Duncan Brown
Shotguns: More effective than 999?
Nigel Warburton wrote in the February issue of Prospect that taking the law into your own hands, by beating up people who were attacking your family, for example, was not compatible with living in civil society. But people continue to do so, like the Sussex pub landlord who appeared in today’s papers saying he regretted not executing two burglars he held at gunpoint.
According to reports, as soon as he heard noises, Simon Thomas got his shotgun out, loaded it, and pointed it at the villains from a first-floor window. Once they were “begging for their lives,” he considered the situation sufficiently under control to call the police. They took 50 minutes to arrive, by which point the intruders were long gone. When the police are so useless, is it acceptable to do what he did?
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Nigel Warburton
What’s wrong with an independent scientific adviser telling the truth about the comparative dangerousness of drugs? Thanks to David Nutt, this question has been everywhere in the media. Truth can be inconvenient. But no scientist with integrity ever knowingly distorts it. At the point where scientific advisers match evidence-based views to political agendas, they cease to be scientists.
Philosophy can be a demanding discipline too. Kant, for example, took a hard line on truth-telling. If a crazed axeman comes to the door asking where your best friend is, Kant argued that you should tell him. For Kant, your duty to tell the truth in all circumstances is a “categorical imperative”: it is absolute and non-negotiable. Even when your partner twists round while looking in the mirror to ask you that famously difficult question, there are no white lies.
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Leo Hornak
Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower in West London
Prince Charles’ planned contribution to a debate at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has a caused a predictable stir this week. A number of the institute’s prominent members are planning to boycott the event in protest at the Prince’s ‘undemocratic’ meddling in the progress of British architecture.
The battlelines are well established in this dispute: on one side the vast majority of architects , schooled to varying degrees in the aesthetics of modernism, post-modernism or post-post-modernism, and on the other the heir to the throne pleading the case for ‘elegance’ and a vague, hazily imagined sense of tradition.
As our resident philosopher and podcaster Nigel Warburton points out on his blog, the same debate blighted the career of Erno Goldfinger (creator of the majestic Trellick Tower, above) in the 1950s. Ian Fleming hated Goldfinger’s work so much he immortalised him as James Bond’s arch villain.
According to Warburton, the ‘Prince Charles fallacy’ is ‘the misguided notion that the only buildings that should be allowed to be built are those that look more less like the buildings that are already in the area’ - that buildings should be designed not according to their use, but according to the appearance of nearby buildings.
Is the heir to the throne right to still be campaigning against ‘modern’ architecture? Or are architects themselves on weak ground when they appeal against ‘intervening in the democratic process of planning applications’? Shouldn’t this debate have moved a little further on in the last 25 years?
Let us know your views in the comments below- and take a listen to Nigel’s latest podcast on the virtue of thrift in politics (also downloadable on itunes and at the right of this screen).
James Crabtree
not quite so simple
One of the world’s most famous philosophy conundrums goes something like this:
You’re standing by a railway line when you see a train hurtling towards you, out of control: the breaks have clearly failed. Fortunately, the runaway train is approaching a junction with a side spur. If you flip a switch you can turn the train off the main route and onto this spur, saving five lives. That’s the good news. The not-quite-so-good news is that on this side-track another person is tied down. Still, the decision is easy, right? By altering the train’s direction only one life need be lost rather than five.
The problem continues:
This time you’re on a footbridge overlooking the railway track. You see the train hurtling towards you and, ahead, five people tied to the rails. Can these five be saved? Again, the moral philosopher has neatly arranged it so that they can. There’s a very fat man leaning over the footbridge. If you were to push him over the footbridge he would tumble over and squelch on to the track. He’s so obese that his bulk would bring the train – Trolley B – to a juddering halt. Sadly, the process would kill the fat man. But it would save the other five.
What should you do? Philosopher Nigel Warburton and journalist David Edmonds this month write an essay investigating such choices—not so much for their capacity for to puzzle, but for what you can learn about the hidden and hard wiring of the human mind by asking them. The fat man on the bridge problem lights up a different part of the brain to that thin man on the tracks. In the essay, the authors lift the lid on the new experimental philosophy, or “x-phi”, movement, which seeks to bring together arm chair theory, neuroscientists with MRIs and psychologists with clip boards and Jungian theory—all in the aid of trying to unpick the basic of human rationality. Not to put it too confusingly, it appears we don’t actually think the way we seem to think we think, one of the reasons why x-phi itself is so controversial among philosophers themselves.
In other news, as you’ll see to the right of this post, Prospect this month is launching its first podcast: you can find it on this very blog, just to the right in the middle of our menus. Nigel, who has become our Resident Philosopher, will every month examine a problem in the news. Its a small experiment, so do tell us if you like it.
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