I am going in this lecture on ‘Philosophy and Practice’ first to say something about philosophy and then something about practice, in order to show you how they bear on one another. But I must start by paying a tribute to the President of the Society for Applied Philosophy, Professor Sir A. J. Ayer, who has kindly agreed to take the chair at this lecture. I can honestly say that he is more responsible than anybody else for putting me on the right track in moral philosophy. He did this by convincing me, when young, that the ways people were doing it at that time had no future. In the famous chapter on ethics in his marvellously readable and exciting book, Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer was thought to be trying to show that moral philosophy itself, and perhaps even ordinary first-order moral thinking, was a waste of time. From later work of his, and from his occasional pronouncements about moral and political questions, it is evident that the second of these slanders was false. But even on the theoretical side the lessons I learnt from his book were positive as well as negative. That is not to say that the negative lessons were unimportant. Some people have still not absorbed them, and continue to waste our time. But here are two positive points which you will find in Ayer's book, and which for me were crucia

Madness is a subject that ought to interest philosophers; but they have had surprisingly little to say about it. What they have said, although often interesting and important, has failed to penetrate to the properly philosophical centre of the topic. They have concerned themselves with its causes and effects, with its social and ethical implications, but they have said little that is useful or definitive about what it is in itself. Preoccupied with its accidents, they have failed to engage with its essence.

Aside from aperçus of Kant, Nietzsche, and of course, Aristotle, metaphor has not, until recently, received its due. The dominant view has been Hobbes': metaphors are an ‘abuse’ of language, less dangerous than ordinary equivocation only because they ‘profess their inconstancy’.

A series of lectures organized in part by the Society for Applied Philosophy and entitled ‘Philosophy and Practice’ is presumably aimed at displaying the practical implications of philosophical doctrines and/or applying philosophical skills to practical questions. The topic of this paper, the role of interests in science, certainly meets the first condition. For as will be argued there are a number of theses concerning the role of interests in science which have considerable implications for how one should see the scientific enterprise in general and in particular for how one assesses the claim that science ought to be accorded its priviliged position in virtue of its results and/or methods And in view of the respect and resources accorded to science what could be of greater practical interest? It remains the case, however, that my interest may seem the inverse of that of the organizers of this series. For in looking at the role of interest in science, one is examining, so to speak, the extent to which the sphere of the practical determines what goes on in science. One is exploring ways in which the non-scientific impinges on the scientific. While my primary focus will be on the physical sciences, it will be argued that there is a significant difference between them and the social sciences; a difference which renders the social sciences intrinsically liable to penetration from outside. As will be seen, some of the particular arguments for this conclusion make pressing the question: what about philosophy? The answer, it will be concluded, is that philosophy is insulated from external influences to a considerable extent. In that lies both its importance and an explanation as to why much of it has little practical application.

It must be considered that a man who only does what everyone of the society to which he belongs would do is not a dishonest man.

A lack of confidence in the ability of a tribunal correctly to estimate evidence of states of mind and the like can never be sufficient ground for excluding from enquiry the most fundamental element in a rational and humane criminal code.

In days gone by, when we had something called Rapid Economic Growth, we used to worry about it. We worried especially about its social costs and its technical limits. If growth meant gearing people to efficient production, we would have to be geographically and socially mobile. That threatened our old ways of community life, with their neighbourhood values and extended families. There were more obvious costs too, like chemicals in the air and highways through the landscape. Furthermore, the cornucopia need not be bottomless. To sustain its effusions, nature might have to be pillaged until we ran out of trees or oil. Technology might hit bottlenecks so severe that costs began to outrun benefits. That would mean thwarting the new expectations which economic growth had aroused and which were its motivating force. But, for all that, our island race faced the horrors of affluence, abundance and goodies for all with a stiff upper lip.

The usual way for new cells to come into being is by division of old cells. So the zygote, which is a—new—single cell formed from two, the sperm and ovum, is an exception. Textbooks of human genetics usually say that this new cell is beginning of a new human individual. What this indicates is that they suddenly forget about identical twins.

This paper will in good part concern six arguments taken as making up what is called the New Retributivism. It will also have to do with a seventh retributivist argument, and with the unexamined idea that reflection on punishment can lead a life of its own, independently of political philosophy. Both that idea and the arguments bear on the main question of whether punishment in our societies is right or wrong. It is a question not worn to a frazzle, as is the one of how it is that punishment is right, which piously presupposes that it is. My answer to the impious question gets very little wear in this reactionary and, as it sometimes seems, vengeful time. For a particular reason, it will have to go undefended here.

When I studied the Scriptures then I did not feel as I am writing about them now. They seemed to me unworthy of comparison with the grand style of Cicero (Augustine, III, 5).

As for the absurdities which used to offend me in Scripture, … I now looked for their meanings in the depth of mystery (sacramentorum) (Augustine, VI, 5).

Only a fool would attempt to discuss the morality of strikes in twenty-five pages or less, and even he will fail. For one thing he can be sure in advance that whatever conclusions he might come to will be ridiculed as outrageous, prejudiced or self-serving by one party or the other. There is, in particular, the accusation that the attempt to discuss in moral terms what is essentially a political issue, is itself an exercise in bourgeois politics disguised as morals, their morals but not ours. But there is also, and more worrying to my mind, the sheer complexity of the issues. This complexity is, however, simply unmanageable in the space available, and I have gone instead for the simple story, in the hope that the essentials will stand out that much more clearly. Whether I have got the right essentials, whether the elegance of the picture compensates for its lack of realism, is something that will have to emerge.

It is appropriate that a lecture in a series on ‘Philosophy and Practice’ should open by considering Bentham's ideas on imprisonment. For Bentham, incontestably a philosopher, was equally incontestably a practical reformer. This, indeed, is a received idea among philosophers; that is to say, most philosophers know that Bentham designed ‘a model prison of novel design’ (Mary Warnock), but few have actually considered the design, its implications or its effects. Most are content, like Warnock, with observing that the panopticon plan was formally rejected, before passing on to the abstraction of Bentham's felicific calculus, his notion of utility, and his ideas about the foundations of law. Yet, strange as it may seem, the underlying idea of the panopticon has never been completely abandoned. One aspect of the idea pervades penal thinking, even while prison practice is still influenced by Bentham's practical proposals; moreover, the panoptic ideal has taken root far beyond the walls of actual prisons. Here is philosophy in practice, and yet, in many ways, practically and intellectually a failure.

The concept of rights is now so dominant in the language of politics that it is becoming difficult to identify its use with any particular approach to the solution of social problems or to gain a clear picture of its significance, its advantages and its disadvantages as a way of conceptualizing and resolving contentious political issues. None the less there is a perceptible shift towards an emphasis on rights in contemporary politics which many welcome and encourage and others question and even reject, a shift which is matched in jurisprudence by the renewed stress which many theorists place on rights as a basic legal concept despite recurrent problems associated with the concept as a tool for legal analysis and moral justification. Conflicting theories of legal rights are canvassed and this in turn feeds into the debate concerning the reality or significance of non-legal rights, for the process of law reform is often presented as a matter of giving legal embodiment to the rights which various interested categories of people are asserted to possess already.

Human beings talk and co-operate, they build and produce, they work to accumulate and exchange, they form societies, laws and institutions, and, in all these things the phenomenon of reason—as a distinct principle of activity—seems dominant. There are indeed theories of the human which describe this or that activity as central—speech, say, productive labour (Marx), or political existence (Aristotle). But we feel that the persuasiveness of such theories depends upon whether the activity in question is an expression of the deeper essence, reason itself, which all human behaviour displays.

I am concerned with a very problematic concept of identity which one encounters in studies of practical problems concerning the adoption of children. The notion is problematic in the extreme, as I shall try to show. It seems to crop up not only in the work of researchers on this topic, but in the spontaneous and (apparently) untutored accounts of themselves given by adoptees. The question is whether there is a concept here at all: by which I mean not, instead, a family of concepts linked by family resemblances, but rather some disparate ideas linked only by verbal similarities, and run together for mistaken theoretical purposes. The notion arises crucially in attempts to deal with practical questions arising in determining policies with regard to adoption: with regard to the placement of children for adoption, and the advice to be given to adoptive parents and to adopted children, whether young or adult, who encounter, or perhaps do not even encounter, difficulties.