Abstract
Joseph Mahon charts the course of a debate on philosophy’s contribution to public matters, examining the work of Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Peter Singer, and others. He examines both the view that philosophers are exceptionally well-equipped to analyze and pronounce on such matters, and the opposing view that philosophers are uniquely ill-equipped, and unsuited, to expatiate on what are called ‘the big questions of life’. In defending the role of philosophy in politics, Mahon highlights the influence of Karl Marx and J.S. Mill on this debate and also examines the committees of inquiry chaired by Bernard Williams (on obscenity and film censorship) and Mary Warnock (on human fertilization and embryology).
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- 1.
In the latter parenthesis, I am, of course, referring to a paper of Hare’s (1967) published in Mind.
- 2.
See Lukes (1985). There is, of course, a vast literature on the subject of Marxism and ethics. But for present purposes, I should like to draw attention to the following further contributions to that debate: Burke et al. (1981), Cohen (1995, 1997), Fromm (1961), Mahon (1990), Quinton (1979), Soper (1987), and Wood (1993). For material on ‘ethical socialism’, see Solzhenitsyn (1971).
- 3.
- 4.
Stuart Hampshire also published a highly appreciative review of The Williams Report in The London Review of Books, 24 January 1980, under the title ‘Common Decency’.
- 5.
In Ireland, the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction, set up by the Minister for Health in March 2002, did not include one professional philosopher among its 19 members. However, one of the Commission’s members—Dr. Aonghus Nolan, chief embryologist at the Galway Fertility Unit—had studied philosophy. Moreover, the ethics subcommittee contained some members who had also studied philosophy, including the sociologist Dr. Evelyn Mahon. Dr. E. Mahon also led the Trinity College Dublin research team that produced the hugely influential, government-commissioned report on Women and Crisis Pregnancy (Mahon et al. 1998), the first and only comprehensive piece of research on Irish women and abortion.
- 6.
Its full, official, title is Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Film Censorship. For direct references to Mill, see, in particular, pp. 53–60.
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Mahon, J. (2016). On Philosophy’s Contribution to Public Matters: Charting the Course of a Debate. In: Fives, A., Breen, K. (eds) Philosophy and Political Engagement. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44587-2_3
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