Uncategorized – Uneasy Essays

Moral Responsibility, History as Rhetoric, and Henry Dundas

A few months back a piece I wrote for The Spectator (9 January 2022) provoked a stream of negative and hostile reaction on Twitter from Professor Geoffery Palmer. I was objecting to the approach and basic assumptions of the Edinburgh City Council’s Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group, as revealed in a recent publicContinue reading “Moral Responsibility, History as Rhetoric, and Henry Dundas”

Foucault, Marx, and pervasive power

One frequently hears the complaint about ‘identity politics’ and ‘critical race theory’ that they are obsessed with power and reduce all social relationships to power, and that this is a fundamental error, and overgeneralisation of power (see for instance, Lindsay and Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories, 2020). On the contrary, I would argue that the thesis ofContinue reading “Foucault, Marx, and pervasive power”

US Presidential Election 2020: a failure of competition?

As I write this the US is in a strange limbo. Joe Biden has been declared the winner of the November 3rd Presidential election by news media and poll analysts, and has been recognised as the President-Elect by many foreign heads of state. All that awaits is formal confirmation through the reporting of the electoralContinue reading “US Presidential Election 2020: a failure of competition?”

The Problem of Imaginary Agents

I have often pointed out to my students a kind of conceptual error endemic in the social sciences, a tendency to imbue names for large and complex processes with an imputed agency. A familiar example is when we talk loosely about ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘globalisation’ being the cause of some result we decry. For instance, ifContinue reading “The Problem of Imaginary Agents”

Marxists or Jacobins?

One of the most disconcerting things about public discourse these days is the running together of ideas of ‘marxism’ and ‘postmodernism’, as though they are equivalent, or that latter grows directly out of the former. This can be found, for example, in statements by YouTube pundits Jordon B. Peterson (Prof. of Psychology at U. ofContinue reading “Marxists or Jacobins?”

Remembering Hume

My university has recently announced its intention to ‘temporarily’ rename David Hume Tower by the more harmless ‘40 George Square’,[1] in light of a recent petition calling for its renaming on the basis of objection to a notorious racist footnote in his essay ‘Of National Character’ (1753). One can read extensive comment on the footnoteContinue reading “Remembering Hume”

The irreducible tension between technology and morality

My university has just announced the launch of a new Centre for Technomoral Futures. The announcement lays out an agenda boldly. The new centre “… focuses on integration of the technological and ethical … as a groundbreaking initiative to design more sustainable, just and ethical models of innovation. … that unifies technical and moral expertise. TheContinue reading “The irreducible tension between technology and morality”

The culture of poverty, again…

Listening to ‘heterodox’ black American intellectuals such as Glenn Loury, John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes talk on various podcasts[1] about the current state of race politics in the US has got me thinking once again about what we mean by ‘culture’. These thinkers are inclined to draw a line between ‘structure’ and ‘culture’ as explanatoryContinue reading “The culture of poverty, again…”

In Defence of Competition

I’d like to argue, in a way perhaps uncharacteristic of the left, in favour of competition. Not for blanket endorsement, but qualified recognition of the value of competition. A basic premise to my argument is that the work of criticism, to be such, has to be concerned with differentiating the good from the bad inContinue reading “In Defence of Competition”