PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC POLICY: MAKING AN IMPACT
Seminar 2: Friday 25 February 2011
Programme
10.30am | Tea and coffee |
10.45am | Welcome and introduction |
11.00am | Should we promote patriotism in schools? Dr Michael Hand, Institute of Education, University of London |
12.15pm | Guardians of the basic needs of future generations: A modest Platonic proposal? Dr Rupert Read, University of East Anglia |
1.30pm | Lunch |
2.30pm | Policy and the future of the family Professor David Archard, Lancaster University |
3.45pm | Plenary discussion Tea and coffee provided |
4.30pm | Close |
Abstracts
David Archard (Lancaster University)
Policy and the Future of the Family
Within modern Western liberal societies there is an increasing diversity of family forms. Law and policy can make a significant difference to which forms flourish and which do not. Conservative defences of the traditional nuclear family are set against the liberal, or libertarian, tolerance of familial diversity. Philosophy can contribute to this debate on the future of the family by means of both a conceptual analysis of what counts as a family and an outline of those normative principles by which families and the proper limits of family policy should be evaluated. I shall say something about how to define the family, and about the limits, if any, to the tolerance of family forms within liberal societies.
Michael Hand (Institute of Education, University of London)
Should we promote patriotism in schools?
If patriotism is love of one’s country, the attempt to promote it in schools must count as a form of emotional education. Emotional education is defensible insofar as it consists in offering pupils good reasons and effective techniques for fostering or suppressing particular emotions. The question is whether we are in a position to offer pupils good reasons for loving their countries. I set out an account of the rationality of emotions in general and of love in particular, then identify two benefits and one drawback of patriotic attachment. I argue that there is room for reasonable disagreement on the desirability of patriotism and that we therefore ought not to promote it in schools but rather to teach it as a controversial issue. (My research on patriotism in schools, which had an empirical as well as a philosophical component, has received extensive and frequently hostile media coverage. I will conclude with some reflections on media coverage as a form of research impact.)
Rupert Read (University of East Anglia)
Guardians of the basic needs of future generations: A modest Platonic proposal?
Plato said we should be ruled by guardians. Habermas and other deliberative-democratic philosophers of course abhor such autocracy. But what if the guardians were selected democratically, by sortition? And what if their deliberations became a high-profile model of what deliberation in a democratic society could be?
Still, there seems little case for substituting guardians for normal elected representatives, for decisions which can be made about us, by people who represent us. But what about cases where the people who ought to be heard in or even making the decisions have no voice -- even over matters which are life or death matters for them?
Future people are the most obvious case of such people. I present here therefore a broadly Habermasian case for powerful guardians for future people / guardians of the future / guardians of future generations, to take the place occupied in our current political system by the royal assent.
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