Month: September 2017

I was sitting next to a professor at Cambridge the other day. She’s a professor in Modern Foreign Languages but what she said had such relevance that I thought I should share it. ‘The students are terrified of failure’ she said. ‘My first job is to rid them of that!’

I was taken aback to begin with. It’s Oxbridge after all who demand the highest grades. If you haven’t got the bank of A*s or current equivalent, you needn’t bother to apply. But I also saw what she meant and at this time of UCAS form filling (and Oxbridge applications) I thought maybe we should explore it a little.

Failure is the domain of the arts subjects – in maths or natural sciences, failure is easily seen – an answer is transparently right or wrong, although the deliberation is naturally credited. But failure – fear of it and embrace of it – is particularly aligned to the arts. The arts subjects live and breathe on uncertainty. You take a historical analysis, a piece of art or literature, or indeed a belief – and then you ask the questions. The unsettling ones; the ones that give pause for thought. All arts are the opposite of fundamentalism; religious studies pre-eminently so.

So …. It is worth us – their teachers – realising that we are actually asking our best students to do not one but two things. Firstly we are asking them to know the facts – they must be able to trot out what MacIntyre said about virtue or how Aulen modified atonement. For a particular kind of person – that’s the easy bit. But then we’re asking them to understand those views to such an extent that they can see round the corner too. Somehow we have to inspire them to really feel these questions so that they want to rip into a viewpoint… with that most mature of skills; the ability to see where their argument might lead – and indeed how it might fail. And to do so with some hunger.

We’re teaching them to be intellectual acrobats – without fear of heights. And that’s a hard thing to be. But I think that’s what the professor was wanting; although I’m sure she was aware of the irony. How can you expect a student, whose whole life has been dedicated to writing the best essays, doing the best work, not to worry about failure? It’s a cruel ask at the last. But one on which education is founded. Education is built on the possibility of failure because that’s what prevents ideas from sliding into fundamentalism.

So when your students complete their UCAS forms it’s worth remembering that these universities have seen it all before. What they’re wanting, above all, is the hunger. A hunger that’s not afraid to fail because the asking is as interesting as the knowing. That’s maybe what they want. And maybe something that the best personal statements do show. Students come and students go – our job is to teach them to embrace failure. Only then can they authentically learn.

Determinism matters because bound up within it is the whole idea of moral choice. If our every action is determined then it’s a bad day for the moral man – he was always going to die for his friend and he’s not really to be credited. Upbringing, psychological make up, you name it – he was always going to say ‘Take me’ to the sadistic guard. But if he has free will, his action is truly moral. Morality assumes we have that will – the dignity of man appears to depend on it.

There are some philosophers who are unwilling to abandon the idea of human freedom (after all, we think we are genuinely debating our moral choices) while yet agreeing that certainly, many things about human beings are determined. These “Soft Determinists” or “Compatibilists” see that to do away with free will makes an evil man a kind of natural disaster. For a hard determinist, Hitler could not help his actions, he is morally neutral; neither better not worse than Nelson Mandela. The Compatibilists try to reconcile some kind of determinism with free will.

Thomas Hobbes attempted to do this – albeit in a limited form. Man does follow a path that is determined by things that happened to arrive there – he can’t help it. For Hobbes it’s a question of logic. If you say that this event happens because of another then that is true. It does. There are sufficient and necessary reasons to cause it to happen – and it could not happen any other way because if it did, the reasons were neither sufficient nor necessary. Something else would have happened in line with the reasons that were actually sufficient and necessary. The laws of cause and effect means we were always going to make the choices we make. And yet Hobbes is a compatibilist – he does try to reconcile determinism and free will and he does it like this.

Imagine a woman in a shop. She sees a teenager nick some high value meals – they’re laid out in the fridge and he just lifts them up and puts them in his bag. There’s just a few seconds to decide whether or not to alert the security guard (the teenager is raggy and he looks like he could use a good meal) or let him get away with it.
Now – according to Hobbes – the will of the woman (the actual bit that choses) is determined. Her upbringing, sense of fair play, values, compassion all have a hand in causing her to make a certain decision. They are sufficient and necessary reasons. But having made the choice (determined) she then is free to do what she will with that choice as long as nothing restricts her (not determined).

Scenario 1 – she decides to report the boy and opens her mouth to do so but his friend sidles up beside her and says ‘If you report him I’ll flatten you.’ She closes her mouth again.
Scenario 2 – she decides to report the boy and opens her mouth to do so but sees his young sister in the corner and realises he’s stealing for her – and she looks positively starving. She closes her mouth again

In the first scenario she is stopped by the gruesome friend and hence not free. In the second, she is not impeded – and hence free to make her decision. And this is what Hobbes means by compatibilism. So long as her will is not impeded; she is free to use it – even though the will itself is not free. He thought it was like a stream flowing down a river – while the water had to flow within its natural confines, it was free in so far as its path was not blocked or impeded.