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I'm reading Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. I'd seen the film first, which I think is actually fairly faithful - at least to the sense of the book, if not quite the sequence or precise arrangement of the episodes it catalogues: the dilapidation of Scampia's concrete monstrosities; the inventive yet nonetheless cheap horror of the violence; the way in which a consciously fatalistic lust for power ends up seeming the only comprehensible reaction; and above all, the total integration into and indeed perfect service of the global economy. But one thing above any other struck me. Although it's quite shocking to think that Pelle Italiane and the other faux designer shops on the Seven Sisters Road are probably run by Camorristi, or to read reports of the blankness of adolescents in Naples' hinterland, the death toll really stops the breath. The Troubles, assuming Saviano and Wikipedia are to be trusted, did not manage to kill more people than intra-Camorra feuds from the mid-seventies onwards. Admittedly, Northern Ireland has a smaller population than the Province of Naples, but presumably a greater proportion of the killings took place in the Province of Naples. The average rate of Camorra killings alone is higher than the present homicide rate for any Western European state. In comparison, the total number of murders in London in the year to September was 128; that's 13 less than the average of organised crime killings over the twenty seven years to 2005 for an area with less than half population. If people must make comparisons to The Wire, then rundown areas of the UK seem not to be the place to start.

Like A Dog Not Walking On Its Hind Legs

I suspect that I tend towards the more formal end of views about the appropriate standards of staff-student interactions at universities. This is probably partly because of the structure of teaching that I'm most used to; tutorials, sometimes with only one student, make particularly obvious how seedy Terence Kealey, vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham, is when he tries to claim that external regulation of exam grades has eliminated power differentials that would corrupt relationships between students and staff at universities here. Still, one would have to have a remarkably laissez-faire attitude to causal misogyny and leching to think that his attempt to legitimate patriarchal sleaziness through clever-clever irony and literary allusion was not rather exploitative, notwithstanding his willingness to blame if not the victim, at least the more vulnerable of the two parties. For one thing, if this is merely about the tributes that age pays to youth and vice versa, why is the relationship in question explicitly defined as one of male professors and female students? I'm not sure whether academia is any better or worse than society at large, but it certainly suffers from various gendered norms and on occasion outright sexism. No male graduate student of my acquaintance would dress more formally to teach, whereas I know women who do, just as no man I know has been harrassed by one of their colleagues. I suppose, though, if you're the kind of person who thinks that the relevant relationship in The History Man is one of acolyte and academic hero, rather than a gradual bullying into submission, and more, in a position to benefit from doing just that, then you would think that any unwillingness to accept that that sort of thing is really not OK was a bit humourless.

I Can Do No Other

I was reading - in bed: devotion to the cause I tell you - one of the early, pre-A Theory of Justice Rawls papers last night, entitled 'The Sense of Justice', and was struck by its explanation of a sense of justice in terms of guilt. The idea is, perhaps more commonly than I'm aware, that it is our capacity to form relationship both with others and to principles where failures to live up to the terms of those relationships generates guilt that accounts for and makes sense of our idea of justice and so our inclusion in the scope of principles of justice. In the absence of a sense of justice, we wouldn't be able to have those relationships; we might be able to have relationships of a similar sort, but since those relationships are marked by the way in which we conceptualise our failures to live up to their terms, we wouldn't be able to have them. Now, what's interesting about this is its foundation in guilt. People have been criticizing Kantianism for secularising - more and less successfully - the fiercely self-directed and often self-critical religious sentiments of mid-to-late eighteenth century Prussia for some time; it's been a persistent theme of Alasdair MacIntyre's writings, for example. For a Kantianly-minded philosopher to begin from guilt though, is perhaps rare. It's also revealing, because it makes it clear how central an ethic of responsibility is to Kantians, or at least Rawls. Unlike shame, guilt is only an appropriate response to something you're responsible for, so to make the capacity for guilt central to being a subject of justice is to make one's sense of responsibility, of having to bear the costs of your actions, central to being a subject of justice.

On Blond Beasts

Richard Layard apparently thinks that there is "no nobler ideal" than crude utilitarianism. Let us do him the charity of assuming that he actually means what he says. Presumably then he thinks it noble to discount the suffering caused by injustices, like say rape, against any pleasures that those who inflict them gain, or that if I could make myself happier by stupifying myself, doing so would be noble. Whatever one might say in favour of crude utilitarianism, the thought that treating all pleasures, regardless of what they are pleasures in, as equally significant would be noble is not usually one of them. Assuming that Richard Layard doesn't actually think that it's better if child molesters enjoy themselves whilst molesting children, perhaps he should leave doing philosophy to philosophers, rather than economists who are apparently neither familiar with the rather long history of philosophical critiques of crude utilitarianism nor capable of understanding the basic implications of positions they advocate.

I Know You Can't Know That

A little puzzle I was offered today, which might perhaps be interesting. I will give what I think is the solution at the end of the week. A teacher says to their pupils, at some point this week I will give you a test, which you will not know is a test until I tell you afterwards. Given that if the test hasn't taken place in the last couple of minutes of Friday, the students will seemingly rightly think that it will take place then, and likewise for the couple of minutes before then, and so on, until the teacher is apparently compelled to say that the test has already been taken, can what the teacher says be true?

Outgrown Those Basic Feelings Anyway

For the first time in 9 years - the first time since I moved here as an undergraduate - I'm leaving Oxford tomorrow without knowing if I'll be back for longer than a night or two here and there. Admittedly, I'll probably be back to teach - and hopefully play football - pretty regularily next academic year, but it's not really the same; even if I do find a spare bed or sofa, it'll only be for a night - I won't be settled here. I describe myself as a Londoner and, more, am quite prepared to attempt to police who gets to make that claim - the postcode plays a generally under-appreciated role: Richmond is, for example, not in the relevant sense in London - but in lots of important ways I was formed here and not there. That's not just because I first lived away from my parents here, and not so much because of the place in a general sense - this is a university town, and for 8 of the 9 years, I've been a student, so I've never really felt like I knew the town separately from being a student in it - but more because of people whom I've been close to: friends I made when I was an undergraduate and lived with when I was a masters student, various people in what I feel really is a community of political theorists, some others I've accumulated, more and less purposefully, along the way.

There was a time when I really wanted to leave, felt like I couldn't bear to be here any more, but even then, that was a fairly explicit piece of self-repudiation: what I thought I couldn't stand was the life I had made for myself here. Like it or not, here is a central piece of who I am: although surely other things underlie them, so much of what has shaped me into the person I am now happened here and in ways that I suspect are often would really only have happened in as a student - and perhaps particularly a postgraduate student - at an elite university in an otherwise rather nondescript provincial town. There are habits, even a habitus, that I've acquired here that it is difficult to imagine having acquired elsewhere; ways of thinking but also habits of mind in a broader sense, learned psycho-social behaviours. This isn't meant as a communitarian paean to the form of life I suppose I now know best - I hope I have the sense to be far more ambiguous about the value of that set of more and less conscious institutions and my way of negotiating them: after all, I did once want little more than to abandon them - but rather an acknowledgement that if I am to maintain a well-founded sense of integrity, of who and what I am and its significance, then I need to see Oxford's role in making me and how suited to it I am. I've not been away for more than 3 weeks for 6 years; it'll be odd to leave.

By The Japanese War Memorial

From Geuss's 'Liberalism and its Discontents', Political Theory, 2002.

[I]f some of the deficiencies inherent in adopting a pure normative standpoint are visible even in a philosopher who has moved as far beyond Kant as Rawls has, this seems to me to give further weight to suspicions about the normative standpoint as a whole.

Setting aside the 'pure' for the time being, I think it's worth marvelling at just how perfect a piece of self-disembowelling this is. Our suspicions about the very idea of a normative standpoint and its deficiencies can have more and less weight; by what measures are we to establish this weight, and by what standards are we to judge these failings? Presumably not normative ones, since they ground suspicions about the very possibility of normativity, and so presumably not ones which are supposed to compel or even count in favour of agreement on them. I suppose anyone who disagrees with Geuss then has no reason to carry on reading him then.