towards the boycott. As for the pro-Palestinian student occupations, I am absolutely for them. They don’t come to much, incidentally, against the neo-Zionist and semitic activities in the universities.”

“I suspect my view is easily the majority view in the world, however quiet people are about expressing it”

This year we mourned the death of Marek Edelman, the heroic resistance leader of the Warsaw Ghetto. The widespread respect for him surely shows that the notion of legitimate armed resistance is something people are, at least historically, happy to assent to. Why, then has Honderich’s position made him such a controversial figure? “I wonder if the explanation has partly to do with a perception of philosophy, not only a popular one. It is a perception, even in this degraded society, that carries with it respect, even in the midst of our monstrous plague of the celebrities. That a member of a respected profession and line of life, not gone over entirely to journalism, holds particular views, gets him or her attention. The explanation also has to do, of course, with the convention that we leave such judgements to governments, and in particular our hierarchic democracies. I suspect my view, on Zionism and neo-Zionism and Palestinian resistance to or self-defence against neo-Zionism, is in fact easily the majority view in the world, however quiet people are about it, however reluctant to express it.”

The Moral Sciences Club meets Tuesdays during term time in St. John’s College Cambridge.

Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War is published by Continuum. Ted Honderich’s personal website is here.

Something marvellous from Alain Badiou on the poverty of so much philosophy:

[Mao said] “Cast away illusions, prepare for struggle.” Hold to the truth, cast away illusions and fight rather than surrender, whatever the circumstances. The trouble is that, nowadays, the word ‘philosophy’ is used in an attempt to force upon us quite the opposite maxim, which might read: ‘Cling to your illusions, prepare to surrender.’

We have seen a ‘philosophy’ appearing in magazines that looks like a vegetable-based natural medicine, or euthanasia for enthusiasts. Philosophizing would appear to be a small part of a vast programme: keep fit and be efficient, but stay cool. We have seen ‘philosophers’ declaring that, as the Good is inaccessible, if not criminal, we should be content to fight against various forms of Evil, whose common name seems to be ‘communism’, when it is not ‘Arab’ or ‘Islam’.

And so we revive ‘values’ that philosophy has always  helped us to get rid of : obedience (to commercial contracts), modesty (in the face of the arrogance of the ham actor on TV), realism (we must have profits and inequalities), utter selfishness (now known as ‘modern individualism’) colonial superiority (the democratic goodies of the West versus the despotic baddies of the South), hostility to living thought (all opinions have to be taken into account), the cult of numbers (the majority are always right, obtuse millenarianism (the planet is getting hotter under my very feet), empty religion (there must be Something), and I could go on.

So many ‘philosophers’ and ‘philosophies’ do nothing to stop this, and instead wear themselves out trying to infect us with little articles, debates, blazing headlines (‘The Ethics of Stock Options: Philosophers Speak out at Last’) and boisterous roundtable discussions (‘Philosophers: The G-String or the Veil?’). This permanent prostitution of the words ‘philosopher’ and ‘philosophies’ will get you down in the long run. At the rate things are going, it is not just cafes that will be described as philosophical. We will end up going to the philosophical outhouse. (Pocket Pantheon, Verso 2009)

 I find it hard to read that without thinking of this pathetic excuse for an intellectual: