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What Does 'Humanism' Mean? An Interview with Andrew Copson

What does 'humanism' mean? Some writers are intent on seeing similarities between all the things that have ever been labelled 'humanist'...but just because the same word is used, it doesn't follow that they have anything else in common, or are on a continuum. Does so-called religious humanism have anything significant in common with the kind of humanism that non-religious humanists endorse?

To clear these muddy waters, I turned to Andrew Copson, Director of Education and Public Affairs at the British Humanist Association (BHA).

Nigel: There is some confusion about what 'Humanism' means. What do you understand by the term?

Andrew: I think the Oxford Companion to the Mind has it right when it calls Humanism 'a morally concerned style of intellectual atheism openly avowed by only a small minority of individuals (for example, those who are members of the British Humanist Association) but tacitly accepted by a wide spectrum of educated people in all parts of the Western world.' This contemporary and widely-shared meaning, which the word has had now for over half a century, takes it to denote a non-religious worldview entailing a belief in reason and evidence as the ways of understanding reality, in human welfare and fulfillment as the aim of morality, and  in the capacity of humanity to make meaning and purpose for itself in the absence of any 'ultimate' meaning or purpose to the universe. This is the meaning of the word understood by the British Humanist Association and all the other national Humanist organisations in the world, and the meaning that is commonly understood in education in UK schools today. It is the Humanism described in books like Richard Norman's On Humanism (Routledge) or Jim Herrick's Humanism: An Introduction (RPA) and great books from the 1960s such as Hector Hawton's Humanist Revolution. Any confusion that there still is over the term, I think, is down to the word having had different uses at different points in the past, before it came to mean what it mainly means today, and this sometimes gives rise to misleading uses of the word.

School of Life Expert: Nigel Warburton

The School of Life in Marchmont Street, London, offers you a chance to meet and discuss whatever you want to with a range of experts...including me! Check out School of Life Experts.

Early Modern Texts in Philosophy: An Amazing Resource

Jonathan Bennett has produced a remarkable set of 'translations' of classic texts in early modern philosophy. The texts are available free from Early Modern Texts in Philosophy. The idea is to provide versions of the books which are accessible to present day readers, particularly students, many of whom are stumped by the archaic language of the originals. There are works by Descartes, Spinoza Hume, Kant, Mill, and others. This involves some selection and paraphrase. Put this way it sounds as if it couldn't possibly work; and very few people would have been able to pull this off (or have the vision to see that it could work), but from my quick survey of some of these texts, it is a genuinely useful way of approaching these works (and check out the endorsements by eminent philosophers!). Amazing.

Drugs that Make Sports Fairer?

There is a fascinating article about Beta Blockers and their capacity to level the playing fields in sports that require a steady hand (such as pistol shooting):'In Defense of the Beta Blocker'  in The Atlantic (thanks, once again, to the superb Arts and Letters Daily for the link). These drugs are currently banned in sports (see the case of the North Korean pistol shooter at the Olympics). Nervous musicians give better performances on Beta Blockers; shouldn't we then allow nervous athletes to take them so they can give of their best against athletes who are immune to nerves? We allow athletes to have sessions with a sports psychologist, which might have a similar beneficial effect for some individuals...Why, then, not allow athletes to take Beta Blockers if nerves stop them performing at their best? (Provided, of course, that these drugs can be shown to be safe).  An interesting idea that raises issues about what we value in sports: it seems odd that most of us would be happy for a nervous violinist to take the drug to be able to give the kind of performance in public that she can achieve in private rehearsal, yet would deny the athlete this benefit ...or does it?

Genetic Enhancement in Sport and the Rest of Life

Watching Eusain Bolt win the 100 and 200 metres by so much in the Beijing Olympics was amazing. But what if he had had the benefit of performance-enhancing genetic manipulation on top of his exceptional natural potential and training? Why restrict what athletes can do to enhance their performance, as long as it is safe? And what about other aspects of life? If we could increase our IQs by taking drugs, would it be wrong to do so?

Questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement get to the heart of what we take a human being to be. It would be nice to think that we all line up equal, but the truth is that both genetic and environmental factors (many of which are outside our control) massively affect whether or not our lives  go well (as well as how fast we could ever run - which may in some cases amount to the same thing). Most of us see the idea of curing disease using intervention as unproblematic: if we can do it we should. But when it comes to enhancing our genetic endowment in any way, some people get edgy. Is this an irrational fear brought on by science fiction parables? Or are there genuine grounds for concern?

The Case for Enhancement
Julian Savulescu gives an admirably clear outline of the issues in a podcast of a lecture he gave in Sydney in 2007. He argues that where we can make people's lives go better, we should and that there may be great social benefits as well as individual ones from making use of the new biological and pharmaceutical possibilities that scientists have opened up for us. In discussion, he also argues that it might make sense to tolerate various drugs and processes in sport provided that they aren't dangerous, and then concentrate resources on dope testing for the dangerous ones.

Listen to Julian Savulescu on the Ethics of Genetic Enhancement

Read an interview with Julian Savulescu in The Guardian (2005)

The Case Against Enhancement
For a passionate defence of the idea that enhancement is not a good idea, listen to my podcast interview with Michael Sandel based on his book The Case Against Perfection (read my review of this book). Whilst he agrees that curing deficiencies and disease is good, he opposes enhancement. His argument turns on a notion of 'giftedness' and the consequences for humanity of boosting individual achievement by technical means. Ultimately this sounds like a religious argument, though Sandel hopes that his reasoning will appeal to the non-religious  too.

Listen to my interview with Michael Sandel on Genetic Enhancement in Sport

Public Ethics Radio podcast launches in the style of Philosophy Bites

Public Ethics Radio, a new philosophy podcast, has just launched in Australia. It's also on iTunes. Only one episode is available so far, Thomas Pogge on persuading pharmaceutical companies that it could be in their interest to make drugs available to the poor. His plan is to introduce what he calls a Health Impact Fund to reward patenters of successful drugs in proportion to their success - but the catch is that to get their reward they have to undertake to distribute the drugs at cost price and give up their monopoly. It is difficult to assess what 'cost price' is in this context, though, given the nature of research that goes down cul-de-sacs etc. which presumably has to be funded from somewhere...Also I don't believe that any pharamaceutical giant would enter into this sort of arrangement voluntarily. But I hope I'm wrong.

The format of Public Ethics Radio is very similar to Philosophy BItes and Ethics Bites: each episode will consist of an interview with a philosopher on a particular topic. The first episode is 29 minutes long - so longer than our podcasts, and they're only posting one every three weeks at the moment. But worth keeping an eye on.

I'll write a proper review of this when there are half a dozen episodes available.

Richard Dawkins on 'Natural'

Richard Dawkins explains how Darwinism as an explanation of our origins is compatible with a desire to act humanely. Nature is 'red in tooth and claw' but it doesn't follow from that that we ought to follow nature and act in a purely selfish way: human beings are in a special position in this respect, according to Dawkins.

I found this on Richard Dawkins' website which has many other links.

Fairness in Taekwondo - Sarah Stevenson

I was about to post a comment about Sarah Stevenson's loss in the Olympic quarter-final in Taekwondo and questions of fairness in sport. She had clearly won the bout, but the judges somehow missed her winning kick giving the Chinese player victory. Her dreams of an Olympic gold seemed to have been destroyed by incompetence or worse. BUT, amazingly, this unfair result has been overturned after a British protest! Any neutral spectator must have felt a terrible sense of injustice until the reversed decision.

Fairness is crucial to our notion of what sport is and why it matters - the reversed decision is a clear victory for the spirit of sport. Had the decision stood, the Olympics and the sport of Taekwondo would have been badly damaged. There would always have been the suspicion that the fact that the reigning Olympic champion was Chinese had been a factor in the bizarre initial result.

Listen to Karl Popper on Natural Selection

Listen to selected highlights from Karl Popper's 1978 lecture on natural selection and the emergence of mind courtesy of the BBC.

Rothko and Philosophy

I'll be talking at the Tate Modern Rothko Symposium on the influence of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard on Rothko (he read both avidly) and how understanding this influence can give a way of viewing the paintings. This coincides with the Rothko exhibition...