Table Of ContentCONTENTS
Introduction
Happiness and the Good
Morality and Empathy
Friendship
The Moral and the Ethical
The Entitlement to Moralise
Ethics and Darwin
Human Rights and Politics
Poverty
Is Beauty Subjective?
Proving a Negative
Body and Soul
Knowledge of Harm
Justice as Inspiration
Apology and History
Social Evils
Fear of Illness and Death
Celebrity
Health and Appearance
Abstinence and Fasting
Adornment
Drugs and Laws
Laughter
Praise
God
Mortification
Remorse
Ethics in Business
Profit
Science and Religion
Democracy
History
Love
Stendhal on Love
Science and Rationality
Education and the Internet
Knowing That and Knowing How
Robots
Gender and Sex
Gender and Research
Scientific Literacy
Personal Identity
Brain and Mind
Climate Change
Ape and Man
Synecology
Longevity
Water
Stem Cells
Cities
Unconscious Knowledge
Political Rhetoric
Hope
Renaissance Portraits
Shock Art
The Byzantine Idea
Free Speech and Political Correctness
Altruism
Plastic Surgery
Appearance
Education
Intelligence Pills
Genius
Symbols
Employment
Confucius
The Moral Worth of Truth
Relativism
Doing Ill to the Bad
Smoking
Hypocrisy
Parental Rights
Money
Shakespeare the Thinker
Shakespeare’s Humanism
Haste and Speed
Protest
Philosophy in Education
Goodness
Human Beings
Travelling
Civil Liberties
A Good World
A New Ten Commandments
Taking Action
Waste
Change
Happiness
Sport
Philosophy
Enlightenment
Evil
Prudery
Inarticulacy
The Case of Ashley X
Contrarianism
Authority
Eccentricity
Religion
Existence
Self-Deception
The Meaning of Life
A Note on the Author
Dimissis nunc praeceptoribus nostris incipimus
per nos moveri et a confessis transimus ad dubia.
– Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones II.21
For Madeleine and all questioners
Introduction
W
e bark our shins against the stones of life with sufficient frequency, whoever
we are and wherever we live – even in peaceful and prosperous parts of the
world – to find ourselves obliged to seek answers to the philosophical questions
that such bruising prompts. We might not call them philosophical questions, or
think of ourselves as engaged in anything so profound (to some, so pretentious)
as philosophical reflection; but the truth is, that is exactly what such questions as
these are: ‘What matters? What is the right way to live? What do I owe to
myself, to others and to society? What kinds of lives are good and meaningful?’
Moreover, these are only the most obvious and frequently asked among
philosophical questions, for reflective people are also likely to wonder about
such further matters as the nature of the universe, whether mind is separate from
body, the nature and extent of human rights, the best political organisation for
society, and much more.
The pages that follow address some of these questions, not to answer them so
much as to provide material – suggestions, considerations, arguments – that
might be useful in seeking answers. There are indeed books that offer definitive
answers to questions like these; dogmatic books, books of persuasion or
exhortation selling one or another party line on the great questions. This book is
not one such. Its premise is different: it starts from the fact that philosophy is,
among other things, the enterprise par excellence of thinking things through, and
engaging in the conversation of mankind about these great questions – and about
the myriad lesser questions that are part of the fabric of life too. Ultimately
philosophy is about thinking for oneself, and making choices, and seeking to live
according to them, with the aim of achieving something good. It is opposed to
one-size-fits-all nostrums, to authorities ancient or modern who claim to have all
the answers and who instruct everyone else not to think, but just to believe and
obey.
It is also, indeed, about the realisation that not all questions have definitive
answers; some have no answers, and others have a variety of answers dependent
on other things.
But it is also about the realisation that sometimes, when there are no answers,
exploring the questions can by itself bring a great gain in understanding and
insight.
In some of these discussions I state my own view, sometimes emphatically.
That invites response, comment, agreement or disagreement; the important thing
is that it is an invitation to a conversation, not the dogmatic termination of one.
Some of the questions will not look at all philosophical, but instead practical,
historical, literary or something else; but there was a reason why they were asked
of someone who is expected to reflect on the philosophical dimensions of
possible answers, and they show that everything has such dimensions, however
unobvious that might seem at first.
Almost everything that follows in these pages has its ancestor in essays I wrote
in response to questions. In two cases this was explicitly so: in a column in
Prospect magazine called ‘Grayling’s Question’ (a title chosen by the magazine’s
editor) I responded to philosophical conundrums sent in by readers, and in a
column in The Times I commented on questions prevalent in the atmosphere of
public concern each week. In other places, such as the New Scientist, the
Dubliner magazine, the Guardian comment section, and elsewhere, the questions
to which I responded were implicit: but there too the task was to think of what
might contribute to answering them, or at least to understanding better what was
being asked.
Hence my title, Thinking of Answers. The questions and the answers have a
range and diversity that are reflective of the multiple and miscellaneous
character of the interests, problems, dilemmas and concerns that arise when
people think and talk; it has been an education in itself to be invited to respond
to them in this way. I am grateful to the editors of the various journals and
newspapers where the ancestors of these essays first appeared, for the
opportunities from which this volume arises.
As the word ‘ancestors’ in that last sentence suggests, I have revised and
extended almost all of the essays, but I have also kept most of them fairly short
because the purpose in hand – offering suggestions and ideas about answers, not
dictating what the answers should be – invites brevity. Given that these essays
are intended as a stimulus for thought, and not as the final word on what to think,
it is worth repeating this point for emphasis: offering stimuli for thinking is the
opposite of offering extensive treatises in search of definitiveness. This is a
starting point; the rest of the endeavour is for the reader.
Happiness and the Good
Does being happy make us good?
And does being good make us happy?
B
ertrand Russell was emphatically of the opinion that being happy makes us
good, and equally emphatic that certain ideas about what is good make people
unhappy. It is tempting to agree with both points, even if they need qualification;
for assuredly, being happy is far more likely to make us good than if we are
unhappy, and puritanism of all forms has certainly made plenty of people
unhappy.
But there are, of course, no guarantees in either direction. The feckless ruffian
might be happy but not good, the rigidly orthodox practitioner of a narrow and
self-denying morality might suffer in order to obey its strictures, yet take
pleasure in thus suffering; human nature is various and not infrequently weird.
On the face of it the questions here might seem to be empirical rather than
philosophical. One can imagine a votary of the new school of ‘experimental
philosophy’ – consisting of philosophers who hand out questionnaires to find out
what people think about morality, knowledge, the self, truth, rationality, free will
and other great staples of philosophical enquiry – seeing this as an opportunity to
exercise ingenuity. Critics of this approach point out that work of this kind is
better done by empirical social science, and anyway only results in descriptions
of what people think – not always a secure guide to what people should think.
But in fact there is a deep philosophical point behind the idea of a relationship
between goodness and happiness. More carefully phrased, the two questions
concern the quality of lives perceived by those living them as being flourishing
and satisfying, with valuable relationships at their core, and directed at the
attainment of aims worth pursuing. Suppose one had a conception of such a life,
and could make a sound case for its value: it would be hard to disentangle the
fact of its being a well-doing and positive life (in which, therefore, the person
living it is a ‘good’ person) from that person’s sense of ‘eudaimonia’ –
Aristotle’s idea of flourishing and satisfaction, now usually and rather feebly
translated as ‘happiness’. On this view of the matter, happiness and goodness
turn out to be the reverse and obverse of the same coin, making their relationship
a peculiarly intimate and mutually reinforcing one.
But given the thoughts mentioned above – that there might be some happy but
bad folk and some good (by some lights) but unhappy folk – the connection
cannot be a necessary one. They only become reciprocal in the optimal way
suggested when the notions of goodness and happiness at stake are appropriately
defined. And that is an obvious enough point: Cyril Joad would have produced
his standard Brains Trust remark – ‘It depends what you mean by . . .’ – on being
asked either question, for one can only get so far with generalisations. In this
case that means one cannot give a fully satisfactory answer until a clear and
detailed account has been given of what each of the vague feel-good words
‘good’ and ‘happy’ means: which is a large part of the task of ethics as a whole.
The following discussions between them seek to contribute towards a
clarification of both, sometimes by direct and sometimes by indirect means.
With such large, amorphous and important concepts, the task of exploring them
has to involve a variety of approaches, one of which – to quote Wittgenstein – is
to ‘assemble reminders’ of things we otherwise know.
Description:In his acclaimed columns in the London Times and Prospect, A. C. Grayling often responds to provocative questions posed by editors and readers. These questions serve as the basis for the essays in Thinking of Answers, among them searching examinations of the following: · Are human beings especially
