Two cases of culpable homicide (1)
Kenneth Roy
Two cases of culpable homicide (2)
Bob Cant
Last weekend I watched a series of BBC 4 programmes about the late great Sir Patrick Moore, whose enthusiasm for astronomy I always found infectious. One of the programmes involved an interview by Mark Lawson. The interview was more biographical than astronomical, perhaps because Mark Lawson – I can sympathise – was afraid that his questions on astronomy would seem naff.
Anyway, in the course of the interview Mark Lawson noted that Sir Patrick was a member of UKIP. Okay, you can be a member of UKIP and still belong to the human race. But Mark Lawson expressed surprise that Sir Patrick, who admittedly held other views characteristic of the English Tory right wing, was totally against fox hunting. Sir Patrick defended his view – as if it needs defence – by saying that he disapproved of people getting pleasure from causing an animal to be torn to pieces by hunting dogs.
Now I don’t want to get into discussions about fox hunting, far less England/Scotland in Europe. But I think it worthwhile to draw attention to the tendency we all have to ‘fix’ people, by which I mean to assume from some things we know about them that other things must be true. For example, Andrew Marr as a young journalist was given the job of interviewing Alan Clark – he of the diaries. Andrew Marr assumed from what he knew of him that lunch with Alan Clark would be a carnivorous affair, but Alan Clark turned out to be a vegetarian.
Again, I can remember a student I once had who was studying for a joint honours degree in philosophy and drama. I had ‘fixed’ her as an average run-of-the-mill student. Then I happened to meet her at a party and she got talking about the drama work she did with deprived and sometimes retarded young people. She was transformed. She was overflowing with exciting ideas and initiatives. I had ‘fixed’ her in terms of the very limited context in which I had previously known her. Academics are much given to fixing their students in the light of their limited knowledge, but I am sure it happens in other spheres too.
Scots are given to fixing people in their traditional environment. In her preface to Carol Craig’s excellent book on the Scots’ crisis of confidence, Kirsty Wark has an anecdote which sums up a certain kind of Scottish ‘fixing’. The anecdote is of a pub discussion about a young man who had made good. But someone said, ‘Aye, but his uncle was an alcoholic’. There is also the occupational fixing. No doubt politicians get tired of the ‘moat’ jokes, and I have a special smile for people who say: ‘You are a philosopher? What’s the meaning of life then?’. or, ‘You must be a secularist’, or, ‘You must be an atheist’ or, ‘Do you know Richard Dawkins?’.
And of course people can ‘fix’ themselves – see themselves as people who do or don’t do certain sorts of thing or have certain values. Then sometimes events force them to re-think. I once chaired a committee concerned with teaching values on social work courses. One of the members of the committee saw me – rightly – as a middle-class academic who knew nothing about ‘real life’. To widen my horizons she took me to a transvestite party.
Robin Downie is emeritus professor of moral philosophy at
Glasgow University
