Humanity

In an interview on Globalisation

Your fifth book?

Jonathan Glover’s Humanity. What’s nice about this book is that it’s truly global in terms of the debates he tries to launch. What is really fantastic about it, and this has a modern-day echo in the whole debate about the war in Iraq, is that he takes a variety of different morally dubious events through the 20th century, and doesn’t ask the question was it right or wrong in terms of the consequence, but rather: did the actors involved in reaching the decision do so in a good moral sense or not? Did the protagonists involved go through the right moral discussion before getting to that particular point? So he uses lots of source material on things like life under Stalin or the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to try to ask some quite heavyweight philosophical questions. I think why I picked this book is because it’s actually individuals who make decisions, for good or bad, and we invest our hopes in those individuals and sometimes find that they’ve let us down in some way or another. 

This ranges across a whole series of different events. You think about the financial crisis: was it purely the result of the market failing, or of decisions made by individual people that contributed to weaknesses within the system, which were glossed over for one reason or another? One example that comes through from this latest crisis, for example, is that it was clear under Clinton and Bush that there was a strong belief in a property-owning democracy. It was important that more and more people should be able to buy their properties, which on the face of it sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to suggest. But of course credit systems work on the basis of being able to distinguish between good and bad credits. If you simply say: we’re not going to care about that any more and just encourage everyone to own their own property, then in effect you’re saying that the financial system will have to support people who may actually be bad credits. 

So part of the issue here is that the political aims that people have, the choices that individuals make, don’t always fit with the economic stability you want to see coming through. But I think that in making judgments about our leaders and ourselves, it’s important to understand the framework within which we’re making the judgment, what it is that’s motivating people in what they’re trying to do. My point is that there is a moral and ethical dimension to what it is we do that is often forgotten about in the history books, and this is an attempt to try and tie together philosophy and history, which I think is an interesting idea.