Don't Get Any More Big Ideas

Liberated or cut loose (it all depends on your perspective) from the apron strings of Blair and Brown, the Labour party is in a period of identity crisis. Dismayed by election defeat and the prospect of five years in opposition, it has been forced to decide what and who it is for, to search for a new vision to inspire voters to return them to power.

The leading contender in this fight for the soul of the Labour party is a movement called ‘Blue Labour’. It is the product of Labour peer Maurice Glasman, ennobled by Ed Miliband, and the Oxford Political Theorist Marc Stears, an old college friend of the party leader (who also happens to be one of my tutors).

Last week saw the clearest statement of Blue Labour’s principles and ideas. An e-book, The Labour tradition and the politics of paradox, collecting papers from the set of conferences where the doctrine was developed, was released. Most significantly, Ed Miliband provided his clearest endorsement of the group to date, by contributing its preface.

Before discussing the substance of Blue Labour, a couple of points about its presentation. Firstly, the name is awful. The people behind Blue Labour clearly enjoy the idea of paradox (judging from the title of their book, and the tendency to describe their position as ‘radical conservatism’), and so seem tickled by the possibility that the future of the Labour party is to embrace (small ‘c’) conservatism. But to an electorate that thinks politicians are already too similar, and many of whom despise the Conservatives, emphasising cross-party agreement, however superficial, seems like a bad move. Moreover, the name is an allusion to the ‘Red Tory’ movement in the Conservative party. This a) makes it seem like Labour couldn’t even be bothered to come up with its own modernisation process, so it nicked the Tories’; and b) highlights the similarity of Blue Labour to an ideology that really isn’t all that different, undermining the originality of the philosophy.

Secondly, much like the Big Society, this complex intellectual trend risks being utterly lost in translation. A friend described his impression of it as being ‘Labour, just more racist’, a notion not helped by all the talk of ‘family, faith and flag’. Blue Labour, like the Red Tory movement, is critical of both the state and capitalism. However, if, as with the Red Tories, only the first part of this message is heard, they will be seen as traitors to the left. To many people politics is still just about left and right, and the inevitable inference will be that this is a straightforward move to the right. Indeed, Billy Bragg’s knee-jerk response is probably a reasonable preview of how Blue Labour will be received by the left.

My focus here, though, is not how Blue Labour will be perceived, but what it actually stands for. Stuart White helpfully draws out five core elements of the Blue Labour philosophy:

1) Decentralised ownership
2) The conservation of English identity[1]
3) Community organising
4) Hostility to moral abstraction
5) A desire to limit the welfare state

The separation of these ideas fails to reflect how interrelated they are. The argument is that Labour’s excessive abstraction and recourse to the bureaucratic state has alienated grassroots membership. An approach emphasising a common identity and decentralised ownership is offered as an alternative, to organise and galvanise the left. However, it is analytically useful to take them in turn.

Decentralised ownership seems to me the least problematic element of the Blue Labour manifesto. There is a lot to be gained from distributing the ownership of wealth, not least as a corrective to power imbalances. This is closely tied in with demands for greater workplace democracy, and a greater stake for employees in their firms. The main problem with this commitment is that it is hardly distinctive, given David Cameron’s apparent desire to spread mutualism. However, if Blue Labour can demonstrate that their dedication to this ideal is deeper than that of the Conservatives, this may well turn out to be one of their strengths.

The strident nationalism of some of the Blue Labour writers is its most eye-catching and alarming feature. Maurice Glasman has fanned these flames with his claim that the Labour party ought to do more to engage supporters of the English Defence League. Jonathan Rutherford, proclaiming that ‘The future is conservative’, has argued:

“In England Labour no longer knows who it represents; its people are everyone and no-one. It champions humanity in general but no-one in particular. It favours multiculturalism but suspects the popular symbols and iconography of Englishness. It claims to be the party of values but nothing specific.”

The trouble is that there is little indication of what, behind the rhetoric, they are really after. Immigration is usually held up as the clearest example of Labour’s lack of connection with its working class support base. Yet for the past few years Labour has been leading a risible race to the bottom over which party can out-tough the on immigration. If Blue Labour want to further restrict the opportunities of those born in less favourable circumstances to better themselves and take advantage of the things we take for granted, that alone is cause for shame.

Connected to this is an emphasis on social conservatism, which seems more closely associated with Glasman than the other theorists. Again, it’s not apparent what he wants. If it is toughness on crime, Labour are already the most authoritarian of the major parties. If it is to roll back gender equality and gay rights, well, that’s deeply worrying.

Most bizarre is Glasman’s Tudor obsession which almost seems like a parody of conservative nostalgia. A man who says things like ‘Selling Dover to the French is mad. I wonder what Henry VIII would really think about that’ is beyond satire.

Blue Labour is on much surer ground with its focus on community organising. After all, it has strong links with the successful ‘London Citizens’ organisation. Marc Stears makes a persuasive case for a vibrant grassroots Labour movement. He observes that in the past the party has tended to swing between ideological purism, with total disregard for electoral consequences, and a desperate willingness to do anything to win power. Focusing exclusively on means has prevented Labour achieving its desired ends. Yet allowing these ends to justify any means has distorted the party’s character. Stears insists that means and ends can be reconciled by authoritative leadership that is willing to delegate power to the broader party, and release the political potential of the mass membership. He looks to the example of the early Labour movement when:

“Constituency parties provided meeting places for those with different opinions and different interests who nonetheless wished to discover shared interests. The broader party then brought these geographical groupings into alliance with industrial groupings through its connection with the trades unions. The socialist societies and affiliated organizations then further brought people with other differences in aspirations and outlooks into the coalition. A series of meetings, rituals, events, and struggles cemented the relationships, ranging from annual conference to festivals, picket lines, marches, galas, and demonstrations. In the early years of the party, commentators even talked of developing a ‘religion of socialism’.”

Stears argues that unleashing this potential will not just improve the party’s prospects of power, but help it to live its ideals in opposition. Through the struggle and development of this mass movement, Labour will develop the solidarity and strong relationships at the heart of its ideology.

Stears’ vision is certainly an appealing one, but I am sceptical about its achievability. Essentially what he requires is for the Labour party to inspire collective action. But as Jon Stokes realises, this involves reforming a general cultural of apathy and disenchantment: “Currently, more people seek meaning and purpose from reality television and celebrity role models than they do from politics. The explosion in life coaching and coaching in the workplace is similarly driven by the desire to make sense of things for oneself, in order to have more control and influence over one’s life and experience”. I think Stears and Stokes have succeeded in identifying a major problem in British society – excessive individualism, collective distrust, a genuine lack of meaningful relationships. Stears complains that far too many of our interactions are ‘transactional’ – we do business with one another, rather than engaging at a deeper level, and he is absolutely correct. My worry is that it is beyond the means of the Labour party to redress this issue.

Primarily, this comes from pessimism about the capacity of politics to resist these powerful social forces. However, in their rejection of abstract arguments, I think Blue Labour have only weakened their ability to inspire people into action. The theorists seem fairly unambiguous on this point: the route to grassroots revival is to engage with specific, concrete, local fights, rather than appealing to big ideas like ‘justice’, ‘freedom’, or (they really seem to hate this) ‘equality’. Stokes says, “if Labour is to have a future, it will be not so much as the meaning-maker itself, but as the facilitator or enabler of meaning-making, of the human capacity to identify problems and to create solutions from within”. And Stears cites approvingly the fact that

“Walt Whitman, once said that in a democracy citizens ‘look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and Governors, as to say, “Who are you?”’. And that is the question that Jonathan [Rutherford] urges us all to ask too. Who are you to tell us what to do? Who are you to tell us what social justice involves, or fairness, or freedom, or equality? Who are you to say what people should aspire towards and what they should seek to avoid? These are decisions that must be made by real people in the contexts of their real lives. They are not to be answered for the public by anyone else, be that by well-meaning academics or politicians or other experts”

This approach strikes me as mistaken for two reasons. Firstly, I think it will be really difficult for the Labour party to attach itself seamlessly onto such grassroots movements. Stears is seems desperate to institutionalise spontaneous action. But any effort to co-opt groups campaigning for things like saving public libraries is likely to be seen as cynical opportunist party politics and resisted. Stears’ broader point, of course, is that it is an awful thing that the Labour party should come to be viewed with such suspicion, but I don’t know how that can be changed in the short term.

My second objection is that in their haste to junk abstract slogans about justice and equality, Labour would be rejecting one of the best resources at their disposal to develop enthusiasm. I’m just not convinced that the small-scale everyday injustices that people face are really more motivational than the big picture. To really inspire people, I would have thought it would be better to offer a grand vision of how to really make things better, fairer, more just.

Notice that I called them ‘everyday injustices’. One problem with the Blue Labour war on abstraction is that it seems to rely on a false dichotomy. The concrete, specific problems that people face are instantiations of the things that people invoke these big concepts against. I would have thought that the art of a great leader would be to connect the two: to show how the small struggles we can fight together form part of a broader fight for justice, equality, whatever.

The worst example of this type of thinking come in the form of the repeated objections to Labour’s apparent obsession with the Gini coefficient. (Odd, given that the Gini coefficient increased under the Labour government). Jon Wilson complains:

“On the left, our idea of equality is based around the measurement of the average statistical attributes possessed by this or that section of the population, rather than the real experience people have of hardship in particular places at particular points in time.”

This seems to rather misunderstand the point of statistics, which are there to systematically collect and compare different ‘real experiences’. Nobody cares about the Gini coefficient per se - they care about the hardship represented by rising inequality.

The final big plank of Blue Labour is an attack on the centralised welfare state. Labour’s obsession with using bureaucrats and technocrats to achieve their goals, they say, has left people passive and disempowered. This argument is another which could have been lifted straight from David Cameron, and indeed it is the rationale behind his ‘big society’ project. The political dangers of this argument are obvious: not only does it mean agreeing with the Conservatives, but agreeing with their wildly unpopular efforts to break down the state. Like Cameron’s plans, the idea is more or less reasonable as a corrective to Labour’s obsession with the state, but needs to remember that there are certain things that the state is best equipped to do.

In fact, this seems like a good summary of the Blue Labour project in general. It has identified certain flaws in post-war Labour thinking – excessive centralisation, abstraction, and statism – and reacts against these. However, taken too seriously, Blue Labour risks throwing away hard fought and valuable achievements.

[1] There is an unfortunate tendency in the Blue Labour papers to address England, as opposed to the UK, one that the Labour party would be advised to avoid, given their dependence on the support ofthe rest of the country

Virtue Ethics: Substitute or Complement for your preferred moral theory?

Virtue ethics has often seemed to me to be at cross purposes with other ethical theories. While most moral systems look to set out the rightness of different actions, virtue ethics investigates the moral status of different characters and dispositions. Virtue ethics is usually set out as an alternative to doctrines such as consequentialism or Kantianism. Yet while these rivals to virtue ethics are quite clearly geared towards guiding our action, its proponents find it difficult to participate in the usual philosophical activities of resolving moral dilemmas and thought experiments. The response has usually been either to manipulate virtue ethics so that it can give determinate guidance to action, or to reject the conventional paradigm and to deny that a moral theory should seek to influence actions. However, it seems to me that virtue ethics may not in fact be inconsistent with other moral theories, but complementary to them.

The trouble with virtue ethics is not just its difficulty in influencing our actions, but the fact that it is not clear how it should influence us at all. The reason for this is that the subject matter of virtue ethics consists of things that we do not have much control over. The virtue theorist suggests that we should not agonise too much about individual actions, but seek to reform our character so as to exhibit virtues. The real question of ethics, on this view, is not ‘What should I do?’, but rather ‘What sort of person should I be?’. So, for example, if courage is a virtue, then I should seek to be courageous. The problem is that the sort of person we are is something we cannot do much to change. Courage is mostly something you are born with. The same goes for many other typical virtues, like wisdom and even temper. Indeed, Aristotle describes virtuous acts as springing from “a fixed and permanent disposition of character”, which definitely doesn’t sound like the sort of thing we can control.

To be fair to Aristotle, he does specify that nature only determines our capacity for virtue, and that we have choice over the extent to which we develop these capacities. However, this is the bit of virtue ethics that I have always found a bit unconvincing – the limits set by our capacity for virtue seems far more significant than our conscious efforts at self-improvement.

If we ignore what many take to be the crucial element of virtue ethics – the demand that we maximise our potential for virtue – and take it as a descriptive rather than a normative theory, it seems more plausible to me. The reason that virtue ethics has such difficulty accounting for thought experiments and dilemmas, on my version, is that it is not concerned with informing conscious decisions, but with understanding our unreflective actions.

My spin on virtue ethics suggests that conventional moral theories account for only a fraction of morally significant acts – those that we consciously decide to perform. Virtue theories complement these by observing and evaluating the myriad things that we do without thinking. For example, the tone of voice we use or our body language may not be deliberate, but could still raise someone’s spirits or darken their mood. These are not the sort of things that normative ethics can legislate for, and yet they seem closely related to it.

The interesting question is how these two domains of ethics interact. One plausible virtue[1] is something we might call sensitivity – an ability to pick up on other peoples’ moods and feelings and respond to them. When my father tells me that a good host can always anticipate their guests’ needs so that they do not need to ask for anything, it seems like its sensitivity that he is on about. When my 14-year old brother says everything with an off-putting layer of sarcasm and condescension, it is because he, like many adolescents, lacks sensitivity.

Sensitivity seems to be intimately related to our moral capacity. A sensitive person will simply see more opportunities for good; an insensitive person is likely to harm people without realising it. Both the sensitive and the insensitive person might agree in the abstract that it is good to hold doors open for people or to help them with heavy bags. But in the actual event, it will only occur to the sensitive person to do those things.

Perhaps developing and maintaining virtues is not the object of morality. Maybe virtues are more like the framework that normative moral theory must work around.

[1] A problem with virtue ethics is that there is no clear determinate list of virtues, and whether a given disposition is virtuous or not is always up for debate.

Some Bad Arguments in the AV Debate

One of the features of the Alternative Vote debate – a common element of many modern political arguments – is that politicians (on both sides) keep making the same bad arguments. Despite the fact that these are regularly debunked, they keep resurfacing as if nothing had happened, a clear sign that certain messages are intended to be hammered home, regardless of their veracity. That these counterarguments are so regularly ignored, despite the fact that anybody involved in these debates must have heard them numerous times suggests flagrant cynicism and duplicity. Anyway, these are the arguments that really irritate me:

A. Arguments from the No Camp

AV will help extremist parties like the BNP

Any sort of claim about what will happen under AV is suspect because it involves trying to guess people’s second preferences and how these preferences would affect results in different constituencies. It is possible that AV could help the BNP, I suppose because BNP sympathisers would no longer see supporting them as a wasted vote. However, as numerous people have pointed out it is extremely unlikely that AV would gain the BNP seats in parliament. Under AV, as I have already argued, the winning candidate is the one that fewest hate. In most constituencies, there are more voters who would prefer any alternative to a BNP MP, such is the hatred for the party. As long as this is the case, the BNP cannot win under AV. If it were not true, the BNP would win even under FPTP. Yet under FPTP, the BNP can capitalise on a split vote, and take a seat based on a strong core vote of a minority of constituents. So AV appears to make BNP success less likely.

Even if it were the case that the BNP would profit under AV, this still remains the worst argument in the history of arguments about electoral systems. To show this is the case, just replace ‘BNP’ with any other party name. Arguments like ‘X is bad because it benefits Labour’ or ‘Y would help the Conservatives get in’ are unacceptable because it is fundamentally undemocratic to rig the system to produce a desired outcome. If people vote for the BNP, the BNP should do better. If you don’t agree, you clearly don’t like democracy and have no place debating democratic systems.

AV leads to hung parliaments

This argument is much like the one about the BNP, though slightly less clear cut. Once again it depends on predicting how the AV system will affect electoral results, which involves a lot of guesswork. Once again, the No campaign seem to have got their guesswork wrong. Their prophecy is fairly unambiguous: “AV leads to more hung parliaments, backroom deals and broken promises like the Lib Dem tuition fees U-turn. Instead of the voters choosing the government, politicians would hold power. Under AV, the only vote that really counts is Nick Clegg's. We can't afford to let the politicians decide who runs our country.”

However, as this article points out, it is more complex than that. The Political Studies Association has estimated the results of past elections had they been held under AV: “Contrary to some claims, AV would not lead to permanent hung parliaments and coalition governments. Of the last seven elections, only the most recent would have delivered a hung parliament – just as under FPTP. By boosting the Liberal Democrats, however, AV does increase the likelihood of hung parliaments a little. Some simulations suggest a hung parliament in the close election of 1992.”

Though the link between AV and hung parliaments is more plausible than the link to the BNP, both arguments are invalid for the same reason. It is fundamentally undemocratic to rig the system to produce a desired outcome, whether that outcome is success for a particular party or ensuring a majority.

AV gives some people more influence than others

The argument seems to be that since some people’s lower preferences are counted but not others, those people have more effect on the ultimate result than others, violating the sacred dictum of ‘one person, one vote’. This is clearly nonsense. For a start, if the preferred candidate of those voters whose second preferences weren’t counted had been eliminated they would have supposedly have more influence, so there is no systematic bias.

But the truth is that nobody’s preferences count for any more than anyone else’s. If your first preference wins, that preference is taken into account at every round of voting. In effect, it is as if there is a fresh round of voting every time a candidate is eliminated, and it is presumed (surely uncontroversially) that people would vote for the same candidate if they can. If we consider these distinct rounds as different elections, we see that every person has one vote and one vote only in each round.

B. Arguments from the Yes Camp

AV means all MPs will have the support of over 50% of the electorate

The first thing to point out is that getting a vote from 50% of the electorate is not the same as having their support or confidence. This is obvious when you consider that some of these votes could be people’s fourth or fifth preference. Getting 50% of the final vote under AV means nothing more than that 50% thought that at least one person would make a worse MP than you.

Worse still, there is no guarantee that winners under AV will in fact get over 50% of the voters. If a substantial number vote only for candidates knocked out in early rounds of the count and fail to express lower preferences, then the threshold of victory will be reduced. As an illustration, twelve of 31 Scottish local authority elections carried out under AV have produced minority winners.

AV would have made the expenses scandal less likely

This argument appears to have two premises:
1. There will be fewer safe seats under AV
2. MPs in safe seats are more likely to be corrupt
As far as premise 1 goes, it is certainly the case that MPs who rely on a strong core support of less than 50% of the electorate will have to woo new voters to keep their positions. However, certain MPs may be more secure if they can attract many second preferences. So, for example, many Lib Dem MPs with relatively small majorities may have their position strengthened if they know both Conservative and Labour voters will put them second. Moreover, over 200 MPs already get over 50% of the vote, so AV is unlikely to have any effect on them. On balance, it seems plausible that AV will cut the number of safe seats, but hardly dramatically.

As for the link between safe seats and expenses, Nick Clegg’s claim that “Research suggests that MPs with the safest seats were much more likely to have been exposed by The Daily Telegraph” is certainly true. However, it is misleading because ‘exposed by The Daily Telegraph’ is not the same ‘made excessive expenses claims’. The study that Clegg cites was carried out before the full extent of expenses repayment were made public. More recent research suggests no statistically significant relationship between repaid expenses and the size of an MP’s majority.

Some Thoughts on the Alternative Vote

Much has been said and written already about the 5th May referendum, when British voters will decide whether UK Parliamentary elections should be carried out under the First Past the Post (FPTP) or Alternative Vote (AV) system. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have already summarised the case for and against the change surprisingly well. Here’s my perspective, though, and possibly a different way of looking at the matter.

The first thing to get clear (at least for the purposes of my discussion) is what the AV vote is not about. One of the problems of the British electoral system is that voters are (or at least think they are) being asked three questions, but are allowed to give only one answer. Under the current system, we vote for an MP, an individual to represent our local area in parliament. We do not, in fact, vote on which party should be in government. Nor do we vote on which person should be Prime Minister and run the country. The three questions are constantly conflated, but under FPTP we only have a say on the first.

Certain reforms would address this problem. Proportional Representation would mean that voters are asked at the polls which party they want in government. Mixed Member P.R. would split the questions of constituency MP and national government and ask both separately. A separate Presidential election would allow voters to choose the leader of the country.

Nothing this radical is involved in the switch to AV. AV asks the same question as FPTP: ‘Who do you want to be the MP for your constituency?’ This means that all the discussion about the effects of AV on the proportionality of parliament or the possibility of coalition government seems to me to miss the point. John Prescott has claimed that AV is a good system for electing individuals (it was the system under which he was elected deputy leader of the Labour party), but a bad one for electing governments. But neither FPTP nor AV are about electing governments, they are systems for electing individual MPs. It is on their merits for this purpose that I’ll try and compare them here.

Comparison is difficult, not least because the economist Kenneth Arrow has long since demonstrated that there is no such thing as a perfect electoral system. Under different circumstances, different systems best reflect the popular will. This can be illustrated with a couple of examples.

Example A: Socialist Split

FPTP AV

A. Black (Conservative)              40%               B. Brown     60%

B. Brown (Democratic Socialist) 35%               A. Black      40%

C. Green (Social Democrat)        25%

The left, true to form, has split, dividing almost equally between the Social Democrats and the Democratic Socialists. Their division stems from some obscure point of doctrine, so there is little substantive difference between them. However, the rift is too bitter to be patched up. Nevertheless, the socialists are all adamant that they would prefer a socialist representative (of any stripe) to a dreaded Conservative. In this case, the FPTP seems clearly to misrepresent the views of the constituency, producing a Conservative MP to stand for a majority of socialists. AV, by contrast would allow the social democrats to use their second preferences to keep the Conservative out.

Example B: Genuine Third Party

FPTP AV

A. Butcher (Socialist)             45%                  B. Baker      55%

B. Baker (Conservative)          35%                  A. Butcher    45%

C. Smith (Liberal)                   20%

Suppose that the Liberal supporters are genuinely liberal, with no real sympathy either for the Conservative or the Socialist. On balance, most of the liberals are more scared of the Socialists, and so their second preferences give the election to the Conservative candidate. In this case, it seems that the FPTP result is better, fired by the positive vision of the Socialist supporters rather than the ambivalence of the liberals.

This example is not straightforward, and many people may have a different intuition that the AV result is preferable. However, these conflicting intuitions seem to get to the heart of the dispute. To put it crudely, FPTP gives victory to the candidate that most people like; AV to the one that fewest hate. AV is for those who fear that a vocal minority can sneak someone despised by the others into power. FPTP is for those who reject this conservative line of thought.

FPTP is best when people vote for a candidate they want to get in; AV when they vote against a candidate they want to keep out. The trouble is that we can never know in advance whether more people are casting their votes for or against politicians.

How much weight should we give to Ethics?

One of the major points of contention between consequentialism and deontology is the proper domain of ethics. Both, in contrast to virtue ethics, hold that ethics is about guiding and evaluating actions, but they disagree as to which actions are morally significant acts. Deontology, as a system of rules, implies that the only relevant actions are those that contravene these injunctions. So, for example, if you believe the Ten Commandments exhaust the demands of morality, the question of morality only arises if you consider killing, stealing, committing adultery etc. If you steer clear of these proscribed activities, you needn’t think about morality any longer.

Consequentialism, by contrast, insists that doing the right thing involves taking the actions with the best consequences. If you are a utilitarian, your every act must be optimal with respect to maximising happiness. Theoretically, it is possible that a consequentialist theory could allow for a large domain of morally indifferent action. For example, if the ‘good’ to be maximised were gold production, the finite resources of gold on the planet would mean that many people could act without having any bearing on gold production. More conventional consequential goods, such as happiness, are much more demanding to maximise. If we are serious utilitarians, we must face up to the fact that everything we do (and equally significantly, fail to do) impacts on someone’s happiness. This implies that every act is morally significant, and so that the domain of ethics covers all action. Indeed, this colonisation of all domains of life by ethics is one of the strongest motivations for rejecting consequentialism.

However, the mere recognition that there are moral considerations pertinent to all actions needn’t mean that these are the only considerations that guide our action, and therefore that we must be moral saints. What Bernard Williams and so many other critics of consequentialism assume is that moral considerations must trump all others. Indeed, this is what most conventional consequentialists believe.

This perspective is suited to deontological systems of thought with a restricted ethical domain. It seems appropriate that moral considerations outweigh all others in the case of murder. But once we expand the sphere of ethics, it begins to be more plausible that other motivations and projects can weigh against ethical ones. For example, if we already donate a substantial proportion of our income to charity, we may feel we have ‘done our bit’, and that even though it would be morally desirable to give away more, aesthetic (e.g. good food, pleasant surroundings) or intellectual (books, courses) considerations also make strong demands on the rest of our money.

The idea that moral demands need not be absolute, but may be weighed against other reasons for action raises another question, orthogonal to the one about the domain of ethics – how much weight should we give ethical considerations?

This is of a matter of concern to all but the most saintly of consequentialists, anyone who fails to maximise the good in all their actions. It also has significance for deontologists who buy into the idea of supererogation. If there are actions that are morally good but not required (i.e. open to being overweighed by other considerations), how much weight should we give these moral claims?

For a concrete example, take the question of career choice. Within the deontological framework, outright harmful careers, like career criminal, are immoral. Saintly careers, like civil rights martyr are supererogatory. But the vast majority of careers are morally indifferent, simply not the subject matter of ethics. This seems bizarre – how can anyone claim it is morally indifferent whether a brilliant lawyer uses their talents to benefit rich (but morally neutral) corporations or to secure justice for the impoverished? Indeed, the increasing interest in the idea of ‘ethical careers’ reflects the fact that moral concerns are salient to many people’s career choices. But for most people they are just one concern among many.

Most conventional ethical systems will just dig their heels in and insist that ethical duties trump all others. On the other hand, if the moral considerations are supererogatory, orthodox systems give us no guidance. Either way, most moral philosophy has nothing to say about what appears to be a common dilemma: how should I weigh moral and non-moral considerations? Perhaps this silence is because this is not a problem for ethics at all, but an exercise in practical reason. Perhaps the presence of moral considerations doesn’t essentially change the process of weighing up different courses of actions with different advantages and disadvantages, a process that we go through every day. We can choose between healthy-but-boring and unhealthy-but-delicious food; is choosing between careers with different moral implications analogous?

If so, this seems to be a matter of grave concern for ethics. What it implies is that people can give little or no weight to moral considerations because that is what is practically rational for them to do. Just as some people (smokers, for example?) may decide that they have other interests which take priority over being healthy, what can we say about people who decide they don’t care very much about ethics?

Not very much, I think. We can try and convince them that they do care about ethics really. So we might try to persuade our lawyer by demonstrating the good they can do, or inspiring them with tales of the sacrifices of others. But if a person doesn’t care very much about ethics, I’m not sure how this is wrong (as opposed to being bad). It’s not illogical or irrational. This isn’t to say we have to like it – indeed, the fact that someone doesn’t care very much about ethics seems an excellent reason to dislike them and to not be their friend, maybe even to coerce them. But is that enough?

Why give aid to countries with space programmes?

The British government’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) aid budget for the next five years, released last week, has received predictable criticism from a xenophobic rightwing press. While the outrage that foreigners should be getting more money at a time of domestic budget cuts was to be expected, the focus has narrowed on India’s position as an aid recipient. The argument is that a country with nuclear arms, a space programme, more billionaires than Britain and a growth rate approaching 10% doesn’t need or deserve British aid. Stephen Glover’s article in the Daily Mail is fairly typical of the kind of the concerns raised.

The argument that India is too rich to need British aid is either disingenuous or incredibly stupid. Glover claims it is likely “there is an outdated sense that it is our duty to disburse funds to the supposedly less fortunate — rather like an impoverished parent continuing to subsidise children who have grown much wealthier, and are more than capable of getting by on their own” (I’m going to be charitable and assume that Glover doesn’t mean that the notion of helping the actually less fortunate – as opposed to the merely ‘supposedly’ less fortunate – is outdated). Yet India’s growth rate is clearly from a relatively low base: if my income of £10 000 is growing at 10% per year, and your £100 000 income is stagnating, it’s still going to be a long time before my income catches yours (25 years if my maths is correct).

Glover makes a lot of the fact that “According to one measure used by the World Bank, in 2009 India was the fourth- largest economy in the world, significantly bigger than the United Kingdom, which was in sixth place”. I can’t be bothered to go check where he gets this from, but in terms of 2009 GDP, the World Bank has India in 11th place, comfortably behind the UK. Even if the two economies are of comparable size, India’s wealth is shared between a population over twenty times that of Britain’s. Accounting for the size of each country by using the more relevant index of GDP per capita, most measures have India outside the world’s hundred wealthiest nations. Glover does acknowledge this, but continuing to refer to the country as the “fourth- largest economy in the world” hardly presses this point.

More interesting, though, is the apparent claim that since “Arguably India should be spending less on defence, and nothing on its space programme, and be diverting more funds to the alleviation of poverty”, it should not receive British aid. I think this is a serious challenge to those who favour giving aid to India, and as such needs to be addressed. The best I can come up with is this analogy:

Suppose you see your poverty-stricken neighbour’s children going about undernourished and badly clothed. You have the means and the will to help them, and so resolve to buy them some clothes and food. However, you notice that your neighbour, despite struggling to look after the kids, is still paying for a satellite TV subscription. Should you still offer the aid?

There are a number of relevant considerations here. Obviously there is a need for sensitivity. You wouldn’t want to embarrass your neighbour or make them feel inadequate. But suppose you know they would be grateful. Most people would disapprove of the decision to maintain the TV subscription. But surely it would be unfair to penalise the children for the irresponsibility of their parents.

We might believe that if the neighbour doesn’t receive help they will be so embarrassed by the state of their children that they will cancel the subscription. If this is the case, then we are not actually doing the children any favours by giving them the gifts. Rather, their parents will continue to keep up their satellite subscription with the money they would otherwise have been shamed into spending on their kids. In effect, we are paying for the satellite subscription.

In development parlance, this is the problem of fungibility: even if aid is targeted directly at the poor, it may simply allow the government to divert the money they would otherwise have spent on the poor to other projects, like a space programme. Fungibility seems to me to be the only argument against giving the aid, either to the TV watching family, or to the Indian government.

I’m sceptical as to whether fungibility genuinely is a problem in this case, as it suggests there is a minimum threshold of poverty relief that the Indian government is motivated to supply, and that if this is met, however it is met, they do not care about poverty any longer. Given the uncertainty, I suspect it is best to just take the risk.

An objection to this analogy is that India is a democracy. Its citizens aren’t therefore ruled in the same way as children are by their parents. The situation is more like an impoverished group of adults communally agreeing to put satellite TV above nourishing food. We should therefore respect their decisions. As Glover says, “the country is a democracy, and its government will be held to account for the decisions it makes. It is hardly our business if India wants to spend so much money on a space programme”. Even if this were so, there would still be a case for paternalistic intervention.

However, this seems to take the mandate conception of democracy too literally. This view implies that either by voting for a government proposing a certain set of policies or by having the ability to eject a government whose policies they disapprove of, an electorate consents and is responsible for all that government does. This is simplistic at the best of times, given the lack of choice, vagaries of electoral mechanisms, absence of full information, and profusion of cross-cutting issues. In this case it implies something absurd: that the Indian people, so many of whom are desperately poor, given the choice between reducing poverty and starting a space programme, opted for the latter.

Admittedly, this isn’t Glover’s view – he acknowledges that the government’s choice may well be out of step with popular opinion. Hence his emphasis on the government being held ‘accountable’. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t understand why this is an argument against giving aid to India. It could take the same form as the ‘mandate’ argument, which his talk of ‘India’ as a unified actor deciding to pursue a space programme implies. Or it could be the claim that British aid could lead to the Indian government not being held accountable for its decisions. I don’t see how this follows. Surely the Indian people will see that the money spent on a space programme could have been directed towards poverty relief, and cast their votes accordingly, independent of what DFID does. If the suggestion is that DFID will do so well in fighting Indian poverty that the space programme will then seem reasonable, that is clearly preposterous.

I’m not sure if this deals with all the problems of giving aid to India, but I think it might be a helpful way of thinking about the problem.

Comeback Kings

Sometimes we just need reminding. Most people who know and love sport do so because of the sheer dramatic unpredictability, the fact that nothing is ever certain. And yet we forget. Enough time elapses since the last miracle that we start to lose our faith. Sport is life in microcosm, and both sport and life seem to serve up inspirational examples to kindle the flame of hope when it is in danger of being extinguished.

The last few weeks have provided a couple of stunning reminders that in sport the apparently impossible rarely is. Earlier this month, Newcastle scored four times in 19 minutes to overcome a seemingly unassailable 4-0 deficit against Arsenal, the greatest comeback in Premiership history. And then yesterday England tied with India in the Cricket World Cup, despite being set a target of 338, finishing one run short of the third highest run chase in history.

These events bring back memories of an incredible eighteenth months in the middle of the last decade when on three separate occasions I felt like I was witnessing sporting history, epic comebacks, the likes of which I had never seen before and haven’t since. The first was the 2004 American League Championship Series, where the Boston Red Sox were an inning away from a 4-0 whitewash to their hated rivals the New York Yankees before recovering to win the series 4-3. In the process, they became the only side in Major League Baseball history to overturn a three game deficit. The second (of course) is the ‘Miracle of Istanbul’: the 2005 Champions’ League Final, where the fifth best team in England triumphed over AC Milan despite being 3-0 behind at half-time. Finally, the following March South Africa saw Australia score more runs than any cricket team had ever done before, and then went four better, in officially the greatest one-day international ever.

All of these occasions were incredibly tense and suspenseful, swinging one way then the other. In each of them, the identity of the victor was in doubt until the very end. Arsenal could have scored a winner in the dying minutes; the Yankees took game 5 to extra innings; the Champions’ League final went to penalties and both cricket matches involved nail biting final overs where all three results were possible. Yet such sporting drama is hardly uncommon: this season will have seen hundreds of last minute goals, and Twenty20 cricket matches almost inevitably end unpredictable last overs.

In a discussion of Twenty20 cricket, David Mitchell (of all people) hit upon the key point, the reason that Arsenal-Newcastle and India-England are so significant, and will live on in the memory beyond most of the other sporting action this year:

Sport is, in essence, the earliest and best form of reality TV (obviously it predates TV - before that, it was just "reality stuff you watch"). It's compelling because it's really happening and no one knows what the outcome will be, and whether it will be exciting and satisfying, a dull anti-climax, or maddeningly unjust

So when sport is thrilling, it's much more so than a Bourne film or an episode of 24, purely because it might have been boring; you've made the investment of time, you've taken the risk, so when the outcome is worth seeing, you're reaping the emotional reward. And there is simply less of that investment involved in Twenty20 than in Test cricket so it can't be as exciting - end of story. It may be a percentage choice for something relatively entertaining but it'll never hit the heights of the climax of an Ashes series because there haven't been five five-day matches over which the campaign has been waged - and that's without counting the hundred years of rivalry, and the literal years of total time spent actually playing over that period, which raise the stakes even more

The best sporting drama is the best sporting drama because it could so easily have been otherwise. Going behind 4-0 to Arsenal means that you will almost certainly lose, as does conceding 338 runs against India. The fact that many spectators left St. James’ Park after half an hour demonstrates this fact, and the implausibility of Newcastle’s recovery.

Equally significant is the likelihood that none of those fans will leave a football game early again. For the mere realisation that these things are possible means that every other game is imbued with the potential for shock and awe. It doesn’t matter how many goals/runs/points your team concedes, how dismally they play: anything is possible. This realisation shelters and protects hope against any number of unpleasant realities. And should hope’s defences weaken, the chances are that another improbable escape will occur to bolster them.

Yet for all their improbability, the events of the last month do not come close to eclipsing the big occasions of 2004-06. While they exemplified drama and scarcity, both lack a third crucial element of truly momentous sporting landmark: a climactic place in a broader narrative. That’s why each of the three events has a dedicated Wikipedia page with a whole section devoted to their background contexts. The Red Sox’ victory was as broad a narrative as they come, prefaced by 86 years of Bostonian failure. The more immediate context was the hurt endured by the Red Sox at the hands of the Yankees a year earlier, succumbing to a last-gasp defeat at the same stage. Liverpool’s Champions’ League story began with the damning departure of Michael Owen, a clear signal that the club’s hopes of major success were too slim to hold on to (then) one of the world’s best strikers. And yet, within nine months, one of the worst teams in the club’s history had claimed the biggest prize in club football. South Africa’s victory was an exorcism too, as the perennial ‘chokers’ overcame the burden of their 1999 World Cup semi-final defeat to beat the world champions.

By contrast, India and England’s match formed part of a group stage explicitly designed to ensure both will progress, and so is of little significance in greater scheme of the tournament. Similarly, Arsenal were likely to finish second before the Newcastle game, and are likely to finish second after it. Even if the two dropped points do eventually cost them the title, there is so much left of the season that the link is unlikely to be widely made. So while the two ties gave caused much excitement, and been a powerful reminder of the wonder of sport, they are unlikely to join the canon of truly great sporting occasions.