Paul Seabright

In the opening pages of Gibbon’s Autobiography, there is an entertaining account of a visit to Virginia in 1659 by his ancestor Matthew Gibbon:

‘It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness: poverty and wealth have both failed,’ says Kin Hubbard’s creation Abe Martin. Since the pursuit of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ has proved so perplexingly difficult in practice, discussion of the philosophical foundations of utilitarianism can easily appear to be otiose. Sometimes it seems obvious that the pursuit of general welfare is what morality and public policy must be all about now that the theological underpinnings of traditional morality have crumbled, and a waste of time to argue over that when the technical obstacles are so pressing. At other times the very elusiveness of welfare, happiness and related notions can make it seem equally obvious that the whole enterprise is shot through with hubris.

A year or two ago my eye was caught by the cover of a magazine on an American news-stand. It was a magazine for the working woman, and its title, in the best traditions of the me-generation, was Self. The cover advertised articles with titles like ‘The Problems of the Kept Man’ and ‘What if He Says No?’ But what attracted my attention was the rather Californian injunction flashed in bold letters across the top: ‘Let’s Be Real!’

Positive genetic engineering – aimed not just at the elimination of identifiable genetic defects but at the promotion of physical, mental and emotional characteristics in our descendants by direct genetic manipulation – is likely to be technologically possible in the fairly near future. How should we greet this development? The history of our century has given ample reason to fear the abuse of such technology in the hands of totalitarian governments. But the caution that should temper our response does not exhaust the issues raised, nor does it necessarily override all other considerations. Just as the morality of splitting the atom raises questions in fields far beyond the reach of Doctor Strangelove, so genetic engineering confronts us with questions that stand clear of the shadow of Auschwitz and Brave New World.

Outside the community of analytic philosophers (and occasionally, subtly, within it) few figures are regarded with quite the mixture of coolness and condescension accorded to the thoroughly rational man. Robert Musil wrote of the wife of a civil servant that ‘what she called “soul” was nothing but a small capital of capacity for love that she had possessed at the time of her marriage. Permanent Secretary Tuzzi was not the right stock to invest it in … apart from the period of honeymoon caresses, Permanent Secretary Tuzzi had always been a utilitarian and a rationalist, who never lost his equilibrium.’ Rationality, we are invited to conclude, may be good for you in doses but can wither the spirit; beyond a certain point its study becomes the province of moral pathology. It has not always been thought so, but there would be few dissenters nowadays. So when David Pears writes of his book Motivated Irrationality that ‘Western philosophy has always puffed the pretensions of reason, which, therefore, can do with a certain amount of deflation,’ one has a sense of relief that a philosophically neglected subject is at last being accorded serious treatment. But it mingles with curiosity as to whether his iconoclasm will be radical enough to shock any but the most austere professionals. David Pears writes with an abstract analytical rigour that is an unexpected vehicle for his anti-rational ambitions. As with every poacher-turned-gamekeeper (or is it vice versa?) his qualifications for the job could not be better – but one wonders how far his heart is in it.–