Niblett’s big idea is to herald in what she calls a “summer of sex”, instructing the general public in the art of having satisfying, mutually respectful erotic experiences. Perhaps assuming that the Right needs more help with this than the Left, she appears to be spinning her campaign towards Reform and Restore voters in particular: “it’s about taking control of our patriotism, about taking control of our Britishness, and not feeling ashamed”. Accordingly, she has named the project “Yes Sex Please, we are British”, which ironically sounds like something only a foreigner could have made up. In fact, though, it’s a riff on a Seventies sex farce featuring Ronnie Corbett — probably a little niche, even for Rupert Lowe fans.

The details of Niblett’s project sound unlikely to get the national pulse racing. Or as Aristotle percipiently noted in a different context, one swallow does not a summer make. She plans to team up with a fellow sex positivist — the equally improbably named Cindy Gallop — to replace the pornographic stereotypes in people’s heads with images of “real people” having sexual contact. In other words: don’t picture the slick thrustings of Pornhub, think Matt Hancock smooching in an office. Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a website where, according to its own hype, you can “watch real world sex videos in all their loving, hot, and messy humanness”. Niblett apparently enjoys visiting the site herself — “It’s a turn on, it helps you masturbate, helps you cum”, she elaborates to the reporter, somewhat unnecessarily — and says she is looking to facilitate engagement between its founder and government ministers.

Gallop, meanwhile, is a 66-year-old entrepreneur who recently told the Telegraph she is proud of the fact that she “regularly and recreationally” sleeps with younger men. It was apparently in the course of these amatory adventures that she had a Eureka moment, in the traditional sense. She started to notice that the young men with whom she was sleeping had various misconceptions about sex, based on hardcore porn consumption. And lo, the idea for MLNP was born.

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In a spirit of inquiry, I signed up for the free version. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience much, though perhaps it was because the clips I was watching were only three seconds long — you have to pay to watch full videos, and I didn’t. Generally, the site looks like an updated Readers’ Wives section. If you like brutally natural lighting, concentrated facial expressions, low-energy writhing on well-worn Ikea furniture, and occasional grunts interspersed with the sounds of the Heathrow flightpath, this might well be the place for you.

Participants write their own blurbs to lure viewers in, and several seem to involve references to childcare: “This is just a short video we made while finding some time in the morning while the children were still asleep”; “We’re again using the time our toddler is napping to get as much of each other as possible”. Another theme is the outdoors: “Witness as Tausha’s body responds to Trevor’s touches. Hear her moans echo through the forest, listen to the birds respond to her primal tones”. I did as instructed and think I might have heard a startled woodpecker, though it was quite hard to tell.

Of course — as Niblett’s fellow MPs have been quick to point out — this is all a right Carry On, and a distraction from current political priorities: wars, looming food shortages, systemic state failures resulting in the murder of children. As Kemi Badenoch pithily put it in the Commons, “it gives a whole new meaning to fiddling while Rome burns”. Stung by the criticism, Niblett has apparently now changed her PR strategy, suggesting yesterday that the campaign is for the benefit of “old people” who “want to have sex”. Presumably Badenoch’s Spads are brainstorming double entendres about the triple lock as I write.

But what is also frustrating is that Niblett and Gallop identify a real problem, though the solution they propose is hilariously empty. It is obvious that porn use, among other modern malaises, is infecting sexual behavior to the detriment of both women and men, but the solution cannot be yet more porn — for this is indeed what MLNP provides, despite the disclaimer in its title. True, there are no webcams or teary-eyed women retching, an undoubted plus; but the mere absence of something awful scarcely counts as a valuable education.

Part of the problem is that images of people enjoying one another say nothing very complicated. Not being made of words, images tend to be simple like that. Gallop grandiosely claims that each of the videos on her site “is an object lesson in consent, communication, good sexual values, good sexual behavior”. But that’s like saying that a photo of Kew Gardens is an object lesson in how to grow roses. In fact, though, what we are supposedly seeing demonstrated onscreen at MLNP — respect, mutuality, loving concern for the other, or whatever — is the end result of a process that is still a complete mystery to many.

Since the sex you have with others is a product of the wider relationship you have with them, a sex education worth its name would require making substantive moral judgments about good and bad relationships — and not just in the bedroom or on the picnic rug. Yet beyond the usual platitudes about consent and better communication, this is something both Niblett and Gallop are very unwilling to do; and it’s a reluctance shared with nearly everyone in the so-called “sex education” space. Niblett insists in her interview that she is not “saying that anybody else’s preferences are wrong”. And in a 2009 Ted talk, Gallop states: “this is absolutely not about judgment… this is not about good and bad”. She even professes herself a regular watcher of hardcore porn. Her big revelation is that for every possible sexual proclivity, there will be some that like it, and some that don’t; and if you don’t like something, it is OK to say so.

But secondary schools, women’s magazines, and soap operas have been harping on this basic point since at least the Eighties. Announcing it yet again is not going to change a thing. In fact, the average person who assents to a hated sexual practice knows perfectly well that a firm “no” is always available; but they don’t want to use it, and not necessarily because they are feeling open-minded. A rival explanation is that they can’t think of any persuasive consideration against the practice in question; and, in this regard, mainstream culture has done nothing to help. On the contrary, it has made nearly every kind of sexual behavior immune to serious critique, as long as accompanied by the transformational fairy dust of adult consent.

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Saying that something is only bad if you don’t like it, but fine if you do, is a particularly unconvincing argument. It doesn’t even work well for wine tastings, let alone human relationships. It makes your likes or dislikes of certain things seem like they must be built on sand, and scarcely worth defending. Feelings of disgust become “preferences” rather than helpful reactions of ethical discernment. You lose the capacity to articulate what in other circumstances would be a perfectly natural thing to say: “No, I’m not bloody well doing that, because it expresses nothing but contempt for me; and you are a creep for even trying”.

A real sex education must be, partly, a moral education, and moral education involves judgment by definition; yet modern moralists have a kink for being non-judgmental, as their preferred phrasing goes. Accordingly, they treat sexual activity as utterly unlike any other sphere of human behavior: as bizarrely insulated from everyday attitudes like hatred and resentment, even when the actions undertaken are obviously hateful and resentful. In no other context could you slap someone hard in the face, choke them, pull them around on a lead, or intentionally cause them to retch, yet still claim later without embarrassment that you “respected” them hugely throughout.

Since only radical feminists and religious types seem willing to contest this absurd narrative, vacuous platitudes from the likes of Niblett and Gallop about “better communication”, “freeing people from shame” and, of course, “increasing consent” will likely continue unabated, circling vaguely around the real ethical dilemmas of sexual interaction but never actually engaging. In a 2019 interview, Gallop talked of plans to start a business called ConSensual: not, as you may have first feared, a sex education site aimed at Conservative Party members, but rather a “safe social sexting app, which both enables you to sext completely securely and improves your sexual communication in your relationship (I have this all planned out in the pipeline, I just need investors)”. Imagine a Cindy-avatar in kinky boots, cheerfully reminding you that if someone calls you a filthy, disgusting whore, that’s perfectly fine, as long as you happen to like it; but absolutely not if you don’t! Personally, though, I think I’ll just stick to WhatsApp, plus my usual practice of avoiding sexting people who clearly loathe me. And that’s a bit of sex education the world can have for free.

Or here is another puzzle. Why does the British Pregnancy Advisory Service — the UK’s main abortion provider, and uncompromising in its mission to facilitate women’s reproductive choices, whatever they are — explain on its website that their clients may take “pregnancy remains” away afterwards for a “private service, burial or cremation”? Why might anyone want to do such a thing?

It is easy enough to arrive at the answers to these questions in your head, provided you don’t have to say them out loud. The first says: ending the lives of fetuses simply because they are female is nowhere near good enough a justification for such a momentous action. Abortions should only be done for a highly restricted set of reasons. They should not be just nodded through for any reason a pregnant woman likes.

And the second says: a woman might want to have a private service or burial afterwards for her fetus, because she recognizes that her decision helped to cause the death of her child — or of her potential child, if you prefer. Either way, she may well be grieving the loss.

Underpinning each of these answers are further facts, equally difficult to spell out in polite society. A life is deliberately ended during the abortion process, whatever else is saved or enabled. Deliberately causing death is a morally serious matter, deserving deep consideration and adequate justification. For some, it is tempting to picture any pregnant adult woman contemplating this as in an unsought, perhaps even coerced situation, with no real responsibility for the outcome. But in a society that contains sex education, consensual relationships, free contraception, and the morning-after pill in pharmacies, this is just not true for many.

Putting things like this does not mean that abortion must be wrong. In a fraught situation with no winners, even the right decision can produce awful outcomes. Sometimes life forces you to opt, very reluctantly, for the least worst thing rather than the best.

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But thanks to the hegemonic, sanitized account of abortion circulated by influential medical and feminist organizations, this difficult conversation is not even available. Instead, enormous efforts are made to make the decision sound no more important than choosing to get a haircut, or opting to let it grow out. On this view, as summed up in the new Scottish report, “women should have the right to their own reproductive choices and are best placed to make pregnancy decisions based on their personal circumstances”. It’s just healthcare, after all — or so the experts keep insisting — and the fact that the health of the occupant in the womb is not obviously improved by the process is neither here nor there.

From the bland starting point of these people, it would be weirdly arbitrary to oppose women having abortions on sex-selective grounds. Why shouldn’t they have one for any reason they like, since the action is essentially trivial anyway? So morally negligible is the process supposed to be, that for years several Royal Colleges have been arguing it should be fully decriminalized, even up to full-term. In June this year, the House of Commons agreed.

During parliamentary debate at the time, ethical concern was mainly reserved for pregnant women who had illegal late-term abortions at home, and who then faced the supposedly cruel threat of prosecution afterwards. Implicit was the idea that such women could only have done harm to their own health, and not to anyone else’s; and hence that there was no need for any law to punish them, nor to deter future others from doing the same.

And now a Scottish “expert group” is arguing not just for decriminalization, but for a significant relaxation of current medical requirements too. Up to 24 weeks, you should be able to abort for any reason you like — including “because it’s a girl”, or indeed “because it’s a boy”. Post-24 weeks, current regulations restrict abortion to cases where the baby or mother’s life or health is gravely threatened; but the authors say that this too should be changed.

According to their recommendations, two “appropriately trained registered healthcare professionals” — not necessarily doctors — should now decide whether a post-24 weeks abortion is “appropriate”, vaguely taking relevant circumstances into account. Unspoken here is the fact that “appropriately trained” assessors will not be able to rule any such decision out; for on what grounds could they, or their trainers, object? It has already been conceded that abortion is a decision only relevant to the woman concerned. She is simply exercising her autonomy, with no downsides for anyone else important.

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It is not that this conspiracy of silence is badly motivated. Indeed, perversely, the staunch commitment to maintaining levels of denial pays secret tribute to the weightiness of the decision, coupled with the knowledge that so many women have already made that choice. There is a lot of guilt, shame, regret; not for everyone but certainly for some, albeit that most therapists will not openly acknowledge it either. In a spirit of sisterhood there is an urge not just to keep away from a painful place, but to try and make it less painful by positive reframing. Other women will try to make you feel better about a terrible haircut. Of course they are going to do it here too.

Signs of the desire to avoid reality are everywhere in the Scottish report. As usual with these things, there is a fussy focus on language. At one point, the sex of pregnant women is referred to as “assigned at birth”, technically making sex-selective abortion impossible anyway. Abortion is — to repeat — just a matter of receiving “healthcare”, a domain which suddenly and conveniently has no ethical dimensions whatsoever.

There is also a lot of cherry-picking, camouflaged in technocratic language. International “best practice” on abortion should be followed, we are told, except when it comes to endorsing the more conservative gestational age limits common in Europe. The concerns of dissenting “stakeholders” worried about existing age limits are waved away. Any attempt to bring the question back to morality is placed out of bounds: “the moral status” of the fetus, we are told, “fell outwith the scope of the review”.

In this way, the authors pretend to themselves they are not doing ethics, when quite obviously they have already taken a view. Admittedly, it is historically a complicated subject. Over the past few decades, there has been much philosophical discussion of whether fetuses count as babies, or human beings, or persons in their own right. It seems to me that, at least by the time we are urgently resuscitating their identically aged peers in neonatal intensive care units, they are clearly all three.

But even if younger, non-viable fetuses were only a kind of pre-human animal — animate and perhaps sentient, but otherwise unfortunately deficient in the personhood stakes — they should surely still be of some moral concern. They would not therefore be nothing. As a society, we care a lot about animals, and disapprove of harming them for no good reason. Why not here too?

I know how these conversations tend to go. Along with anger at the heresy — not to mention irrelevant comparisons to draconian US regimes — there will likely be deference paid to the supposed real-life judgments of actual women. People don’t tend to get an abortion lightly, I will be told. Actually, I know that is not always true. But to the extent that it is, it can only confirm my basic point: unlike many of those professionally interested in the subject, others understand that there is a weighty decision to be made about a prospective death, and not every motivation is a good one. The state putting limits on unacceptable decision-making is therefore as it should be. This is not the same as a “ban”.

It will take courage to talk openly about the social and personal losses of abortion, as well as the gains. Doing so need not entail placing unhelpful blame or stigma on woman who have had one (or two, or three); nor upon the medics who carried it out. It is clear that a well-oiled system, governed by a code of silence towards half of the story, has colluded to produce present behavior. But unless someone challenges the vision, we are not so much faced with a slippery slope as an utterly frictionless one.

The numbers are leaping up annually — perhaps fueled by the continuation of the pills-by-post scheme, first instigated during Covid and then kept on. We already have highly permissive rules, and yet they keep being challenged by people with simple-minded fixations, who show no signs of wanting to slow things down.

In order to complain about this respectably, you are not supposed to approach directly, but have to find some circuitous route: to talk hyperbolically about the evils of sex-selection, or about the dire specter of population decline. You can’t mention the most obvious ethical difficulty: hundreds and thousands of deaths. By all means, let’s talk about the effects of abortion on adults. But – if we have to use mindless bureaucratic language – let’s not pretend that there aren’t other stakeholders here too.

The trouble with this view is that it sees democracy in purely instrumental terms. It judges political systems primarily in terms of whether they secure the best results, however “best” happens to be defined. This surely can’t be right, since even fascist regimes have come up with some impressive achievements from time to time. You can’t look only at the consequences of a form of politics, rather than at its internal operations. What my Tutor seemed not to grasp was that democracy isn’t just a way of getting things done, a way which for Winston Churchill was the least worst and for my Tutor the very worst, but what Aristotle would call a virtuous activity. This means among other things that it’s valuable in itself, not just for where it might get you. Aristotle isn’t altogether opposed to my Tutor’s viewpoint: he thinks that if there’s an individual who is clearly superior to everyone else, then it’s right that he should rule over them all; but he also believes that this is rare or non-existent.

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There’s also a sense in which Aristotle thinks, like my Tutor, that political arrangements should be judged instrumentally. But this means judged in terms of how far they help to secure the good life; and for Aristotle the good life is a virtuous one, which like ballet or laughter or gift-giving is an end in itself. You might say that the goal of the political state is human friendship, but friendship itself doesn’t have a goal. Human beings naturally have affection for each other and therefore desire to have a life together, Aristotle writes in the Politics, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help. This is strikingly at odds with the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, for which government is basically a matter of individual self-interest. The state exists to prevent us from strangling each other or stealing each other’s property. Its function is thus largely negative. There’s an element of this in Aristotle’s view, but to his mind the state has a more positive role in creating the conditions in which individuals may flourish; and one form of that flourishing is their participating in the running of the state, which is to say democracy.

This view can lead Aristotle to some pretty authoritarian conclusions, but in anachronistic terms it also puts him on the political Left. (There are those, needless to say, for whom the political Left and authoritarianism are synonymous.) By and large, the Left has looked favorably on political society as the matrix of all individual flourishing, whereas the Right tends to interpret this as meaning that a totalitarian state should take you over. The key distinction between state and society is elided. It sounds authoritarian to some liberal ears to claim that society takes priority over the individual, but for the Left this is a statement of fact rather than a political imperative. Only by belonging to a language and form of life, does one become a person. The self is relational to its roots. There couldn’t be just one individual, any more than there could be just one letter or number. Society is constitutive of individuals, not simply a neutral space in which they move or a potential obstacle to their freedom. The liberal or conservative might retort that it’s the same the other way round — that society itself is simply a collection of individuals. But this isn’t quite true. Society is a set of relations between individuals, some of them formal and some informal, not an assemblage of isolated units.

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So democracy, or self-government, is an exercise of our powers and capabilities which is inherently valuable, as well as conducive to ends beyond itself. As far as its results go, Aristotle isn’t worried that under democracy the people will make all the wrong decisions, since though each of them will be a worse judge than the experts, they will collectively speaking be better, or at least no worse. One might also point out that human beings can abuse their freedom, but they aren’t fully human without it. Collective self-determination, i.e. democracy, may result in thwarting some people’s freedom, but to be self-determining is to be free, at least in one sense of the term. To be free is not just not to be governed by someone else, but to have learnt how to govern oneself alongside others.

Still, there are problems with this vision. For one thing, it seems to suggest that politics and morality are fundamentally incompatible. Politics may be based on the will of the people, but it’s hard to view ethics in the same way. Is murder wrong just because most of us think it is? An alarming number of medieval citizens believed in burning witches, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. What if the moral consensus of the future contradicts the orthodoxy of today? Most people in Britain once held that homosexuality was sinful, but most of them don’t hold that now. It’s disturbing, however, to suppose that we just make up our fundamental principles as we go along. It seems to suggest that humanity rests on nothing but itself. Democracy means that we are the ultimate authority, rather than that there exists a sovereignty beyond us to which we should conform. Human beings determine their own history, but according to no ground plan independent of themselves. Democracy, in a word, is secretly atheistic. God has been replaced by the Plebs, and humanity assigned an importance which may lead to hubris.

There’s also a strained relationship between democracy and the market. If men and women are self-determining in the political sphere, they wouldn’t seem to have much of this capacity in the economic one. On the contrary, their own free actions merge together in the marketplace to constitute alien forces capable of commanding the course of their lives. To be truly sovereign over oneself, you need an environment which is relatively stable and predictable. You can’t play a decent game of croquet if, as in Alice in Wonderland, the equipment keeps shifting capriciously around. A degree of predictability is a condition of freedom, whereas sheer randomness amounts to the death of it. The economic life of capitalism is like a surreal game of croquet in which things stroll off the pitch or morph into something else just when you want them to keep still. As far as keeping still yourself goes, you have to run very fast simply to do that, as the Queen remarks to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale. Socialism is among other things a response to the fact that a capitalist economy is inherently out of control, not out of control only at times of crisis. And in the world of Trump, politics has become almost as volatile and erratic as the stock exchange.

There used to be a time when the proletariat was seen as the potential downfall of this system. That it was destined to be the gravedigger of capitalism was a kind of irony, since it was itself a product of it. Today, the potential undoing of the system is still the system itself. Advanced capitalist economies have reached a degree of opaqueness, complexity and global reach which undermine some of their own moral foundations. Classical liberalism, with its faith in individual freedom, has evolved into an anonymous corporate world in which the individual is largely dispensable, and the nation-state along with it. A traditional respect for God, family, community and country gives way to rootlessness, faithlessness, the disruption of communities, the provisional nature of all values and a planet on which any place is more or less interchangeable with any other. Nor can you have proper self-determination when the self seems little more than a fiction, a fleeting nexus of impulse and desire without continuity or foundation. Neoliberalism rounds savagely on its more classical forebear, ripping up civil rights and redefining freedom of expression as the freedom to profit from hate speech. In reaction to all this, parts of the global capitalist system enter a kind of time-warp, turning back to the days when men were men, the nation stood tall, home and kinship were precious, God was in his heaven and the manufacture of automobiles was in Detroit.

Neoliberalism unmasks the embarrassing truth that capitalism and democracy aren’t at root compatible, even if we still have the privilege to choose which particular bunch of old Etonians should represent us at Westminster. This incompatibility wasn’t so evident in the age of classical liberalism, when the individual’s freedom to acquire property seemed to go naturally with his or her freedom to dissent, divorce, launch a campaign or rise in the social hierarchy. We don’t, however, speak of Walmart or the oil companies in terms of the individual’s right to private property. In practice, that whole discourse is almost obsolete; but neoliberalism has nothing but the language of wealth and acquisition with which to fill the ideological gap left behind. John Stuart Mill knew that liberal democracy was constantly under threat from “sinister interests”. Today, it has been effectively taken over by them.

Why is the commander wrong? Partly because, morally speaking, he is a consequentialist. He believes that the way to judge human actions is to calculate their probable effects, then assess whether they are largely positive or negative. What counts as positive or negative is clearly a problem. Different people are likely to return different, sometimes conflicting, answers to this question. Perhaps the most familiar kind of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which weighs the sum-total of happiness which will result from your action against the sum-total of unhappiness it may cause. (You will, of course, need to define what counts as happiness, since what it meant for Plato isn’t what it meant for Marx or Jacob Rees-Mogg). What matters isn’t so much your intention, or the nature of the action itself, as the impact it will have on the world, which is to say whether it will increase overall human happiness or not. Actions are as actions do.

But how do we know what impact it will have? Any ethics based on consequences is bound to be retrospective. Only when you look back can you evaluate the fruits of your actions, since only then will they have come into existence. Trying to calculate them in advance is a tricky business. It would take a sizable team of investigators to trace the results of even the most trivial act. Perhaps I see an advertisement from the top of a bus, the colors of which remind me of another advertisement some years ago, which first turned me on to smoking. I take up smoking again — then die of lung cancer a few years later. As a result, one of my children drops out of college, becomes delinquent and hits you over the head with a whisky bottle one dark night in Hackney. After the assault, you develop blurred vision and drive your car into a butcher’s shop in Greenwich, gravely injuring an elderly customer. Their partner sinks into depression, and jumps off a bridge.

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It’s impossible, then, to say how many people are involved in a single action — and I haven’t even mentioned the agency which designed the advertisement, the workers who built the bus, or those who extracted the rubber which went into its tires. Who owns an action is a question which much concerned the ancient Greeks. For them, humans move precariously, in a tangled net of cause and effect which can never be grasped as a whole. Only God, or an omniscient narrator in a novel, can do that. What we do can spin out of our control, breed multiple effects, merge with the acts of others and confront us as an alien force. In this sense, we are all, like Oedipus, “guilty innocents”, caught up in potentially lethal situations which we never got to choose and might not even be aware of. The Christian doctrine of original sin, for which we’re all implicated in a condition for which none of us is actually guilty, is an equivalent of this tragic way of seeing.

There’s also the question of what doesn’t happen as a result of what you do, or don’t do. Maybe one of the schoolchildren you blow up would have grown up to discover a cure for cancer. We’re speaking here of what one might call the subjunctive realm — the spectral world of what might have come about had you acted differently. Here, however, one needs to tread carefully. It sounds reasonable to say, “If I hadn’t been delayed in getting to the airport, I would have been on the aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic with no survivors”. But it could be argued that if you’d been on time for the flight, history would have been different, and this alternative history might not have included the air crash. Perhaps you can’t alter one bit of history without changing the lot.

So judging solely from consequences has its problems. And there’s another reason, too, why it isn’t the soundest form of ethics. It’s strongly counterintuitive to claim that we think things are good or bad only according to the difference they make in the world. It’s not only that a bad action can have positive effects, or vice versa. It’s that we sometimes feel like saying that a way of acting is good in itself, regardless of the results it might produce. It’s good that someone is willing to go to their death to defend the cause of the innocent, even if the whole project backfires and leaves the innocent worse off than they were before. Similarly, it’s good that you don’t slaughter thousands of Gazan civilians, even if it means that you don’t get your hands on the militants of Hamas.

In Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, the 16th century martyr Thomas More refuses to take an oath denying the authority of the Pope even though this means his beheading. He takes his stand, regardless of the consequences, because to do otherwise would be to betray his own identity. The real-life Thomas More was more of a consequentialist: he refused to deny the sovereignty of the Pope because he feared burning in hell if he did.

Actions which contain their value wholly in themselves are rather like works of art. Like art, they resist being treated in a merely functional or utilitarian way. We don’t ask what the “Mona Lisa” is for. Even actions of this kind, however, may have consequences which they don’t intend, or which are surreptitiously intended. Take, for instance, Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove, in which Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend Milly Theale, a fabulously rich young American woman, who Kate discovers to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that he and Milly may marry and Densher will inherit her fortune when she dies. Milly learns of the plot against her, but bequeaths her wealth to Densher on her deathbed anyway. Like a martyr, she uses death creatively, placing it at someone else’s service. The effect of this astonishing act of forgiveness and generosity causes Densher to fall passionately in love with Milly’s memory.

Remorseful for his and Kate’s plotting, he refuses to accept the heiress’s bequest. He is willing to marry Kate — but without Milly’s fortune. If Kate chooses not to marry him, he will make the legacy over to her. For her part, Kate insists that she will marry Densher only if he accepts Milly’s money, thus testifying that he has put his devotion to the dead woman behind him. Unable to resolve this deadlock, the couple part forever and the novel closes.

Milly’s dying act is meant to transcend the tangled web of cause and effect in its supreme disregard for consequence and calculation. It belongs to the category of action which James often calls “beautiful”, meaning those ways of behaving which have nothing in them for oneself and are performed purely for their own sake. There is a recklessness about living in this self-squandering way, a kind of extravagant pointlessness, but it is more than outweighed by its sheer grace and radiance. Milly’s is an aristocratic ethic, so to speak, as opposed to the mean-minded bookkeeping mentality of Kate and Densher.

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Milly’s final act seems like a riposte to consequentialism. It will certainly have no consequences for her, since she will very soon be dead. Yet her action has momentous effects for Kate and Densher. The question is whether Milly herself has foreseen those effects. Is she a saint or a schemer? Has she acted to demonstrate her moral fineness, win Densher’s heart forever or break up his relationship with Kate? Is her splendid disinterestedness a devious act of aggression? As usual with James, the answer is unknowable. The novel carefully allows us no access to Milly’s motives. It’s hard to say whether her graciousness is a form of egoism or altruism, a humbling of the self or a final assertion of it.

The commander who orders the school to be blown up, then, seems to believe that, morally speaking, the end justifies the means. This can certainly be the case. Hardly anyone thinks that it’s wrong to lie to the Gestapo about the whereabouts of your Jewish grandmother. The greatest of all theologians, Thomas Aquinas, wouldn’t have agreed. But though he thought lying was absolutely wrong, he didn’t think that “absolute” meant “very wicked”. He just meant it as a synonym for “should never be done”. Almost everyone, however, maintains that if you see a 10-year-old kid sneaking out of your front door with a five dollar bill of yours, it’s not permissible to shoot him in the back. (A lot more Americans are likely to do this than the British are — not because the British are morally superior to Americans, but because they don’t have guns.)

So there can be no general rule here. Some people probably believe that it doesn’t matter if you kill a million Palestinians, so long as you eliminate Hamas in the process. It’s worth asking how this makes such people different from Hamas. There are also those of us who hold that massacring the innocent — non-combatants — is never morally permissible whatever gains it might bring you, and that to see such mass slaughter as mere collateral damage is a moral obscenity. Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima were cases of mass murder. If you’re allowed to do that, then you’re allowed to do more or less anything, and all talk of morality becomes superfluous.

“We couldn’t represent everyone we wanted to,” Shukla admitted, citing “a culture war or two” and “an industry that assumed itself to be doing the work” as relevant explanations for the company’s failure. But even leaving aside the growing backlash against DEI practices, his analysis seemed incomplete. For there was also the folly of calling a business “The Good Literary Agency” (TGLA), a strategy surely so hubristic that they were bound to come a cropper eventually.

But then again in 2017, the year the TGLA launched, we were also blessed with the pompously named The Good Law Project — a company also now ailing — so perhaps there was something in the air. After all, it was the early days of the first Trump presidency: many histrionic Guardian op-eds were being written and pussy hats knitted. It was easy to feel good about yourself in contrast to the evil orange one: to sail into work, your lunchbox stuffed with Innocent smoothies, Kind protein bars, and JUST water cartons, feeling you had moved one step closer to canonisation simply by turning up. And every day offered opportunities for new acts of righteousness: writing bits and pieces of moral cant for the company website; putting pronouns at the bottom of emails; signing various petitions to get your colleagues sacked, and so on.

But still, in retrospect, announcing your company as “Good” in its title does seem particularly daft when you work in the literary world; a place that tends to demand that writers “show, don’t tell”, traditionally holding lazy topline descriptions in some contempt. Equally, novelists have wrestled for centuries over what makes a man good, kind, innocent, or just, but rarely have they concluded that his self-identifying as these things is a reliable sign. That original ‘umblebragger Uriah Heep keeps telling us about his defining virtue, but Dickens knows it is all fake news. “I am not fond of professions of humility,” says wise David Copperfield, “or professions of anything else.”

To be fair to Shukla and Kingsford, in naming their agency they presumably were inspired by the success of Shukla’s 2016 edited collection The Good Immigrant. But whereas that title wore its sardonic irony on its sleeve, the later business name came across as painfully straight-faced. Perhaps they told themselves that the branding would hover playfully between “we are good at our job” and “we are good people”, but the accompanying piety seems to have eliminated useful ambiguity from the start.

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Clearly, they were not just saying they were good, in the way a baker, estate agent, or an arms dealer might be — namely, by performing their stated commercial function well. Rather, they were Good with a luminous capital “G”, putting the gospel of diversity and inclusion into practice. In her own Bookseller exit interview, Kingsford made this explicit, describing people like them as “hopeful change-makers” and saying: “So much good has been done across the industry since 2016, but for those of us at the coalface it feels like we are at a high risk moment where the danger of complacency, of a feeling that enough has been done, that we don’t need to keep pushing for more change, is beginning to creep back in.”

This fluently sanctimonious style has become emblematic of progressive ventures over the last decade, barely even noticeable in a field so crowded with proselytising. How anyone ever got taken in by the posturing is still a headscratcher, but it seems many did. Ascertaining someone’s morals is traditionally supposed to be a complicated business, requiring close and prolonged attention to the interaction of character traits, intentions, behaviour, and outcomes. Yet somehow, about a decade ago, we got to a point where explicit boasts about personal ethical achievements acted more like subliminal messages in adverts, inserting a conviction in the hearer that he must be in the presence of spiritual purity, though he wasn’t exactly sure how the thought had got in there.

The flipside of being so mesmerised with superficial markers of virtue is that you are also shallow and credulous about what counts as vice. And so we find adults who genuinely think it plausible that a tech billionaire, well known for his enthusiastically awkward gestures, would deliberately perform a Nazi salute at a post-inauguration Presidential rally, as the latest stunt of those subtle intellects at Led By Donkeys suggests they do. Or we get the sort of people who interpret “Jewish” as identical to “Zionist”, and “Zionist” as identical to “genocidal maniac” without noticing any moral variations under those first two headings — as a former Save The Children staffer did in a TikTok video this week, to her cost. And on the other side, we also get those who automatically equate “Pro-Palestinian protestors” with “hate marchers”. Obviously, there can be deliberate political strategy behind a particular decision to lump certain categories rather than split them, but equally, it sometimes seems that the art of fine moral discernment is just generally dying out.

Maybe part of the underlying problem is a mania for thinking of yourself and those in your tribe as belonging to the good people, a childish mental construction which both requires a contrast class (the bad people, over there) and some vaguely plausible-looking fellow travellers. There is a hint of this in Shukla’s plaintive “we did the best we could”: and it’s there every time someone falls back on the excuse of having had good intentions, ignoring well-known observations about pavement arrangements on the road to hell. It’s also there when you extend similar excuses to those with whom you feel some kinship, as if you know that whatever bad-looking things they do could only be the result of well-intentioned misreadings of the situation; as if there were no really bad people on your side of the fence at all, but only unfortunately foolish ones. Needless to say, such a concession is rarely made to opponents.

But in fact, just as there is no particular reason to trust myself on how good a person I am, there is equally little reason to trust me about the goodness of my intentions, or about those of people I like and presume to understand. It is true that there is a limited sense in which most or all intentions are “good” — meaning only that whatever action you chose, that action seemed to you to have some attractive aspect at the time. Philosophers sometimes describe this as acting sub specie boni; alternatively, acting “under the guise of the good”. In the same fairly trivial sense, Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost said “Evil, be thou my Good” but it didn’t make him any less satanic.

For my intentions to be “good” in a more full-blooded sense, relevant to moral assessment, depends on whether they stem from attitudes like benevolence, love, courage, or kindness; or alternatively from self-interest, hate, cowardice, or cruelty. It’s hard to admit that it might be the latter, even to yourself. And such things are even harder to discern in others, based only on a superficial glance. In the case of the now defunct Good Literary Agency, the still active Good Law Project, and other Good enterprises, it should go without saying — but apparently doesn’t — that uninformed onlookers have no actual idea what sorts of intention motivate their founders, whatever the holier-than-thou branding. They might actually be good people, or they might not. Still, I’m with Davey Copperfield: the fact they keep saying so should make us highly suspicious.

During its bitter fight against the militants, the Afghan government must have received thousands of such reports. What made this one so special was its provenance: not the drones and informants of its friends in the world’s greatest superpower, but rather Raven Sentry, an AI-enabled warning model designed to predict insurgent activity. 

Developed in 2019, while US negotiations with the Taliban were still underway, Raven Sentry was built to maintain situational awareness in Afghanistan after the final withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. “We were looking for ways to become more efficient and to maintain situational awareness”, says Colonel Thomas Spahr, a professor at the US Army War College, adding that Raven Sentry would “enable” the Afghans to continue the fight after Nato had flown home.

The details are classified, but Raven Sentry apparently proved successful in Jalalabad, even as it stymied several other attacks as well. In the end, though, the programme was terminated abruptly, about the same time as democratic rule in Afghanistan, amid the chaos, fear and bloodshed of Kabul International Airport. Yet what Raven Sentry achieved that day in July 2020 could yet transform warfare — if, that is, the technical and ethical hurdles don’t prove too high.

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Militaries have experimented with AI intelligence for a while. As far back as 2017, the US launched something called Project Maven to help analysts process large amounts of data. Yet if Maven relied on sophisticated object-recognition software, Spahr equally stresses that human officers remained “central” to the process. 

Raven Sentry was different. Gathering together a range of data — social media messages, news stories, significant anniversaries and even weather reports — it could then predict places at risk of insurgent attack. “Neutral, friendly, and enemy activity anomalies triggered a warning,” Spahr explains. “For example, reports of political or Afghan military gatherings that might be terrorist targets would focus the system’s attention.”

Despite America’s eventual failure in Central Asia, meanwhile, Afghanistan proved an ideal testing ground. That’s essentially down to what Rafael Moiseev calls Afghanistan’s data-rich environment. “AI is only ever as good as the data that trains it,” explains the AI expert. As Moiseev continues, Nato’s 20-year odyssey in Afghanistan meant there was plenty to go on, from historical attack data to anecdotal evidence from Spahr and his colleagues. The graveyard of empires even offered lessons from the Cold War, with Raven scooping up content from the Soviet occupation in the Eighties.

Just as important, Raven sharpened its predictions over time. Like other algorithms, it could first scour unclassified databases, before honing in on what mattered — useful when so-called “OSINT” data is now a global market worth $8 billion.

All told, this comprehensive approach proved successful. As Spahr says, Raven spotted some 41 insurgent attacks across five Afghan provinces before they actually happened, usually offering warnings of about 48 hours. And by October 2020, less than a year before Raven would abruptly be wrapped up, analysts had determined it was firing out predictions with 70% accuracy, even if humans were crucial to its success too.

Raven Sentry is only one example of how AI has transformed war this century. Aside from being a predictive analytical tool, after all, AI technologies also boast what Polly Scully calls effective and ethical applications elsewhere. “In the broadest sense,” explains Scully, who heads Palantir’s defence and national security work in the UK, “it has the power to dramatically lower the technical proficiency required for personnel to engage with large amounts of data in sophisticated ways, in order to make better decisions.” 

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To explain what she means in practice, Scully refers to the use of AI in improving battlefield awareness, something Palantir’s been working on. She notes that algorithms can analyse how appropriate particular aircraft — and their bombs — are for striking targets. “AI,” she adds, “has the potential to transform logistics too.” Among other things, it can keep artillerymen informed about how quickly gun barrels are wearing out. From there, Scully adds, the computers can tell manufacturers to build spare parts. 

Examined from the other end of the barrel, Moiseev says that AI can cut casualties by enabling the deployment of autonomous machines on the frontline, with actual troops safely orchestrating the battle from the rear. This isn’t some Terminator fantasy either. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian military deployed about 30 “robot dogs” against its Russian foe. Though not totally autonomous, the so-called Brit Alliance Dog (BAD2) can explore trenches, ruined buildings and other areas drones struggle to access. 

The Ukrainians have also experimented with autonomous machine guns, as well as drones that use AI to identify and attack enemy targets. In the Middle East, meanwhile, and in an echo of Raven, it was recently revealed that Israel used an AI programme called Lavender to designate close to 37,000 Palestinians as Hamas targets.

Yet as the catastrophic civilian casualties wrought by systems like Lavender imply, battlefield efficiency and wartime morality are two very different things. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI” and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, warned about the “possible bad consequences” of the technology — noting especially that robotic killers may one day move beyond our control.  

It hardly helps, of course, that some of AI’s most ardent enthusiasts are arguably less than perfect. Though Scully unsurprisingly emphasises the ethics of Palantir’s platforms, her company has faced scrutiny over how it collects and uses data, while also apparently inviting young children to an AI warfare conference. That’s before you consider its murky relationship with the US government, with Palantir also causing controversy over its work for the NHS here in Britain. 

Yet these challenges aside, Moiseev is ultimately confident that few people want to see society torn apart in a future ruled by killer robots. “Rather,” he suggests, “we should be developing AI to prevent and resolve disagreements.” In a broader sense, meanwhile, predictive AI can be used to not only foil attacks, but also respond to conflict and help civilians. Whatever the question marks around Palantir, it is currently using AI to help de-mine over 150,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian fields.

And what about that future hinted at Jalalabad? Could AI predict some future conflict? Moiseev thinks so. As he says, though the invasion of Ukraine came as a shock to most, a team of scientists and engineers based in Silicon Valley had already predicted Russia’s move almost to the day — even months before the war actually began. “There is often a wealth of signs that a conflict is on the horizon,” Moiseev adds, “whether unusual movement at missile sites or a sudden stockpiling of critical materials. The problem is that humans aren’t very good at spotting subtle clues. But for AI, that is one of its greatest strengths.”

No wonder US decision makers are hoping to use AI to analyse data to spot any future Chinese actions around Taiwan. Certainly, Admiral Samuel Paparo, a US Pacific Fleet commander, has implied as much. As he recently told a defence innovation conference, the Pentagon is looking for ways to “find those indications” of an imminent assault by the People’s LIberation Army. Given, moreover, that any eruption in the Pacific could occur without warning, experts have argued that AI could equally improve overall the general readiness of US forces year round.

Then there’s the question of whether the computers could be outwitted, by some enemy eager to retain a modicum of surprise. Tellingly, this may happen via even smarter machines, potentially millions of times more powerful than regular supercomputers. Quantum machines could analyse enemy movements in a second, smashing through their encryption.

It would be reckless, though, to let computers take complete control. As Spahr says, war is ultimately fought by men and women, meaning we can never allow an “automation bias” to cloud our strategic judgement. Given how his country’s adventure in Kabul ultimately ended, that’s surely sound advice. 

Now, TV foodie Gregg Wallace is not someone I had ever thought of as being in the same category as Lecter. Nor indeed, as some kind of public intellectual cum satirist, reflecting on the great social issues of the day. Yet his recent Channel 4 mockumentary on eating human flesh was clearly a satirical social commentary on the cost-of-living crisis. In it, people are forced to sell slices of their bodies; “with money from her donation, Gillian will be able to pay for two weeks of energy bills”. At one point, Wallace and Michel Roux consider whether the lifestyle of their dinner might affect the flavour: Alison, a former NHS nurse tasted a bit stressed, but children were the most succulent. “Our babies taste best with gravy,” explained the fictional start-up company, Good Harvest.

The show didn’t put me off my dinner, as it did many predictably outraged viewers. It was clearly a reference to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which he proposed that poor Irish children be sold to the rich for food: “A young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.” People were outraged then, too.

Cannibalism has a long, politically charged history. In the early modern era of colonialism, the figure of the cannibal became the representative Other to Western civilisation. Soon after Columbus discovered the New World, the cannibal became a sensationalist spur to much European moralising about what counted as right behaviour. In this era, considerable legal attention was given to shipwrecked colonisers forced to eat their dead colleagues. As the Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu argues in his history of cannibalism, these extreme situations represented a crisis of Western civilisation, a descent into the kind of savagery only seen, or perhaps just imagined, in the distant societies that sailors encountered.

Cannibalism thus represented the boundary, and thus, to some extent, the defining feature of European moral consciousness. Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest — whose name, some argue, derived from an anagram of the Spanish for cannibal — is a very obvious counterpoint to the “civilised” colonialist, Prospero. Half man, half monster, Caliban is “not honour’d with a human shape”, and so is enslaved by Prospero. Cannibalism became a key link in the moral justification of slavery.

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I find cannibalism fascinating. Partly, I suppose, because as a high-church Christian, and one for whom the Eucharist is at the centre of his spiritual life, the invitation to consume the body and blood of Christ is a daily source of nourishment, albeit spiritual — that caveat a source of endless medieval dispute. Early critics of Christianity made much of the cannibalistic vibe of passages like this from John’s Gospel: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” I have often wondered why we who believe in transubstantiation do not experience at least a bat squeak of disgust when receiving the bread and wine.

Philosophically, though, cannibalism presents fewer issues than we might imagine. After all, if a body can be left to medical science, for the betterment of society, why can it not be left to feed the hungry? Where is the violation of the harm principle? The same may be true of something like incest. People say it is wrong because it may have negative genetic consequences, but those people don’t argue that incest with birth control is fine.

No, cannibalism is more a theological problem than a philosophical one because we treat human bodies — even after death — as in some way sacred. Those who blithely insist that after death anyone can do what they want with their bodies — throw them on the rubbish tip — are very much in the minority, and I often wonder how sincere they are. Even dead bodies are reckoned to bear some sort of imprint of the life that the body lived. That is why, in what remains at root a broadly Christian culture, bodies are treated with respect, not used as fresh meat for the butcher.

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But in strictly ethical terms, the disgust with which we react to cannibalism is now reckoned to be a poor guide to moral assessment. That some may react to the thought of gay sex in the same way, for instance, is now widely understood to be, more or less, as morally insignificant as my child’s grimacing at eating something a little bit different. Disgust may originate in some evolutionary need to protect against infection, but outstays its welcome when translated into various forms of social othering.

Indeed, disgust seems highly illogical. You may kiss your partner on the head, nuzzling her hair, but then retch when you clean the same hair from the shower plug. Your mouth is constantly full of saliva, but we generally don’t like the idea of spitting into a glass and then drinking it. Intellectually, it’s hard to know the difference; viscerally, it matters.

Here we might recall Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt as “matter out of place”: what is called soil in the garden is called dirt on the kitchen floor. That is, our interpretation of things is rooted in a certain map of the world in which things have their place. Hair on the head, in its place: fine to kiss. Hair in the plug, out of place: disgusting. This is why conservatives, who tend to have a stronger sense of there being “a place for everything and everything in its place”, reference disgust more readily than liberals. And nowhere is this truer than the politics of the human body — transgender issues, for example. The breast-feeding man violates the conservative’s map of things.

Liberals argue that the “irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight”. But the limits of this viewpoint can be seen when it collides with cannibalism. Strict liberals may — philosophically at least — find no fault with the man who served tacos to his friends made with meat from his own amputated leg. My body, my choice and all that. But I doubt they would be first in the queue for that buffet.

What the response to Wallace’s documentary made clear is that strict rationality is not — and perhaps never will be — the fundamental basis of our morality. As conservative bioethicist Leon Kass put it, “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate”. Yes, the liberal warning against disgust being weaponised against minorities is well made. But when used in the defence of human dignity, disgust can be a powerful moral ally. What begins as a biological reaction to a threat to our bodies can be a sign of a spiritual reaction to a threat to our souls.

What they did have was a strong career incentive to produce quirky arguments in favour of the progressive norms emerging at the time, an advanced capacity to handle abstraction and technicality, and huge intellectual confidence. In real life, these would be the last people any sane individual would trust with a moral dilemma. Luckily for the outside world, they tended to have little influence, mainly because nobody could understand what the hell they were talking about.

The same cannot be said for the philosopher geeks in charge of the hugely popular and influential Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which was given new vim last week with the publication of a new book by one of its leading lights, 35-year-old William MacAskill, accompanied by a slew of interviews and puff pieces. An Associate Professor at Oxford, MacAskill apparently still lives like a student, giving away at least a tenth of his income, living in a shared house, wild swimming in freezing lakes, and eating vegan microwave meals. (Student life isn’t what it used to be.)

But his influence is huge, as is that of EA. Beloved of robotic tech bros everywhere with spare millions and allegedly twinging consciences, EA and offshoot affiliate organisations such as GiveWell, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can aim to apply strictly rational methods to moral action in order to maximise the positive value of outcomes for everyone. Unlike many metaphysicians-turned-ethicists, MacAskill sells this in a style that is comprehensible, even attractive, to civilians — and especially to those with a lot of dosh to give away. Quite frankly, this worries me a bit.

The background to EA is austerely consequentialist: ultimately, the only thing that counts morally is maximising subjective wellbeing and minimising suffering, at scale. Compared to better potential outcomes, you are as much on the hook for what you fail to do as for what you do, and there is no real excuse for prioritising your own life, loved ones, or personal commitments over those of complete strangers. MacAskill’s new book, What We Owe The Future: A Million Year View, extends this approach to the generations of humans as yet unborn. As he puts it: “Impartially considered, future people should count for no less, morally, than the present generation.” This project of saving humanity’s future is dubbed “longtermism”, and it is championed by the lavishly-funded Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, of which MacAskill is an affiliate.

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Longtermism is an unashamedly nerdy endeavour, implicitly framed as a superhero quest that skinny, specky, brainy philosophers in Oxford are best-placed to pursue — albeit by logic-chopping not karate chopping. The probability, severity, and tractability of threats such as artificial intelligence, nuclear war, the bio-engineering of pathogens, and climate change are bloodlessly assessed by MacAskill. As is traditional for the genre, the book also contains quite a few quirky and surprising moral imperatives. For instance: assuming we can give them happy lives, we have a duty to have more children; and we should also explore the possibility of “space settlement” in order to house them all.

In this matter, MacAskill seems to be in line with his colleagues at FHI: a 2013 profile of the institute describes how the consensus then was that “the Milky Way galaxy could be colonised in less than a million years, assuming we are able to invent fast-flying interstellar probes that can make copies of themselves out of raw materials harvested from alien worlds”. (The potential of space settlement to solve the current housing crisis appears sadly unaddressed.)

In his previous book, MacAskill described EA as about asking: “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good.” True to form, What We Owe The Future is full of graphs, tables and graphics, and — as with the EA movement generally — the first impression is of something rigorously scientific, free from all those pesky emotional biases that might otherwise hamper rational thought.

Given this emphasis, it is unsurprising that both EA and longtermism seem to have captured the imaginations of the sort of tech-bro entrepreneur fascinated by the possibility of freezing his own head. Bill Gates has endorsed MacAskill as a “data nerd after my own heart”. Elon Musk already funds the FHI, and described MacAskill’s book as “a close match for my philosophy”. Billionaire crypto-trader Sam Bankman-Fried has appointed MacAskill as an advisor to his organisation The FTX Future Fund, dedicated to funding “ambitious projects to improve humanity’s long-term prospects”.

Talking to the New Yorker recently about MacAskill, Bankman-Fried disparaged “neartermist causes” such as “global health and poverty” as “more emotionally driven”, and described himself as never having had a “bednets phase” (referring to EA’s earlier focus on targeting malaria). “I did feel like the longtermist argument was very compelling. I couldn’t refute it. It was clearly the right thing.” Psychopathic as this sounds, it is entirely in keeping with the logic of longtermism: only unreliable and partial emotion could lead you to care more about the lives of real people over those who are yet to exist.

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Yet of course EA is not actually science as we know it. If an impartial scientific worldview were really in play, at best we’d end up with the conclusion that altruism towards immediate conspecifics is an adaptation that has helped the human species survive, alongside things like language and opposable thumbs. At worst, we’d end up with the idea that it is disguised self-interest. Either way, there would be a strong argument for the absence of any quantifiable, verifiable moral facts about goodness and badness. The scientific worldview, strictly applied, leads to a separation of facts and value, and the demotion of value to a form of psychological projection. It certainly doesn’t lead to any moral concern about what to do with respect to humans that don’t exist yet, or of the idea that we could accurately detect, quantify, and then rank something as ephemeral as human well-being.

And EA isn’t emotion-free, either. In these polarised times, it is tempting to contrast EA with that other wildly successful moral movement of our time, woke progressivism. At face value, while woke seems to be all heart — about oozing empathy for certain minority groups at the expense of more hard-headed and complicated concerns — EA seems to be all head. Actually, though, the two have more in common than you’d think.

Throughout his book, MacAskill covertly uses emotive thought experiments to push the reader’s moral intuitions in the way he wishes them to go. At one point, for instance, the reader is asked to imagine leaving a broken bottle on a pathway, so that a child then cuts herself on the shards. We are then supposed to extend these consequent feelings of guilt and revulsion through time to unborn strangers. Future people are talked about as if they were distressingly disabled by their own non-existence: as “disempowered members of society” who “can’t made their views heard directly” and are “utterly disenfranchised”. MacAskill exhorts us, as if from the pulpit: “Imagine what future people would think, looking back at us debating such questions. They would see some of us arguing that future people don’t matter. But they look down at their hands; they look around at their lives. What is different?”

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Effectively, both longtermism and woke progressivism take a highly restricted number of emotional impulses many of us ordinarily have, and then vividly conjure up heart-rending scenarios of supposed harm in order to prime our malleable intuitions in the desired direction. Each insists that we then extend these impulses quasi-rigorously, past any possible relevance to our own personal lives. According to longtermists, if you are the sort of person who, naturally enough, tries to minimise risks to your unborn children, cares about future grandchildren, or worries more about unlikely personal disasters rather than likely inconveniences, then you should impersonalise these impulses and radically scale them up to humanity as a whole. According to the woke, if you think kindness and inclusion are important, you should seek to pursue these attitudes mechanically, not just within institutions, but also in sports teams, in sexual choices, and even in your application of the categories of the human biological sexes.

In both cases, our original and admirable impulses eventually get buried under so much impersonality that they are obliterated, or at least distorted beyond recognition. And so it is that we find longtermists such as Bankman-Fried worrying more about future non-existents than humans suffering today; or progressives trying to get people removed from their jobs in the name of kindness.

What is perhaps particularly scary about the longtermists, as opposed to the other lot, is not that they are driven by emotion, but that they don’t know they are. And what is perhaps scary about humanity generally is that, in our perennial attraction to movements like EA, longtermism, and woke progressivism — and to the gurus within them — we seem so bent on fooling ourselves into thinking that the ethical world is relatively one-dimensional and hackable. Grand-scale fantasies of saving the world are easy. Personal relationships are hard. Ethics is an art not a science — and, in my experience, people with PhDs are probably not the most reliable guides to it.

Florence Read: Louise, you have made a case against the sexual revolution. What is it?

Louise Perry: My argument starts from the somewhat controversial recognition that there are some very important physical differences between men and women. Women are the ones who get pregnant; we’re much smaller than men; we’re much more vulnerable to violence in any kind of heterosexual encounter; we suffer all the negative consequences of hormonal birth control.

There are also psychological differences between the sexes, which very strong evidence suggests are at least partially innate. On average, men are much more interested in casual sex than women are, and they’re also more interested in things like watching porn, buying sex — doing all the things that have become much more socially acceptable post-sexual revolution. 

The argument that I make is that even though there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, a culture of sexual hyper-liberalism suits men much more than it does women, in terms of their preferences. The sexual revolution encouraged women to imitate masculine sexuality. And that is not good for the well-being of women.

FR: Aella, you are a porn performer. Do you think that you are imitating male sexuality in your everyday work?

Aella: Yes. A lot of what you said I don’t disagree with. Porn is purchased mostly by men. Men are typically the primary consumers of the content that I create. Female purchasers of porn basically don’t exist. A good chunk of women do in fact watch porn, but don’t typically pay quite as much.

FR: What’s the problem with that? Louise, what is your issue with the male-dominated world of sexuality?

LP: One of the ways in which women are quite different from men is: we have a much lower sexual disgust threshold. It’s much easier for us to get “the ick” in a sexual encounter. Women tend to be much choosier about their sexual partners than men are. There’s a very obvious evolved reason for this: up until five minutes ago, we didn’t have access to reliable contraception, which meant that having any kind of sexual encounter could lead to pregnancy. So it makes sense that women have evolved to be choosy about who they potentially get pregnant from: is he going to hang around, is he going to be a good father?

And the problem with trying to override that choosiness — trying to have sex like a man and trying to regard sex as casual: just a leisure activity without any sort of innate meaning or specialness — is that it forces women to suppress that instinct. It often causes distress. There’s a whole genre of articles in women’s mags about how to stop yourself catching feelings — strategies that you can use during sex to dissociate almost, to not bond with your partner. It’s things like: don’t make eye contact, take certain drugs, get drunk. Just look at the orgasm gap: the fact that most women don’t orgasm in casual encounters; women are much more likely to orgasm with long-term committed partners. Often women talk about casual sex as if you have to run the gauntlet: this is a phase in your life that you have to go through, the hook up phase, on the route to a more committed relationship.

FR: Aella, you’ve described yourself as polyamorous. Do you feel that you are in distress?

A: No, not at all. Polyamory has been absolutely fantastic. But I feel like the crux of the issue is: what percentage of women are having a bad experience of casual sex? Is this thing inherently damaging? People are kind of unskilled at casual sex. I went through a couple of different phases of casual sex, and the first phase was pretty terrible, understandably. No orgasms. But if you are told often that casual sex is bad for you, you’re going to re-parse casual sex as having been bad for you.

I lived in a house full of cam girls for a year. We were very close: we worked together, we talked about our deepest hopes and dreams. And we didn’t hide anything; we bitched about it quite a lot. Fast forward almost 10 years. One of the girls happened to date a bunch of men who really don’t like sex work. And she, in my opinion, revamped her past in order to be like, “Ah, that experience was damaging for me”. And I was like: “Bitch, I was there. I heard you talking about it at the time. There was no hint that any of this was bad for you.” When you enter a culture that’s feeding you this idea that you should feel bad about what you went through, you’re going to reverse develop this narrative.

To be fair, this can happen both ways. A lot of people will try to tell women that casual sex was definitely good for them, and they should feel good about it. Any narrativising, trying to tell women what they should feel, is, in my opinion, bad.

My ideal would be to ask women: do you actually like what’s going on or do you actually not? To what degree are you just trying to conform to other people? I think that’s a message that would result in a lot of people realising that they don’t want to have casual sex. And maybe a lot of people realising that, in fact, they do.

LP: I do agree with you that the power of narrative is amazing, and we restructure our memories according to narrative. There is a phenomenon, though — I don’t know if this necessarily applies to camming — but, a lot of women who’ve done in-person prostitution (particularly the worst end: street-based, brothel-based prostitution) say that, when you’re in it, believing a narrative that it’s okay is the way you survive. It’s the way you get through what is a fairly terrible experience.

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FR: There are many jobs that people do that are unpleasant, and they have to do for money. What makes sex work any different, Louise?

LP: The idea that sex is like any other kind of social interaction — comparable to working in a factory, to shaking hands, to making coffee, going surfing — I call that, in the book, sexual disenchantment. It’s this idea that comes out of the sexual revolution, that all of the religious, bourgeois, traditional norms of the past had to be done away with. The idea of sex having any kind of special status, let alone sacred status, had to be done away with in order for people to shake off the oppressive shackles of the past. And I think the problem with that idea is twofold.

One, I don’t think people believe it in the vast majority of cases. They overwhelmingly don’t behave as if sex is like anything else. There are people who do polyamory well and enjoy it. There are also, on any given platform devoted to discussion of polyamory, people really struggling with jealousy — finding it really, really difficult to suppress that instinct to view sex as being unique compared with other kinds of relationships.

And the problem with trying to pretend that sex is just like anything else: if you can’t have a special status for sex, you also can’t have a special status for rape, which we do in law. We recognise that rape is worse than theft — instinctively, and also in our legal codes. We recognise that sexual harassment has a uniquely harmful effect on its victims.

FR: Aella, do you think that sex is sacred?

A: I agree that for some sections of the population, sex is treated very seriously, and in others, it’s not. My guess is that people are much more flexible along the spectrum than you might think.

I worked at a factory — terrible hours — and then I escaped into sex work, and eventually into prostitution. After I did this, I was shocked that people had placed so much meaning on sex, in a way that prevented me from escaping terrible jobs to begin with. Because I didn’t go straight into sex work because of that meaning that people placed on it. And then when I did, I was like: “Fuck that, that meaning that people loaded up on to sex, prevented me from living basically my best life.” And I know a lot of other sex workers who feel the same way. And I’m not saying that everybody should. I also know some sex workers who tried sex work, and they were like: “Shit, I can’t not have the meaning here”. 

My overall issue here is: people are pointing a laser eye at the non-standard, non-normal, deviant types of sexual approaches than they are at the conservative, socially-accepted ones. You’re correct that a lot of polyamory discussions are talking about jealousy issues, but monogamy also has dead bedroom problems. Both are relationship structures that require some sort of negotiation of your desires, and what you can achieve in your life. And both of them have pretty severe downsides. And as a sex worker, I see a huge amount of the downsides in monogamy, from men who come see me because of failures in their monogamous relationships.

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FR: If you were not there to service their needs, do you think they would turn back to their partners and have a frank conversation about their sex life? Or do you think that you are offering them a way out?

A: I would ask the guys that I saw: “Are you married?” And if they said, yes, then I’d ask: “So why are you seeing me?” The general sense that I got was that most of them had wives that weren’t interested in them anymore. Basically wives that had a bunch of kids, or had health issues, and their sex drive was zero. And sometimes I would ask: “Well, have you considered bringing it up with her? Have you talked with her about it?” And the majority of their responses — I’d say 60 to 70% — were horror. They were like: “I don’t want to destroy my entire life.” It was common for guys to be like, “If I bring it up with her, I think she would leave me.”

A lot of the men had been sexless for ten years before finally trying to find a sex worker. Most men don’t feel great about making their wife unhappy, potentially, to do this. A lot of them are risking damage to their life. Most guys I talked to, I got the impression that they had made at least some effort. Some of them, no — some guys were like, “Fuck it, I don’t give a shit. Our relationship is totally separate from this, and I’m just going to fuck other people, because that’s what I want” — but it was not the majority. In fact, I got the impression that seeing these men actually probably helped save them from divorce, because their other option was leaving their wife because they couldn’t talk. So it was this safe, tiny outlet that allowed them to maintain longer, more dedicated relationships.

LP: Presumably, their wives would have left them if they’d known though. So these were secret encounters. Monogamy clearly has its downsides too, but everything in the whole entire world has trade-offs. I completely take your point that there are some people for whom polyamory is great, there are some people for whom sex work is great, there are some people who are just temperamentally much more suited to non-conventional sexual lives. But I think the other thing that I’m interested in, and which is much more difficult to talk about within a liberal framework, is how this scales.

So one of the things that I write about in the last chapter of my book is the fact that there are all sorts of ways in which societies that have a monogamous marriage system do better than societies that don’t, even though only about 20% of societies on the anthropological record have been monogamous. They tend to be more affluent, they tend to have lower rates of crime, they tend to have lower rates of spousal abuse, child abuse, compared to polygamous cultures.

A: I’m not surprised that this is the case. I would guess that if you compared polygamous cultures to monogamous cultures, monogamous cultures would probably do better.

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FR: Is there an ideal when it comes to how we build our relationships? Louise, do you for example disapprove of Aella’s work as a sex worker? In your ideal society, would OnlyFans not exist?

LP: “Disapprove” is not a word I would use. I think that it is clearly the case that some individuals do well on OnlyFans. Most don’t. I think we agree on the fact that OnlyFans is insanely unequal. The vast majority of women who become content creators are not going to make any real money, and are likely to suffer negative consequences down the track. I think it would be better if OnlyFans didn’t exist. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think it should be banned, because there are obviously all sorts of downstream consequences of that kind of legislation, which might do more harm than good. I think it’d be very, very difficult to ban OnlyFans or similar sites. But I think, on balance, they have a net negative impact on society.

A: Would you agree with OnlyFans if, say, before signing up, a girl got like statistics on how likely it was for her to make various amounts of money? Like, “90% of creators make under $1,000 a month,” or something like this?

LP: I think that would be good. I imagine the platforms would not want to do that, because it’s obviously going to limit their profit-making.

The other thing that I would want a lot of naive young women to be aware of is the fact that even though men are less likely to admit to the fact that they still ascribe to the sexual double standard, they do. And I think that one of the worst consequences of OnlyFans for very many women, which isn’t talked about nearly enough, is the fact that it becomes that much harder afterwards to find a committed relationship, which actually most women say is what they want long term, because men are judgmental about it.

A: My guess is that this is very well-known in women cultures. I’ve joined so many discussion groups where girls are thinking about getting into OnlyFans, or already doing OnlyFans, and a huge amount of that discussion is centred around, “How much is this going to damage my mate prospects? How much should I hide it from my potential mates? How can I do OnlyFans in a way where it’s not going to leak to potential mates?” This, to me, is one of the top things, at least in practice that I have seen women consider. To me it doesn’t feel like an overlooked aspect at all. 

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FR: Doesn’t that suggest we should be driving towards a more sexually open society? Because I suppose if we got into a place where nobody had any taboos around sex work, then we wouldn’t have to deal with that problem.

LP: I think that the nature of human beings is such that we seem to have a very strong instinct towards regarding sex as being special. Men seem to have a very strong instinct towards mate guarding. Trying to dissuade people from feeling this way is a serious uphill struggle. Any kind of political project based on the idea that we can undo human nature is one that’s doomed to failure. I think that we do still basically have minds evolved for a hunter-gatherer life, because that’s 90% of our species’ history.

A: I think that this is probably why women are very into BDSM — because evolutionarily, and historically, you had to be aroused by powerful men in order to survive. But also, to some degree, a lot of it is quite cultural, too. We’ve seen a lot of different sexual structures throughout history. I do think that we have a little bit more flexibility.

FR: Both of you seem to be arguing there that there’s a certain amount of nature involved here and we’re trying to push against nature, and to impose social norms upon it. Is there an argument for letting nature run riot and just allowing people to tap into their most primal selves?

LP: I think the problem with absolute liberation — just allowing people to do whatever feels right to them — is the fact that some people have dark, destructive, horrible desires. Actually, probably a lot of people do. Human sexuality is not necessarily nice and pro-social at all. So you have to think about how you’re going to manage the desires of people when that desire is destructive to others.

The other problem is: one sex is much more vulnerable inherently than the other sex. How you manage that asymmetry is, I think, a question that all civilisations have grappled with. And no one has ever come up with a free-for-all as the best solution, because clearly it wouldn’t actually work.

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FR: Digital sex work might be an answer there, though. Aella is behind a screen: she is, in many ways, invulnerable to male violence, and she is being paid for sexual acts, which she finds pleasurable, I assume. And so, isn’t that a win-win?

LP: Or, a step further, sex robots. Then there would be no ethical issues in terms of consent. It would bypass all of the feminist arguments over sex work that’ve been going on for so long. The focus is normally on the effects on women, though. And I actually think that having a class of men who basically just spend all day indoors, playing video games, and having sex with their sex robots seems like a fairly bleak future for that portion of mankind.

A: It seems nicer if they can have access to real women. I would be sad. I used to do OnlyFans, but to be clear, I’ve also been an IRL prostitute, and have been subject to male violence. But out of all the sex-work forms that I have done, the in-person feels the healthiest to me, for both me and the men. The others feel like some sort of weird, warped version of human interaction that objectifies us both more. And sure, it’s safer to some degree, but you can take steps to be safe in-person. In my opinion, in the healthiest future society, the dominant form of sex work would be human to human, eye contact, skin contact, just like God intended.

FR: What about these sex robots? That’s certainly not what God intended, but it’s a lot safer for everyone involved, isn’t it?

 A: I like the idea of sex robots existing. I think if men can have an outlet that they need that is affordable and accessible to them, this seems good. I’m generally pro people independently pursuing what they want. And if that’s sex robots, then go for it.

FR: But do you think that the skin to skin contact, as you said there, is superior to this kind of digital sex work that we’re talking about?

A: Yeah, absolutely. Because it feels really dehumanising, like I said, for both parties. With OnlyFans, I’m not dealing with a man, I’m dealing with the collection of men. I’m dealing with the statistical likelihood of a man clicking on this thing. It’s very robotic. And similarly, this is encouraging men to treat women the same way. You have like a billion women, and it’s just like cycling through them. You’re not really developing a relationship with any of them.

And again, I am pro people pursuing what they want, in their own time. I’m happy OnlyFans exists. But I noticed it was much better for my mental health to do it in person. It just felt so much better and more fulfilling to be able to touch an individual person.

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FR: There used to be quite high barrier to entry for sex work, if you’re talking about street prostitution. Whereas now, with things like OnlyFans, the barrier has been lowered massively. Is it a good thing that more and more people have access to a sex-work career?

A: Yeah. I know a bunch of single moms or women with health issues — women who are struggling to feed their kids on their own — who said, “Oh, I tried OnlyFans, and it gave me, not even that much money, an extra $300 a month, but now I can pay my rent.” There’s a whole bunch of people for whom their lives are really drastically improved by that amount of money. Typically people who are really disadvantaged in some way. It disproportionately assists the poor, or people I would consider to be lower-class — people who were culturally priced-out of the better paying jobs — which is why I think this worked for me so well. I grew up very, very conservative, no access to education, and so a lot of people are like, “Oh, well you should just go to college and get an education, and then get a job.” For some people, their lives just don’t work like that. And for some people being able to have easily-accessible side income that you don’t need training for, or elite approval or credentials, is incredibly beneficial and life changing. And I’ve known so many women for whom this is the case.

LP: I take that point, although I do think it’s worth emphasising the fact that drug and alcohol addiction is extraordinarily common among sex workers. The OnlyFans end of the spectrum is clearly the much less dangerous, traumatic end of it. But it’s also not representative of the whole spectrum of sex work, some of which is dire. And it’s very, very common for women to end up taking drugs and using alcohol as a way of dealing with the emotional fallout of prostitution. And that means that you’re not actually ending up in a better situation at all: you end up potentially spiralling downwards and getting stuck.

I’m not really a radical feminist at all – I think I can comfortably speak for radical feminists, though, in that they tend to think no woman should be in a situation where she can’t feed her children unless she’s doing sex work. I do recognise that we live in the real world and there are situations where that might seem like the best option. The other problem is that because lay people’s understanding of the sex industry tends to be very poor, it can be very difficult to know how you will find prostitution until you’ve actually done it. So saying at the outset, “I think I’m well suited to this, I think it will be fine. I’ve read through my checklist of warnings, and I think it’s fine,” isn’t actually quite the same as actually doing it.

When you make a move towards normalisation, de-stigmatisation, and presenting this as a perfectly valid career route, you are going to end up with people going down that career route for whom it is an absolute disaster and it ruins their lives.

A: There’s a lot of talk about alcohol and drug stuff with sex workers – which I agree is true, they have much higher rates of drug use. But if, say, we have a world where we dramatically criminalise something like plumbing — like, plumbers are really stigmatised and if you plumb then people are like, “I’m not sure I want to date you”, and if you get assaulted as a plumber, you can’t go to the police otherwise they’ll put you in jail — I would expect the kind of people who would gravitate towards plumbing are people who are unsuccessful in other aspects of their life, and probably have problems with drug and alcohol use. My guess is correlation, not necessarily causation.

LP: I agree with you that clearly the stigma makes all sorts of things worse in all sorts of ways. But also, I’m not convinced that the stigma is an after effect of the law. I think that actually the stigma seems to stick to the sex industry, across time and place. And I think it comes back to this problem of the socio-sexuality gap requiring a prostituted class of women. Most women don’t want to be in that class. It’s very hard to persuade anyone to think that that isn’t a bad outcome for those women and the stigma flows from that.

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A: It feels like you’re implicitly telling women that they should feel bad for these things. I wish I could hear more, “Yeah, some woman are like that and if you’re not, it’s chill.” When you were talking about prostitution I was like, “Well, you should just try it once or twice and see how it works for you, and if you don’t like it, then stop.” If you have a bad experience, it doesn’t seem to me like it needs to be traumatising. But if we treat it with this level of like gravitas, then it’s going to create that trauma in people. And I wish that when I was in a really sex-negative culture, I could have heard more messaging about how it’s okay to be sexually promiscuous if you want to. If I had been surrounded by people giving me the kind of message that you’re giving me, I think I would have ended up with a lot more shame and guilt overall.

LP: I acknowledge that it can seem condescending and judgmental — the anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminism — but we all know that the really brutal attitudes towards sex workers come overwhelmingly from sex buyers. I’m sure there are exceptions, but we know that men who buy sex are more likely to be sexually aggressive, more likely to admit to rape outside of the sex industry. I think the problem with the effort to de-stigmatise, in the hope that we will somehow arrive at a sex industry that really is just like any other industry, is: it is basically based on theory. It’s based on the faith that all of the stigma is causing the problem, not that stigma is attached to the innate problem, which actually has much more to do with the fact that most women find prostitution very distressing and most sex buyers don’t treat the women they buy sex from with proper respect. 

FR: Louise, do you think that you are part of a new movement? Is there a sex-negative movement? You said earlier that you’re not a radical feminist — so what would you call yourself? Are you a conservative?

LP: The key way I guess in which I diverge from radical feminism is I don’t believe in the blank slate. I don’t think that the differences between men and women are a consequence of socialisation. I don’t think that they can be just dissolved away. I think that we have to deal with the existence of these differences on a psychological level as well as a physical level, and kind of progress from there. I’ve arrived at some conclusions which some traditionalists agree with me on — not all of them by any means. I guess maybe this is a materialist form of feminism, in the sense that it’s coming out of the recognition that these material differences exist and we have to make our peace with them.

We are reckoning with these vast material changes. The one that I’m primarily interested in, in my book, is the pill. I don’t accept this idea of the great woman theory of feminist history, where the thing that drives feminist change is particularly charismatic women. There clearly have been charismatic women, but I think the thing that’s driven change for women has primarily been technological — the washing machine, the tampon, whatever you want to name.

And the points, if you look at the history, when you see feminist thinking flaring up, tend to be at the points where you have some important material flux. So you have the internal combustion engine and you have suffrage, and you have the Second World War and the move away from industrial economy and then you have the second [feminist] wave. And I think now, possibly, there is another flare up, and there’s another reckoning with feminist ideas, because we’re seeing the next revolution, which is the online revolution. And it’s really important to be thinking about sexual difference in that space, because it may appear as if we are just these genderless economic units who can all participate in the knowledge economy on a completely even footing and stuff, but actually sexual difference exists. And it will persist until I guess the transhumanists finally have their way.

FR: And Aella, do you feel that you’re an agent of change in this revolution that Louise is talking about?

A: An agent of change? I feel like I just want to defend people like me. It feels, especially in recent years, like I’m fighting against this push of people disrespecting me solely because of my sexual promiscuity and the way that I like to approach sex. And it feels like there’s more shame and judgement about it. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m exposed to different places of the internet or if this is actually a movement, but I feel really protective of it. I’m like, “No, I am okay the way that I am.” And I really want to give that message to anybody who’s like me. Living like me can be a wonderful, healthy and fulfilling and you don’t have to feel shame, or like you need to hide. And so if there’s people like me out there, I really want to take a stand and have a bold, unapologetic ownership of that. And that feels like the thing that I’m fighting for.

So, as Stephanie Hare rightly points out in Technology Is Not Neutral, it’s never just an object. Technology is as much social as scientific, as much economics as engineering. There’s little point in Silicon Valley companies hiring an ethicist to decide a product’s value — its effects go far beyond the shiny thing that comes out of the box.

Apple, for instance, might not have put AirTags on the market in their present form if they had paused to wonder whether a coin-sized tracking device — ideal for keeping track of keys, luggage or children’s toys — could also be ideal for stalkers to electronically track an unsuspecting person. Now they are forced to come up with solutions, most of which rely on the tracked person also having a smartphone.

But, precisely because technology is a social phenomenon, embedding ethics, and ethicists, in its development will never remedy its dangers. Take Facial Recognition Technology, for example. It’s an issue Hare has been actively — and critically — researching for some time. Like other biometric technology, it has been introduced in practice with remarkably little scrutiny, regulation, or debate.

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Today, with ubiquitous CCTV cameras and widespread availability of facial recognition software, British police forces are using it to pick out individuals in public spaces, with AI programmes that match faces seen on camera to faces in databases. But private spaces like shops, museums, casinos and arts centres were using Facial Recognition Technology first. Some cities and states in the US have moved to forbid or control its use, but in the UK there is no legal framework to prevent somebody from matching your face to your identity, and other data about your life.

How did we end up here, unable to reliably go about our lives anonymously in public spaces? Just as technology is inseparable from wider social structures, “tech ethics” can’t be seen as merely part of the technology development process. They make sense only in the context of wider social and moral frameworks.

It’s entirely possible that the designers of the Facial Recognition systems looked at the millions of photographs that people upload to social media every day, tagging themselves, their friends and families, and couldn’t see anything wrong with gathering all that information into one handy index. True, it could result in specific harms, like stalkers finding their victims, or innocent people being unjustly targeted by the police. But those could be relegated to the “unforeseen consequences” of a generally desirable change.

Yet the indifference of governments, businesses, and many individuals, to privacy is a much deeper problem than a few irresponsible tech bros. As the recent pandemic years have shown, the desire to be free from scrutiny unless there’s a good reason to be scrutinised is widely seen as, at best, eccentric and, at worst, automatic grounds for suspicion.

We simply can’t articulate why a private life is valuable. We have no sense of ourselves as autonomous beings, persons who need a space in which to reflect, to share thoughts with a few others, before venturing into public space with words and actions that we feel ready to defend.

Few question the desirability of exposing private messages that fall short of today’s acceptable attitudes. In-jokes are regularly taken out of context and used to condemn the joker. If a wrong thought has been expressed, even privately to friends or associates, it’s evidence of bad character and subject to public judgement. The use of Implicit Bias tests by employers shows that even subconscious thoughts are not safe from dissection and testing for impurity.

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And since Covid struck, the ethical implications of our relationship with technology have only become more profound. Consider the use of “contact tracing” apps which, as Hare notes, could be more accurately described as “exposure notification apps” since they don’t facilitate contact tracing, because they’re designed to be anonymous.

We owe that design element to Google and Apple, who added to their operating systems the capacity for devices to exchange tokens with nearby devices, using Bluetooth, but only anonymously.

Many governments, including in UK and France, didn’t want this anonymous system. They wanted to know the patterns of who was infecting whom, as well as the possibility of contacting individuals to make sure they were isolating when they should. Arguably, public health might justify that kind of intrusion. But the tech giants didn’t want to gift governments information about who spends time within a few metres of whom.

Perhaps they were right — but either way, we never got to have that argument. Governments largely evaded public debate about the measures they used against Covid, and tech companies decided what capabilities to build into their products. The successes and failures of the apps were only partly technical; they were largely down to the wider strengths and failings of Covid policies. It is, after all, little use telling somebody they may have been infected if they can’t get a speedy test result, or if they can’t afford to self-isolate without sick pay. Again, no amount of ethical tech development would have changed that.

As the pandemic moved on, the attention of the UK government moved from “Contact Tracing Apps” that weren’t, to “Vaccine Passports” that weren’t, but were really. Despite almost universal rejection of the idea by health, cyber-security and equality organisations, and repeated insistence that the government was not considering vaccine passports, the Government funded eight pilot schemes for vaccine passports, and gave the green light for private organisations to demand them.

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Ethicists went public with their many warnings: vaccine passports would be socially divisive, discriminatory, needlessly intrusive, and a perverse incentive to get infected. But none of this had any impact on government plans: principles like privacy and social solidarity found no resonance in opportunistic policymaking. Neither did the Government have the courage to argue that these undesirable measures were proportionate and necessary, and trust the public to accept exceptional infringements in exceptional times.

This is the other limitation of technology ethics: they are no match for power. Britain is currently an outlier among European and other governments that are imposing highly divisive and restrictive vaccine passport regimes, and using physical force against dissenters.

And yet masses of people do seem prepared to accept restrictions on their lives that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. Why are we so willing to accept that a condition of participation in public life is an app that affirms our medical status? Why have we been so willing to accept the repeated reduction of society to one household in one space, connected mainly through screens to the wider world?

One answer is that technology has ridden to the rescue. Without the constant ability to connect to that digital network — a network of other humans, as well as data — it would simply have been impossible for half the population to just stay home for months on end. Work would have been done in offices or not at all. Education would have been unable to stagger on, even in its unequal and truncated form. The severance of social connections would not have been a reduction to two-dimensional faces on screens, but near-complete isolation.

But that is only half an answer. A retreat from shared public space, alongside the penetration of private space by always-on connection, was far advanced before governments told us to Stay Home. When bedrooms and kitchen tables became classrooms and desks, was it so great a change from answering work emails from the sofa, or chatting about homework on screens across many teenage bedrooms?

And that earlier change, accelerated but not precipitated by the pandemic, was as much social as technological. Through technology, we can be apart, but never completely alone. Interacting through screens, we are insulated by space and — when we’re exchanging messages — by time. Public space is increasingly digital, so we need never be fully there, but with a smartphone there is no fully private space either.

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This shift away from shared social lives began in the mid 20th century. We lead more solitary lives than our grandparents. We start families later, we belong to fewer social organisations. Most of all, we lack a shared framework of morality and ideas about a shared future. When difficult times hit us, we lack a foundation on which to base our judgments. This is true of us as individuals, but also as a society. No wonder our governments cast about for technological solutions to moral questions.

Hare quotes John von Neumann in 1954, testifying about the development of the atomic bomb:

“We were all little children with respect to the situation which had developed… None of us had been educated or conditioned to exist in this situation, and we had to make our rationalisation and our code of conduct as we went along.”

Today, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t act — and probably feel — like a young child when confronted with adult responsibilities.

Part of the appeal of technologies like AI is the fantasy that a machine can take the role of wise parent, immune to the emotion and unpredictability of mere humans. But this tells us less about the real capabilities of AI, and more about our disillusionment with ourselves

The urge to fix Covid, or other social problems, with technology springs from this lack of trust in other people. So does the cavalier disregard for privacy as an expression of moral autonomy. Technology ethics can’t save us, any more than technology can. Even during a pandemic, how we regard one another is the fundamental question at the root of ethics. So we do need to treat technology as just a tool, after all. Otherwise we risk being made its instruments in a world without morals.

To describe Erasmus Darwin — the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton — as simply a doctor would be selling him short. He was a figure the stature of Samuel Johnson. Unlike Johnson, however, he stayed in the Midlands and was transfixed by science. Darwin was a pivotal member of the Lunar Society, that constellation of thinkers who believed in the power of science to improve humanity. Coleridge, his friend and correspondent, described him as “the most original-minded man”.

He was also an abolitionist. The emancipation badge, the medallion with the inscription “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” that inspired Darwin’s verse, was made for the Society for the Abolition of the Slavery. It was the most popular symbol in the fight against the slave trade in the late eighteenth century. And it was created by Darwin’s good friend: Josiah Wedgwood.

Stoke has unfairly acquired the status of a provincial backwater. It is a Brexit city and its football team is a punchline: a foreign player can be good, but he can’t be that good if he can’t do it on a rainy night in Stoke. But Stoke’s most famous son was the emblematic figure of the long eighteenth century. Wedgwood’s work is mentioned in the novels of Austen and the letters of Gibbon. He made ceramics for Catherine the Great and the Georgian Royal Family; his family-surgeon and close friend was Erasmus Darwin; his other friends included Joseph Priestley, the minister and scientist who discovered oxygen.

Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and former Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, has written a fluent and insightful biography of Wedgwood. Near the start of The Radical Potter, Hunt states: “Wedgwood’s marriage of technology and design, retail precision and manufacturing efficiency, transformed forever the production of pottery, and ushered in a mass consumer society”. But what is clear from the biography is that Wedgwood was also responding to the demands of a new consumer society.

By 1700, Britain was behind in terms of ceramic production. Japan and China were masters of exquisite design. British ceramics, by contrast, were crude. Lorenzo de Medici, the most powerful supporter of art in Renaissance Italy, loved Chinese porcelain. And so did Henry VIII. Louis XIV of France adored Chinese porcelain so much he even created a porcelain pavilion for, Hunt writes, “ceramic-themed assignations with his mistress Mme de Montespan”.

However, as Hunt notes, “over the course of the early eighteenth century, the need to substitute Asian and European imports with indigenous manufacture was vital in the development of a mass-market, consumer goods industry”. This need was satisfied by Wedgwood.

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The Wedgwood family had been minor potters in North Staffordshire for two centuries before Josiah was born. What made North Staffordshire so useful was the proximity of clay and coal in the environment. Pottery ran through the veins of the family the way clay and coal veined the earth.

Wedgwood developed a leg disability from smallpox when he was 12. This meant he could never be a “thrower” — someone who operates the foot pedal on the potter’s wheel. Misfortune, was in this case, a stroke of luck. His disability allowed him to instead get stuck in on the more cerebral aspects of the business. “Design, innovation and business were aspects of the pottery trade”, Hunt writes, “to which Wedgwood could devote the attention that he could no longer apply to the thrower’s bench”.

The task of Wedgwood and his business partner Thomas Bentley was, in the words of Hunt, to “see off the attraction of luxury Chinese porcelain, dominate the fast-moving retail market, satiate the insatiable appetite of the middling sort with fashionable products sold at a healthy profit and soak up the emulative spending power of the increasingly taste-conscious Georgian consumer”.

Wedgwood came from a nonconformist religious tradition; he subscribed to political radicalism and popular democracy. His business success was nevertheless beholden to the patronage of the aristocracy. He made a creamware for Princess Charlotte, the wife of King George III “who set the fashion in London”. Hunt emphasises this ideological fissure when he notes that “a luxury product endorsed by high society was thus by far the most effective means for developing a profitable, mass-market commodity and if Thomas Bentley and Josiah Wedgwood were to secure the patronage of the trend-setting nobility they had to jettison their political radicalism, Nonconformist ethos and thirst for democracy”. The fissure, however, would be more brutally exposed by Wedgwood’s entanglement with the trans-atlantic slave trade.

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The demand for ceramics was linked to a demand for other goods in the eighteenth century; porcelain was a pretty appendage to drink and grub. In particular, the period witnessed a tea craze. Tea was imported by the East India Company from China. The Company also imported sugar from slave plantations in the Caribbean. Sugar went from being a luxury product to a “dietary staple”. It was used to make chocolate, jam and treacle. But most importantly it was used to drink tea. 8,000 tons of sugar were imported to Britain in 1663; it was 97,000 by 1775. Britain had developed a sweet tooth.

But it was a sweet tooth that encouraged an industry characterised by savage cruelty. As Adam Hochschild makes clear in his book Bury the Chains: “When slavery ended in the United States, less than half a million slaves imported over the centuries had grown to a population of nearly four million. When it ended in the British West Indies, total slave imports of well over two million left a surviving slave population of only about 670,000”. Wedgwood was complicit in this industry: he exported pottery to slave plantation estates in Barbados and Jamaica. And he personally took commissions from slave-owners. But by the 1780s, he was passionately opposed to the slave trade.

The committee for the abolition of the slave trade was founded in 1787 by William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp: the Three Musketeers of British Anti-Slavery activism (With Olaudah Equiano as d’Artagnan). Wedgwood was subsequently elected to the committee. During this period, he “wrote impassioned letters, circulated petitions, attended meetings and joined boycotts”.

He also created the emancipation medallion, which was, as Hunt notes, “the dominant motif of anti-slavery activism until illustrations from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin became prominent in the nineteenth century.

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Wedgwood was, so it seems, a bundle of contradictions. Much of his working life was spent trying to negotiate his desire for business success with his concern for social justice. Eric Williams, the Trinidadian statesman and historian, famously argued that the British ended the slave trade for financial rather than moral reasons. For Williams, this is an indictment of Britain. Many people today — on the Left and Right — denounce corporations and businesses who ostentatiously display support for social justice movements. The phrase ‘virtue signalling’ is typically used as an insult.

Although many critics denounce social justice warriors and woke capitalists as sanctimonious, the underlying criticism of them is that they are insufficiently moral; that they are engaging in activism to sell something or gratify their vanity or be in with the Cool Kids. They are not doing it simply because it is the right thing to do.

But what is clear from Hunt’s biography of Wedgwood is that the Staffordshire potter used our materialism and desire to emulate high-status people to advance the abolitionist movement. The materialism and trend-setting craze that fuelled the slave trade — the desire for sweetened tea and sumptuous ceramics to adorn them — also undermined it: this time by seeing respectable people wearing a beautifully-crafted medallion. As Hunt writes: “Even though the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century had helped to fuel the Atlantic slave trade, Wedgwood’s understanding of its ethos of emulation now enabled him to popularise abolitionism more effectively than any number of Sharp petitions or Equiano readings”.

Social movements, political ideologies and religions don’t spread because we individually analyse beliefs and say This is Obviously Good and This is Obviously Bad. We are sociable creatures: we care about what our peers do and the behaviour of charismatic people. This isn’t a normative judgement; it is a descriptive fact. Rather than bemoaning virtue signalling and woke capitalism, we ought to understand how we actually behave. The spread of an ideological movement through material interests is not necessarily a bad thing. 

Which is not to say it’s necessarily good either. The moral focus should be on the beliefs themselves, rather than how they are spread. I am critical of many contemporary vogueish social justice movements. However, I am critical of them because I think they are wrong and or harmful, not because many high-status people support them. 

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The assumption which seems to underpin the view that it is necessarily bad if moral movements are spread by non-moral means is that we are solely motivated by ethical reasoning. Any deviation from moralising therefore constitutes a betrayal of the principles we claim to espouse. But this assumption is untrue. We don’t only care about right or wrong; we also care about status.

A part of me thinks we should be more moralistic, not least because I think people who espouse an essentialist form of identity politics, and companies that jump on the bandwagon of social justice, flatten rich individual experiences. But that’s probably my religious prejudice speaking: talk of individual moral conscience only makes sense by presupposing a coherent and distinctive self. That we have a soul.

But we are also mammals. The means through which our moral norms spread will always be somewhat imperfect, haphazard, bungling; reflecting the vagaries of status. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin. His maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood.

There are various reasons, not least that spouses physically look after each other and once alone, a widow or widower might not care much any more. But there is also the psychological impact of grief, the broken heart and the feeling of not wanting to go on. Death is, in this sense, contagious — but, then, almost everything is. Perhaps after a tortuous year and a half in which everyone has learned about infection and “R values”, we should start to appreciate this more.

Today we exit lockdown after 16 difficult and strange months, a period that began and ended with two of the most watched television programmes in British history: the Prime Minister’s television broadcast to the nation, and the 2020 European Championship final.

In between those two events, the British public were forcibly locked into their homes, pubs were closed, casual sex was made illegal and parties were banned — it was the most popular policy in living memory, and a huge swathe of the population seemed to actually enjoy it. Indeed, a large section of the public wants lockdown to last forever, with almost one in five favouring a permanent 10pm curfew.

What some people liked about lockdown was the feeling that everyone was was in it together, all in the same boat: no one had a social life, everyone was isolated and scared, and that felt somehow more communal. And while the fetishisation of the NHS can feel strange, the Clap for Carers and the weird cult of Captain Tom was the closest thing we’ve had to common rituals for a long time — and people need common rituals.

The British obsession with the Second World War is often misinterpreted as being about triumph, but it’s actually related to the sense of common purpose people felt, especially during the Blitz; humans are much happier when they’re part of something, which is why suicide rates fall during periods of intense group feeling, a trend first noted by Durkheim.

When the virus first hit, Boris Johnson was slow and reluctant to act because he is, by nature, a classical liberal, a philosophy that holds individual liberty as the central good. It is deeply inadequate in such a crisis, because we have no individual choice during an epidemic — our risk of getting sick depends not just on our behaviour, but on the behaviour of those around us.

That is partly why the poor suffered higher death rates (that feeling that we were all in it together during lockdown was largely false). It was not only that most manual workers continued to go into sometimes dangerous workplaces, or that the poor have higher risk of ill-health and live in denser areas — it’s also because the people in their social networks were more likely to be infected to start with.

Yet the same is true of everything. Almost every aspect of life depends on contagion in some way, fixing the odds against those in the wrong networks. We are ultra-sociable as a species, unusually so for mammals, to the extent that E.O. Wilson even described humans as “eusocial apes”. Compared with our relatives, we like to live in very large groups, socialise with strangers, and imitate them. It is for that reason that plenty found lockdown unbearable.

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Because humans live in such large groups, and are also so unusually influenced by culture as well as genes, it’s not just viruses that are contagious within human populations, but ideas and behaviour. One of the first recognised “contagions” was suicide, a problem called the Werther effect, after the Goethe novel The Sorrows of Young Werther published in 1774. A story of unrequited love, the book was blamed for a string of suicides, with copies found beside the body in some cases.

In the Fifties it was first noticed that, whenever a prominent celebrity suicide was reported, there followed a spike in road fatalities. It turned out, as insurers soon cottoned onto, that a great deal of car accidents are disguised suicides. Copycat suicide has been found repeatedly in various studies across countries, the most prominent recent British case being the Bridgend epidemic. Multiple studies show that people are more likely to commit suicide after a friend or acquaintance does, mostly using the same methods. It is why the media has very strict rules about reporting suicides, probably the only rule that British newspapers have assiduously stuck to down the years.

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Suicide is not unique, though. Marriage is contagious, as is non-marital cohabitation, divorce and pregnancy. If a woman becomes pregnant, the likelihood of her friends becoming pregnant rises over the next two years.

Yet the contagion effect is largely ignored in political debates. One of the big issues of the Nineties and Noughties was whether out-of-wedlock births and fatherlessness had a negative impact on life chances, and what the state’s role was in this trend.

It’s hard to disentangle cause and effect, nature and nurture, but it now appears that what affects a child’s life outcomes is not just whether he has a father at home, it’s whether the other kids in the neighbourhood have a father at home. One US study found that “Black father presence at the neighborhood level strongly predicts black boys’ outcomes irrespective of whether their own father is present or not”; another that “Children of single parents have higher rates of upward mobility if they grow up in a neighbourhood with fewer single parent households”.

Boys from more comfortable backgrounds, whose own fathers were absent, were much more likely to have other male role models in their social network, where family break-up had not reached epidemic levels. It takes a village, as the saying goes, but you need men in the village.

The debate has largely disappeared with the sharp decline in teen pregnancies across a number of countries, and while much of this is down to greater contraception uptake, another is that girls are just much less likely to get pregnant if none of their friends do. The huge increase in teen pregnancies in the late 20th century was in part a contagion, and it’s burned out.

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Similarly, corruption, according to a meta-analysis of 137 experiments into unethical behaviour, is contagious, as are bad ethics. When a prominent steroid user joined baseball team, his teammates started cheating too. Drug taking, the biggest scourge in American life, is certainly contagious, and gun violence maybe, although people disagree about how much.

Likewise, happiness is contagious, as is sadness, so that “each person in your network who became happy increases your chance of becoming happy by 9%, an unhappy person drops it by 7%.” One of the reasons social media is depressing is because it’s just full of unhappy people writing about how miserable they are.

During the height of last June’s protests, leading health experts in America were justifying support for Black Lives Matters rallies by saying that racism was actually a deadly contagion, so this was actually a health matter. Obviously, it’s more sophisticated sounding than saying “I’m an abject moral coward and don’t want to go against the prevailing ideology, however obviously stupid it is”, but it is true that ideas have certain epidemiological traits.

That is, political beliefs are contagious, which is why students often adopt their roommate’s ideology.  University attendance makes people more Left-wing, not because students are being indoctrinated by academics, but because they’re copying their peers, just as they would if their peers smoked, drank or declared themselves non-binary.

Better technology means that ideas can spread through human populations more rapidly, so that the arrival of the iPhone caused the Great Awokening just as printing led to the Reformation. If the last year has often been odd, it’s partly because we’ve been both cut off from our regular networks, and at the same time subjected to the most contagious medium of viral spread.

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The internet, as at least one paper has suggested, is to our minds what the transition to cities was to our bodies. When people moved to the first urban settlement, novel diseases like measles, TB and later plague were able to spread rapidly among these eusocial apes; the same is arguably true with ideas and lifestyles in the 21st century, with technology imposed on a species uniquely vulnerable to contagion and imitation.

Many people have no more resistance to the insanity spreading out of US academia than our ancestors had to viruses carried by cattle or pigs. Humans are viral creatures, and if the Covid era has taught us anything, it’s that our life outcomes really depend on those closest to us and that everything, from the misery of illness to the mind-melting memes of June 2020, is contagious.

Humankind’s eusocial nature was almost perfectly summed up 400 years ago by another victim of infectious disease; John Donne, reflecting on life and death after a bout of typhus, afterwards wrote the immortal words that still bear true today: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine.”

So happy “freedom day”, but remember: we are not as free as we suppose.

It is not just culture that is upstream of politics, so too are the basic moral/ethical theories that feed into our political decision making. Broadly speaking, there are three very different moral systems of thought — rule-based ethics, or deontological ethics; utilitarianism; and so-called Virtue ethics or character based ethics — and it struck me that they would lead to three very different approaches to a crisis like Covid. So how have these different systems fared when confronted with the complex moral questions that a pandemic presents?

Rule-based ethics is, on the surface at least, the easiest to understand. It is the “thou shalt not” approach: ethics that can be codified in law as a set of rules or instructions. This is what most people expect moral instruction to look like. But though apparently easy to understand, this approach finds it hard to keep up with a fast-moving situation. As Covid spreads, affecting different areas differently, expanding and contracting over weeks, the idea that such a complex environment can be covered by some very basic rules feels extremely naive. Hence Matt Lucas’s fabulous impersonation of Boris Johnson’s bumbling confusion.

“So we are saying don’t go to work, go to work. Don’t take public transport, go to work, don’t go to work. Stay indoors. If you can work from home, go to work. Don’t go to work. Go outside, don’t go outside. And then we will or wont .. er .. something or other.”

The fact that BJ has just had to apologise for not correctly remembering the rules is a stunning indictment of this whole approach. I have no idea what the rules are now, and I don’t suppose many of the rest of us have either. And that is because rule-based approaches are very clumsy moral instruments for such capricious circumstances.

On the battlefield, soldiers are asked to abide by a voluminous amount of legislation covering their behaviour. But the idea that they might look things up as they prepare to pull the trigger, as bullets are pinging about all over the place, and when they haven’t slept for a few days, is simply preposterous. Real-time moral decision making just doesn’t look like that. And it doesn’t look like that with Covid either because the rules necessarily multiply when faced with complexity. There are not 10 commandments in the Hebrew Bible, there are 613. And most of us can’t remember all of them either.

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The utilitarian approach is, one might say, the ethic of the technocrat: it’s ethics in one and zeroes, where situational risk is quantified and calculated. It was designed in the 19th century as an alternative to the religious-feeling of rules being handed down from on high. Consequentialist in nature, it calculates the right course of action based on whether it leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number (though there are various versions of this formula.) In a sense, it’s the ethics of the Test and Trace app and much more responsive to the particularity of the situation one is presented with.

But despite its apparent dexterity, it too has its limitations – not least because many of the moral challenges we face involve qualitative judgments that are not easily quantifiable. Utilitarianism is a data friendly approach to moral decision making, but because it seeks to convert very different moral considerations onto a single scale (so that a course of action can be calculated), it can easily misplace or misshape some of the things that are most important to us.

It’s easy enough — in theory, at least — to decide a course of action based on which might lead to less Covid deaths. Each death can count as one and the rest is simple mathematics. But how do you set the number of deaths against less quantitative moral goods like the impact on personal relationships, or the consequences for personal freedom, or on our sense of well-being? Notwithstanding the impossibility to actually calculate the full consequences of any individual action on anything other than the most short-term of time frames (see the butterfly effect), data driven ethics is a clumsy way of measuring what are often incommensurable moral values. I suspect this is why the moral case against lockdown restrictions has been so weak: because it involves things that do not readily admit of enumeration. The things we value in life are not just apples and oranges. They are apples and bicycles, impossible to plot on a single scale.

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Which leaves us with virtue ethics. This has experienced a surge in popularity since the moral philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe started writing about it in the late 1950’s. Returning to the kind of ethical thinking first explored by Aristotle, it refocuses consideration not upon the morality of the deed, but upon the moral formation of our characters. The kind of thing a virtue ethicist would say is: “Behave as a virtuous person would behave in your situation.”

To those schooled in the first two theories, this approach can feel like it’s not really doing what ethics is supposed to do: it’s not about duty to obey rules or acting to bring about desirable consequences. But the advantage of refocusing on moral character as the crucible of moral decision-making is that it recognises we are always making intuitive responses to constantly changing situations. On the battlefield, it is ethical instincts that do most of the work. Situations that call for an immediate response require us to act out of those deep moral intuitions that have been laid down within us over years of formation.

The old school name for this is character. And what the army has long been good at recognising is that, important though it is to have the right rules governing battlefield behaviour, they are no substitute for moral character.

There is, I suppose, something of the small state conservative view of the world that looks to character as the basis of moral decision making. This is the sort of take that distrusts the top-down approach of deontology as much as the nerdy calculations of the scientists, preferring to rely upon the informed instincts of ordinary people to do what is right, as well as to balance the various competing moral goods as they present themselves. Of course, for those who can’t do their thinking unless there is a number attached to it, all this is unfathomable. These are the kind of people who express mock outrage when Boris says that we should “trust the common sense of the British people”, pretending — and, of course it’s a pretence — that unless an idea has the same sort of definable clarity as a mathematical formula it is effectively meaningless.

Both rules-based and data-driven approaches to morality haven’t had such a good Covid crisis. They have both been exposed as insufficiently flexible. Moral character – shorthand, common sense – is the sort of wisdom that has grown with experience and over time. And the Prime Minister is correct that moral character is our best defence against the way Covid is hollowing out our society – even though, of course, moral character may not be something he is known for having very much of himself.

Naomi Wolf was on the receiving end of it recently. It emerged, in the course of a live broadcast, that she had made a serious mistake in interpreting some of the evidence which she had marshalled to defend the argument of her new book. And gosh how people enjoyed it.

People on social media, with little real interest in Wolf and her oeuvre, joyfully shared the audio clip of her being informed of her error. As it happens, Wolf dealt with it graciously. She did not rail, storm, deny or prevaricate. Most important of all, she did not continue to defend it after it had become clear it was no longer defensible (a most common habit of the age). Instead, she said that she would like to address where her research had gone wrong.

In general, people do not react like this when their errors are revealed. And some errors have more serious implications. So it was this week with the news, and then correction, about a tragic case from the Netherlands.

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The story broke of a 17-year old Dutch girl called Noa Pothoven who had been euthanased at an ‘end of life clinic’. In a number of countries (including Italy where I was at the time), this was front page news. It was obvious why: this is exactly the sort of story which epitomises the fear felt by those who oppose the introduction of euthanasia. Outrage swept through social media.

But before the day was out, the story had been debunked. Local media reported that, rather than having died at a euthanasia clinic in The Hague, Pothoven had in fact died at home in Arnhem on 2 June after refusing to eat or drink.

Thus was a massive media misinterpretation and over-reaction corrected by cooler minds. But the underlying ethical nightmare lingers, playing on the fears of rational minds. It was all too plausible. And while people point out the media’s mistakes, no one’s addressing the underlying problem.

I have researched and written about the issue of euthanasia in Belgium and the Netherlands a number of times. It is particularly striking how relatively few people are willing to take on the deep challenges that the whole issue throws up.

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Those who do, tend to be those who hold the traditional views of the Catholic church on beginning and end of life issues (as the prominence of the Pothoven story in the Italian media proved). To those who regard life as God-given, sacred, and not to be stopped from the moment that life originates, the whole question of euthanasia is recognised to be a profound challenge to their view of life and its purpose.

Outside of this, the euthanasia debate has become mired in some of the most shallow and prevalent attitudes of the age. These include, though are not limited to, arguments couched in the language of ‘human rights’, as though the ability to die at a time of one’s own choice is not merely a human right but the ultimate, perhaps final, such right. For who is anyone else – let alone the law of any land – to refuse us the right to such a final demonstration of autonomy over our own bodies and lives?

When Lord Falconer attempted to pass an ‘assisted dying’ bill in the British Parliament in 2014, it was presented as a humanitarian necessity: one which partially solved a medical – you might say terminal – problem. Although that bill was eventually unsuccessful, the tone in which it was argued is now familiar in those countries, such as Australia, where the euthanasia issue has been recently debated. The argument focuses on people with terminal illness, suffering unbearably at the very end of their lives, and is generally supported (or at least leaned towards) by those who favour the reduction of suffering unconnected with any wider system of ethics beyond that.

This was not the case with Pothoven. She was clearly a very unhappy and unfortunate young woman. Her friends say that she had made repeated efforts to kill herself, had suffered severe depression and also suffered from anorexia. It also appears that she approached one of the ‘end of life’ clinics in the Netherlands last year, and that they had judged her too young to die. But for how long will this remain the case?

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Since euthanasia was legalised in the Netherlands and Belgium, both countries have seen a remorseless push on two fronts. The first is to broaden the recognition of what should be deemed to be a ‘terminal illness’. Just last year a 29-year old Dutch woman called Aurelia Brouwers was euthanised despite suffering no terminal physical condition. Brouwers suffered from mental illness.

The other direction in which the euthanasia argument spills out is in the lowering of the age of those able to be euthanised. In the Netherlands and Belgium, campaign groups have called for a lowering of legal limits for euthanasia from the moment that the practice was first permitted. Belgium has allowed children as young as nine who are suffering from terminal illnesses to be euthanised.

These are two vast ethical traps which require far deeper consideration than a mere ‘media gets something wrong’ story allows.

The lowering of the age at which people can be euthanised is, in many ways, the simpler of the two problems. Most countries have age-limits on a range of activities, and it’s quite possible euthanasia could be kept within the same restrictions as access to tobacco or alcohol. This could allay any fears about desperately miserable teenagers.

But the far more serious problem, which always creeps up on societies which permit euthanasia, is the line between mental and physical illness. This is a primed bomb.

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In most Western European countries, there is an increasing drive to view physical and mental illness as having parity. In the UK, the government has repeatedly said that it wishes to take mental illness issues as seriously as physical illness issues. Everywhere the melding of the two is (rightly or wrongly) going on. But in a society which permits euthanasia, things get more complicated; the bomb explodes. For who is to say that a severely depressed person in their 20s is not to be judged to be in as serious a condition as somebody with cancer of the same age?

I have yet to find anyone willing to explore this boundary. Most look away, postpone or try to find false consolation in mocking reporting errors like those in the Pothoven case.

In the long-term, this is a mistake. Such serious ethical matters must be addressed at length as well as in depth. It might be fake news today, but tomorrow it could be a reality. Yes, the factual errors of this case need to be corrected. But to simply dismiss the case, without acknowledging its desperate possibilities, is a reckless move which will have long and severe consequences. There’ll be little schadenfreude if we get this one wrong.

“I have for many years thought the problem of the incommensurability, and still more the incompatibility, of some values to be central to all ethical, social, political and aesthetic issues.” Isaiah Berlin.

One of the more interesting features of the Brexit debate is the way it raises a question of how human beings argue about incommensurable values. By this, I mean values that are not comparable on some common scale – values that are so intrinsically different that they do not lend themselves to any sort of direct comparison or ranking.

You might say, for instance, that those who think the Brexit question fundamentally revolves around issues of sovereignty, and those who think it is all about prosperity, are appealing to values are so different in kind that they can only ever talk past one another. Could it be that much of the anger generated in the exchange between these positions comes from a frustration at managing debate between incommensurable values?

Those, like the great Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who believe that there are incommensurable values in human life are known as ethical pluralists. Those who believe that human values can ultimately be reduced to one super-value – often something like utility, or happiness – are known as ethical monists.

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The dominance of economics over the way we talk publically about the things we esteem in human life, and the way this has played into so-called ‘evidence based policy’, has meant that public discourse is often, de facto, a form of ethical monism. The attraction of monism to the tidy-minded is that it promises to make comparisons between apparently different things easier, assigning each some common and comparable value.

In other words, the monist argues that apparently different values, once properly understood – that is, translated in term of the super-value – can be plotted on the same scale, and thus easily compared, assigning each some sort of numerical value. Value A has X units of super-value Alpha, value B has Y units of super-value Alpha. Therefore, in deciding between the two, one has only to compare X and Y to see which is the greater. Moral decision-making is that straightforward.

But, unfortunately, the monist achieves this simplicity at the expense of a proper estimation of why certain things are valuable. The debate over the importance of the arts in education, for instance, is often hampered by the dominance of monist assumptions, with the arts being required to justify themselves in terms of their utility, something that STEM subjects, for instance, find it much easier to do.

The problem here, of course, is that music and engineering are valuable for totally different reasons, and cannot be compared by reference to some common scale of values. In terms of value, they are not just different, they are irreducibly different. In moral terms, the life of a nun and the life of a mother can both be seen as valuable, but in entirely different terms. Likewise, justice cannot be plotted on the same scale as mercy. Or creativity and security. Or equality and liberty. Or prosperity and democracy.

Suggested reading

Globalisation's mistaken rule

By Giles Fraser

A few months ago, I wrote a slightly tongue in cheek piece for UnHerd expressing qualms about the global dominance of the metric system. “I’d love to return to pre-metric diversity,” I wrote, “If only to fight back against that politically dangerous mythology that there is only one way of doing things, and we must all submit to a common standard.”

I could have written another piece, arguing for the reintroduction of £sd. The deeper point here, semi-seriously intended, grows out of a desire to disrupt the growth of monism. Because life is more complicated and messier than the instruments that we have chosen to measure it by. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” said Kant – a quote Berlin loved and often repeated.

So to the presenting problem: the nature of the antagonism that exists in the current debate over Brexit. And I suspect our culture of default monism has something to answer for here. Because monism promises that moral decision-making is a relatively straightforward calculation between comparable goods, the monist has to reach for some alternative explanation if people keep on permanently disagreeing. And that alternative explanation is typically to question the ability or the good faith of one side. If the monist is right, and all moral disputes are simply disguised disputes between the same super-value – say utility – then one side is either too thick to make the right calculation or has ulterior motives for backing it. And that is precisely what Remainers and Leavers accuse each other of doing.

Monism, with its promise of decision-making without conflict, is a noble aim. But misconstrued. Because if values are genuinely incommensurate then the contest between them is inherently agonistic. There is no right answer. That is why rationality can never act as some white knight Deus ex Machina that will rush on stage to sort out these sort of feverish disputes. And so for some, the argument will consist of trying to find the most captivating voice in which to articulate one’s own position (that, I suspect, was the essential genius of Dominic Cummings as brought out by James Graham’s Channel 4 film, Brexit: the Uncivil War). For others, unfortunately, it will mean screaming insults at those with whom they disagree.

Suggested reading

Can our politics survive Brexit?

By James Kirkup

Isaiah Berlin credited an obscure Victorian judge, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, with the first articulation of value pluralism. And I quote the following passage in full because it seems to sum up so precisely the situation we find ourselves in with Brexit:

“There are innumerable differences which obviously add to the interest of life, and without which it would be unendurably dull. Again, there are differences which can neither be left unsettled nor be settled without a struggle, and a real one, but in regard to which the struggle is rather between inconsistent forms of good than between good and evil. In cases of this sort no one need see an occasion for anything more than a good-tempered trial of strength and skill, except those narrow-minded fanatics whose minds are incapable of taking in more than one idea at a time, or of having a taste for more things than one, which one thing is generally a trifle. There is no surer mark of a poor, contemptible, cowardly character than the inability to conduct disputes of this sort with fairness, temper, humanity, goodwill to antagonists, and a determination to accept a fair defeat in good part and to make the best of it.”[1.  Stephen, James Fitzjames (1874), Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.]

Berlin and Fitzjames Stephen lived long before argument was coarsened and weaponised by social media. But reading Sir James’s distinction between worthy and poisonous argument, you can almost imagine he was looking down on us from above as he wrote it, watching the yellow-jacketed thugs screaming “Nazi!” at Anna Soubry, watching the sneering superiority of those who think the other side to be ignorant fools, watching so many of us descend into a pit of pettiness and rancour.

The lesson is that capitalism cannot be left on autopilot. To work – and it must work, it is the only system that can deliver mass prosperity – it requires active public policy. Public investment organised by local government cracked the first derailment; Keynesian macroeconomics cracked the second; but so far, the current derailment remains unaddressed. I wrote my book, The Future of Capitalism, because we should be facing these new anxieties.

Since the 1980s, Western societies have been riven by two new divisions, a spatial divide between a booming metropolis and broken provincial cities; and a class divide between the college-educated and the less-educated.

Further reading

Is capitalism immoral?

By Victoria Bateman

For skilled metropolitans, global capitalism has been the gift that keeps on giving: in Harold Macmillan’s famous 1950s phrase, we “have never had it so good”. But his line was aimed at provincial manual workers, the group now facing, to use Theresa May’s phrase, “burning injustices”. This is the group with the new anxieties. Their skills have been devalued, their prestige shredded, their family structures are falling apart. They are the mutineers: Brexit, Trump, Corbyn, Five Star, ADF.

The new populists and the old ideologues have seized their chance because the conventional parties of both Left and Right were lured away from their pragmatic ethical foundations into fashionable cul-de-sacs.

The sound foundations of the Right had been One Nation, epitomised by firms with a sense of social purpose, such as Cadbury and John Lewis. But One Nation was abandoned as the Right was seduced by Friedman’s worship of the market – the travesty of Adam Smith in which ferocious self-interest would drive society upwards.

It was also tempted, especially in America, by Libertarianism: the cult of individual freedom. Translated into policy, ethics became redundant – the sole purpose of the firm was profit, the sole purpose of the individual was fulfilment through achievement. This would be achieved through a combination of deregulation and intensified competition, secured through high-powered incentives linked to tightly monitored targets such as quarterly profits.

Further reading

Corporate fat cats are abusing their power

By Michael Jacobs

The sound foundations of the Left had been the Cooperative Movement – the construction of reciprocal obligations to address the practical concerns of ordinary people, such as housing, shopping and funerals. This was abandoned when the Left was seduced by the Utilitarian paternalists, dominated by economists, and the Rawlsian victim-seekers and Libertarians, dominated by lawyers.

Translated into policy, the economists wanted to empower the state to redistribute consumption through taxation and benefits, with the concepts of dignity and desert absent from their framework. The lawyers wanted to confer new rights, dubbed ‘human’ rights, on favoured groups and individuals, and the public interest of the majority had no place in this new hierarchy. In combination, obligations floated up from firms and families to the state, while rights showered down, selectively.

These agendas were very different, but they had two characteristics in common: they were dominated by highly-educated metropolitans, and neither resonated with the concerns of less-educated provincials. While the new Right and the new Left fussed over implementing their agendas, the new anxieties of spatial and class divides widened, unaddressed.

Suggested reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

By chance, my own life has straddled these appalling new divides. I have a foot each side of the new spatial divide, I live in the most desirable district of Oxford, the neighbourhood-of-choice for metropolitan success – my postcode has the highest ratio of house prices to income in the entire country. But I grew up in Sheffield, the emblematic broken provincial city, made famous by the film The Full Monty. Those people were my family and neighbours. Sheffield, a city with a continuous tradition of specialist steel going back to Chaucer, imploded in just five years due to inept public policy.

I also have a foot each side of the education divide. I am sufficiently educated to have been appointed to chairs at Oxford, Harvard and Paris, but both my parents left school aged twelve. They led frustrated lives, their abilities flowers left to bloom unseen.

Most painfully, I have straddled the new divide in life trajectories. My book starts with a photograph of two four-year-olds: myself and my cousin, born on the same day, into the same social class and city, and by fourteen both attending grammar schools. As I progressed upwards, through chairs, and medals, she plunged into the traumas of teenage motherhood. Divergence echoed down the generations, and both her daughters became teenage mothers. In our prosperous world, such divisions are avoidable.

Further reading

Could true neoliberalism save the West?

By Henry Olsen

The Future of Capitalism is pragmatic about how to tackle this. The new anxieties may have empowered the old ideologues and the new populists, but neither has the least ability to solve them. We need new ideas to address – carefully crafted ethical and technical public policies, some of which will offend vested interests, and most of which will upset established ideas.

It is vital that ethics is restored to the centre of public narratives. Not the fashionable ethics of victims and outrage, but the foundational ethics of any successful society: a dense web of reciprocal obligations in firms, families and state. Firms and families, the arenas in which we conduct our lives, are not merely vehicles for profit and individual achievement, they are the ethical heart of our society. The genius of reciprocal obligations is that they precisely match new rights to new obligations, and they will only be accepted if they are recognised as meeting legitimate needs.

We can heal the divide in life-chances by enhancing the productivity of less-educated people whose homes are the provincial cities. This means a massive shift of focus from cognitive skills to vocational skills. Switzerland does it right with their four-year training courses, half-financed by firms who make sure people come out employable. And it means restoring provincial cities by establishing new clusters of skill-intensive firms. That will take bold, pro-active public policies; and it will take money. Who will pay? The skilled and landowners in the metropolis. London is Britain’s new oil.

I do not know whether the Right or the Left will rethink first. But by fixing these new anxieties, whichever party does so will govern for the following two decades.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier is published by Allen Lane on October 4^th

In recent years, as the ‘new atheism’ wave of the 2000s has begun to relax into something else, I have occasionally wondered about adding an addendum – almost a rejoinder – to Hitchen’s intellectual battering ram. Which is to point out what a growing number even of new atheists are becoming willing to admit.

There has been a presumption among some atheists in recent years that a rise in secularism or atheism did not necessarily mean that there would be any meaningful change in the morals or ethics held in the societies that were losing faith. They could accept that certain vices might go, but rarely consider that any meaningful virtues would be lost.

That countries such as Britain are becoming increasingly atheistic can hardly be denied. For instance a British Social Attitudes survey published last year found that 53% of British adults described themselves as having no religious affiliation. Since the figure in the same survey in 2015 was 48%, this showed not only that in 2017 for the first time most British people had no religious affiliation, but that five percent had abandoned it in two years alone. That is a trend which – were it to continue, rather than level – would see the evisceration of religion from the UK in less than 20 years.

Further reading

Can we survive this era of anti-social media?

By Douglas Murray

Yet the unwillingness to acknowledge that a shift in religious affiliation is likely to also bring about a shift in ethical and moral attitudes is curiously fixed. Perhaps people intuit that it might be the case but avoid dwelling on it, for fear that it might drive people back towards religious conformity.

Still, an interesting story from The Atlantic shows that there are some people at least who are aware of the potential void that might be left if religion departs at the rate it currently is, especially among the young. MIT has decided to appoint a ‘humanist chaplain’ to help MIT students with the ethics of tech and assist the next generation of entrepreneurs with some of the ethical challenges they are going to face in their careers.

The Atlantic piece quotes from this chaplain – one Greg Epstein, who has been the humanist chaplain at Harvard since 2005. In his interview, Epstein reflects on his time at Harvard:

In these 14 or so years of experience that I’ve had, the single biggest thing I think we as humanists and human beings need to look at when we’re training young leaders today is the need for more attention to human values in science, technology, and business. The world is being reshaped before our eyes, and we’re not ready on campus, because we don’t have an ethical footing from which to teach.

This is a brave and mildly disturbing concession, with significant consequences. A reminder that it is not enough to claim that ethics are self-evident because – as Rabbi (Lord) Jonathan Sacks once put it – “they self-evidently are not self-evident”.

It is particularly significant that MIT should seek to tread into this space. Because, of course, the shifting of the tectonic ethical plates of a society at precisely the same moment as tech opens up the possibility of major societal alterations is something that is going to need serious and sustained attention. Already the average teenager has in their pocket a device which could do more damage to them (as well as, if they use it right, an unprecedented amount of good) than anything most of their parents could have imagine.

A phone is bought to put parent in touch with child. But the same device puts the child in touch with the world, and a development that was meant to alleviate the worry of a parent can end up accelerating it. Likewise, tech did not come up with information-sharing apps after thinking through all the possible personal and moral qualms that such developments might throw up. They came up with the technology and then their users discovered some of the unexpected downsides.

When social media platforms such as Twitter were created they were intended to be a means to communicate more swiftly and effectively with people around the world. Almost nobody predicted that the most striking early trend on Twitter would be a slew of famous and unknown people across the world destroying their careers and engaging in witch-hunts against total strangers for reasons justified and unjustified.

Further reading

There's a moral vacuum in public life. We need a set of standards that we can agree on

By Douglas Murray

Social media may have been expected to make us happier and more connected. But it has made many people more isolated and unhappy than ever. And anybody who is surprised by that can never have considered the crooked timber of humanity that nearly every generation before this one accepted as something like fact.

Naturally all this will be exacerbated in the years to come by the fact that it will continue to be young people – the people with the least life experience – who will be responsible for the most technological innovation. MIT’s hire shows that some people are beginning to realise some of the challenges that this will pose. Many good things may well come from it. But it is also an interesting concession to the fact that (to alter Hitchens’s phrase) even if you cannot or do not believe in a deity, all of your work on ethics is still before you.

Further reading

Free Minds: Sam Harris - An atheist rock star

By Douglas Murray

In 2005, the UN established an UN Ethics Office, which is supposed to protect UN whistleblowers from retaliation. However, as the Washington-based Government Accountability Project (GAP) has found, more than 95% of UN whistleblowers’ complaints to the Ethics Office never get investigated, and whistleblowers receive little support from this office.

Unfortunately, UN whistleblowers are in for an even harder time.  A revised whistleblower protection policy adopted in January 2017 says that whistleblowers face the threat of being “disciplined” if their allegations or complaints are found to be false or based on “rumours”. This means that if a staff member suspects wrongdoing in his or her department, and makes a complaint so that further investigations can be carried out, and then it is determined that there was no wrongdoing (which usually happens as the UN rarely admits to wrongdoing), that staff member could face disciplinary action.

In essence, the revised policy is a gagging order on UN whistleblowers and a significant step backwards in improving accountability and transparency within the UN.

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Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.