• Is it about the knowledge of the great philosophers?
• Or is it about ‘doing philosophy’ and demonstrating one’s own ideas?

It is very much the latter. There’s hardly any memorisation of facts and most of one’s grade seems to come from explaining an idea clearly and making a good argument for or against it regardless of whether the conclusion of the argument is correct.

Most of my essays took this form:

• Explain what X is.
• Explain what Philosopher Y said about X.
• Explain why Philosopher Y is wrong (*) about X.
• Guess what Philosopher Y might say about my argument.
• Explain why Philosopher Y is still wrong.

Fortunately, the great philosophers were mostly wrong so there is a lot to work with!

(*) You could argue that they were right about X too of course but that’s boring. And you can still get a good grade without introducing any original ideas, but that’s boring too.

I especially liked that we were encouraged to disagree with both the great philosophers and with our tutors. As long as you make a good argument, you can agree or disagree. It’s all good. It’s hard to imagine another class like that. I’ve just started my next class about the Classical World and I doubt that I’d get a good grade for arguing against my tutor’s explanation for Achilles’s long sulk in the Trojan War but in philosophy, it’s expected.

Looking back at the philosophers we studied, I wonder if they were chosen specifically because they were so wrong. Let’s look at a few examples…

John Locke (1632-1704) believed that someone continues to be the same person if and only if they have the same memories. If your 40-year-old self doesn’t remember what your 15-year-old self did then your 40-year-old self is no longer the same person.

I think Locke was wrong.

Continuity of memory is not a reliable way to determine whether someone is the same person. People lose memories for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they lose them temporarily and recover them later. Does this mean that they were briefly a different person? Sometimes we forget some memories but remember others. Does that mean we are a little bit the same? Of course not. Derek Parfit would disagree but he is wrong too.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) said that doing something right simply to feel the warm glow of satisfaction of doing the right thing has no moral worth. Conversely, striving to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing is morally valuable even if your efforts will inevitably come to nothing.

I think Kant was wrong.

Doing something that makes the world better has moral value whether or not it makes you feel good, whether or not it follows your conception of duty and doing something that you know to be futile has no moral value either way.

René Descartes (1596-1650) believed that we are made of two distinct substances—the body is made of material stuff and the mind is made of immaterial stuff. Furthermore, the immaterial stuff is the part that constitutes the ‘real you’ because we can imagine what it is like to live without a body but we cannot imagine not being able to think.

I think Descartes was wrong.

There is no immaterial substance and the mind is simply what the brain does.

John Rawls (1921-2002) argued that people with natural talents or with a natural tendency to work hard do not deserve to be rewarded for their talents or tendencies because, ultimately, they acquired their talents and tendencies through the luck of genetics or their upbringing and no one deserves to be rewarded simply for being lucky.

I think Rawls was wrong.

People who work hard deserve to be rewarded regardless of where their ability or motivation came from.

Not every philosopher we studied was wrong about everything but most were wrong about most things. Was this just a big coincidence? Or perhaps the course designers deliberately choose philosophers who are wrong so we could argue against them?

— 1979 —

We were always in trouble during those years, but I was just a naughty boy. I talked too loudly in class. I rarely did homework on time. My worst crime was arguing with teachers. I was just a naughty little boy; nothing worse than that. I never stole anything… or broke anything… or hurt anyone. Still, I got lots of detentions. Paul did, too.

We both liked to make people laugh. In the first few years of school, we put on a play for the drama festival. My class chose a comedy about two football hooligans who were always in trouble with the law. Guess who played the hooligans!

But Paul was something more. He wrote graffiti on the walls and stole motorbikes. He occasionally came over to my house to give me a ride, but I was never interested in stealing motorbikes myself.

Still, we were naughty, and we had a rule at Chis & Sid: if you got more than three detentions, you got the cane. But our headmaster was a nice guy and didn’t whack us, so Mr Gooden, our form teacher, did the whacking instead with his size-13 Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes. He’d make us come down to the teacher’s changing room and stare into his eyes while he gave us our lecture. Then we’d take off our purple blazer, and he’d hit us as hard as he could. Three times. I got lots of those.

One time, we were a bit rowdier in French class than we should have been. Miss Furey was quite young — probably new to teaching — and our class wasn’t the easiest class to handle. She would shout “Taisez-vous!” (“Be quiet!”) over and over. I spent much of her class writing “Le silence aide le travail” a hundred times in the corridor outside her classroom, because je ne me taisais pas.

Martin and David caused some commotion in French class when Martin looked out of the window and shouted, “Look at that!” The whole class ran over to look out the window, and there was nothing that poor Miss Furey could do to regain control.

“Asseyez-vous! Asseyez-vous!” Ms Furey shouted.

There was nothing poor Miss Furey could do to regain control. She just broke down and burst into tears. She ran out of the classroom crying and didn’t come back for days.

The deputy-head master came in soon after to tell us what naughty children we were, and Mr Gooden beat us with his tennis shoe. Paul and I had nothing to do with this particular commotion, but he beat us anyway.

I like to think we were kinder to Miss Furey after that.

Another time, Mr Gooden made us come up to Room 51 to get the cane, long after everyone else had gone home. I forget what our crime was — maybe there was no crime at all — but Paul went in first, and I stood outside, waiting for my turn.

Back in those days, we put our wooden chairs on top of the wooden desks, so the cleaners could do their cleaning, and before long, Paul and Mr Gooden started shouting at each other and throwing chairs. Naughty little boy that I was, I sat outside, terrified that I was next.

Mr Berry, Mr Gooden’s boss, came out of his office and asked me what was going on. Why was I sitting there so late in the evening? I explained that Paul and Mr Gooden were in there, throwing chairs, and that I was next.

“Oh,” said Mr Berry.

Then he grabbed his coat and went home.

After a bit more banging and shouting, the uproar calmed, and Mr Gooden drove me home. When we got to my house, he made me stay in the car while he went to talk to my mother. After maybe fifteen minutes, I went inside and told Mum that I wanted to go to a different school. “I know”, she said.

There was a military school in Greenwich. Maybe I could go there.

— 1980 —

While I continued getting in trouble for stupid little things, Paul upped his game. He made a bomb with gunpowder and aerosol cans one time and tried to blow up Five Arches bridge over the Cray River.

One weekend, Paul broke into the school chemistry lab and stole half the chemicals — sodium, phosphorus, sulphuric acid, magnesium dust — and a whole lot more. Boxes and boxes of dangerous chemicals. Not long after, Paul was hanging out with friends, and he threw burning phosphorus at someone. They called the police, and Paul went to the juvenile detention centre.

I never saw him again.

A lovely lady left me a comment a little while ago to say she was having lunch with Mr Gooden next week, and “Would I like her to say anything to him for me?”

I wrote him a polite little note, reminding him what a great chemistry teacher he was, but what a hard time he gave us as a form teacher. He wrote back, and now we are planning to meet for dinner one day soon. What a world, eh?

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This is chapter three of my memoirs.
You can find chapters one and two here.

— 1977 —

My first year at Chis and Sid (aged 11-12) passed without incident apart from an impressive number of detentions. Detentions at Chis and Sid were a serious business where you had your name read out in morning assembly, and you went to the front of the assembly hall to get your little lecture from the headmaster. The list of names was always some permutation of Monroe, Harding, Winch and Lawrence.

Three detentions in a single term and you got the cane. My record was six. My detentions were never for properly naughty stuff. They were mostly for not doing my homework or for talking in class. The naughty stuff came later.

At the end of every school year, we had a few weeks of exams. They were a kind of warm-up for the O-level exams that would come at the end of the fifth year. After the first-year exams, they put us into “streams” according to our results. I should have been in the top stream but was put in the middle stream — perhaps it was all those detentions dragging me down.

— 1978-80 —

I was very happy with the middle stream, though, because my classmates were the best a teenage boy could wish for. I fell in love with a girl in my class in the very first week (more about that here), and we were all best friends (almost everyone — sorry, David) and we hung out together all the time. Birthday parties on Saturday night with a bottle of cider and a Party Six of Heineken. Ice Skating at Queensway, in London, on Sundays. We even took the train for a day trip to Margate (John’s mum didn’t trust him to take the train on his own, and she watched us all the way to Dartford). Most of us boys went to the Good News Christian summer camp at Winchester School where we spent a week singing Jesus songs and getting up to mischief. I’m still friends with several of my classmates 40 years later, and we still meet up for the occasional beer.

We were a lovely bunch, but we often pushed our teachers to the edge and beyond.

We were well-behaved, for the good teachers. On the first day with Mr Carlisle, we were our usual unruly selves when we entered the room, but Mr Carlisle made us all go out and come back, one by one, in silence. We were never unruly again. At the other extreme was Mrs Timm. Mrs Timm would drone on about the English Reformation or the Industrial Revolution, and no one paid even a smidgeon of attention to her. We took a cassette recorder to her class one time to record the lesson and the whole period was just mayhem with everyone talking and walking around the room while Mrs Timm droned on and on. I wonder if all her classes were like ours, or if we were just especially unkind to her. I wonder what her memories of teaching are like.

I’ve always loved history, but Mrs Timm made everything so grey and tedious. We had a history essay for homework every week, but I never scored more than 4 out of 20. Except that one time, when we had an essay on Lord Nelson. I got 19½ out of 20. I got 19½ for an essay on Captain Cook the week after too. But then I went back to 4 out of 20 for the rest of the year. Why did I do this? I don’t know. From the very beginning, I wanted to be myself and demonstrating that I could get any grade I wanted was important to me. Most days, I just didn’t want a good grade.

Several teachers had a way of getting our attention. More than a few had perfect aim with a blackboard eraser thrown at the head of any student not paying attention. Mr Williams would slam his metre-long ruler down across your desk and if you didn’t move your fingers fast enough… too bad. Sore fingers. “Basher” Lewis slammed Martin’s face down into the bench in biology, and he beat me and Paul around the head over and over and over until half the class were in tears. The Terrible Mr Gooden deserves his own story

It was about this time that my refusal to do homework became a problem. Julie and I were put on Homework Report, which meant our teachers recorded every homework assignment on a card and our parents had to sign it. We had to come to school 30 minutes early every day to show our completed homework to Mr Durbin, the head teacher. The homework was easy, so I didn’t stay on Homework Report for very long, and I was soon back to my old ways.

At the end of every term, we were given a report card, and Julie and I took turns to come last in our class, but when the end-of-year exams came around, I came top or thereabouts in nearly every exam. I won a prize for my exam results and bought a book on computer programming with the book voucher. That was the book that changed my life.

My history exam became something of a legend, because I answered every question as a joke. In the essay question about the Suffragettes, I wrote how the Suffragettes were a bunch of silly women who didn’t do as their husbands told them. In the Reformation question, Raquel Welch was a Buddhist. The teacher marking my essay wrote STUPID BOY! in huge letters diagonally across the page in red ink and gave me a zero. Why did I do this? Who knows? Maybe I thought it was funny at the time. Martin still has my essay.

— 1980-82 —

For the next two years of school, I did practically zero work and never even took a book home. Still, when the final exams — O-levels — came around, I came first or thereabouts in most of the subjects and won another prize. I shared the top spots with Alison, Corrine and Roger, and they all went to Oxford and got their names in gold lettering in the school lobby. I quit school and joined the Royal Navy.

— 1982-86 —

I thought I’d get more of a challenge in the Navy, but what a joke that was. The academic work in the Navy was so easy I felt like my brain was rotting.

— 2024 —

Epilogue
I am finally doing the degree that I should have done forty years ago, but now my brain is rotting for real. I wonder if I’ll finish my degree in time.

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Mr Gooden was terrifying and a tyrant and he altered the course of my life more than anyone else.

JK Rowling’s Severus Snape is the modern archetype of the terrific/terrible/terrifying teacher and Potter doesn’t know until the very end where Snape’s loyalties lie. But the tyrannical teacher par excellence is Miss Jean Brodie.

Jean Brodie: “Little girls! I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

Maggie Smith’s terrifying teacher, long before Professors Snape and McGonegall and long, long before The Dowager Countess, was a fascist and an admirer of fascists. Miss Jean Brodie was inspired by Mussolini and Franco and inspired her girls to great heights; moulding and shaping their lives but ultimately dooming them to tragedy, sending them off to war and worse. Miss Brodie wielded charisma and conviction and certitude as weapons to inflict scorn and shame on her students. Snape too. But Mr Gooden had them both beat with charisma and conviction in abundance and he directed scorn and shame like guided missiles against a Palestinian hospital.

Mr Gooden was an evangelical Christian and ran our school’s Good News Club, a welcome refuge from a rainy winter’s lunch break. To those who didn’t know him well, he had a reputation as a ferocious disciplinarian. To those lucky enough to have him for chemistry, he was a magical storyteller, bringing his subject to life and instilling a love of science that has lasted a lifetime. Mr Gooden, the chemistry teacher would be a shoe-in for Teacher of the Year. Mr Gooden the form teacher would merit a different award entirely.

Time for a quick sidebar to explain some features of English schools for American readers. JK Rowling captured a great many features of the British Grammar School with surprising fidelity. The sorting of First Years into houses to foster competition and team spirit is spot on (give or take a Sorting Hat) and, while we didn’t have Quidditch, we did have regular inter-house rugby, cricket and track/field tournaments (Lester forever!). Ordinary and Advanced Wizarding Levels are essentially O levels and A levels—the exams you take at age 16 and 18 that determine your success or failure in life. One big difference between an English school day and my American kid’s day is that we all travelled from class to class in a herd, only occasionally breaking ranks to split up for Latin or German. Our herd travelled everywhere together including, in our case, ice skating every Sunday and the occasional trip to Margate on the train. American kids (mine at least) miss out on that camaraderie and have to work harder for their friendships. That’s one thing that my school got right. The “Form” system made it so easier to build friendships and many of my friendships from that period have lasted a lifetime.

The official name for our herd was a ‘form’. Each form had a Form Room and a Form Teacher who started and ended each day with a roll call and was responsible for the discipline and life lessons that didn’t fall under the rubric of the curriculum proper. Our Form Teacher was a prominent part of our lives (like Professor McGonegall was for Harry, Ron and Hermione) and could make those lives great or awful according to their tastes. Mr Gooden was our Form Teacher for my second and third year of grammar school (7th & 8th grade for ‘mercans).

My first day in Form 2P was filled with trepidation. Mr Gooden’s reputation as a tyrant loomed but, like many a dictator, Mr Gooden up close was quite personable; charismatic even. Our days began with laughter and inspiration and I was soon grateful for a teacher that took an active interest in our lives. We were lucky to have Mr Gooden for chemistry too and he was a born showman in the chemistry lab. How well I remember the zinc and sulphur explosion! What better introduction to molecules than the oil drop experiment?

Mr Gooden’s active interest in the form room extended to encouraging us all to donate to his special charity collection every Tuesday morning. Mr Gooden’s class was consistently the most generous in the school and he made sure that we all gave until it hurt, publicly shaming anyone who fell short. He also made sure we “volunteered” for any extra-curricular project that required work. Character-building stuff, I am sure and, considered in isolation, something to be commended. But eventually the constant pressure to “volunteer” for good deeds and give money for good causes became oppressive. But it was on disciplinary issues where Mr Gooden really crossed the line.

I’ll confess right now that I was not the most well-behaved child at Chis and Sid. I had more than the average number of detentions. The average number was close to zero but, when the headmaster announced the detentions in assembly every Tuesday and Thursday, a handful of offenders were named over and over. It was rare that the list of miscreants did not include some combination of Monroe, Harding, Winch or Lawrence. Detention began with a certificate signed by the offended teacher and counter-signed by the offender’s parents.

Other schools had a punishment called detention but it was a pale imitation of the elaborate ritual of shame that Chis and Sid inflicted on its naughtier students. Mr Gooden rarely gave out the official sanctioned punishment though. Mr Gooden’s justice was more personal; more primal. It began with a barrage of scorn for anyone who did not live up to his lofty expectations. He had a way of focussing his ray of humiliation on a single student while making every other student feel that they too had let him down. Class punishments were common but it was the private discipline that provoked the most fear.

My first private chastening came after that episode in Ms Furey’s French class. I’ll confess again that I was often the naughtiest boy in her class. I spent much of third year French in the corridor outside Ms Furey’s classroom, reflecting on my sins, and far too many of my lunch breaks writing “Le silence aide le travail” 100, 200 or sometimes 500 times for some transgression or other.

I wasn’t the only naughty boy in the class though and, on that particular day, I was far from the naughtiest. As I recall, on that terrible day, Martin and David were the instigators and at the peak of the mayhem most everyone in the class contributed to poor Ms Furey’s breakdown. I was, at worst, a part of the chorus, embarrassed by her tears.

When I received my summons, I knew that evidence was not going to help my case. At roll call the next day, Mr Gooden said those dread words “Oh, and Kevin, I want to see you outside the Staff Changing Room at 12:15.” As anyone who has been on the receiving end of Mr Gooden’s wrath knows, the Staff Changing Room is where Mr Gooden kept his Size 14 Dunlop Green Flash plimsolls. The routine became depressingly more familiar with each punishment but the first time was special in its banality. First of all, the penitent (me) had to perform a series of stupid little tasks while Mr Gooden changed out of his tracksuit. Fetch me this. Bring me that. Deliver this thing. Next, you had to stare into those limpid pools of justice while he lectured you on the responsibilities and virtues required of a student at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School. Finally, you had to take off your purple blazer, hang it on a coat hook and bend over to touch your toes while you waited for the Dunlop Green Flash to deliver the justice of the righteous Mr Gooden. The first whack was almost hard enough to knock me off my feet. The second and third came with increasing force as Mr Gooden got comfortable with his swing. Just three swings this time.

I forget the occasion for my second visit to the Staff Changing Room but it obviously was not sufficient because, on my third visit, the Green Flash plimsolls had been replaced by a cane and not one of those swishy canes like they used in old movies either. This was the kind of cane that the rule of thumb was apocryphally named for and each swing resulted in a thud rather than a swish leaving a welt of pink on my stinging backside. At least I was allowed to keep my trousers on.

As far as I know, Mr Gooden’s extra-curricular punishments were entirely off the record and neither the school administrators nor our parents were ever aware of them. I certainly never told my parents and would not have received any sympathy if I had. Mum had too many stories of corporal punishment of her own to be impressed by mine. I often wonder if Mr Gooden would have got in trouble if anyone in authority had known what he was up to. The closest I came to telling anyone about it was when Paul Winch and I got to enjoy some double discipline.

I forget the exact crime this time around but Paul and I were kept back after class. I was sent to wait on the landing outside room 51 while Paul went in for the opening bout of punishment. I don’t know who started shouting first but their verbal missiles were soon joined by wooden ones as they began to curse and throw chairs at each other. First Paul would scream some obscenity and throw a chair or two then Mr Gooden would shout something back and throw more chairs. This continued for an eternity while I listened in terror, knowing that I was next. Mr Berry—Head of Chemistry and Mr Gooden’s boss— walked by just at that moment and asked me why I was still in school so late and why I was crying. I told him I was about to be caned but said nothing of the roar of Bedlam that continued above our heads. Mr Berry said something vaguely soothing, grabbed his coat and headed for home. I waited for my turn in the chamber of horrors.

Eventually the ruckus died down and Mr Gooden came down the stairs to tell me to wait by his car. Paul told me later that he had broken Mr Gooden’s cane. He must not have replaced it because I never felt its bite again and Mr Gooden switched to more psychological torments. Mr Gooden drove me home that day and made me wait in the car while he spoke with my mother. I’ve no idea what he said but, when I got inside, I told my mother “I don’t want to stay at Chis & Sid”. “I know”, she replied.

Not long after the chair-throwing episode, Paul went away to some kind of prison for young offenders.. By then I was totally disengaged from school and had vowed to leave at the earliest opportunity. I never did another lick of homework or took another book home from school. In most classes, I did no work at all. No official work anyway. I read Homer under the desk in my Latin class and I wrote programs in Basic in French class. Still I came first in my class every year.

I need to explain that.

In American schools, most of one’s grade comes from the opinion of one’s teacher. In England of that era, one’s grade came entirely from how one performed in the end of year exams. End-of-year exams took three weeks and bore little resemblance to the pathetic little multiple choice tests that they do on this side of the pond. For each subject, there were two exams of three hours each. There was no “teaching to the test”, the bête-noir of American teachers. It was teach-teach-teach for most of the year then now-let’s-see-what-you-understand-you-little-fuckers.

I came first in my class at the end of the third year. I won a prize for the most improved student (last-in-class to first-in-class is hard to beat) and Mr Gooden was furious.

One of my teachers, Ms McDonnell was new to teaching and, frankly, not very good at it. She taught physics (my favorite subject) and she taught it very badly. I paid close to zero attention to her awful lessons and did less than zero of the work assigned. When the exam results were published, only two students in her class passed. I got 70% and John Burford got 57%. No one else got more than 34%. Mr Gooden made me stay in class for every break and lunch break until the end of term while I completed a year of homework that I had not done.

The last two years of Chis & Sid couldn’t pass fast enough.

I had nothing more to do with Mr Gooden but by then I had a deep seated contempt for all teachers, even the good ones like Mr Lewis. We had a Mr “Chemistry” Lewis and Mr “Biology” Lewis (AKA “Basher” Lewis). Chemistry Lewis was a genius. I’ll always remember the day that he sat in as a substitute for biology when Basher was out sick. He asked us “So what topic are you supposed to be learning today?” “Cell-division” we replied. Mr Chemistry Lewis proceeded to give the lesson on meiosis and mitosis far better than Mr Biology Lewis ever could. I really felt that I had let him down when he reviewed my chemistry exercise book and I had done only two pages of work in two years.

When ‘O’ levels came around I came equal first with three other students all of whom went to Oxford and Cambridge. But I was already out of there, headed for life in a different colour blue. In my 16 year old head, I thought that the Navy would be more of a challenge than two more years of school and ‘A’ levels.

How stupid I was.

Epilogue

I did four more years of schooling in the Navy and the exams were just appallingly, trivially easy. I even did ‘A’ level maths in my spare time just to make sure my brain had not completely rotted (it took me six weeks and I got an A). I often wonder what path my life might’ve taken if I’d gone to Cambridge instead.

Thanks Mr Gooden. You changed my life.

The essay takes many twists and turns and each one of them is a fascinating journey in its own right.

It starts out as a review of the movie The Reader.

I was watching Tony Scott on the Charlie Rose program, and he said, in connection with “The Reader,” that he was getting tired of so many movies about the Holocaust. I didn’t agree or disagree. What I thought was, “The Reader” isn’t about the Holocaust. It’s about not speaking when you know you should.

[It’s great that The Reader is not about the holocaust because I’d like to see it and my wife wouldn’t watch it with me if it were about the holocaust.]

In his first meander, Ebert uses Twain

That wise man Mark Twain told us: “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from others.”

as an excuse to reel off a laundry list of Things He Believes

This is true. It is even sometimes true of me. Perhaps of you. However, there are certain areas in which I consider myself an authority, like the movies. I have devoted years to learning about the Theory of Evolution. I think Creationism is superstitious poppycock. I believe the problem with the literal interpretation of the Bible is that anyone can easily discover its support for the opinions they already hold. I believe Conservatism has proven itself disastrous every time it has been implemented in this country.

After meandering past speaking engagements, dinner parties, segregation and atheism – with every meander a gem – he ends up back at The Reader.

The Reader, Ebert says, [Spoiler Alert!] is about a woman’s wrongful conviction that she could have easily avoided if only she could overcome her shame about her inability to read. A key witness realizes this but fails to speak up because of his own shame that he had an affair with her.

This is where his essay gets interesting because it leads Ebert into a riff on the power of shame

We learn of young mothers who put their babies in dumpsters because they are ashamed of their pregnancy. Young fathers who murder their girlfriends, simply because of the universal human reality of pregnancy. We hear of prison guards who follow orders to torture, orders they know are illegal and immoral. And leaders who issue the orders. We learn of terrorists who die and kill others rather than face the shame of being frightened to. We hear of gang members who kill people unknown to them, not because they want to, but because they have been shamed into “proving” themselves as men. We hear of Wall Street executives who lead their firms into what they know are dangerous and unsound practices, because they would be shamed to be outdone by rival executives. They steal the savings from millions of victims, so they can win a pissing contest.

and ultimately triggers Ebert’s memory of a shameful episode in his own past. Ebert’s shame story is about cheating in a game of chess with a blind man who was his very good friend.

More than 40 years have passed since that game, but I have not forgotten it. I can never even think of the University of Cape Town without it coming to mind. My cheating itself was shameful. When I denied it, that was despicable. Herb, I hope someone reads this and tells you about it. You were right. Of course, you always knew you were right, and we both knew that I had lied.

Just reading that makes me feel that familiar burning sensation that heralds the unbidden return of my least favourite memory. Suddenly I am transported back to my fourth-year Latin exam in Room 41 and

David Samuel is handing me his exercise book under the desk.

We are halfway through our end of year exams.

Our exams are kind of a big deal because, unlike America in 2009, in England circa 1981 the only thing we will have to show for all our years of schooling is a certificate that said how we performed in a bunch of exams — O Levels — that we’ll take at the end of the fifth year (aged 16).

We do two of these three hour exams for each O Level (plus an oral exam for languages). I’m taking 9: English, English, Maths, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, French and Latin.

Every year until now has ended with a solid battery of two weeks of exams with 8 hours a day under exam conditions. Our grades throughout the year are based on classwork and homework but all that was tossed aside after the exams. Only the exam counts. The fourth year exams are special because they are a dress rehearsal for the real thing at the end of the fifth year.

For me, exams are a godsend. The laziest student ever (until I have children of my own), I have made avoiding work into an art-form. In the last two years of chemistry, I have written a total of three and a half pages of notes and have done no homework at all. I read computer magazines in Latin class and I am teaching myself BASIC in French. I am bottom of my class. In two weeks I will be top of my class. Again. They stopped giving me Most Improved Student Award after four years of improving from worst in class to best in class every exam time.

Best of all, I genuinely enjoy exam time. We have no homework assigned and I have no need to study. The fact that I have no notes to study from is irrelevant. I will not open a book. Last Christmas, Miss Mills said that we should be studying about 6 hours a day by now. I have not studied for 6 hours total in my whole life and Not At All for these exams.

Each subject has two exams: one essay-based; one short answers. In Latin, the second exam requires us to translate passages of Latin.

In class, we have translated Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Tacitus’ Histories, umpteen poems by each of Ovid, Horace and Catullus and the complete works of Pliny the Younger. In the exam, we’ll have to translate some 10 or 12 of these.

And now I’m sitting in the back row of room 41, next to David Samuel and, when I open the exam paper, I realize that I don’t know anything.

It’s easy to fake your way through translating French. It’s all “Ou est la Place de la Concorde” but Latin is much more precise, more distant. More foreign. And you certainly can’t fake your way through poetry. They expect us to understand it.

David Samuel leans over, opens his bag and shows me that he has a book with all the translations. “Give it to me”, I signal. He smiles and hands it over. I copy just enough to save me from being booted out of Latin class because Mr Hickey doesn’t want bad students sullying his class’s record.

That feeling of dread when I opened the exam paper inspired me to study for an exam for the first time in my life.

I still didn’t study for Maths or any of the sciences because they were easy (all As, in case you are wondering). Nor English Lang because: what’s the point? Neither did I study for English Lit as I had never got better than 8% and studying wasn’t going to make much difference.

[I didn’t even read one of the assigned books – Brighton Rock – until I was 23. When I did finally read it, I fell in love with Graham Greene and have now read all of his books. If I had read it at 15 like I was supposed to, I might’ve gotten a better grade at ‘O’ Level but I might’ve hated Greene and never read him again.]

But I did study Latin.

I memorized the translations of every single one of those histories, poems, legal documents and letters to Emperor Trajan except Pliny X.96 — the one about the Christians — but that’s a story for a different day.

I still remember many of them by heart now.

That Suffenus, whom we know well Varus,
Is a charming, witty and sophisticated man.
Yet at the same time he writes more verse than anyone else.

Not, as usually happens, on second class papyrus.
He uses new papyrus, all ruled with lead and smoothed with pumice…

But, more than the poems, I remember the shame because it eats into my conception of who I am. I have barely spoken with David Samuel since that day but I don’t think I could even look him in the eye if I saw him again.

Worse still, he was the boyfriend (and eventually married) my girlfriend’s best friend. I imagine him telling Sarah who tells Jo: Remember Kevin? The kid who was good at exams? He was a cheat. I saw him. He used to take books into the exams.

David Samuel’s mum used to work with my mum. They were very competitive about their offspring as mothers often are. What if David’s mum knows I am a cheat?

I never cheated again but that once was enough to give me a lifetime of shame.

The common element of all these shame stories leads me to propose the following hypothesis:

Our greatest shame arises when we do something that is not just bad but that conflicts with our image of ourselves.

Ebert’s is bleaker:

I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along. We vote with the tribe. What would we have done during the rise of Hitler? If we had been Jews, we would have fled or been killed. But what if we were one of the rest of the Germans?

It’s a shame that the movie is about the holocaust because I’d really like to go see it but my normal movie-going companion won’t take me so it will be condemned to my Netflix queue where it will fester until it finally arrives and sits on the shelf for three weeks because I can only watch those movies after everyone else has gone to bed which seems to get later and later as the years go by.

It’s a shame, I tell you.

Some tips:

Introduction

Write the introduction first. It will get you started and saves you from the agony of staring at a blank page for hours. Once you have decided on the argument you want to make, the introduction will write itself.

It will usually be something like this:

Philosopher X described how XXX. In this essay, I will begin by explaining XXX then describe what X claimed about XXX. I will also explain why philosopher Y disagreed with X. Finally, I will explain why X is wrong (or right) and include examples to show why XXX does not (or does) make sense because ZZZZ. I’ll start by describing XXX.

Write more in the introduction than feels comfortable. I usually write about 80-100 words. Include the gist of your conclusion in your introduction and say how you will go about proving it. Your introduction should tell your reader everything you plan to say: don’t leave any surprises until the end.

Build an outline first

I used to just write-write-write until I got to the end but I found that building an outline gives me a bit more control over what I am writing (Thanks, Dr Stuart!).

Your outline will vary depending on the question you are answering but will usually be some variant of:

• Introduction
• Here’s where I give some background and some definitions so you know what I am talking about.
• Here’s a philosopher and here’s what they thought.
• Here’s another philosopher who disagreed with him.
• Here’s what I think.
• Here’s why.
  • Here’s why the other philosophers probably think I am wrong.
  • Here’s why I am right and they are wrong.
• Conclusion

Sometimes, I might drill down a level in my outline. For example, if I think five things about XXX, I’ll list the five things under the ‘Here’s what I think‘ section.

Fill in the details

This is the hard part.

Make sure you understand what the question is asking. Make sure you answer the whole question, especially if the question has multiple parts.

Follow your outline as you write your essay. If you have 6 things in your outline and you have to write 1200 words, plan on writing about 200 words on each thing, more or less. If you write more than 200 words on one thing, you’ll have to write a bit less on another thing. I always end up writing way too much and have to edit it down to fit the word count. Usually, the stuff I end up deleting was crap anyway.

The outline gives you a bit of flexibility to move things around or to add or remove bits as you figure out what you really want to write.

Make sure you stay on topic. You have to be relentless about this. If what you are writing doesn’t answer the question, don’t write it. This is what I find hardest and it’s what I agonise over most after I hit SUBMIT.

Conclusion

By the time you write your conclusion, you should have already proven everything you want to prove. Don’t include anything new in your conclusion and don’t claim more than you have proven in the rest of the essay.

Some bonus tips

Know your audience. You are not writing for your tutor, you are writing for an intelligent reader who knows nothing about your topic. This means you have to explain your terms every time you introduce a new idea.

You don’t need to write a mini-biography of your philosopher like you might in other humanities essays. Maybe just provide her dates the first time you mention her.

When you write the ‘what I think’ section, add a bit about why X might disagree with what you said and then explain why X is wrong. You probably want to note several objections like this.

Be sparing with your quotes. It’s better to paraphrase than to quote. Your tutor wants to read what you have to say, not what Philosopher X said. Make sure you add an inline reference every time you quote or paraphrase. I try to limit myself to a couple of quotes per essay. If you do include a quote, say why it’s relevant then explain it or restate it in your own words.

Use lots of signposts so your reader can figure out where they are in your essay. When you finish writing a section, summarise what you just said and then hint at what you are going to say in the next section.

No need to struggle for synonyms like you might in a creative essay. Once you have picked a word for a concept, use the same word every time.

When you are done with your essay, go back and fix your introduction to match what you actually wrote because you almost certainly changed your mind while writing the essay.

Read your essay five or six times. Make edits each time to make the sentences tighter and to clarify any points that are fuzzy. You might decide that your argument works better if you move your paragraphs around or even delete whole paragraphs that don’t really support your argument.

When you are sure your essay is as good as it can be, leave the essay for a day to let the words settle and then edit it again.

Good luck, aspiring philosophers!

I got lots of ideas (and stole a few) from here: https://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/akind/intro01s/writing.htm

A university is a place where people help each other access the highest intellectual goods. A university is a place of heterodidacticism.

An autodidact is someone who learns best on their own, by teaching themselves things. “Heterodidact” is a word I made up to describe the rest of us, for whom learning and knowing is a social activity.

Agnes’s definition cuts to the very heart of what I am searching for in my life right now: learning as a social activity. I’ve never experienced that.

I’ve written before about my life as a Buccaneer Scholar. I left school at 16 and pretty much everything I know I have learned from a book or figured out for myself. I taught myself to code from a book (or, maybe, two books). Even when people tried to teach me stuff, I wanted to learn different stuff. I never really had the experience of learning with other people. I want that.

Agnes has a riff on reading the Iliad as an experience to be shared.

I think the Iliad is one of the greatest things ever made by human beings, but I hadn’t read it in at least seven years. Why not? What was stopping me from picking it up? For that matter, why am I not reading it right now? The answer is that it’s hard to read the Iliad. Have you ever tried? It takes so much energy. All those epithets.

…and all those black ships.

I’m not that different from the students I teach. They get their energy from me, I get my energy from them. That’s how a university works.

This is entirely foreign to me. I’ve always had to do it on my own.

I read the Iliad under my desk when I was supposed to be learning about Bessel functions in Radar Theory class. My instructor caught me reading and did the “Would you like to teach the class?” thing. He gave me the pen and I taught the class. I was able to do it because, as soon as I heard we were going to be studying Bessel functions, I went and learned everything I could about Bessel functions. By the time we came to talk about it in class, second-order differential equations were old hat and the instructor didn’t really understand them very well anyway. I taught the class better than he could.

This was the ever-repeating story of my education.

In every class at school, the day we received the syllabus and our textbooks, I’d go and read all the books and learn everything. By the time we were covering it in class for real, I was bored and interested in something else. While we were learning the subjunctive mood in French, I was writing Z80 code in my rough book. When I was supposed to be learning Z80, four years later, I was reading Plato.

I signed up to do a maths degree with the Open University just as we were leaving for America and my only contact with my tutor was a letter that the postman delivered with my grade about 6 weeks after I snail-mailed each assignment (this was pre-internet).

It was a lonely experience. I’ve always wished for Agnes’s heterodidaction but I’ve never had the opportunity to experience it.

When we came home to England, I decided to fix this. I applied to Bristol University first but they said I needed recent academic experience so, on a whim, I signed up for the Open University again. My plan was to get that little bit of experience and then apply to Bristol again. But now I am at a crossroads. Should I continue with the OU or apply to a brick university?

The Open University is simply wonderful.

The first module, A111, is a whirlwind tour of everything you might want to study in a humanities degree. Poetry, history, philosophy, literature, music, art, drama, creative writing, religion, architecture. I am in learning heaven. But I am still learning on my own. I wish I had someone to share it with.

There’s a scene in Educating Rita where Rita — studying with the Open University — overcomes her imposter syndrome and gets into a heated argument with some “proper students” about literature. That was the moment that Rita finally understood what university was about.

We had a brief moment in my tutor group where we were all totally into Cowper’s “Epitaph on a Hare” and I got a tiny glimpse of heterodidaction…

…but studying in the Open University has been a mostly solitary activity.

I’m coming to the end of my first module — one more essay to write — and now I have to make a decision. Do I continue this lonely journey as an autodidact and just get my degree? Or do I go in search of a community of learners that will challenge and encourage me? Or just forget the whole thing?

My tutor says that wherever I study, philosophy students are pretty much on their own and the OU is as good as it gets. But I have to believe that, somewhere, there’s a community of learners where I can experience heterodidaction for the first time.

Like Rita, I ask myself every day why I am doing this. But, unlike Rita, I still haven’t found what I am looking for.

I left school at 16 and after a full and successful career, I am working towards a degree with the Open University (OU) later in life. I’ve been all STEM all the time ever since I was 12: maths and three sciences at school; sonar engineer in the Navy; software engineer ever since. I even started an OU degree in maths 30 years ago but 70 hours a week at two jobs, a move to California and a brand new baby got in the way and I had to abandon it halfway through.

Now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I thought I’d give it another go but this time I’m studying the humanities. I’m four years into it with one year to go so I thought I’d stop and reflect on what I have learned so far. And maybe rant a bit.

I wanted to study philosophy but the OU doesn’t have a philosophy degree. You have to mix it in with other stuff. The official name of the degree is Arts and Humanities (Philosophy) and the first couple of years are a mishmash of all the humanities. Only then can you focus on your chosen subject.

A111 (Discovering the Arts and Humanities) covers architecture, art, classical studies, colonialism, creative writing, drama, history, literature, music, philosophy, poetry, religion, and sculpture with a different topic every week.

A113 (Revolutions) dives deeper into history, music, philosophy and religion and weaves them all together to explore what happened in The Reformation, Revolutionary France, World War One and The 60s from various points of view.

A222 (Exploring Philosophy) taught us the techniques of philosophy with brief dives into Self, God, Ethics, Knowledge, Mind and Political Philosophy.

A229 (Exploring the Classical World) took us back to ancient Greece and Rome where we enjoyed some drama and Greek statues, read some Roman poetry and interpreted some Roman tombstones.

Here’s what I learned.

I learned to enjoy poetry again. I had a spell in my 20s where I read everything that Byron ever wrote but I’d forgotten how moving poetry can be. Willliam Cowper’s Epitaph on a Hare seemed so modern and so full of humour, I could scarcely believe it was 250 years old.

I loved skipping from topic to topic, week by week in A111. I imagine this is rather like studying in the USA where your degree covers a wide spectrum of materials. Over here, if you are studying biology, you learn biology and they don’t expect you to know anything about Shakespeare or the Constitution. If you are studying literature, you don’t need any calculus. I think our way is better but it was fun to start with a little tour and I learned a lot.

Who knew that Ancient Greek drama could be so moving (Antigone) or laugh-out-loud funny (Lysistrata)? I had read The Iliad and The Odyssey 40 years ago but I understood what they were about this time. Achilles was even more heroic than Brad Pitt and he sulked even more too.

I’ve got to say that going to the British Museum with your Classics teacher is pretty cool. All those ancient bits and bobs in the cabinets actually mean something when there is someone to explain what they are.

I learned to write an essay the way the OU wants me to write it but I really don’t like writing essays this way — or reading them. I don’t understand why anyone does. I’ve tried blogging in the academic style but it sends me to sleep even while I am writing. It’s much more fun to write like a human being. It’s more fun to read too.

I learned some cool writing tricks along the way though. I’ve always saved the punchline for a big reveal at the end but the OU wants you to say what you are gonna say in the introduction. This steals a little of your thunder but it gives the reader a chance to decide whether she actually wants to read what you have written. Probably not.

I learned that philosophy tutors like you to write your introduction in the first person (In this essay, I will show how Sartre’s existentialism will lead to a life of misery…) but tutors in the classics don’t like that at all! Not even a little bit. The third person is required and one can better avoid subjectivity if the passive voice is employed (It will be shown in this essay that use of the first person will result in your distinction being lost).

Philosophers like you to argue with them too. Classics tutors… not so much. That’s a shame because I enjoy arguing with tutors.

The zeitgeist had led me to expect lots of woke stuff but there has been hardly any — they managed to cram it all into a chapter about music in the 1960s. The women in my class seemed to enjoy that much more than I did.

I learned that it’s much easier to study a topic you enjoy rather than one you find boring (Roman tombstones are not as much fun as they sound). I can’t imagine doing a whole degree on a subject that I don’t like but so many people do. I’m not sure why.

I’ve always been fascinated by religion and was inspired by the Noble Eightfold Path. Learning what the monks have for their dinner was less inspiring. Likewise, there’s so much I would want to know about Mary, Mother of God before I might want to study Spanish women who rub statues of her on their tummies. If I were designing a module on religion, I would make it have something to do with God and Jesus and the Qur’an and stuff like that but maybe that’s just me.

Tutors give very little feedback when you are doing well — except Dr S. (*) in my first module. He was brilliant. Dr F. was good too. When you watch movies about university life, there is always a great tutor who inspires and challenges the students to go above and beyond. They don’t have many of those at the OU. Most write “very good… very good…” after each paragraph which is nice but it doesn’t inspire the way that Robin Williams does in Dead Poets’ Society.

(*) Unfortunately, Dr S. was terrible at administrivia and even disappeared for a month without telling anyone. But I will happily trade poor admin skills for great feedback. Dr S. wrote me several 1000-word emails challenging me to dig deeper in my study of the philosophy of mind. Dr S. is the only teacher in my whole life who has done that for me.

I wonder if tutors are overburdened with students who struggle. In the old days, OU students were mostly older and were studying to improve their career prospects or because they were enthusiastic about a topic. The number of younger students has increased in recent years as the expectation that everyone must get a degree becomes oppressive. I wonder how many 18-year-olds who might struggle at any university come to the OU because their mum said they had to get a degree and no one else would take them (*). This is pure speculation but perhaps tutors have to spend more time helping students who struggle leaving less time to inspire students who don’t.

(*) To be clear, I think the Open University is an excellent choice for an 18-year-old who wants to learn. It’s just not a great choice for one who doesn’t. Likewise, I have no issue with students who struggle. It’s the ones who don’t even want to be there who bother me.

As you might expect, it’s hard to make friends when you are studying at home. Most of the WhatsApp groups seem full of 18-year-olds who don’t want to study and they certainly don’t want to talk about the materials they are studying. Drinking and partying and football are usually the hot topics. Luckily for me — perhaps because I forgot to update my address and the OU still had me down as a Californian — I was initially put in a group of international students who were interested in talking about art and literature and we had fun writing poetry together about our absent tutor.

Elizabeth was the only international student who accompanied me to my second module and our WhatsApp group was so appalling we ignored it entirely and had our own discussions every day. About halfway through the course, Elizabeth pinged me to say she had just been diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. I got my diagnosis a couple of weeks later and Elizabeth was the first person I told. We had even more to talk about after that but sadly the cancer took my study buddy away from me right as our final assignment was due.

Philosopher Agnes Callard wrote an essay about heterodidacts. ‘Heterodidact’ is a word she made up to mean ‘someone who learns with other people’ as opposed to ‘autodidact’ which means ‘someone who is self-taught’. Almost everything I know, I’ve taught myself and that has barely changed with four years at the OU. The textbooks are excellent which makes it easy to teach yourself but apart from the occasional online tutorial, you are mostly on your own.

Educating Rita is a movie about a mature student at the Open University and there’s a scene where she finally gets to hang out with some ‘proper students’ and her subject comes alive. That doesn’t really happen in real life. Back when I was doing my maths degree in 1995, I flew home from New York for summer school where I hung out with students like me for a week. The OU doesn’t have summer school any more. They’ve even cancelled face-to-face tutorials. We really are on our own. Working from home too means that I rarely meet a human being I am not related to.

English people don’t like to talk about their grades unless they are getting crap grades. Barely a day goes by without someone on Facebook asking if they can still pass if they got 42% on their last three assignments. This is a big difference from America where they celebrate people who are doing well. Over here, getting a good grade is something to keep to yourself like a dirty secret. But… in each of those awful WhatsApp groups, I’ve had someone ping me and say “Do you mind if I ask how you did in that last assignment?” In every case, the person pinging me has been doing well and wants someone to talk to.

The OU came alive for me when I started my philosophy module. Not only because I was finally doing philosophy but because I found the loveliest group of philosophy students you could wish to find — and argue with. We are still friends two years later as we begin the next philosophy module together. We even managed a pub crawl in London to celebrate our results. In my next module, my fellow students were back to talking about parties and football and Ingrid was my only secret collaborator.

Now that the end of my degree is in sight, I am thrilled to be starting another year of philosophy but I am eager to be done with it all so I can dive deep into the topics that I really care about. My bedside table is piled high with Nozack and Rawls, Sartre and Beauvoir. I want to learn what I want to learn. And I want to write about it.

If you’ve never read philosophy before, you probably expect it to be boring and difficult but lots of people get hooked on philosophy if they give it a chance. I’m especially interested in the question ‘How should we act?’. Maybe you will be interested too.

How should we act?

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) said that when making moral decisions, we should always choose the option that provides ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest number’ (Bentham, 1789). He called this moral theory ‘utilitarianism’. At first glance, Bentham’s theory seems like a good one but his critics objected that utilitarianism neglects many of the virtues that make us human, such as duty, courage and honour. Other critics say that a singular focus on happiness can lead to appalling consequences and that an approach to decision-making based on duty or virtue would give better results. I will argue that a clearer understanding of what we mean by happiness will make these objections evaporate like the morning dew. I will also show that a proper understanding of how choices are made redeems utilitarianism as a moral theory and that happiness is, after all, the good that we seek. I will begin by explaining what I mean by happiness and how it relates to utilitarianism. 

Bentham’s utilitarianism is based on two principles: consequentialism is the idea that the correct action is the one with the best consequences and hedonism dictates that the best consequences are those that provide the most pleasure and the least pain (Bentham, 1789). When faced with a moral choice, utilitarians will choose the option that results in the most happiness. It’s not just our own happiness that counts—that would be selfish—we should also consider everyone who might be affected by our actions both now and in the future. Utilitarianism can be contrasted with other moral theories where, for example, intentions are more important than consequences and virtues such as duty, integrity or obedience to a rule are more important than happiness. I will now look more closely at what Bentham meant by happiness and pleasure.

Bentham, in his description of utilitarianism, seems to use happiness and pleasure interchangeably as though they mean the same thing. Indeed, Bentham’s protégé, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) said that ‘By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain’ (Mill, 1861) but happiness and pleasure are not the same thing at all. Pleasure is a momentary positive emotion that makes us feel good but happiness is a more lasting state of mind. Pleasure occurs in the moment while happiness and the associated qualities well-being, life satisfaction and human flourishing should be considered over a longer period of days, months, years and even a lifetime. An example will illustrate.

A common criticism of utilitarianism is that, if we wish to maximise our pleasure, we could simply inject ourselves with heroin every day. But consider: when you imagine heroin addicts, do you think of them as happy people? Yes, they experience a momentary flash of pleasure as the needle enters their arm but one rarely thinks of heroin addicts as happy. Their lives are not filled with satisfaction, neither are they often described as flourishing. This distinction between pleasure and happiness is not universally accepted but, in this essay, I will use ‘happiness’ to mean a lasting sense of well-being and contentment. With this definition in mind, I will show that happiness—not pleasure—is the proper goal of moral actions and that Bentham’s attempts to measure it were misguided. 

Bentham concocted a scheme for computing pleasure. He called this a hedonic calculus and his aim was a system where one could calculate the precise amount of pleasure that results from an action. To this end, Bentham enumerated the sources of pleasure and pain plus modifiers like intensity, duration, remoteness and the number of people affected. Finally, he prescribed an algorithm to tot up these various pleasures, pains, modifiers and quantities to produce a score, which Bentham called an action’s utility. Thus, when making a choice between two actions, one would choose the action with the highest utility (hence, utilitarianism).

I have two criticisms of Bentham’s calculus: Firstly, as noted above, happiness (not pleasure) is the proper objective of utilitarianism. Secondly, neither pleasure nor happiness can be added up in the way that Bentham imagines. Qualities like happiness, beauty and freedom are often described as incommensurable, which means that, though they can be compared, there is no objective scale that captures the value of the quality (Hsieh and Andersson, 2021). For example, one can compare flowers and say that one particular flower is more beautiful than another but there is no cardinal scale of flower beauty and we cannot calculate the beauty of a flower arrangement by adding up the beauty of the individual roses. Neither can we say that a particular rose is more beautiful than, say, a sunset or the smile of a young child. Similarly for happiness: we can say that we are happier today than we were yesterday but we cannot simply add up our happy days and subtract our sad days to calculate a lifetime happiness score. Our assessment of happiness is more impressionistic and subjective. This incommensurability creates a problem for a theory that aims to maximise happiness but this problem is not insurmountable, as I will show in the next section.

We have seen that we cannot add happiness scores together to obtain a total score but there are also problems with comparing one person’s happiness to another’s. It seems to me that while happiness, like beauty, is not entirely objective, it is not entirely subjective either. At the extremes, we might all agree that a poorly-treated slave working a copper mine, for example, is probably less happy than an emancipated slave running a successful café thus making emancipation an obvious choice for a utilitarian but it gets harder to decide when the contrast between outcomes is less stark. Are astronauts happier than gardeners? Would the country be happier with more lawyers or more accountants? Will the citizens of Bristol be happier with a beautiful garden in Queen Square or with a highway running through the middle of it? Opinions will vary.

We should not expect utilitarianism to provide all the answers but it does provide a guide to the right questions to ask, both in our personal lives and in public life. Whenever we make policy decisions, we should be asking ‘Does this policy make people happier?’ and we should think about ALL the people affected by the decision. For example, when thinking about the highway through Queen Square, we should think about the old people sitting quietly on park benches and the students playing volleyball on a Sunday afternoon as well as the commuters speeding home to their families after a day’s work in the city. We should think about the deaths caused by particulate matter from polluting diesel vans as well as the frustration of waiting for a bus that will probably be late again. Decisions like this are difficult and must take into account a diversity of views but focusing on the consequences helps guide us towards the right choice, even when the choice is difficult to make. As we have seen in the arguments about clean air zones and low-traffic neighbourhoods, the hardships imposed on tradesmen who can’t afford to replace their polluting vans are important but so is the happiness of the children who can no longer play in the street because of the overabundance of traffic. While we can’t directly compare the happiness of the drivers of polluting trucks with the happiness of the children dying of respiratory diseases (Royal College of Physicians, 2016), we can focus on their respective happiness to give us a common basis for discussing a solution. 

At this point, it is worth noting briefly that critics—and occasionally supporters—sometimes claim that the proper goal of utilitarianism is the maximisation of utility points rather than happiness. I suggest that substituting the more abstract utility points for the more concrete happiness introduces unnecessary ambiguity. When speaking of utility points, it’s inevitable that we lazily think of them as a kind of currency that can be averaged and summed in a way that happiness cannot. Furthermore, there is a certain rhetorical power in asking ‘But does this make you happier?’. We can, perhaps, imagine that a road through the middle of Queen Square results in more utility points (whatever they are) but it is harder to imagine that it results in greater happiness. Similarly, when choosing the design for a new building, we should ask ‘Which design will bring the most happiness?’ but when we think of a building that is ‘utilitarian’, we think of a grey, Soviet-era office building—the very opposite of a building that makes us happy. Happiness is not measured in utility points. It’s unfortunate that Bentham chose such an ugly name for a theory that aims to maximise happiness but, unhappily, we appear to be stuck with it. I will now briefly consider some other common criticisms of utilitarianism before looking at some alternative ethical theories.

Several arguments against utilitarianism describe extreme scenarios where the rights of a single person or minority group are weighed against the pleasure of thousands. This supposedly highlights utilitarianism’s neglect of traditional virtues like honour, justice and respect but I contend that many such scenarios can be resolved by returning the focus to happiness rather than some other consequence that the critic has chosen to highlight. An often-quoted scenario describes a trip to the hospital for a minor operation. While at the hospital, the doctors discover that you are a perfect match for several transplant patients so they decide to kill you and harvest your organs so that five other patients can be saved (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2022). Five lives for one. It is often claimed that this is a knockdown case against utilitarianism but let’s look more closely at the consequences. Firstly, utilitarianism does not aim to maximise the number of lives saved: it maximises happiness. If you were the doctor in this case (or a theatre nurse, or one of the patients or the parent of a patient), would you be happy to kill a healthy patient to harvest their organs? If so, I suggest that you are a moral monster and a greater focus on the happiness of the people around you might save you from any number of moral crimes. Secondly, if hospitals made a habit of killing healthy patients to harvest their organs, no one would ever visit a hospital again which would result in even more deaths and more unhappiness. We must consider all of the consequences of an action, not just the immediate effects. Killing patients to harvest their organs is not a good strategy for maximising happiness.

We might also consider scenarios that posit an act of cruelty that results in pleasure for the many. Utilitarianism is often claimed to justify the torture of Christians by Romans in the Colosseum. Supposedly, the excruciating deaths of the Christians are justified by the enjoyment experienced by the baying crowd but let’s pause for a moment to wonder: Does the idea of torturing Christians make you happy? I didn’t think so. Me neither. It didn’t make the Christians happy either. I don’t expect that many people in modern society would be happy watching people torn to pieces by animals. Perhaps people in less moral times enjoyed watching torture but we are prescribing a morality for us, not them. Scenarios like these often fail to consider a wide enough circle when thinking about whose happiness matters and we can, perhaps, wonder whether the dramatic reductions in violence and murder over the years are a result of this growing circle of empathy (Pinker, 2011).

Steven Pinker’s (1954-) book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Pinker, 2011), plots the relentless decline in violence over the past several decades, centuries and millennia. This decline manifested in fewer deaths from war, executions and domestic violence. To illustrate just one example from hundreds, the chart below shows a tenfold to fiftyfold decline in the rates of murder in Europe over the last 700 years (Pinker, 2011).

One of the reasons Pinker offers for this decline is that, where humans previously had a very parochial view of our obligations to our fellow humans, our circle of empathy has grown to the point where we now consider more than just our immediate neighbours when we decide whose lives—and whose happiness—matters. Thinking back to the Colosseum, we should not only be weighing the happiness of the crowd against the happiness of the handful of Christians in the arena; we should also be thinking of every Christian—and every other potential victim—who might fear being thrown to the lions. From our viewpoint in history, we’ve learned that societies are happier when we don’t face the threat of arbitrary violence and cruelty.

I mentioned earlier that it’s often claimed that utilitarianism neglects other virtues such as honour, dignity and duty in its monomaniacal focus on happiness. Consider again Pinker’s chart showing the decline in murder over the centuries and the comparable decline in war and ethnic violence. How many of those wars from centuries past resulted from the exaltation of duty and honour? Consider cultures that value honour codes such as the Taliban or Ku Klux Klan or gang cultures in New York and Juarez. How many revenge murders and female circumcisions could be avoided if the families valued happiness more than they valued honour and duty? This is not to say that honour and duty are unimportant but they are only important to the extent that they promote happiness. If you believe the honour of Russia requires that you invade Ukraine, you should still pause to consider how happy the widows and orphans of Russia and Ukraine will be when your honour is restored. Similarly, some ethical systems require their followers to follow the rules in a holy book written long ago. Again, following the rules is worthwhile to the extent that following the rules makes us happy. If God is Love, as the holy books claim, then God would want us to be happy more than He would want us to follow arbitrary rules.

There are, of course, limits to utilitarianism as a guide to ethical behaviour. Humans are social animals moulded by millions of years of primate evolution and thousands of years of cultural evolution. The famous trolley problem illustrates this well. A brief reminder: a runaway railway trolley is hurtling along the tracks towards a group of five railway workers. The only way to prevent their certain deaths is to pull a lever that will divert the trolley to a side track where only one worker will perish. Should you pull the lever? Most people say yes and offer some version of consequentialism as justification. However, if you change the scenario slightly and, instead of merely pulling a lever to divert the trolley, you suggest that pushing a fat man onto the tracks to stop the trolley will save the five in peril, most people say that, no, you shouldn’t push someone in front of a runaway trolley, even if it would save five lives. Why is there such a big difference in choices even though the consequences will be the same in both cases? It’s tempting to try to explain this in terms of happiness—who would be happy to live in a world where someone might push you in front of a train at any moment? A better explanation is to think about why we have such a visceral reaction to the idea of pushing someone in front of a train when merely pulling that lever is a moment for quiet reflection. The answer is that all those years of evolution as a social animal have given us certain instincts: it’s wrong to push people to their deaths.

Daniel Kahneman (1934-) in Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2012), suggests that we have evolved two separate circuits in our brains for making decisions: System One makes decisions instinctively based on rules crafted by evolution and policed by our emotions: we recoil instinctively against the idea that we should push someone to their death. But in the pull-the-lever scenario, we have no relevant instincts and the decision has to be made more rationally by System Two. Joshua Green (1974-), in Moral Tribes (2015), compares these two systems to the automatic mode and manual mode on a camera. The camera in automatic mode has been designed to take perfectly adequate photos in most situations but, occasionally, you need to switch to manual mode to get the lighting just right. In the same way, we have been conditioned by evolution to make many moral decisions without reflection (No killing! No adultery! No Stealing! No pushing fat men in front of trains!) but, occasionally, a situation arises where we need to stop and reflect. In such situations, we should pause to think about which choice would result in the greatest happiness. This isn’t a concern for governments making policy decisions—in fact, Paul Bloom, in Against Empathy (2016), argues that our moral instincts are a poor guide to government policy—but, for personal morality, we should accept that utilitarianism is limited by human nature. There are limits as to how much rational thinking can override our instincts and how far we can stray from the instincts that evolution and tradition have given us. Any moral theory must be grounded in human nature to be successful.

Human nature and cultural traditions sometimes get it wrong. Sometimes the System One heuristics that worked well for our ancestors on the savannah no longer apply in the twenty-first century. Similarly, the cultural traditions from ages past may impede our happiness and should be updated. G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) gave us advice on how to think about outdated habits and traditions in the parable of Chesterton’s Fence.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Chesterton, 1929.

Applying Chesterton’s logic to the question of whether to allow same-sex marriage, for example, the fence was blocking the path to happiness for countless gay couples but was thought to have some important value to society. Furthermore, many claimed that the ancient rule was supported by human nature as evidenced by the disgust they feel at the idea of gay sex. The ban on same-sex marriage was eventually overturned in England and the USA by appealing to equal rights but the legislators could have reached the same conclusion by appealing to the happiness principle. Only a decade later, we can measure the increased happiness in the smiles in the wedding photographs and in the same-sex couples who can now grow old together. Traditions often contain hidden wisdom but sometimes we are mistaken about the value of a tradition as the increase in happiness in the case of same-sex marriage makes clear.

This same observation about human nature also applies to the question of whose happiness we should be concerned with. Evolution has trained every mother to value her own child’s happiness more than the child’s in the next village, country or continent. Hard-core utilitarians might claim that these mothers betray the spirit of utilitarianism by preferring their own offspring but I’ll note again that for any moral theory to be successful, it has to work with human nature. One could imagine deciding whether to give your last jelly bean to your true love (Zero 7, 2004) or to a child in Sri Lanka whom you have never met but the second option stretches human nature beyond the breaking point. There may be extreme altruists (Macfarquhar, 2016) who can send all their possessions to faraway beneficiaries but that’s too much to ask of the rest of us. Donating to a child in Sri Lanka is a fine thing, but your own children deserve to be happy too.

You’re the warmth in my summer’s breeze
You’re the ivories in my ebony key
You would share your last jelly bean
And you would somersault in sand with me

— Zero 7

One controversy among utilitarians concerns whether we can make individual utilitarian decisions in isolation or whether we should implement rules that constrain people to the happiest choice. Consider a grove of bluebells that delights passing ramblers with their Spring beauty. A family of ramblers passing the grove might decide that a few armfuls of bluebells would brighten up their kitchen and they decide to take some home with them. The next family decides the same and, before long, all the bluebells are gone and subsequent ramblers are made sad by their absence. In such a situation, we might decide to create a rule: DO NOT PICK THE BLUEBELLS. Camus assures us that ‘Integrity has no need of rules’ (Camus, 1942) and we might hope that the harvesting ramblers would consider the happiness of subsequent ramblers but, sadly, not every rambler has integrity and, even if they did, a long sequence of diligent ramblers might still exhaust the beauty of the bluebells and a rule is required to prevent it. Until everyone has learned to think about the happiness of others, we’ll need rules to encourage them to do the right thing anyway.

As we have seen, critics pose many challenges to utilitarianism that side-step the idea that the greatest happiness for the greatest number is the most important aim for society. Many of these challenges miss the mark because they assume some goal other than happiness: heroin addicts are not famous for being happy; asking doctors to kill their patients is unlikely to make doctors or patients happy; feeding Christians to the lions would not, in the modern world, make most people happy. Other challenges require an extreme stance regarding whose happiness is important. Yes, it’s important to donate to charities that feed orphans in Sri Lanka but not if it leaves your own children hungry and unhappy. Charity begins at home. It’s important to be expansive when one considers whose happiness will be affected by a decision but if a moral theory is to escape the philosopher’s armchair and thrive in the streets, it needs to be accessible to the people we wish to act upon it and asking mothers to neglect their own children is asking too much. Similarly, asking a community of neighbours to give preference to a community on the other side of the world is unlikely to result in either goodwill or happiness. We are constrained by our natures.

Critics of utilitarianism are quick to point out its limits: we can’t accurately calculate a happiness score; we can’t easily decide who should be in the moral circle and who should be outside it when we are deciding whose happiness is important; and it’s sometimes impossible to decide which of two competing happiness claims should take priority. And yet, still, we should always ask of any moral decision: Will this choice make more people happy? Sometimes the happiest choice will be obvious. Other times, such as when weighing the unhappiness that results from a £12.50 ultra-low emission charge against the unhappiness that results from children dying from vehicle pollution, the trade-off is less obvious but, nevertheless, thinking about the happiness of everyone affected by a decision is the best place to start.

References

Bentham, J. (1789) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. 

Bloom, P. (2016) Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.

Camus, A. (1942) The Myth of Sisyphus.

Chesterton, G.K. (1929) The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic.

Green, J. (2015) Moral Tribes.

Hsieh, N and Andersson, H. (2021)  ‘Incommensurable Values’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/value-incommensurable/

Kahneman, D. (2012) Thinking Fast and Slow.

Macfarquhar, L. (2016) Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help.

Mill, J.S. (1861) Utilitarianism.

Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. 

Royal College of Physicians. (2016) Every breath we take: the lifelong impact of air pollution. Available at: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/every-breath-we-take-lifelong-impact-air-pollution

Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2022) ‘Consequentialism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition). Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/consequentialism 

Zero 7 (2004) ‘Somersault’, When It Falls [CD, 5050467 0987 5 6]. London: East West Records.

But the one subject that they really need to teach more of is rhetoric. Jay Heinrich believes that every parent should teach their children to argue and I agree.

To disagree reasonably, a child must learn the three basic tools of argument. I got them straight from Aristotle, hence the Greek labels: logos, ethos, and pathos.

Heinrich goes through each of the elements of rhetoric in turn and illustrates it with examples from arguments with his children.

Logos is argument by logic. If arguments were children, logos would be the brainy one, the big sister who gets top grades in high school. Forcing my kids to be logical forced them to connect what they wanted with the reasons they gave.

Mary won’t let me play with the car.

Why should she?

Because she’s a pig.

So Mary should give you the car because she’s a pig?

Repeat the kid’s premise (she’s being a pig) with her conclusion (therefore she should let me play with the car), and she has to think logically.

Logos is the one that gets technical people in trouble with their non-technical wives. Ethos is what gets them out of trouble. Sometimes.

Ethos, or argument by character, employs the persuader’s personality, reputation, and ability to look trustworthy. (While logos sweats over its GPA, ethos gets elected class president.) My kids learned early on that a sterling reputation is more than just good; it’s persuasive. In rhetoric, lying isn’t just a foul because it’s wrong, it’s a foul because it’s unpersuasive. A parent is more likely to believe a trustworthy kid and to accept her argument. For example, if both children – the entire list of suspects – deny having eaten the last cookie, ethos becomes important.

Me: One of you took the cookie.

Dorothy: Have I ever stolen cookies before?

Me: Good point. George?

Careful with pathos. Especially if you have a daughter.

Then there’s pathos, argument by emotion. It’s the sibling who gets away with everything by skillfully playing on heartstrings. When a kid learns to read your emotions and play them like an instrument, you’re raising a good persuader.

Dorothy: Dad, you look tired. Want to sit down?

Me: Thanks. Where did you have in mind?

Dorothy: Ben & Jerry’s.

The article was even better the second time I read it. You should read it too.