Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 117 No. 1 £1.50 January 2012

LUCRETIUS’S – ON THE NATURE OF THINGS Whilst human kind Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed Before all eyes beneath Religion – who Would show her head along the region skies, Glowering on mortals with her hideous face – A Greek* it was who first opposing dared Raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand, Whom not the fame of Gods nor lightning’s stroke Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky Abashed; but rather chafed to angry zest His dauntless heart to be the first to rend The crossbars at the gates of Nature old. from Book I, translated by William Ellery Leonard

* A reference to the Greek materialist and atomist philosopher, Epicurus, on whom Lucretius modelled his own philosophy. This was expounded in his famous book De Rerum Natura, written in 50 B.C.E. See article on page 3.

‘THE POET OF NATURE’: GEORGE SANTAYANA ON LUCRETIUS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL POET Timothy J. Madigan 3

LET’S TAKE FREE SPEECH SERIOUSLY Alan Haworth 11

VIEWPOINT Tom Rubens 17 ESSAY: EXPERIENCING ANOTHER’S MIND? THE CASE OF THE HOGAN TWINS Graham Bell 18 BOOK REVIEW - FAR FROM THE FASHIONABLE CROWD The People’s Concert Society and Music in London’s Suburbs David Morris 21 ETHICAL DOUBTS ABOUT A MARKET IN LIVE DONOR ORGANS Simon Rippon 22 A CRITICAL LOOK AT THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT Fred Whitehead 26

ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 28 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Main phone for all options: 020 7405 1818 Fax (lettings): 020 7061 6746 www.ethicalsoc.org.uk Chairman: Chris Purnell Vice-chairman: Jim Herrick Treasurer: Chris Bratcher Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] Staff Chief Executive Officer: Jim Walsh Tel: 020 7061 6745 [email protected] Administrator: Martha Lee Tel: 020 7061 6741 [email protected] Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7061 6740 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7061 6747 [email protected] Archivist Carl Harrison Programme Co-ordinator: Ben Partridge Tel: 020 7061 6744 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7061 6750 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7061 6743 [email protected] together with: Angelo Edrozo, Alfredo Olivo, Rogerio Retuerna, Cagatay Ulker Maintenance: Zia Hameed Tel: 020 7061 6742 [email protected]

CONWAY HALL EVENING CLASSES, JANUARY 2012 From January 2012, historic Holborn venue Conway Hall is running the following evening classes which have been specially developed for a general audience by members of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group: Brendan Larvor, Peter Cave and Prof. Richard Norman: Exploring Humanism: a 6 week basic introduction to what Humanism is and what Humanists believe and do. Aspects of Humanism: an 8 session, 16 hour in-depth course on the history and philosophy behind Humanist beliefs. Applied Ethics: a 5 part look at differing approaches to moral thinking and action throughout history. Death and Dying: 4 sessions exploring the significance of death, from murder and suicide to terminal illness; the meaning of life and immortality. Each course will be running twice and will be tutored by members of the London School of Philosophy. The first sessions will take place from 24 January to 22 March, with the second round running from 1 May until 19 June 2012. Each session will be priced at £10, but there is a discounted rate of £7 per session if two whole courses are booked. To make a booking or for more information about dates, tutors and further details on course content, please email [email protected] or call 020 7061 6744 or look up www.conwayhall.org.uk/courses

SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethought the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields. We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record, is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is now £35 (£25 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65)

2 Ethical Record, January 2012 ‘THE POET OF NATURE’: GEORGE SANTAYANA ON LUCRETIUS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL POET Timothy J. Madigan Philosophy, St.John Fisher College, Rochester, New York

This lecture to the London Ethical Society was given on 18 December 2011 as part of the festival marking the 20th Anniversary of Philosophy Now magazine, of which Timothy Madigan is a US Editor

“A naturalistic conception of things is a great work of imagination – greater, I think, than any dramatic or moral mythology: it is a conception fit to inspire great poetry, and in the end, perhaps, it will prove the only conception able to inspire it.” George Santayana (1863–1952), “Lucretius”, in Three Philosophical Poets (TPP:27 1) Quotations are from the 1954 Doubleday edition of Three Philosophical Poets; bibliographic information for all references can be found in the Select Bibliography at the end of this article.

Defining Humanism In 1951, Warren Allen Smith, then a graduate student in English at Columbia University, working under the auspices of his professor, the noted scholar Lionel Trilling, attempted to come up with a definition of the meaning of the term ‘Humanism’ by writing to several prominent individuals — including Thomas Mann, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Henry Hazlitt and Lewis Mumford — who had been identified in one way or another as ‘humanists’. One of the personages he contacted was the philosopher, poet and novelist George Santayana, who was living in retirement in Rome. Santayana, then nearing the end of his long life, responded in length to Smith’s letter, penning his reply on 9 February 1951. “Dear Mr. Smith,” he wrote: In my old-fashioned terminology, a Humanist means a person saturated by the humanities: Humanism is something cultural: an accomplishment, not a doctrine. This might be something like what you call ‘classical humanism.’ But unfortunately there is also a metaphysical or cosmological humanism or moralism which maintains that the world is governed by human interests and an alleged universal moral sense. This cosmic humanism for realists, who believe that knowledge has a prior and independent object which sense or thought signify, might be some religious orthodoxy, for idealists and phenomenalists an oracular destiny or dialectical evolution dominating the dream of life. This ‘humanism’ is what I call egotism or moralism, and reject altogether. Naturalism, on the contrary, is something to which I am so thoroughly wedded that I like to call it materialism, so as to prevent all confusion with romantic naturalism like Goethe’s, for instance, or that of Bergson. Mine is the hard, non-humanistic naturalism of the Ionian philosophers, of Democritus, Lucretius, and Spinoza. [The Letters of George Santayana, 8:328] Thus, in a letter written shortly before his own demise, Santayana

Ethical Record, January 2012 3 expresses his continued interest in, and commitment to, the ‘hard naturalism’ or materialism of Lucretius. Indeed, throughout the many volumes of Santayana’s collected letters one can read of his appreciation for Lucretius’s great work, De Rerum Natura. In a letter to a friend dated 16 January 1887, for instance, Santayana writes: “By the way, do you ever read Lucretius? If you don’t, I should advise you to try him. He fills me with the greatest enthusiasm and delight. The arguments are often childish, but the energy, the flow, the magnificence and solidity are above everything.” (1:46) Santayana Excited by Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura What so excited Santayana about this work? First of all, he himself was often torn between devoting himself to philosophical analysis and writing creative poetry. While a prolific author of works in professional philosophy, his first published book was entitled Sonnets and Other Verses (1894). In many ways, he exemplified the modern dichotomy between science and the humanities. A gifted versifier, he was also trained as a student at Harvard in strict logical argumentation. For much of his long life, Santayana struggled between the desire to follow his creative flights of fancy and the duties of adhering to factual matters in explication. In Lucretius he found a soul mate who seemed to have somehow been able to combine both. In addition, Santayana greatly admired Lucretius’s ability to not only bring poetry and scientific understanding together, but to do so in an extended work, rather than in the short verses and sonnets which he himself was able to produce. Santayana was to write a three volume autobiography, which described in detail what he considered to be the three phases of his life. Volume One dealt with his birth in Madrid, Spain, his coming to America with his mother when he was eight, and his time growing up in Boston and attending Harvard University as a student, where he came to feel himself to be a pilgrim in a land of Puritans (his one and only novel is significantly entitled The Last Puritan). Volume Two describes his time as an instructor of philosophy at Harvard, where he both completed his Ph.D. under William James, and then joined his teacher as a colleague and fellow professor, from 1886–1912. He himself had many subsequently famous students while teaching at Harvard, including several who themselves became well-known poets: among them, Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. However, Santayana never truly felt at home in Boston, or in America itself, which he came to feel was an unhealthy combination of rapacious commercialism, know-nothing religiosity, and unthinking progressivism. Very early in his professorship he began to express a desire to leave the academic world. But, like many others in such a situation, he felt trapped by economic necessity to remain. Finally, as detailed in the third volume (entitled My Host the World), thanks in no small part to the royalties he had finally begun to receive from his published writings and a subsequent legacy he inherited from his mother after her death in 1912, he resigned from Harvard and left America, never to return. He spent the remainder of his life in Europe, primarily in Italy, where Smith’s letter was to reach him 40 years hence. Lucretius, Dante and Goethe Shortly before his time as a Harvard professor came to end, however, Santayana offered a course which allowed him to combine his interest in academic 4 Ethical Record, January 2012 philosophy and creative poetry, entitled ‘Three Philosophical Poets — Lucretius, Dante and Goethe’. While preparing the lectures gave him great pleasure, the fact that the course caused dissention in his own department exacerbated his growing disenchantment with Harvard politics, and hastened his ultimate decision to leave academia. In a letter to Harvard President Charles Eliot, dated 16 February 1907, he writes: Now the Philosophical Department seems to be of the opinion that this half-course should be given under their auspices, and not in the department of comparative literature. They add that if a part of my work is to lie in another department, a part of my salary too should be regarded as coming from that quarter, and a corresponding sum should be set free for the uses of the philosophical division. To me it is a matter of indifference in which part of the pamphlet my proposed course figures, except that it is meant for the students of literature rather than for the technical philosopher, and that the requirement of a previous course in philosophy (usually made in offering our philosophical courses) would be out of place in this instance. [1:360–361] One suspects that this sort of academic in-fighting was in fact not a matter of indifference to him at all. Ironically enough, the published version of his lectures, which came out in 1910 under the title Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe, proved to be not only one of his best known works but also one of his most lucrative. In many letters penned later in his life he commented upon how nice it was to get royalty checks for a book he had written so long before. In a letter written in 1946, for instance, he states: “The source of this cheque — to return to that — is the royalties due me by Harvard for an old book, ‘Three Philosophical Poets’ which they published forty years ago. These are the royalties for three years, 1943–5, minus 30 percent deducted for income tax. Not bad that after 40 years a book should still sell yearly, on the average, 227 copies. I daresay it is used in some classes in some girls’ College — bless their innocent hearts!” (7:269) Poet or Philosopher? Putting together this particular work was of therapeutic as well as economic benefit to Santayana. It helped him to partly resolve his own dilemma — to be a poet or philosopher. While still dabbling in the poetic arts, he had come to the conclusion that his primary work was to be a critic rather than a creative artist. Though souring on academic work, he realized that his life centered primarily on philosophy. He continued to write poems but no longer felt this to be his vocation. Rather, he now saw himself as a genuine seeker of wisdom, like the pre-Socratics of Ancient Greece, instead of as a captive of the Ivory Tower. While he would shortly retire, at the age of 48 and devote the rest of his life to writing, it would be wrong to see Santayana as an aesthete, withdrawn from the world in sullen retreat. He was fascinated by the world, and by the many ways human beings interact with each other within it. This is witnessed by his life-long defence of materialism. It is important to note that he himself was Ethical Record, January 2012 5 never puritanical when it came to discussing sexual or — as he put it — ‘frank’ love. In this, he looked to Lucretius as a role model — someone who never shied away from any aspect of reality, as well as someone who placed humanity firmly within a naturalistic framework. In many of his published books as well as in his letters, Santayana argued that religion and poetry have much in common. Both celebrate life, but neither is a science. Yet, while both religion and poetry might mythologize and deceive, they also give a zest to living which science usually lacks. Can science inspire? Can analysis lead to transcendence? Only when it comes into harmony with poetic inspiration, a task all too rarely performed. While difficult, it is not, he felt, impossible, as demonstrated by the key works of the so-called three philosophical poets, Lucretius, Dante and Goethe: De Rerum Natura, The Divine Comedy, and Faust, Parts One and Two. He begins his book on them by pointing out that a concern for the nature of truth is not ordinarily an exhilarating experience to read. Philosophical investigation is usually rather pedantic. Epicurus, Aquinas and Kant, for instance, for all their differences, share one common trait: they are not poetic. “The reasonings and investigations of philosophy are arduous”, he writes, “and if poetry is to be linked with them, it can be artificially only, and with a bad grace. But the vision of philosophy is sublime. The order it reveals in the world is something beautiful, tragic, sympathetic to the mind, and just what every poet, on a small or large scale, is always trying to catch.” (TPP:17) The Three Poets’ World Views And yet, much the same worldviews expressed by Epicurus, Aquinas and Kant were poetically described in the works of, respectively, Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. What makes the three poets so remarkable is the way in which their visions — their insights into how things are, the very nature of things — are connected to cosmological systems ‘borrowed’ from the works of scientists and philosophers. These poets, with their steady contemplation of things in their order and worth, are both imaginative (visionary) and yet grounded in the scientific understanding of their times. They do not create their worldviews, but instead make these into exciting and morally stimulating adventures for the reader. They manage to fuse the careful analysis of the lover of wisdom and the creative spark of the versifier, a very rare accomplishment: “A philosopher who attains it is, for the moment, a poet, and a poet who turns his practiced and passionate imagination on the order of all things, or on anything in the light of the whole, is for the moment a philosopher.” (TPP:18) Using the three individuals as symbols for differing worldviews, Santayana goes on to argue that Goethe is the poet of life, of Egoism, of ‘The Drive for More’, and of the Self. Lucretius is the poet of nature, of the Impersonal, the Orderly, and of this world; and Dante is the poet of good and evil, of salvation, the eternal, and of the Other world. “Each is the best in his way, and none is the best in every way. To express a preference is not so much a criticism as a personal confession.” (TPP:181) Nonetheless, based on the criteria of who best brings together imagination and form, he goes on to say that Dante is on a higher plane than 6 Ethical Record, January 2012 Lucretius and Lucretius is on a higher plane than Goethe. Why? Because for all his powers of imagination, Goethe cannot escape the human view. He is the great Romantic, pursuing the human comedy in all its forms. Lucretius, on the other hand, exemplifies a higher understanding, that of Classicism. Unlike Goethe, he expresses a view of the world without constant reference to human beings. But Dante brings structure and passion together in the highest way. He carries us further than the other two poets. Goethe gives us flux and the desire to live; Lucretius gives us an understanding of things as they are, and an acceptance of death. Dante gives us a glimpse of the ultimate: of what is possible and impossible. The Divine Comedy is a compilation of all the various senses of what an afterlife might be like, and how it would accord with a just ethical system. Santayana would later state that he had not been fair to Goethe, using him too much as a placeholder for an extreme sort of Egoism which he felt had come to dominate philosophy in the modern world, especially among German thinkers. He would sometimes speculate in his letters that it might have been better to have used Shakespeare as the poet of humanity in all its forms, but that he could not really ascertain a philosophical point of view in Shakespeare as he could with Goethe’s embrace of Romanticism. Lucretius’s Inadequacies While we know from his letters the high regard he held for Lucretius, in Three Philosophical Poets Santayana frequently points out what he considers to be inadequacies in De Rerum Natura. One of the strongest criticisms he makes of Lucretius is, interesting enough, connected to his concept of materialism. Santayana finds it to be uninspiring. Lucretius’s notion of what is attainable for human beings within nature is, he holds, “meagre”, an ultimately shallow set of hopes, such as freedom from superstition; use of science to improve life; an allowance of healthy animal pleasures; and an advocacy of friendship as the cornerstone of a successful life. All well and good, but — as Peggy Lee would so famously phrase it in song — “Is that all there is?” Where is the Sturm und Drang of Goethe’s Faust in his endless striving for a perfect moment; where is the passion of the doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, in Dante’s Inferno, or the rapturous sense of salvation found by Beatrice in the Paradiso? In De Rerum Natura, Santayana notes, one finds “No love, no patriotism, no enterprise, no religion. So, too, in what is forbidden us, Lucretius, sees only generalities – the folly of passion, the blight of superstition”. (TPP:183) As a guide to a vigorous life, Lucretius’s work is thin gruel compared to The Divine Comedy or Faust. Dante in particular moves us with his stories of those doomed to hell; those struggling through the travails of purgatory; and those who achieve eternal life in paradise. These characters — many of whom were actual people Dante either knew or knew of, as well as mythological and Biblical personalities — come to life through his poetic art. “Dante is the master of those who know by experience what is worth knowing by experience; he is the master of distinction.” (TPP:185) All the types of love and hate are categorized but also exemplified. Dante fills in the details in ways superior to both Lucretius and Goethe. Through reading The Divine Comedy, one arrives at a richer appreciation of what life has in store for us all. “Here, then, are our three poets and their messages: Goethe, Ethical Record, January 2012 7 with human life in its immediacy, treated romantically; Lucretius, with a vision of nature and of the limits of human life; Dante, with spiritual mastery of this life, and a perfect knowledge of good and evil.” (TPP:183). Dante seems triumphant. Santayana Not A ‘Catholic Atheist’ After All But Santayana too was a master of paradox. It is not for nothing that he is often referred to as a ‘Catholic atheist’. While loving the pageantry and tradition of the Church, he cannot literally accept its teachings as factual. At the end of Three Philosophical Poets he takes back what he seems to be granting. Dante’s idea of nature, Santayana notes, is not genuine. Nature for Dante is an inverted image of the moral world — a mirage. Much like Goethe’s Faust, humans are at centre stage throughout The Divine Comedy. The actual world, the material reality in which humans come into and pass out of existence, is but a shadow. “The voice that sings it is a thin boy-treble, all wonder and naiveté. The art does not smack of life, but of somnambulism.” (TPP:185) While inspiring, Dante’s worldview is ultimately, in all meanings of the term, unrealistic. His visions of the afterlife give short shrift to flesh-and-blood experiences. His intellect is hypnotized by wishful-thinking. Much like Goethe’s Faust, Dante is obsessed by a world that never was and never will be, rather than accepting of the material realm around him in all its brute facticity. At heart, then, both Dante and Goethe are anthropocentric. They cannot imagine a world without humans; nature is something to be used, not appreciated on its own. “We may envy Dante his ignorance of nature”, Santayana writes, “which enabled him to suppose that he dominated it, as an infinite and exuberant nature cannot be dominated by any of its parts. In the end, however, knowledge is good for the imagination.” (TPP:186) We need to put our feet back on solid ground — the ground exemplified by Lucretius’s atomic materialism. Thus, in a stroke of poetic justice, Santayana brings us back to the middle way — Lucretius. It is Lucretius who grounds us in impersonal nature. Humans are not the end-all and be-all of existence, but just a part of it (and perhaps an ultimately rather minor part, at that). “For this reason, Lucretius”, he writes, “who sees human life and human idealism in their natural setting, has a saner and maturer view of both than has Wordsworth, for all his greater refinement. Nature, for the Latin poet, is really nature. He loves and fears her, as she deserves to be loved and feared by her creatures.” (TPP:60) Lucretius, more than either Dante or Goethe, is the true precursor to the Darwinian worldview just now emerging. The most ancient of the three poets is, in many ways, also the most modern. In summation then, for Santayana, Goethe is the poet of Egoistic humanism, Dante the poet of Transcendental humanism, and Lucretius, the poet of Nature, or as Santayana expressed it in his letter to Warren Allen Smith, of hard, non-humanistic naturalism. He alone praised Nature itself, not Nature as the repository of humanity. While Lucretius’s great poem may lack the dramatic narrative power of The Divine Comedy or Faust, it more than compensates for this by giving us the greatest glorification ever of the material world itself. The challenge, then, for modern-day philosophers and poets, is to figure out how best to understand reality in the here-and-now. He closes his book with a call to arms: 8 Ethical Record, January 2012 It is time some genius should appear to reconstitute the shattered picture of the world. He should live in the continual presence of all experience, and respect it; he should at the same time understand nature, the ground of that experience and he should also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own passions, and for all the colours of his possible happiness. All that can inspire a poet is contained in this task, and nothing less than this task would exhaust a poet’s inspiration. We may hail this needed genius from afar. Like the poets in Dante’s limbo, when Virgil returns among them, we may salute him, saying: Onorate l’altissimo poeta. Honour the most high poet, honour the highest possible poet. But this supreme poet is in limbo still. [TPP:190–191] My Host The World There is a sense of wistfulness in this closing, a longing for an ideal which Santayana – that philosopher/poet – longs for but has accepted will never come to be. It is perhaps fitting that the title of the third volume of his posthumously published autobiography was entitled My Host the World. Like Lucretius, Santayana was reconciled to returning at last to the only home humans can actually have, the earth itself. At his funeral, his friend Daniel Cory read at his graveside excerpts from his Poet’s Testament: I give back to the earth what the earth gave, All to the furrow, nothing to the grave. The candle’s out, the spirit’s vigil spent; Sight may not follow where the vision went. What is this but a poetic recapitulation of Lucretius’s atomism? Warren Allen Smith, Santayana’s pen pal near the end of his life, has continued his own explorations of the meaning of ‘humanism’, and is penning his own three volume autobiography in his ninetieth year. In one of his other books, Smith gives us a charming anecdote about confronting yet another noted individual, the novelist Gore Vidal, in his on-going quest to find out the meaning of ‘humanism’. Attending one of Vidal’s book signings, Smith recounts that:

In 1995, after leaving unanswered many offers to become listed as Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism, he was approached by the present author, whom he had never before seen. ‘Mr. Vidal,’ he was told in a dour voice, and brusquely, ‘you and I are in love with the same man!’ Conversation in the vicinity hushed. A publisher’s representative approached. The novelist was taken aback, looking quizzically ahead and wondering what was about to transpire. After a studied pause, during which I looked somewhat stonily into his eyes, I relaxed. ‘The man? . . . Lucretius.’ ‘Oh,’ he laughed uproariously, ‘and Tiberius and Apuleius, too?’ [Smith: 265]

Ethical Record, January 2012 9 Perhaps Smith’s own love for Lucretius was inspired by the letter he had long before received from Santayana. After reading Three Philosophical Poets, one could say that while he admired Goethe and Dante, Santayana’s heart belonged to the author of De Rerum Natura. If Virgil was Dante’s guide and master, Lucretius served the same function for George Santayana. He remained a follower — and a friend — of Lucretius to the very end. Select Bibliography Lachs, John. George Santayana. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. McCormick, John. George Santayana: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Saatkamp, Herman J. (general editor) and William G. Holzberger (textual editor). The Works of George Santayana. Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press: Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, vol. 1 (1986); The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory, vol. 2 (1988); Interpretations Of Poetry and Religion, vol. 3 (1989); The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form Of a Novel, vol. 4 (1994); The Letters of George Santayana, vol. 5, Book One: [1868]–1909 (2001), Book Two: 1910–1920 (2002); Book Three: 1921–1927 (2003); Book Four: 1928–1932 (2003); Book Five: 1933–1936 (2003); Book Six: 1937–1940 (2004); Book Seven: 1941–1947 (2005); and Book Eight: 1948–1952 (2006). Santayana, George. Three Philosophical Poets. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954. Schilpp, Paul Arthur, editor. The Philosophy of George Santayana. Evanston and Chicago, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1940. Singer, Irving. George Santayana, Literary Philosopher. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2000. Smith, Warren Allen. Celebrities in Hell. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, Inc., 2002. Sprigge, Timothy. Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995.

THE HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY The Humanist Reference Library is open for members and researchers on Mondays to Fridays from 0930 - 1730. Please let the Librarian know of your intention to visit. The Library has an extensive collection of new and historic freethought material.

Members are now able to borrow books from the Library. Readers will be asked to complete a Reader Registration Form, and must provide photographic ID, proof of address and proof of membership. They will be issued with a Reader’s card, which will enable them to borrow three books at a time. The loan period is one month. Journals, archive material, artworks and other non-book material cannot be borrowed. Full details of the lending service are available from the Librarian. Cathy Broad, Librarian Tel: 020 7061 6747. Email: [email protected]

10 Ethical Record, January 2012 LET’S TAKE FREE SPEECH SERIOUSLY Alan Haworth Lecture to the Ethical Society, 30 October 2011 At present, the public debate over free speech is largely dominated by two opposing arguments. One states that although free speech is undoubtedly a good thing, there are limits which should be set to its exercise. In the argument’s more familiar versions, those limits are held to be determined by the sensitivities of the group, or groups, to whom certain forms of expression are (supposedly) offensive. (I take it that pretty well anyone reading this will be familiar with the argument in one version or another. Something like it underpinned recent attempts criminalise ‘incitement to religious hatred’ and to censor ‘homophobic abuse’. Versions of it have advocated banning the use of sexist and racist ‘hate speech’ in certain contexts, – on campus, for example.) Those who take this view tend to say, ‘It is necessary to strike a balance’. In direct opposition to this, proponents of the other argument dismiss all such talk of ‘offensiveness’ and ‘sensitivity’ as so much pussyfooting ‘political correctness’. They claim that free speech is of such importance that it must be defended at all costs; so much so that everyone must be permitted to say anything whatsoever in any context, however offensive to others the opinions expressed may be. Those who take this point of view tend to say, ‘There is no such thing as a right not to be offended’. The Softies and the Toughies Here, I shall refer to those who take the former view as ‘the softies’, and to those who take the latter as ‘the toughies’. The epithets are meant to characterise the attitudes supporters of these positions respectively strike. They do not refer to the quality of their arguments, for the arguments of those who support one position are just as feeble as the arguments of those who support the other. It is a situation which anyone who takes ideas seriously can only find profoundly depressing. In this lecture, then, I shall illustrate the point with reference to the following claims, each of which plays a prominent role in the current debate. 1. ‘There is no such thing as a right not to be offended’. 2. ‘You have to strike a balance’. 3. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’. 4. ‘Better out than in’ Let me take each in turn. 1. ‘There is no such thing as a right not to be offended.’ If anything is the toughie slogan, it is this. It has been reiterated so often, and by figures as eminent as Philip Pullman, John Cleese, Ronald Dworkin, Peter Tatchell, Ricky Gervais, and Christopher Hitchens. (It only took a five minute trip around Google to reveal that. There are, no doubt, many other names which could be added to the list.) The slogan is stirring. However, there is a problem with it, namely that it is patently false. To see why, you only have to consider how wrong it would

Ethical Record, January 2012 11 be to make a habit of gratuitously abusing randomly selected members of the public. For example, suppose someone were to approach a passer-by and address that person in the following terms: ‘Oy, fishface! You smell like a rat’s backside!’ Now ask; does this person have a right not to be addressed in such an offensive manner? In this case, I think you would be lacking moral sense if you were to answer the question in the negative. and that is sufficient to establish for sure that – contrary to the claim at issue – there is indeed a right not to be offended. Or, if you would like a more elaborate example, take the case of the offensive T-shirt. A number of outlets now specialise in the sale of such garments, as you will easily discover if you type the phrase ‘offensive T-shirt’ into your search engine. One such garment bears a large picture of a cock (as in ‘male domestic fowl’) and the slogan, ‘Are you staring at my cock?’The double- entendre is too obvious to require explanation, and I realise that the joke is tasteless and crass. Still, I think you will agree with me that it’s the sort of thing which can appeal to teenage boys in the first stages of adolescence. It is my personal view that such humour is harmless enough, and I must say that if I were to find my own thirteen year old wearing such a T-shirt I would do no more than smile indulgently. Even so, things would be different if he and I were about to embark upon a tea-time visit to my prim and somewhat churchy aunt, who would be extremely affronted by it. It would be wrong to upset such a nice old lady – clearly so – and I would insist that he changed his T-shirt. If you would do the same, it follows that, like me, you think my aunt has a right not to be offended; in which case you have to agree with me that the claim presently at issue is false. I’m sorry, but you do. I do realise that some readers may be feeling, at this point, that my use of these simple, rather jokey, examples is inappropriate, because we are – after all – concerned with a serious, even profound, philosophical and political question here. But those readers would be wrong. On the contrary, in philosophy, it is quite often useful to appeal to simple cases – cases which are uncluttered by emotional baggage of one sort or another – in order to highlight the true character of arguments which are usually deployed in more ‘serious’ contexts. Not that the softies have it all their own way here. I have said nothing from which it follows that there is a right not to be offended such that one must never express oneself in ways which are offensive to others. All I have established up to this point is that such a right exists in certain cases; cases such as that of my prim aunt. It is perfectly consistent with this that there should be other cases in which it would be perverse to insist upon respect for a ‘right not to be offended’. The real problem is to determine the dividing line between the former category and the latter – but, as so often, it is the real problem which gets ignored. It’s a point to which I shall return in my concluding section. (So, I wouldn’t want to claim that Pullman, Dworkin, and the others are wrong to be exercised about the issues which concern them. I am only pointing out that you can’t do justice to those issues simply by reiterating the claim that, ‘there is no such thing as a right not to be offended’, and without a clear view of the issue, we are in danger of going astray.) 12 Ethical Record, January 2012 2. ‘You have to strike a balance’ (between rights) If anything qualifies as the official softy mantra, it is this. As in the case of the previous claim, you only have to spend a minute or so on Google to appreciate how frequently it is reiterated; and there is – we should note – at least one point which counts in its favour, namely that, unlike the previous claim, it does take account of people’s sensitivities. (To take just one example, the website of the Australian Human Rights commission states that, ‘The law against racial hatred aims to strike a balance between the right to communicate freely [‘freedom of speech’] and the right to live free from racial vilification’ – and it is quite right that this law should, given that actual vilification is an issue here.) The difficulty here arises, not from the idea that a balance must be struck, but with the question of how the balance is to be struck between freedom of speech and expression on the one hand, and, on the other, freedom from offence, or, for that matter, other values such as personal privacy, public order and national security. Nor does it explain how much freedom of speech should be sacrificed for what quantity of these other liberties. After all, there is no literal balance here – no set of scales designed for the purpose, to be taken down from the cupboard and used. So, should we, perhaps, rely upon intuition? Surely not, for such an approach would be open to the objections to arguments from intuition which were raised by John Stuart Mill a century and a half ago, namely that ‘intuitions’ are really nothing more than the internalized and unsubstantiated prejudices of the person having the intuitions. Should we, then, pay more attention to the person or group who happens to be shouting the loudest at a particular moment, ‘striking the balance’ between freedom and censorship in its favour? That would be an equally unsatisfactory way of doing things, although there is a danger of its being what happens in practice. Here is David Blunkett discussing the proposal to make ‘incitement to religious hatred’ a criminal offence and, in this passage, the relationship between the proposed legislation and the limits set by the European Convention on Human Rights. (I am quoting from Hansard, 7 December 2004): With these offences the rights in play are going to be Article 9, the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and Article 10, the right to freedom of expression. In interpreting these offences the Court will have to consider both of these rights and, if necessary, balance one against the other. All this does is shift the burden of responsibility by placing it upon the shoulders of the legally trained. It does not explain why judges and QCs should be any better at striking the balance than would any other reasonably intelligent person. (As an alternative, why not ask philosophers to decide? They might do better.) This is just the sort of proposal which can lead to ad hoc legislation of a type which is more likely to erode our right to freedom of speech than it is to protect. The conclusion I draw here, then, is that this second claim suffers from the same deficiency as the first, namely that it fails to provide a viable criterion for distinguishing those acts of expression which genuinely exemplify the exercise of free speech, and which ought to be protected at all costs, from those which Ethical Record, January 2012 13 can be legitimately suppressed for the sake of other values. I shall offer a suggestion as to what such a criterion might be in my concluding section. Before that, let me deal with the third and fourth claims on my list. 3. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’ Or, to put it another way, there is a difference between speech and action such that, whereas the former is relatively harmless, at least in normal circumstances, one can do real damage with the latter. A similar point was made by John Stuart Mill when he wrote, in On Liberty, that, ‘No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions’ and – in a famous passage – that, ‘On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.’ But, if Mill’s point is that, in the normal case – for example when an idea is handed about ‘in the form of a placard’ – the expression of opinion is harmless in a way that action is not, then he is just wrong. On the contrary, any distinction between ‘opinion’ on the one hand and ‘action’ on the other is artificial to the extent that the expression of opinion is itself a form of action. When you express an opinion you do something and, more often than not, you do it in the hope of bringing about a change. You announce that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that Jeremy Clarkson ought to be locked up, with the intention of getting something done about corn dealers or Clarkson. I think the point is too obvious to labour, so let me now turn instead to the notion of offensiveness. Although it is a conception which has tended to figure prominently in contemporary discussions of free speech – with arguments over whether such-and-such speech acts are offensive to such-and-such groups, and so on – it is quite inadequate when it comes to the description of what really goes on. You will see what I mean if you open Hitler’s Mein Kampf at random. Your copy might fall open at the passage in which he writes that, ‘If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle in filth and offal’, that, ‘they would try to get ahead of one another in hate-filled struggle and exterminate one another’, that, ‘the Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism of the individual’, and so on. In fact, it wouldn’t make much difference where your book fell open, for the whole thing is one long antisemitic rant. Not only that, we can be confident that it is the written equivalent of the speeches with which, in the period immediately preceding its publication, Hitler had been haranguing enthusiastic crowds of drunken Brownshirts in the beer halls of Munich. Now ask, were Hitler’s speeches ‘offensive to Jews’? ‘Offensive’? It seems to me that the question itself is pretty offensive; that it’s almost obscene. I can well appreciate that, in the febrile political atmosphere of the 1920s, German Jews must have been terrified, intimidated, cowed, panic stricken, depressed, humiliated, angry – but ‘offended’? The word is hardly adequate to the situation. T-shirts can be offensive, so can jokes. But, as for the present case, 14 Ethical Record, January 2012 you might as well stab someone, twist the knife in the wound, and then ask, ‘Does that tickle?’ As for the specific question of cartoons, I would recommend the historian Claudia Koonz’s impressive study, The Nazi Conscience. Koonz demonstrates – and in detail – that Hitler’s programme of mass extermination was not something which suddenly appeared on the scene, without warning, as it were. It needed the compliance of the German people, and this could only be achieved through a long process of ideological ‘softening up’. ‘Germans’ readiness to expel Jews from their universe of moral obligation evolved as a consequence of their acceptance of knowledge disseminated by institutions they respected’ she writes, and, ‘Like citizens in other modern societies, residents of the Reich believed the facts conveyed by experts, documentary films, popular science, educational materials and exhibitions’. There are, no doubt, lessons to be drawn from this for how more recent events ought to be viewed, including, perhaps, the case of the Danish cartoons. Certainly Koonz gives a full and persuasive account of how cartoons – the quotidian bombardment of the public consciousness with the racist caricature – had their role to play in the softening up process. I doubt that their influence could have been dismissed on the grounds that they were ‘just cartoons’. Of course, I am not saying that modern Denmark resembles Weimar Germany. (In fact, I have no detailed knowledge of Danish politics or society.) I am simply suggesting that one should study situations before rushing to judgment. To this, I will only add that – ‘words can never hurt me’ being patently false - it is a good question whether there are lessons to be drawn here for the way Muslims are presently treated by certain British newspapers. 4. ‘Better out than in’ It is sometimes argued that whenever an obnoxious opinion is expressed in public, everyone will see it for what it is, and then reject it. It is held to follow that one should always tolerate the expression of opinion, even in the case of morally revolting opinions. The trouble with this claim is that it rests upon a factual assertion which is false. It is thus, false, that whenever an obnoxious opinion is expressed it will be generally rejected. The truth is that, while rejection may sometimes result, there is no guarantee that it will always do so. Thus, it is certainly true that Nick Griffin’s bumbling performance on Question Time recently did his reputation no good, and it can’t have done much for the credibility of the British National Party. But, what if Griffin had turned out to be an eloquent and persuasive orator? It is not obvious that the result would have been the same. With that said, let me now return to a question I raised earlier, that of how to distinguish the category of actions which genuinely count as instantiating the exercise of free speech from the category of actions which do not. As noted, it is a deficiency of the first and second claims discussed here that they fail to draw such a demarcation line. This is where philosophy enters the picture – or at least where it ought to – for philosophers who have addressed the issue of free speech have made it their business to draw that line and to explain why actions which fall within the former category ought to be protected. Ethical Record, January 2012 15 Naturally enough, different philosophers have drawn the line differently but, as an example, take John Stuart Mill’s celebrated defence of ‘the liberty of thought and discussion’. You will find this in the second chapter of his, On Liberty. In essence, it is Mill’s argument that, ‘it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied’. It is, thus, his view that the liberty of thought and discussion, protected by law if need be, is a necessary precondition for the discovery of truth. (Like many a good Victorian, Mill thinks that truth and human progress go hand-in-hand.) Society A Large Discussion Group As I see it, Mill’s ideal society would resemble a large discussion group. There would be, as it were, a public realm or arena in which may ideas and points of view were subjected to discussion. The idea is not so absurd, provided that the public arena is defined widely, to include not just university seminars and think- tanks, but the press, the other media, the internet, artistic institutions such as art galleries cinemas and theatres, a ‘sphere of action’ defined by laws protecting the right to hold public demonstrations and, no doubt, much else besides. (Of course, I don’t mean that there would actually be a building – something like Wembley Stadium – where everybody met.) To this, let me add that, if you consult the websites of Philip Pullman and the others who insist that, ‘There is no right not to be offended’, you will find that, in fact, they are assuming such a context, or something like it.) Now, Mill’s model yields a reasonably credible criterion for distinguishing those acts of expression which ought to be protected from those which need not be. It all depends upon what can be counted as a genuine contribution to a public debate. For example (i) it would clearly protect the expression of atheist opinions, however offensively blasphemous those opinions might be to some, for – e.g. – ‘God does not exist’ is undoubtedly a proposition which can form the subject of genuine debate. On the other hand (ii) it would certainly exclude racist ‘humour’ such as Bernard Manning’s and it would probably exclude Clarkson’s oafish meanderings too. (iii) It might protect the Danish cartoons. That would depend upon whether they can be portrayed as making a genuine contribution to a public debate. If they can’t, then it wouldn’t. In my view, it would (iv) exclude the literature of ‘Holocaust denial’ on the grounds that it is really hate speech in disguise, and too ridiculous to qualify as serious history, although it would include revisionist accounts of the Holocaust which genuinely engaged with the facts. (How one distinguishes the two forms of literature is not a question I shall engage with here.) Again in my view, (v) it would resist substantial control of the media by a single powerful agency such as the state or Murdoch’s News International. (How could genuine debate take place when one point of view is dominant?) Those are just suggestions and, in any case, even with Mill’s model the question of precisely what falls into which category can still be a matter for debate. Mill’s ideal was not embodied in the society of his own time, nor is it in ours. However, it is an ideal worthy of our aspirations and, more than that, relatively achievable – all the more so with the advent of modern communications technology. 16 Ethical Record, January 2012 Finally, then, a comment upon another remark of Mill’s, namely his warning that unless an opinion is vigorously and earnestly discussed it will degenerate into ‘dead dogma’ and become ‘a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction from reason or personal experience’. Ironically, this is precisely what has happened to the ideal of free speech itself – at least, that is how it seems to me. It is an issue which appears to invite posturing. That is the trouble. Of course, facing staunchly into the wind and announcing, ‘I am going to be offensive, and you’ll just have to like it!’, can make you look good in the eyes of some. However striking an attitude is no substitute for real thought. It’s time to start taking free speech seriously. Suggested Reading Alan Haworth (1998): Free Speech, London: Routledge Claudia Koonz (2003): The Nazi Conscience, London & Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press John Stuart Mill (1859): On Liberty. There are many inexpensive and easily available editions of Mill’s famous essay. Alan Haworth is a Research Associate of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for Human Rights and Social Justice, London Metropolitan University. His most recent book is Understanding the Political Philosophers: From Ancient to Modern Times (Routledge). The second edition is due to be published in April 2012

VIEWPOINT Population Growth In reply to John Rayner’s letter in ER Dec 2011, regarding my views on the above subject: nothing I said in my letter in ER Nov 2011 stated or implied 1) that I reject the argument that positive measures for population control need to be adopted 2) that I think ‘natural developments’ will bring populations into balance with their resources. On 2): what I said in my letter was that economic improvements in poorer countries would help stabilise population levels. These improvements are hardly to be described as ‘natural developments’ since they are of course man-made, bound up with scientific and technological methods. On 1): True, nothing was said in the letter about birth-control methods, but that does not mean I disapprove of them, as John seems to think. John should look back to my letter on population growth which appeared in ER Oct 2011, where I said: ‘a world- wide stabilisation of population requires, among other things, [italics now inserted] global economic betterment.’Among those other things, I actually had in mind birth-control methods. That I did not make this clear at the time is something which, in the light of John’s letter, I now regret. But at least the phrase did imply that I was not only thinking of economic measures. Tom Rubens - London N4

The views expressed in this Journal are not necessarily those of the Society. Ethical Record, January 2012 17 ESSAY: EXPERIENCING ANOTHER’S MIND? THE CASE OF THE HOGAN TWINS Graham Bell

It is a commonplace of philosophy that no human can experience the mind of another. It follows that it is impossible to tell whether, under controlled conditions, a given sensory input results in an identical sensation in another human. This situation is now challenged, at least in part, by the case of Krista and Tatiana Hogan, Canadian conjoined twins. Two competing theories attempt to explain the origin of conjoined twins. The older theory is fission, in which a fertilized ovum splits only partially. The second and more generally accepted theory is fusion in which a fertilized ovum completely separates, but stem cells, which search for similar cells, find like-stem cells on the other twin and fuse the twins together. The resulting twins could be conjoined in a variety of ways but only a small proportion, about one in 2.5 million of twin births, is craniopagus; that is, joined at the head. The Hogan twins are unique in the annals of the recorded scientific literature of even craniopagus twins because, not only are their heads joined, they also share some brain tissue – and as a result, some sensations. The twins are fused at the top, backs, and sides of their heads (1). Their brains are joined at the thalamus with the left thalamus of one being joined to the right thalamus of the other (2). The thalamus is a large, symmetrical two-lobed mass of grey matter positioned just above the brain stem and buried beneath the celebral cortex (3). It has multiple functions, primarily in sensory perception and the regulation of motor functions. It acts as a relay station between a variety of subcortical sensory areas and the celebral cortex. However, the thalamus is not a passive two-way relay station; it appears also to process and filter out some sensory signals, thus affecting consciousness. Every sensory system (with the exception of the olfactory system) includes a thalamic nucleus that receives sensory signals and routes them to the associated primary cortical area. Normally, therefore, sensory information from the body would be routed by the thalamus to the region of the cortex appropriate to its processing, resulting ultimately in the corresponding sensation, if one does occur. In the case of the Hogan twins, it appears that the primary sensory signals generated in one twin are correctly routed within that twin. However, in most cases a copy of these signals is also transmitted to the conjoined twin via the ‘thalamic bridge’ (2) between their brains (see image). Then, as neurological tests moderately confirm, the twins can potentially experience corresponding sensations. The twins are now 5 years old and have started school. They have achieved all the normal childhood milestones such a walking, talking and counting but are retarded in mental development by approximately one year. This delay does not surprise their doctors given the girls’ unusual brains and the fact that they have been forced to develop skills other children have not. They have quite distinct personalities despite being in effect identical twins. Such is not unusual with 18 Ethical Record, January 2012 conjoined twins. The conjoin is rarely completely symmetrical with the consequence that disabilities are not equally shared. One twin might be more dependent on the good physiological function and/or behaviour of the other than vice versa. Some of the following behaviour is anecdotal, reported either by the girls or by their family, but much is now receiving medical and psychological confirmation as well as being expected given the presence of a ‘thalamic bridge’. As babies, putting a dummy in the mouth of one could cause the other to stop crying. Tatiana can see though Krista’s eyes and Krista can see through one of Tatiana’s. If one twin is given a toy to play with, the other, eyes covered, can correctly identify it. One twin might respond to what the other is watching on television. Doctors confirm that if one twin is tickled, the other might jump or that if one twin is touched, the other can identify which part of the body was touched. If just one girl eats, the other girl feels it. If sufficient is eaten, the other girl also feels satiated. Some of their tastes differ. One likes tomato ketchup, the other not. If the first eats ketchup, the other is likely to react by making a face and attempting to scrape it from her own tongue despite not having touched a drop nor seen her sister do so. Krista is allergic to canned maize; Tatiana is not. There is also the possibility of information overload and confusion. Each girl always refers to herself as ‘I’ and never ‘we’. Nevertheless, when each girl, eyes closed, held a piece of paper in one hand, Krista announced, “I have two pieces of paper.” Abortion Was Advised Their mother learned that her twins were conjoined at the head following a routine ultrasound scan 5 months into the pregnancy. She was advised but declined abortion. When the twins were 10 months old, a team of doctors refused to separate them for fear an operation would kill or paralyse the girls. The birth of the twins excited vigorous, divided debate among bio-ethicists and doctors. Some concluded that the life of such twins would be so wretched that the decision to abort should be taken away from the family and placed in the hands of an ethics committee (e.g. 4). Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, believes that children with major deformities of this kind should have life terminated within 28 days of their birth (4). Others point to the costs of keeping such twins alive especially given the cumulative social cost of the profusion of new techniques for keeping potentially able people in work and the increased social funding required for a gradually ageing and therefore medically more demanding population. Others point out the worthwhile lives led by some conjoined twins, including that of the most famous pair, Chang and Eng Bunker, brothers born in Siam, later renamed Thailand, who lived to the age of 63. They travelled with P. T. Barnum’s Circus for many years around the mid19th century billed as ‘Siamese Twins’, hence the use of this term as a synonym for conjoined twins. The oldest twins joined at the head alive today are US sisters Lori and Reba Schappell, now 50 years old. Reba has developed a career as a country singer with the stage name George. Lori works in a laundry, arranging her workload around George's singing commitments. Lori says that, as a fan of George's, she pays to attend concerts, just like all the other fans, simply making herself quiet Ethical Record, January 2012 19 and ‘invisible’ while George is performing. Lori, a trophy-winning bowler, has had several boyfriends and was engaged to be married, but lost her partner in a motor accident (5). The Hogan family have allowed the twins to appear on many talk shows on Canadian and US TV, their appearances managed by a large transnational media company. The Hogan family justifies this because the twins are unlikely to have a normal childhood under any circumstances, the family’s current financial problems and to meet any future medical bills. However, now that the children are happy and relatively healthy, their family is not eager to have them tested and examined by the medical community in the pursuit of science. As one family member explains, “If one of them needs it for their health, by all means, they can do what they need to do … but I’ll be damned if you’re going to poke and prod and experiment on them.” Even if this potential hurdle can be overcome, it is difficult to predict what science can expect to learn from investigating this unique medical case given our very limited understanding of how the brain functions. Clearly, ethical considerations would dictate that only proved-to-be-safe non-invasive techniques would be used. Any findings would not be verifiable or falsifiable by parallel experiments conducted in laboratories elsewhere on different subjects so would always remain at least partly conjectural. At best, perceived anomalies could form the basis for new experimental research on normal subjects. Are Their Thoughts Shared? The Hogan twin case could be an incomparable resource for neuroscientists interested in tracing neural pathways, in the malleability of the brain and in the construction of the self. Much might be learnt about neural information flow at the level of the thalamus. When finally they learn to read, it will be interesting to determine whether what one twin reads can be understood by the other. Presumably, if this happens, some form of pictorial representation of the text will be transmitted from one twin to the other although even this could be complicated by how the eyes scan text during reading. It is unlikely that the meaning of the text will be transmitted via the thalamus as, on our present understanding, the processing of text data to extract meaning occurs using a variety of modules located in the neocortex and is a very much more complex form of information processing than occurs at the level of the thalamus. It seems most unlikely that they will be able to share thoughts as internally transmitted thoughts, although other cues might come in to play that makes thought by internal transfer seem apparent. It could be that the twins are having parallel experience, but not one they experience in some kind of commingling of consciousness – how would neuropsychologists be able to tell? Their apparent sharing of at least some sensations does pose questions about the nature of and our perceived integration of consciousness when the latter is made up of component parts and, for example, is subject to the filtering of input information contingent on current mental focus. Whether any speculative answers will emerge remains to be seen. As to the commonplace alluded to at the beginning of this piece, some neuroscientists maintain that this breach already exists in part through the 20 Ethical Record, January 2012 mechanism of the mirror neuron system which is thought to foster empathy, creating connections of which we are hardly aware but which binds us in some kind of mutual understanding at a neurological level, and moreover, in some senses, penetrates the barrier of ‘free will’ (6). References: (1) Enter ‘Conjoined Hogan Twins’ in Youtube.com for brief videos of the twins (2) Google ‘nytimes conjoined twins: brain imaging’ for a scan of their conjoined brains – the thalamic bridge is clearly visible (3) For an animation of the brain showing the thalamus, google ‘Thalamus wiki’ (4) Google ‘The many tragedies of conjoined twins’ (5) Google ‘Schappell twins wiki’ (6) Google ‘Mirror neurons wiki’

BOOK REVIEW - FAR FROM THE FASHIONABLE CROWD The People’s Concert Society and Music in London’s Suburbs Written by Alan Bartley. Whimbrel Publishing (2009) ISBN 0956582206 Review by David Morris (former member of the South Place Sunday Concerts Committee) This book has a section on ‘South Place and its Music’. The book seems to have been very thoroughly researched and covers the music scene across late Victorian and Edwardian London and suburbs. It is a comprehensive work and is most interesting although sometimes not the easiest to read, probably due to its ‘research’ nature. Nonetheless it has stimulated my interest sufficiently and I plan to buy it. The author has made a number of acknowledgements, including to the then SPES Librarian, Jennifer Jeynes and the Organiser and Treasurer respectively of the concerts, Lionel and Miriam Elton. As regards the Sunday concerts, only 21 of the 303 pages are devoted to the chapter ‘South Place and its Music’ and 45 pages to the chapter on its precursor ‘The People’s Concert Society’ which the S.P. Ethical Society began supporting in 1887. The background and history does make interesting reading. What comes through very effectively is the strong commitment to uncompromising high quality of music which was retained from the outset throughout the history of the concerts. It is apparent that it was not the intention of the author to cover the history of the concerts in more recent times, hence the references do not go beyond the early fifties. There is a passing reference only to the series currently running in Conway Hall. Apart from my own understanding of the origin and history of the concert series, my experience is well after the period covered by this publication. While there are a number of common strands, my main recollection is one of a unique entity comprising musicians, audience and organisers with the single aim of providing the highest quality chamber music at the lowest practicable cost. The atmosphere at these concerts was quite unlike any I had experienced elsewhere. On a personal note, it was a privilege to have been closely involved in running the concerts for many years since the mid-eighties. It was a particularly successful period in the concerts’ history both artistically and commercially. Ethical Record, January 2012 21 ETHICAL DOUBTS ABOUT A MARKET IN LIVE DONOR ORGANS Simon Rippon Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and Somerville College, Oxford Lecture to the Ethical Society, 4 November 2011 Should you be able to buy or sell the organs and organ parts that you could donate as a living donor? It is possible to donate such things as a kidney, lobe of a lung, or portions of the liver, pancreas, or intestine while living. Perhaps more people would be persuaded to donate if they were compensated financially for their organs. So should we be permitted to sell these ‘excess’ parts of our bodies, or to buy them from others if we need them? A first point to note is that the questions of whether we should be able to buy or sell are conceptually separate. We might think it is ethical to allow people to sell their organs, but insist that the NHS be the only buyer, because we think it necessary to ensure that human organs are distributed only on the basis of need, rather than on the basis of ability to pay. I’ll focus just on the question of whether we should be permitted to sell our organs, and argue that we should not. The Pope’s Bad Objection There are many bad objections to selling organs; many of these are religiously based. The Pope has said that selling organs would ‘clash with the meaning of gift’, and violate the dignity of human beings. Of course it’s true that an organ sold is not an organ gifted, but if it’s not wrong to donate organs, why would it be wrong to sell them? (It’s worth reflecting that selling only differs from donation in that money flows in the opposite direction to the object transferred). We don’t think that people are obligated to be motivated altruistically when exchanging things like our labour or property, so why does the Pope think that organs are special in this respect? Moreover, organ sellers might well be motivated altruistically – you might want to sell an organ in order to make a charitable donation, or to fund expensive medical treatment for a family member. ‘Dignity’ is a woolly concept whose introduction does not help clarify moral questions like this one; when people resort to saying that some activity would ‘violate human dignity’, they are usually doing little more than giving their reaction of repugnance a fancy-sounding label. Maybe the Pope wants to restrict the sale of organs because he is concerned to promote instances of morally praiseworthy altruism. No doubt purely altruistic motives are a good thing, and we should indeed try promote them. But what price is worth paying for this? There are over a thousand deaths a year in Britain due to a shortage of donor organs available for transplant. If we could increase donation rates by offering cash incentives for donation, should we allow hundreds of those people to die in order to make sure that some others will act purely altruistically? Surely not! There is, however, a much more significant objection to permitting organ selling, which is made on behalf of those in poverty. If we permit an organ market, this objection says, then the people who actually sell their organs will not, for the most part, be already well-off people who desire luxury goods such

22 Ethical Record, January 2012 as cases of fine wine or recreational flying lessons, but rather the poor and financially desperate. If we want to protect those in poverty from coercion and exploitation, then arguably, we should prohibit the market altogether. The Libertarian Objection This anti-market argument, however, faces an oft-repeated objection. I call it ‘The Libertarian Objection.’ The Libertarian Objection says: If, in the context of a free market, there are people in poverty who want to sell an organ, then selling an organ must seem to them to be the best option that they have. So if we then prohibit the market to protect the poor, aren’t we objectors making the situation of those in poverty even worse, by taking away their best option? Or, if we don’t accept that it would be best for them to sell their organs, aren’t we committed to paternalistically substituting our own judgments about what would be best for the poor for their own judgments about what would be best for themselves? Shouldn’t we therefore permit an organ market? In the rest of this discussion, I’ll try to identify what’s wrong with the Libertarian Objection. I’m not going to try to argue that there’s anything intrinsically morally wrong with selling or buying an organ. Rather, I’m going to argue that sometimes you can harm people just by giving them an option. Indeed, sometimes you can harm people by giving them an option that they would be better off taking! And I’ll argue that permitting an organ market would harm those in poverty in this kind of way Perhaps the most obvious way you can harm people by giving them options is when the new options interfere with their ability easily to make an optimal decision, for example by confusing them. An example of this would be if, on dialling 999 for an emergency and asking for an ambulance, I were offered a choice of ambulance models to select from: Ford, Mercedes, Subaru, Rover, and so on. If I knew all the relevant information about how these different vehicles were equipped, their respective top speeds, ability to handle varying terrain, and so on, then I might have been able to select a better ambulance for my emergency than the one that would have been assigned to me by default. But of course, I don’t have this information, and I want the ambulance to come quickly – I don’t have time to make such difficult decisions. I’m better off with fewer options in cases like this! How Options Can Be Bad However, my argument that the option to sell organs would harm those in poverty does not depend on the difficulty of making decisions about organ selling. I don’t want to argue that poor organ vendors would face tough decisions, or might be for some reason ‘unable to resist the temptation’ of making a bad decision. In fact, I’m going to concede some rather unrealistic assumptions. I will assume that those in poverty would: (1) always make the best possible decisions, (2) always do so instantaneously and effortlessly, and (3) always be fully rational in choosing to sell their organs, whenever they choose to sell them in a market. Another way that additional options can be bad for you is by making your bargaining situation worse. Consider the case of a union leader who is negotiating a deal with management, and doesn’t like the deal on the table. He Ethical Record, January 2012 23 might try to insist on a better deal being offered, on the grounds that he doesn’t think this one is fair. But he would be in a better bargaining position if he can honestly say tell management that the members simply won’t accept this deal, no matter what he does to try to persuade them. Having his hands tied like this makes his negotiating position stronger! A similar example is of a cashier in a shop with a time-lock safe, and a sign in the window stating that the cashier has no access to the safe. It’s no good trying to rob this shop for the cash in the safe, as the cashier simply can’t provide it. Giving the cashier that option might lead to robbers making very unwelcome bargains – ‘Your money or your life!’ Additional options can also have a third bad effect, by changing the character of the situation you are in, or the quality of the options you already have. An example of this is found in the results of a study of blood procurement in different countries in the 1970s by Richard Titmuss, described in his book, The Gift Relationship. Titmuss made the surprising finding that introducing payments for blood actually reduced the amount collected. This seems surprising, because wherever payments were introduced it was still possible to donate blood for free. One might expect that introducing payments would have the effect of supplementing altruistic motivations with financial ones, and increase blood supply. But on the contrary, financial payments were found to ‘crowd out’ altruistic motivations for donating. Why? The answer is that introducing the option of receiving payment changed the nature of the old option of providing a gift. Altruistic blood donors who once gave the priceless ‘gift of life’ were now just giving something that could be bought for a certain amount – in effect, just saving the recipient the market price of the blood commodity. The new option to sell changed the character of the old one, to give. These examples show, then, that options can be bad for you, even when it is better for you to take them when you have them. They may be bad for you strategically, by making your bargaining situation worse, or they may negatively affect the character of the situation you find yourself in, or the character of the options you already have. Because the option to sell your organs might be bad for you in these sorts of ways, the Libertarian Objection is mistaken in assuming that objections on behalf of the poor must be paternalistic, or that the poor would necessarily be better off as a result of having options they would wish to take. I think the introduction of even the best regulated market for live donor organs, if it increased organ supply, would introduce options for those in poverty that would in fact harm them, and that the harm is significant enough that we should prohibit the market to prevent it. So what kind of harm do I have in mind? Commodification Can Harm In general, the commodification of something exposes us to social and legal pressure of various kinds to sell it. When you are given the option to sell something, you become responsible for your choice of selling it, or for your choosing not to. Suppose we permit an organ market. When organs become commodified, they would become subject to the kinds of economic, social and legal demands that govern our other transactions. Selling organs would likely become something expected of us as need arises. We must consider whether

24 Ethical Record, January 2012 people with ‘financial assets’ in the form of ‘excess’ organs to sell would remain eligible for bankruptcy protection or state assistance. Would they ever fall under legal requirements to sell their organs to pay taxes, paternity bills, or rent? Would society perceive them as lacking entitlement to charitable help, if they choose not to sell their organs to help themselves? Would there be pressure to sell to meet general familial needs, such as university tuition fees for your children? We already recognize the kinds of harms that economic, social and legal pressures like these would produce in other domains. This is why we enact laws stipulating things like minimum wages, minimum vacation days, parental and sick leave, and workplace safety standards that you cannot contract out of, even if you want to. It also explains why we enact laws against the commodification of other objects, such as laws against prostitution and against selling our children – even into loving families where they might be much better off than with their poverty-stricken genetic parents. In all these areas, we recognize that having the option would harm people. Now, someone might object to my argument that there’s no evidence that we need to prohibit an organ market – rather, it might be said, we ought to regulate it to prevent the kind of coercion and exploitation that I have raised concern about. My response to this is to ask just what sort of regulation is needed. Suppose, for example, that we set a regulated minimum price for organs. It is true that it this would prevent one kind of exploitation – but it would do nothing to prevent people selling out of economic desperation, and indeed might well increase the number of people driven to sell their organs to try to escape financial problems. Effective regulation would need to prevent those in desperate economic need from entering the market, for example by only allowing people who have high incomes to sell organs. But we’ve already noted that people who actually want to sell their organs tend to be desperate and we’ve seen how financial incentives might ‘crowd out’ altruistic donations. These factors make it unlikely that a regulated market of this kind would provide more organs than pure altruism does. Selling Organs Especially Harmful If social or legal pressure to sell things is bad, this provides a reason that seems to count in favour of prohibiting markets in anything at all. But if selling anything and everything was prohibited, we would never trade, and we would all be much worse off. So if my argument is not to prove too much, I need to point to some special features of organ selling that makes social or legal pressure to engage in it especially harmful. There are two special features of organ selling that explain this. The first is the peculiar special value we human beings place in having full control over incursions on the intimate parts of our bodies by others – we desire very strongly the importance of our negative right to exclude others. This psychological feature of human beings also helps explain things like the particular badness we find in rape and torture. It’s our control over invasion that matters here, not the physical acts in question, which we may even find pleasant when we freely consent to them. Another important feature of organ selling is that it is somewhat

Ethical Record, January 2012 25 risky. For example there is a small but not insignificant mortality risk of about 1 in 3,000 for kidney donors. It can be permissible to take such risks. But importantly, in a market these risks of organ selling would be unevenly (and unjustly) distributed. Nearly all of them would be placed on those in poverty. My conclusion is that social and legal pressure to sell an organ in a market system would be especially harmful. This means that those in poverty are better off not having the option to sell an organ even if supposing that they had it, they would be better off taking it. This gives us sufficient reason to prohibit a market in live donor organs. We still face a huge problem, though, where people are dying needlessly for lack of organs. The government should urgently investigate alternative options for increasing donation rates– especially from the dead (such as the option of moving from an opt-in to an opt-out system). In the meantime, it needs to devote more attention to publicising the fact that everyone needs to voluntarily sign up to be a donor after death, and talk their decision through with their families, because families still wield a veto in practice.

A CRITICAL LOOK AT THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT Fred Whitehead of KANSAS CITY, USA [email protected] In the few months of the Occupy movement, an enormous amount of commentary has erupted, from all sectors, right and left, Left and Right. Already there are books about it, collections of documents and the like. Clearly, it aimed to change the debate, to take the momentum away from the Tea Party, and to some extent it has succeeded. However, the marked enthusiasm of aging Leftists, often amounting to prayerful gratitude that Someone Is Doing Something at Last, should prompt scrutiny instead of hosannas. One anonymous observer on the Right quipped that their chants amounted to: “What do we want? Nothing. When do we want it? Now.” Ouch. To be fair, the motivations of many Occupiers were clear. They had gone heavily into debt in their college education, had even graduated, only to find there were no jobs, and there weren’t going to be any jobs. Wise pundits reflected the “recession” might go on for years and years, or decades. It was an outrageous situation, and found expression in broadly felt outrage from those thus discarded from society. In the 1960s, the radicals of Students for Democratic Society, many of them “red diaper babies,” i.e. the children of parents who had been in or close to the Communist Party and similar organizations, at least knew there had been some kind of history back there. They didn’t feel they had to know anything about it, it just wasn’t necessary to study anything, and of course they subsequently reverted to archaic forms of revolt, similar to the terrorist activities of the Narodniks in 19th century Russia. Aiming to escape history, they became atavistic, and finally collapsed. Recently I forced myself to watch a documentary film on the Weather Underground. One after another, now old veterans of that period, some still in prison, others released after decades of incarceration, said that their devolution into terrorism had been erroneous and futile. Then they all firmly declared they would do it all over again. This is what passes for learning in present-day America. 26 Ethical Record, January 2012 Now the Occupy people do not even know that there was a history, of anything. At the encampment in Kansas City, near the Federal Reserve building, and ironically, tents cluster around a monument to the U.S. soldiers in the Spanish-American War. There was a Day of Learning, so I went to check it out. I was impressed at how young people could squat in the dusty grass and listen to hour after hour of repetitive harangues about the Evil Corporations. But there were no perspectives from the past. One group heard an incoherent lecture about Aristotle, followed by an ecstatic lesson in Dance. There seems to be some new mode of communication, a ritualistic twiddling of massed hands, approving or disapproving what is being said. Lacking amplification (forbidden by the police), they repeat short sentences in cadences, giving the effect of an incantation. The whole affair is clearly a crude and juvenile effort to start building some kind of community, any kind of community. Many participants have testified they have felt a part of a living group for the first time in their lives. This is no small matter: as in the 1950s, alienation in 2010s America has become deep and severe. The labour unions are but a shadow of their former selves. Schools are merely custodial and punitive. The mass media are full of palpable imbecility. It’s a real mess, and these young people have tried to begin to straighten it out. The central “authority” in the Occupy sites is the General Assembly. But in practice they lapse into interminable and inconclusive chaos. Participatory democracy: good. Democratic centralism: bad. The difference between the 1930s and now is that the Hoovervilles were populated by people who literally had no homes. Though the Occupy sites have attracted some homeless people, they are often viewed as nuisances by their supposed comrades, who are only fleeing suburbia. Lest it seem that I am resorting to mocking dismissal, let me again grant that the grievances of the Occupy movement are real. The 1% has indeed ripped off the 99%, though I’d have to note that there is a sizeable part of the 99%, say 40% who still defend capitalism in spite of everything. That would be the Tea Party, unaware as they are that their organizations are being secretly funded by the 1%. America, I would argue, is the World Centre of False Consciousness. So, what to do? It’s difficult, because adolescence has been artificially extended in this society, far beyond what it biologically should be. It’s a trend of long-standing. Peter Pan and the kids around him never want to grow up. Greyheaded rock stars still strut their stuff before mass audiences, though lately the giant raves of yore have not been so successful. The Occupy movement, like the society, needs to grow up, as Paul said, when he became a man, he put away childish things. A revolutionary movement would be active on all fronts, including electoral politics, because like it or not, that is where power in this society is lodged. No matter if you pound drums all night, the gates of the Federal Reserve will not swing open in the morning, and bankers will not issue forth to admit they have plundered us, and say: “Here is all our money.” We have to take their money, either peacefully through sufficient taxation to unseat their power, or through other means.

Ethical Record, January 2012 27 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7405 1818 Registered Charity No. 251396 For programme updates, email: [email protected] Website: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk Note: Admission to Sunday morning lectures is free for members of SPES and £3 for non-members. For other events, no charge unless stated Sunday meetings are held in the Brockway Room. JANUARY 2012 Sunday 8 1100 No lecture. John Tillson’s talk is postponed till 15 April 2012 Sunday 15 1100 THE CULT OF CONFIDENCE Nicholas Fearn Sunday 22 1100 THE MYTHS OF CHRISTIAN EUROPE Kenan Malik Sunday 29 1100 THE SCIENCE DELUSION: freeing the spirit of inquiry Rupert Sheldrake FEBRUARY Sunday 5 1100 EXISTENTIALISM, ATHEISM AND HUMANISM Gary Cox Sunday 12 1100 FLAWED ETHICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE Evan Parker

TWO EVENTS ARRANGED BY THE CENTRE FOR INQUIRY UK 1030 - 1600 Saturday 14 January 2012 BEYOND THE VEIL – A CLOSER LOOK AT SPIRITS, MEDIUMS AND GHOSTS Chris French, Hayley Stephens, Paul Zenon, Richard Wiseman, Ian Rowland

1030 - 1600 Saturday 28 January 2012 BLASPHEMY! Kenan Malik, Andrew Copson and Austin Dacey Fee for each of these events: Public: £10. Members of BHA, AHS, SPES and students with valid ID: £8. Free to members of the Centre for Inquiry UK. (Entry to both events £16 /£12)

CONWAY HALL EVENING CLASSES, JANUARY 2012 Conway Hall is running evening classes developed for a general audience by members of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group: Brendan Larvor, Peter Cave and Prof. Richard Norman: To make a booking or for more information about dates, tutors and further details on course content, please email [email protected] or call 020 7061 6744 or look up www.conwayhall.org.uk/courses

To receive regular Society news and programme updates via email, please contact Ben Partridge at [email protected]. Similarly, if you have any suggestions for speakers or event ideas, or would like to convene a Sunday afternoon informal, get in touch with Ben on 020 7061 6744.

SPES’s CONWAY HALL SUNDAY CONCERTS 2012 Tickets on the door (£8/£4 concessions). 6.30pm Full details on: www.conwayhallsundayconcerts.org.uk

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