Richard Dawkins address to the Liberal Democrat Party conference in September 2009, arguing in support of a motion to restrict the scope of libel laws used maliciously to undermine the supremacy of scientific investigation and understanding. (A shortened version of the transcript follows the video below).

Abridged version of the text reposted from the Guardian:

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world. Litigants are coming to England from another country to sue people who live in a third country over a book that was published in a fourth country – the excuse being that a handful of books were sold here too. A nice little round-the-world jaunt for lawyers it may be, but sensible or liberal it is not. Nor is it just.

Of course there must be redress if you are maliciously attacked in a way that damages you. But if such a law is cast too wide it has disastrous consequences on the public interest, not least in the area of science and medicine where the stakes are high, profits and reputations are guarded jealously, and the vulnerable need to be protected from unproven or fraudulent claims for cures, whether by “alternative” therapists or big pharmaceuticals.

As a scientist, and as Oxford’s inaugural Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, I have sometimes wondered why science itself cannot sue for libel. You can legally lie about the real world to your heart’s content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain. Teachers can legally tell innocent children the palpable falsehood that the world is less than 10,000 years old (the true figure is more than 4.5 billion years). The world cannot sue you for lying about its age, because the world cannot prove that it has been damaged by the lie!

But people really can be damaged by unscientific medicine. Homeopathy is obvious nonsense, and given another two minutes I could prove it to you. It can even be damaging, if it lures patients away from seeking the best, evidence-based medical advice until it is too late. Yet before saying a thing like that, I have to look nervously over my shoulder, intimidated by the notorious English libel laws. The biologist Olivia Judson wrote last week in the New York Times:

Several times this summer, science journalists in London have leaned over to me and said something along the lines of, ‘I was thinking of writing,” and gone on to describe an article that was going to be critical of someone. ‘But then,’ the speaker would gloomily conclude, ‘I thought to myself, “Simon Singh”, and I decided not to.’

Back in June leading academics, publishers, journalists, performers, clinicians and scientists issued a public statement backing that courageous hero Simon Singh. The British Chiropractors Association has sued him for criticising chiropractic claims to cure asthma and other childhood complaints. I and many of my colleagues fear that, if Singh loses, it would have major implications on the freedom of scientists, researchers and other commentators to engage in robust criticism of scientific, and pseudoscientific, work. It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.

Dr Ben Goldacre, who writes on science in the Guardian, was bogged down for years defending – ultimately successfully – a libel claim brought in London by a German millionaire vitamin pill salesman who was promoting his pills as a cure for Aids in sub-Saharan Africa.

Scientists often disagree with one another, sometimes passionately. But they don’t go to court to sort out their differences, they go into the lab, repeat the experiments, carefully examine the controls and the statistical analysis. We care about whether something is true, supported by the evidence. We are not interested in whether somebody sincerely believes he is right. There exist objective methods for discovering whether he is, as a matter of fact, right. If he is wrong, the evidence will show it, and – notwithstanding Judge Eadie – be blowed to whether he is sincere in his error or not.

If the British Chiropractic Association was really sincere, it wouldn’t go into court to sue Singh. It could have taken up the Guardian’s offer of a right to reply. Or better, it could go into the lab and do an experiment to show him wrong. Why doesn’t it submit its case to the higher court of scientific test? I think we all know the answer.

Or will I be sued for saying that? The trouble is, it’s hard to know. That is the point. Do we really want discussions on matters of science, evidence and medicine, and indeed any area of public interest, to be conducted in an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty?

This is an edited version of Richard Dawkins’ speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth

by Dennis Hayes (reposted from battleofideas.org.uk)

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom draws our attention to a contemporary irony in Othello’s famous cry, on losing his sense of personal honour, that ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’ (1). The irony is that for most contemporary audiences Othello’s profession has gone before the play begins. Military values, the honour and the glory of war, of being a general in the Venetian army, or any other, are ones that elicit no sympathy today.

I want to cry the same about the occupation of philosophy, but for entirely the opposite reason. Philosophy now seems to have become very popular. The spate of philosophy books being published for the ordinary reader, and an increased interest in teaching philosophy from primary school to university, encourages the thought that the profession of philosopher is at its zenith. However, it would be an act of self-delusion for philosophers to think that everyone wants to be a Socrates now, and I want to claim that ‘Plato’s profession’s gone!’

The basis for this claim is a straightforward and simple sociological critique of contemporary philosophy, particularly but by no means exclusively, applied or popular philosophy. Plato’s profession has gone because of sociological and cultural changes. When philosophers sought to question rigid assumptions and fixed truths and to act as under-labourers in the pursuit of knowledge, the unspoken sociological assumption of philosophy was that there was a socio-cultural necessity to shake people out of their unquestioning, confident beliefs and unreflective opining, and turn them into critical thinkers. This was always a dangerous business for philosophers and their willing or unwilling students. More dangerous for the philosophers, though, who might suffer opprobrium, or be forced to take the hemlock, whereas students could expect at worse the ‘offence’ of the aporia.

When I was a student my tutors complained that I illegitimately crossed disciplines and brought philosophical analysis into the study of literature and sociology. ‘So much under-labouring to do,’ was my response. Like Socrates listening to Protagoras’s lengthy rhetoric I wanted to ask ‘What did you mean by ‘x’ in the first sentence?’

Unrepentant about my illegitimate crossing of disciplinary boundaries, I want to make three sociological observations about key aspects of philosophy in defence of my claim, and no doubt now, as then, I will be marked down!

Scepticism

Philosophical scepticism, questioning the alleged foundations of knowledge, is perhaps the basic job of the philosopher. Do we know what we think we know? Do our moral values stand up to challenge and counter-example? Such questioning used to cause friction and ferment in the agora, but in the shopping mall it will be met with ready agreement. No one will defend any knowledge or value. Roger Scruton, in his Modern Philosophy, called moral relativism the ‘first refuge of a scoundrel’ but this is too facile (2). It doesn’t seem like that anymore. The new therapeutic relativism demands the non-judgemental moral high ground. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind reminds us that ‘Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labour, that he was ignorant. Now every high school student knows that. How did it become so easy?’ (3) The contemporary openness to all viewpoints is an expression of therapeutic relativism, and although it covers up a deeply cynical lack of commitment to any knowledge or morality, it condemns those who are not so open, or those who think they are right about anything, as epistemological tyrants. Philosophers can await the first charge of epistemological bullying.

Even in more academic environments the situation is the same. When the late Terry McLaughlin spoke to Faculty of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, he gave a traditional speech about questioning the concepts and definitions we use. Instead of this being a wake-up call to analyse ideas, it reinforced the cynical idea that everything must be questioned and that no knowledge or value was ‘absolute.’ ‘Absolute’ is the adjective that now suggests the best epistemological state is the know-nothing state, not ignorance but constant therapeutic questioning. This ‘question therapy’ is often called ‘Socratic’ by colleagues who do not see that endless questioning becomes an end in itself. Even some philosophers see the elenchus and aporia as therapeutic devices. (4)

Knowing

Complementary to therapeutic scepticism is another basic philosophy teacher’s staple, the Kantian distinction between ‘knowledge’ and ‘opining’. Stanley Fish is a model of the old-style philosopher with this rant: ‘I told my students I hadn’t the slightest interest in whatever opinions they might have and didn’t want to hear any. I told them that while they may have been taught that the purpose of writing is to express oneself, the selves they had were not worth expressing, and it would be good if they actually learnt something.’ (quoted in Times Higher Education 11 December 2008). Fish’s students are supposed to do some reading and research and, when they have some knowledge, to come back with informed comment. They must find this hard when they have been taught that giving opinions is what ‘thinking’ means in the non-judgemental classroom. Isn’t opposing ‘opinion therapy’ in this way worthwhile, then?

I used to find the distinction useful, but its employment in this way, without being explicitly part of a critique of therapeutic philosophy – a critique of being so ‘open-minded’ that your brains fall out – does not merely silence stupid, thoughtless and ill-founded opinions, but all opinions. There is a whiff of such a critique in Fish’s rebuke, but not much. What he offers in its absence is merely a more demanding therapy that silences students because they are ignorant. It resembles a form of ‘directive therapy’, but in the end it will just reinforce self-doubt and makes it less rather than more likely that students will come back as robust and assertive knowing beings. They will be more ‘open’ either as a device to ward off another ad hominem attack or because they have discovered that it is morally better to be open than opinionated.

Criticism

The job of the philosopher is criticism. But now everyone is critical of everything. Criticism is welcomed. Training in ‘critical thinking’ is popular everywhere. For the most part this involves techniques and games that are not related to any particular context and therefore encourage a view of ‘criticism’ as a simple set of techniques that can be an aspect of an individual’s psychological framework of character. Criticism, literally, has become an attitude. This can only exacerbate societal problem such as the rejection of adult or any other authority. Criticism of this ‘cool’ kind is not criticism but cynicism.

Recently, when I was talking to a group of students about the university as a place to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable, and made a defence of criticism, one insightful student told me that the lecturers she most disliked were those that were exclusively ‘critical’ and never offered anything. She was right, and that comment started to change my view of the role of philosophy.

Philosophical tradition tells many stories of philosophers who were unpopular because they were sceptics, challenged conventional knowledge and wisdom, and taught the art of criticism. In the present sociological and cultural context, however, these three attributes turn philosophy into therapy and makes it a saleable commodity. It should come as no surprise then, that in the increasingly therapeutic workplace environment, philosophers are thought of as flexible and creative employees, and candidates with philosophy degrees are wanted by the top employers.

If philosophers are not to continue to sell philosophy as therapy they have to do three things that will challenge contemporary attitudes. They must negate their own working principles and argue for knowledge, for the assertion and defence of opinion, and make a stand against idle criticism.

In a special issue of the Philosophers’ Magazine published in 2007, its anniversary year, Stephen Law noted in his contribution to a forum special on ‘the making of minds,’ that the rise in wacky and dodgy religious and other beliefs now left him only cautiously optimistic over the Enlightenment belief in reason (5). I am more sanguine, with this caveat. A belief in Enlightenment values is not a philosophical but a social and political matter. If Enlightenment values are to be defended, then philosophers must learn from sociology and regain their profession by becoming once again difficult and dangerous individuals.

Dennis Hayes is Professor of Education at the University of Derby and the author, with Kathryn Ecclestone, of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, (Routledge, 2009).

1) Harold Bloom (1998) Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York: Riverhead Books.
2) Roger Scruton (1994) Modern Philosophy, London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
3) Allan Bloom (1987/1993) The Closing of the American Mind: how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books: p43.
4) see Higgins, C (1994) Socrates’ Effect/Meno’s Affect: Socratic Elenchus as Kathartic Therapy
5) Stephen Law (2007) ‘The Making of Minds,’ Philosophers’ Magazine, 38: 55-7.