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.

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.

And if I can’t think? I’ll go on anyway because a) I have nothing to lose (I can’t think, remember?) and 2) How do you know I can’t think? Maybe I really can think but just can’t communicate what I am thinking.

I expect the state of Ebert’s face leaves a lot of people thinking “I wouldn’t want to live like that” but those people are missing the most beautiful part of Roger Ebert. He is absolutely one of the most powerful writers on the planet and I feel privileged that I can read his blog every now and again (but cheated that I only discovered it in the last couple of years).

Even when Ebert is writing about something as trivial as a movie, his words are magnificent but he rarely stays on topic long enough to merit the lowly title of movie critic. More often he writes about himself – which is to say, he writes about me. He wields his pen like a time machine transporting me magically into my memories. To memories of burning shame – or burning pride – or of quiet moments of reflection that repeat, reprise and return.

Today, Ebert started with the madness in Arizona but he was soon telling me about that time a bunch of midshipmen from Dartmouth drove down to Torquay with our consorts from Stover Girls School – me with the blackest girl i ever kissed  – and reminding me how it’s a mistake, if your grass skirt is homemade, to go commando.

But his important topic for today was how the deepest lesson you must learn, as you metamorphose from child to man, is to learn to imagine what it is like to be someone else.

Ebert’s example, as always, is mine.

That brings me back around to the story of the school mural. I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life?

I often wondered, seeing pictures of those brave first students who calmly smashed through the racial barricades in Little Rock, what was it like to be those people?

Not Elizabeth Eckford. It’s easy to imagine being her – just like it’s easy to imagine being Neil Armstrong making his giant leap for mankind, or Geoff Hurst making sure it really is all over now.

What was it like to be the girl behind her with so much hatred for someone she does not even know?

What was it like to be that guy who was so offended by the idea of black people and white people eating lunch together that he poured his drink over them?

What is it like to be so afraid of catholic school children walking on protestant streets that you need to throw bricks at them?

Ebert:

But what about the people in those cars? They don’t breathe that air. They don’t think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don’t like those kids in the school. It’s not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever “they” are.

Ebert’s story starts with the town in Arizona that commissioned a mural for their elementary school and then made the artist lighten the faces after a local politician complained on the radio. It ends long ago with a story from his own life.

One day in high school study hall, a Negro girl walked in who had dyed her hair a lighter brown. Laughter spread through the room. We had never, ever, seen that done before. It was unexpected, a surprise, and our laughter was partly an expression of nervousness and uncertainty. I don’t think we wanted to be cruel. But we had our ideas about Negroes, and her hair didn’t fit. Think of her. She wanted to try her hair a lighter brown, and perhaps her mother and sisters helped her, and she was told she looked pretty, and then she went to school and we laughed at her. I wonder if she has ever forgotten that day. God damn it, how did we make her feel? We have to make this country a place where no one needs to feel that way.

John Newcaso was the first black kid I knew and I am happy to count him among my 7 year old friends. If my memory serves me, John was an orphan and newly arrived from Africa. He was very popular, perhaps because he was the only one who could throw two punches in a second—Hey! We were seven!—or because he held the record for longest flight for a paper aeroplane even after we all copied his design. But we made fun of him because he wore a brace on his legs.

I wonder how he remembers us?

Was his first year in cold, dreary England tremendous fun because he had so many friends and lashings and lashings of ginger beer? Or hell because of our relentless teasing? Or maybe it was just my memory cleaning up the darker corners? I hope not.

Sebastian inherited a tomato farm from his father. It’s a very productive farm of 2,000 acres. In his first year, Sebastian had a bumper crop and made over a million dollars.

Does Sebastian deserve all those tomatoes?

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argued that justice requires fairness and fairness consists of liberty and equality.

The liberty principle says that everyone should have the same fundamental freedoms. Everyone should be free and have an equal right to vote, equal access to public office and to be treated according to the rule of law.

The equality principle has two parts:

1. Everyone should have equal access to opportunity.
2. Inequality is only allowed if it helps the least well-off (this one is complicated and I will come back to it).

Rawls would say that Sebastian did not deserve to inherit his tomato farm just because he was lucky enough to have rich parents. Following the equality principle, everyone should have equal access to opportunity and most people will not inherit a tomato farm.

According to Rawls, no one deserves any reward that results from luck.

Let’s consider another scenario.

More talent = more tomatoes

Theresa has a natural talent for growing tomatoes. Theresa grew up in a poor family but a teacher gave her a tomato plant when she was young. Theresa nutured that plant and discovered that she was good at growing tomatoes. Every year, she sells her tomatoes and uses the profits to buy more plants and more land to grow her tomato plants. By the time she was twenty-three, Theresa had acquired 2,000 acres and was making over a milllion dollars a year.

Does Theresa deserve all those tomatoes?

According to Rawls, none of us deserves rewards that result from ‘accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance’. Theresa was lucky to have a natural talent for growing tomatoes. Her talent is an accident of natural endowment. So, according to Rawls, Theresa does not deserve her tomato farm and she does not deserve the rewards that accrue from it.

A quick aside about the distinction between deserving a reward and being entitled to a reward. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes the following distinction (my phrasing and examples),

1. An entitlement is created by a social institution such as the rules of a lottery. If the rules say that the winner will be awarded £100, then the winner is entitled to the prize money.
2. By contrast, desert comes from a moral sense that someone deserves a reward. A team that cheats to win a World Cup quarter-final might be entitled to go through to the semi-final but they did not deserve it (I’m not still bitter, honest).

Rawls would say that Theresa does not deserve her tomato plants either because her natural talent for growing tomatoes is an accident of luck but I think Rawls is wrong on this point. I believe that someone who has a natural talent for growing tomatoes deserves the tomatoes that she grows and the profits she makes from selling them.

Here’s another case.

Hard work = more tomatoes

Miguel has no talent for growing tomatoes and he did not inherit a tomato farm from his parents. However, Miguel works hard. Theresa hires Miguel to work on her tomato farm and pays Miguel a portion of the profits. Miguel works hard and makes a lot of money from his hard work.

According to Rawls, Miguel’s predisposition to work hard also results from luck. Perhaps Miguel was born with Hard-Work genes or perhaps Miguel’s parents instilled in him the propensity to work hard. Either way, according to Rawls, Miguel was just lucky to develop a character trait that lazy people do not enjoy and Miguel does not deserve the rewards that accrue from his hard work.

It seems to me that Rawls’s account does violence to the meaning of the word deserve. If we can’t reward talent, hard work, diligence, kindness or determination (all accidents of natural endowment or social circumstance) then the word means nothing useful at all.

I propose that contra Rawls, we absolutely should reward talent, hard work, diligence, kindness and determination. The people who have these attributes and put them to productive use should be rewarded more highly than people who do not. I believe it’s a moral issue. Morally, I think that Theresa and Miguel deserve their tomatoes. They worked hard for their tomatoes and the tomatoes belong to them legally (entitlement) and morally (desert).

Rawls said that, although they do not deserve special rewards, talented and hard-working citizens would be entitled to additional rewards if and only if they resulted in benefits to the least well-off in society and I will consider this in a separate post.

Spoilers Ahead!
Before I read the book, I had always understood Lolita to be a sexually precocious teenage girl who seduces an older man.

In this scenario, Humbert is technically guilty but it’s still possible to have a little sympathy for him. It’s only our prudish modern society that frowns on sexual relationships between middle-aged men and teenage girls. In classical times, they were celebrated as the very pinnacle of erotic love. Humbert was just unlucky enough to be born in the wrong era.

But Nabokov makes it very clear that this interpretation is absolutely mistaken.

Humbert himself, as the narrator, describes how he is sexually attracted only to very young girls who have not reached puberty. It’s only in his perverted imagination that Lolita flirts back (she was asking for it, yer honour). Lolita is twelve.

During Lolita’s long imprisonment as Humbert’s sex slave, he rapes her repeatedly while persuading himself and the reader that Lolita is a willing and equal partner. When she refuses some of his more depraved advances, he bribes her by raising her allowance to two dollars (and later steals it back).

Lolita, the book, is a tale of child abuse, plain and simple, and Nabokov makes no apologies for that. The story has no moral value and no moral lessons for the reader. It’s almost as though Nabokov is saying “Look! I am such an awesome writer, I can write this book about paedophilia and you’ll still enjoy it.”

I didn’t enjoy it.

A sucker for punishment, I watched the movie last night.

Jeremy Irons’ Humbert was still a depraved pervert but his Lolita was a more willing partner and much further into puberty than the girl in the book. It was easier to feel a little sympathy for this monster. The movie made it almost seem like a tragic story of forbidden love.

Maybe it’s the difficulty of reproducing the unreliable narrator device on film – or maybe it’s just harder to portray child abuse – but I feel that the movie betrayed the book’s premise. If the movie Lolita were as young as the book Lolita, there would have been outrage – as I assume the author probably intended.

The blog where I snagged the book cover captures the issue succinctly by comparing the various covers that have graced the book over the years.

Which of these books is about a man who preys on little girls?.

I think you’ll agree, it’s this one:

Sting may have struggled to resist the girl who stood too close, but the famous book by Nabokov is about a pervert.

There’s a tiny number of exceptionally good people. Maybe 2%. Your Gandhis and your Martin Luther Kings devote their lives to a cause bigger than themselves. Oskar Schindler saved the lives of over 1,000 Jewish people and Greta Thunberg has committed her young life to preventing the worst effects of climate change.

Larissa MacFarquahar wrote a book, Strangers Drowning, that profiles some of the extreme altruists who decide that helping other people is more important than helping themselves. These people are not necessarily saints or good in all aspects of their lives but, in the domains where they have decided to be good, they are the best.

At the other end of the scale are the bastards and arseholes who totally fuck up our world. I’d guess that about 5% of people are like this. There are rapists and child molesters, yes. On the bigger stage, there are malevolent conmen who will corrupt a nation to burnish their reputations or to satisfy their need for gold-plated toilets or gold-flecked wallpaper. The worst of them send millions to the gas chamber to avenge a perceived slight or to fulfil some monstrous racial prophecy. The most pathetic punch old ladies in the street or lob beer cans into a neighbour’s garden. The rest of us know not to do these things, but the 5% seem to recognize no ethical boundaries at all.

There’s a scene in Midnight Express where the protagonist, Billy, discovers, in the basement of the mental prison in Turkey where he is being held, a shuffling wheel where the maddest of the mad walk endlessly around a pillar. Billy is joined in his shuffling by a Harvard-trained philosopher who explains his theory of bad machines.

Sometimes the factory makes bad machines so they put them here. The bad machines don’t know that they are bad machines but the people at the factory know.

Midnight Express

I subscribe to this idea of bad machines. The bad machines are broken. Maybe they have reasons for being broken — maybe they had an abusive father or an incompetent mother — and we should have sympathy for their plight. But they are broken nonetheless and should be removed from society. We should still show them compassion and treat them with kindness and help them if we can but the first priority should be to protect the rest of us from them. We certainly shouldn’t elect them President or Chancellor or Prime Minister.

But what about the rest?

To recap: we’ve got good people, some very good people and some very bad people. That leaves about 30% who could go either way depending on what might best serve their interests at the time.

I’m not sure what we should do with this ethically flexible 30%. Donald Trump says we should storm the Capitol, so we storm — or at least defend the Stormers. Adolf Hitler says we should round up the Jews, so we round them up — or at least deny that anyone could have known that we were rounding up Jews.

Nigel Farage says that the brown people are swarming onto our shores to take our jobs and our women and to impose their barbaric laws on our society. Of course, we should ship them off to Rwanda or, better yet, send them back where they came from.

The man on the telly says the gays are corrupting our children. We need to ban the gays. Except for that nice Ellen Degeneres and Elton John. They are not hurting anyone and Elton wrote some lovely tunes. But we should ban the rest of them and we certainly should not let them teach our children or get married in our churches.

The ethical behaviour of the easily-persuaded extends from the truly abhorrent to the merely unpleasant. Should I piss in my neighbour’s garden? Should I call this young woman on the internet a cunt? I could go either way — let me see what Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan say first. The Daily Mail said that High Court judges are the Enemy of the People for upholding the rule of law. Donald Trump said much the same thing, as did Stalin and Robespierre before him. Would the Daily Mail lie to me? Would Fox News? Would Joseph Stalin?

There’s a crazy story in Bristol 24/7 today. The building opposite ours, Invicta, has just declared that the pathway that runs along the front of the building will be closed to the public because members of the public (I am guessing around 5%) are pissing on their patios and throwing cans and pizza boxes into the doorways of the people that live there. In an ideal world, this depraved 5% would not exist and the footpath would remain open and free in perpetuity. But in this actual, fallen world, they do exist and they piss and they puke and they break. So what to do? Lock them up? The ethically flexible have other ideas.

The most common response to the article is that people who don’t want people pissing on their patio should not move in next to a pub. This ignores the obvious fact that the patio owners did not actually move in next to a pub. There are a couple of fancy restaurants down near where we live but the pubs did not actually arrive until ten years later. I am in favour of pubs though. I’m just against pissing on patios. Why do I have to choose to have neither or both? Why not allow pubs but ban pissing on patios?

At the peak of the pandemic, when all the pubs were still closed, our little corner of Harbourside was discovered as a cool place to hang out and we had around 500 people sitting on the pontoons by the dock every night with a crate of Thatcher’s Gold and an endless supply of nitrous balloons. There were no public toilets so every one of those 500 people would piss in our garden (and about 5% would shit in our garden) and every morning there would be sacks and sacks of empties and thousand of little silver canisters to clean up. The response from the ethically ambiguous was the same: if you didn’t want 500 people pissing in your garden, you shouldn’t have moved to a place where 500 people piss in your garden.

I’m still young at heart so I take pleasure in seeing the young and the beautiful getting high and swimming in the harbour but my neighbours were a little less pro-party and at times, even I struggled to defend the partiers. The people shitting in our gardens were a bit annoying and the people selling cocaine were maybe taking things a bit too far but most of the revellers were good people who took their cans and their bottles — and their shit — home with them. What was confusing to me was when something obviously bad was happening and the other revellers did nothing to stop it.

The dudes doing wheelies on motorbikes in the middle of a crowd of people were obviously ethically challenged but why did none of the others think to say “Yeah. No. Don’t do that. What you are doing is dangerous. Let’s just enjoy the cool vibes, dude.”

It’s understandable that some of those people are so broken that they think nothing of tossing their empty beer bottles into the square to enjoy the SMASH!!!! but it’s much harder to understand their fellow revellers who laugh and say nothing. When I went down to pick up the glass — and the guy from Invicta came down to help me — what were the other revellers thinking? Did they resolve to tell their friends not to smash bottles next time? Or did they resent our silent rebuke?

Smashed bottles and pissing on patios don’t amount to much in the big scheme of things but there are challenging times ahead on this side of the Atlantic and on the other. I fear the 5% with no ethical sense at all but, even more, I fear the 30% who could go either way.

Ethical? Not Ethical. Makes no difference really. I’ll do what’s most convenient for me. The politicians are all as bad as each other when you think about it. I just want things to be the way they used to be.

I saw Les Misérables on stage with my wife-to-be on one of our first dates and read the book soon after. I watched it again last night with my daughter after a twenty-something-year gap and I think I spotted something new about the story that I have not heard mentioned before. I even went to check the SparkNotes to see if this was some obvious theme that only I was missing but… nope. No one else noticed it but me.

When anyone mentions Les Mis, there are a few themes that immediately pop into your mind: it’s very long and tedious; it’s sentimental kitsch; the songs are awful; the story is an entirely predictable tale of redemption for Jean Valjean; the scene on the barricades is totally unnecessary and out of place.

All those things are true but I think there is something quite profound about how the characters interact with each other. All of the characters (*with one possible exception below!) are very moral according to their own particular version of morality. Of course, since it’s a liberal play/book/movie, all the ‘good guys’ subscribe to liberal conceptions of morality: everyone deserves a chance; kindness will be repaid; poor people commit crimes out of necessity.

But if that was all there was to the story, it would be a very shallow fable about a very liberal morality — we all get to cry for Fontine and boo at Javert — but I suspect that there might be more to it. We have all been missing something quite shocking.

Everyone in Les Mis behaves quite morally—according to their own understanding of right and wrong. Even the baddies.

Jean Valjean gets off to a bad start but learns the power of love and earns his redemption many times over.

The priest believes that everyone deserves a chance and gives Valjean his at great cost to himself.

Fantine gives up every sliver of self-respect to keep her daughter alive.

Javert believes in the Rule of Law above all and it matters not at all to paladin-types like Javert that Valjean has done good in his life. Valjean has broken the law and must be punished. Javert is willing to devote his whole life to bringing Valjean to justice.

The anarchists on the barricades believe the government is corrupt and should be overthrown. The soldiers who gun them down have the opposite view.

The slut-shaming women that get Fantine fired from her job believe that sexual impropriety and non-traditional families are Very Very Bad and should be punished. The Slut-shamers’ beliefs are probably shared by a majority of People Who Consider Themselves to be Morally Upstanding.

The foreman who actually sets Fantine on the road to self-destruction is following an ethical code that has held sway for most of human history and has only recently begun to retreat from the mainstream. In the glorious 50s that conservatives love to reminisce over,  most young women would have been suffered the same fate as Fantine. Even today, young teachers can be fired for inappropriate Facebook photos.

The only exception to the ‘everyone is moral’ rule is, of course, The Master of the House but I bet, if you asked him, even he would say that all those other conceptions of morality were invalid and that the only proper behaviour is to look out for your own interests.

[* OK. That last one is a stretch. The Thénardiers are quite evil]

It’s quite something that all these conceptions of morality still have their champions 150 years after Hugo wrote it all down for us. Will we ever figure out which one is correct?

“The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?” – Bentham (1789)

When the Spanish seafood firm Nueva Pescanova recently announced its plan to open the world’s first octopus farm, many animal rights activists (and the wider public) reacted with horror. Taking intelligent creatures from the wild to exploit them for human gain is seen instinctively as a moral step backwards.

Ellen Pasternak in UnHerd magazine

Ms Pasternak suggested that the only relevant moral line is the one between humans and other animals: humans — be kind to them and don’t eat them; other animals — eat them and be as cruel as required to turn a profit. I suspect that Ms Pasternak is missing the point of concerns about octopus farming.

I am a confirmed meat-eater and my favourites include a rack of lamb and a nice juicy steak but my favourite dish of all is octopus stew. I am well aware that for me to enjoy my culinary delights, animals have to die. That fact does not overly concern me. It is the way of the natural world. I would gladly slaughter the lamb or kill the octopus myself.

However, I am absolutely appalled by the way that industrial farming treats animals, especially in the USA, which mostly follows Ms Pasternak’s ethical rule to treat only animals on the near side of the human/other line with respect.

You’ve all, no doubt, seen the way that industrial farmers keep sows in farrowing cages where the sow is unable to move or even see her piglets. You’ve seen the dark, fetid charnel houses where chickens are raised for eating. You’ve seen the way that calves are removed from their mothers and crammed into warehouses of death.

Many vegetarians argue for a complete ban on meat eating. I don’t think an outright ban is morally justified and neither is it good politics. Meat eaters have too many votes for this approach to be successful.

I have, however, been persuaded that the suffering we inflict on animals in the food production industry is cruel and unnecessary and it demeans us as well as them. It’s perfectly possible to raise cows, pigs and sheep with respect and to kill them humanely. We have been doing it for thousands of years.

Ms Pasternak’s ethical bright line should be extended to include the animals that we rely on for food and that rely on us for care. The way that we raise chickens is appalling but I dread to imagine the horrors that we will inflict on conscious and intelligent molluscs. I gave up eating octopus three weeks ago for precisely this reason.

An ethical approach to meat-eating will require us to eat less meat and to source it from farmers who treat their animals with respect. We’ll have to learn to treat ribeye steak as an occasional luxury instead of a cheap sandwich that we eat 5 days a week. Pigs raised in humane conditions actually taste nicer. You should try them. For the other days of the week, vegetarian substitutes are a pleasant variation.

An ethical approach to sustainable farming is the way forward if we want to move past this atrocious period in animal husbandry—there’s no need to ban meat-eating.

The climate will thank us too.

The media dubbed me America’s Worst Mom (Go ahead, Google it.) But that’s not what I am.

I really think I’m a parent who is afraid of some things (bears, cars) and less afraid of others (subways, strangers). But mostly I’m afraid that I, too, have been swept up in the impossible obsession of our era: total safety for our children every second of every day. The idea that we should provide it and actually could provide it. It’s as if we don’t believe in fate anymore, or good luck or bad luck. No, it’s all up to us.

Childhood really has changed since today’s parents were kids, and not just in the United States. Australian children get stared at when they ride the bus alone. Canadian kids stay inside playing video games. After I started a blog called Free Range Kids, I heard from a dad in Ireland who lets his 11-year-old play in the local park, unsupervised, and now a mom down the street won’t let her son go to their house. She thinks the dad is reckless.

What has changed in the English-speaking world that has made childhood independence taboo? The ground has not gradually gotten harder under the jungle gym. The bus stops have not crept farther from home. Crime is actually lower than it was when most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young.

If this is America’s worst mom, I had the worst mum in England. She made fun of me when I was 10  because I wouldn’t take a two mile bus ride to the doctor’s on my own.

Lucky it wasn’t America because the police would’ve nabbed me.

I have to be honest, though: I write all this in a kind of shaky mood because I just got a call from the police. This morning, I put Izzy, now 10, on a half-hour train ride out to his friend’s house. It sounds like I’m a recidivist, but really: His friend’s family was waiting at the other end to pick him up, and he’s done this a dozen times already. It is a straight shot on a commuter railroad. This particular time, however, the conductor found it outrageous that a 10-year-old should be traveling alone, and summoned the police, who arrived as my son disembarked.

A couple of years ago an older couple accosted me in The Good Guys because I had left my kids watching the big screen TVs while I looked for a stereo. Who knows who might’ve snatched my urchins away in the 4 minutes that they were alone.

But…

Mostly, the world is safe. Mostly, people are good. To emphasize the opposite is to live in the world of tabloid TV. A world filled with worst-case scenarios, not the world we actually live in, which is factually, statistically, and, luckily for us, one of the safest periods for children in the history of the world.

Like the housewives of the 1950s, today’s children need to be liberated. Unlike the housewives of the 50s, the children can’t do it themselves. Though I’d love to see hordes of kids gathering for meetings, staging protests, and burning their baby kneepads and maybe they will, it is really up to us parents to start renormalizing childhood. That begins with us realizing how scared we’ve gotten, even of ridiculously remote dangers.

Locking children away is cruel.

Be free, little children! Be free!

Morals are the rules that we follow when there are no rules and no one is watching.

Corollary

When we create laws to prevent immoral behavior, we make society less moral.

Citations

In the old days, you used to have to do tons of research – read books and do studies and stuff – before making claims like this. Now you can just stick it on your blog and someone will come along and say “that sounds just like what that famous philosopher said in his second book”. If only I knew someone who lived next to a philosopher, he could ask him.