Free Will is not an illusion, not a mirage arising from the perspective of the individual. It is the correct perception of the individual's perspective. We each believe ourselves to be free, and we are in fact so; that is to say, this perception of freedom is a correct detection of our position at the leading edge of a causal chain. That is the meaning of freedom; existing at time's frontier.

But for any other observing us we are simply the robot of circumstance. - They see us in the past.

Both perspectives are actual, and the judgments from those perspectives correct.

If a party cedes responsibility for a matter to another party, the first party will implicitly cede authority over that matter and all other matters that the second party requires to control in order to discharge that responsibility. Indeed it is a test of sincerity of a party accepting a responsibility, whether or not they also insist on or take steps to acquire the necessary authority. However, it is in the interests of the first party to to persuade the second party to accept and discharge responsibilities without authority as extensive as in fact required; in effect, this transfers much if not all the cost of the responsibility to the second party. As a result, the first party is often less than fully conscious of the fact that cession of responsibility is necessarily accompanied by cession of authority. Furthermore, they may not even sufficiently alert to to the fact that a second party may offer to take responsibility for a matter in order to acquire with justification authority that they desire in any case and for some other reason than discharging the responsibility.

For example, if individuals cede responsibility for health to the state, then the state must, necessarily, assume authority over a wide range of matters that affect the risk entailed by the responsibility, in other words the hazard multiplied by the probability of that hazard, which in this case is the probability of a particular demand on the health service, resulting in costs. Those ceding responsibility in this case often do not see why the state has become so interested in their diet and their behaviour; but it could not be otherwise. The state cannot plan, cannot budget, if it does not have the authority to control the risk of cost to the provision system.

The implied political effects of socialism are, therefore, authoritarian, as an administrative and a practical necessity. If the state were to provide and guarantee equal incomes, as honest and thorough socialists such as Shaw have realised is essential to their design, then the state must take authority over the entire economy to guarantee (and cap) wealth generation, and over the size of the population. Otherwise, the provision of income cannot be guaranteed,and since equal incomes are required, at least by Shaw, there must be complete control of both production and consumption in order to guarantee that equality of effect across all individuals. Nothing else would be feasible.

Similarly, if a a country such as the United Kingdom hopes to benefit from the socialisation of risk and opportunity offered by the European Union, assuming this to be real, then it is inevitable that the country must also accept the cession of sovereignty over all matters fiscal, and probably all matters economic, indeed, all matters whatsoever. Without that authority the responsible party cannot realistically offer the umbrella of protection that is required.

In considering this principle it is important to recognise that while taking responsibility may well have reasons for desiring authorities that go beyond those needed for the discharge of the responsibility, they need not have such ulterior motives. The authority is simply a necessary component of the procedure for successfully discharging a responsibility. However, any one faced with another party offering to take responsibility for some matter should be on their guard, lest it is the authority or some potential exceedance of authority that the party seeks. Indeed, in practice, the administrators of any responsible party will be motivated to exceed the necessary authority for reasons of their own.

Freedom from care comes at the cost of liberty, and the hazard of subjection.

If we were to replace 'criticism' with 'study' would this make much of a difference to the work of literary academics? Yes, slight though the change might seem, the potential redirection of focus arising from that renaming would amount to a hand-brake turn.

The modernists looked to the early seventeenth century and found people fascinated, as they themselves were, with the techniques of language. We are no longer so interested in this subject, and feel impatience at the limited purview of the renaissance mind. – In this country a very narrow thing. The Victorians, on the other hand, are a people engulfing the world, and choking, explaining our own dyspepsia.

To you it is only a dead hedgehog, but to me it is a desert island loaded with a thousand cast-aways, every one of them watching us steam over their horizon.

It seems from latest polls that David Cameron's attempts to discourage the electorate from voting to leave the European Union may, after all, be successful. If correct, this is regrettable on three counts:

Firstly, that the population in the United Kingdom should be susceptible to a campaign of demoralisation;

Secondly, that Britain would, like all the other European states, almost certainly be much more prosperous outside the constricting and neurotic framework of the European Union; and

Thirdly that this would mean that the window of opportunity for a peaceful unravelling of the European Union will have been missed.

Of all these it is the last that is most troubling because the alternative path that it indicates is not so much unknown as rather too familiar.

Drawing our inferences from history, the EU as an administration is all but certain to fail in delivering prosperous lives to the individuals in its populations, and will become, like the government of all such multi-national aggregations before it, an agent collecting rent from the many on behalf of a distant few.

At present this Europe-wide government is only the partial realisation of an ideology, and not yet, to use Burke's pregnant term, an 'armed doctrine'. It could even now be dissolved peacefully by a simple refusal from the unsubjected populations, and a British vote to Leave would catalyse this resistance, giving courage to others in Europe and so precipitate a collapse of the European Union as an expansionist project, returning it to its roots as a region of free trade. Thus the royal blue flag with its binding ring of gold stars would fall to earth not with a bang but a whimper, the best of all possible political conclusions. A vote to Remain, on the other hand, will mean that this moment will pass, and that any resistance in the future, and there is very likely to be intense dissatisfaction within a matter of decades, will of necessity tend towards violence, for by then it will be rebellion not civil disagreement.

A significant difference between study in the humanities and that in the sciences is that logic, Popperian logic say, has never seemed of much importance in or to the arts. Doubtless there are many reasons for this, but perhaps the greatest is this: that in the arts we have no hypotheses, because, indeed, we have no problems. By this, I mean that there is no great interest in forming a technology of the arts, that there is nothing to be won there. Yet, a great part of literary critical theory, certainly in the 1990s when I last paid attention, appears dedicated to the mastery of all territory. Why is it that literary theorists did not turn to the obviously successful scientific method? Because, shrewdly, the scholars of literature knew that this modified empiricism would rapidly take the field out of their hands, and criticism would be succeeded by naturalism. This would have been personally and institutionally inconvenient.

On the 5th of June 1993 I lost my temper with Peter Singer in a public discussion about his approach to the inclusion of animals within the moral sphere. He was a guest speaker, and I was just a member of the audience, so this was ungrateful and very rude. I felt bad it about then, and in retrospect a little worse. But the palpable dishonesty of his talk really got under my skin. He was presenting as objectively reasoned a position that was plainly self-serving. My quarrel was not with the conclusions, but with the bogus arguments in their favour. By all means serve your self, but don’t pretend to be doing something else altogether.

The problem is this: In his Animal liberation (1975), and Practical Ethics (1980), Expanding Circle (1981) Singer’s general argument states that to qualify for moral treatment an organism must be able to suffer. We must, he says, and on reasoned moral grounds extend human standards of morality to all creatures that can suffer. This leads him to a number of recommendations with regard to factory farming and human diet, uncontroversial ideas I think, and probably sensible. However, the criterion of ‘suffering’, on which these recommendations are based, is fallacious and will:

a. Impair the enactment of these principles

b. Discredit them

c. Lead to the proposition of inappropriate recommendations.

Moreover, the flaws in the foundations of his moral system are so grave that no corrective tinkering is possible; instead we must abandon that whole line of thought and start building up from a different location. (I won’t explore that here, but it is fair to admit that I would ground my position in an evolutionary theory of moral intuitions that sees them as arising from self interest, not reason.)

The main problem with Singer’s criterion is that it draws lines that cannot be maintained or defined with any precision: We cannot decide definitely if another person is suffering, though we can make a reasonable guess. In the case of animals we cannot even make a guess. What is necessary to “suffer”? Singer would reply “consciousness”, but what is this, why is consciousness necessary for an animal to suffer, and how do we decide whether other creatures have it? None of these questions are easy to answer, and some are impossible. Singer rejects the idea that simple creatures such as shellfish can suffer, but on what grounds? One begins to wonder whether his definition is any more tenable, indeed any different, from the criterion of rationality, the ability to reason, which he rejects.

Furthermore, Singer talks of the “interests” of hens, and the need to respect them, but this term is not given any precision beyond that implied in the suffering criterion; i.e. that the only interests to be infringed are those connected with the right to avoid suffering. This is open to criticism as a totally inadequate definition of “interest”. From a molecular biological perspective, all organisms have interests with the same fundamental character, the replication of genes. From that view Singer’s proposed limitation of the definition of “interest” simply to animals capable of suffering seems narrow, and unjustified. One could very reasonably say that at a deep level all life forms have interests that can be infringed, even viruses.

Thus Singer’s criterion is inadequate because it simply doesn’t lead us to any useful principles. We are left wondering where to draw the lines to mark the boundaries of our moral responsibility, and, since the purpose of the criterion was to redefine this boundary, it fails in its own terms. It’s no good saying that in the future the criterion might be workable; we need something now. The consciousness of animals, the capacity of animals can suffer are questions to which we can give no precise answer, and perhaps in principle cannot answer. Since these questions remain open, Singer’s criterion turns out to be no criterion at all.

However, Singer does draw lines, yet his theory does not, and I say cannot explain why he chose those places. We are justified therefore in assuming that the location was decided in advance for other reasons, reasons which go undeclared, with the argument making an appearance after the fact to provide justification.

Overall, I could not avoid the conclusion that the criterion of suffering appealed to Singer because it left him something to eat. Indeed, his lines of division are suspiciously convenient in other ways for human beings. Most of the hostile life forms we encounter, from viruses to mosquitos, are creatures that Singer’s line excludes, but which, as I have remarked, could with as much reason be said to be within his line rather than beyond it. In short what really annoyed me in 1993 was that Singer appeared to be a Pecksniff of the first water. While claiming to be at the very tip-top of the moral high ground he was in fact pushing a slightly revised, indeed a concealed form of anthropcentrism. I had no wish to deny him his dinner (of mostly herbs), but I resented, and still resent the fact that he was telling cold-blooded lies to put it on the plate quite free of guilt.

A: What an opinonated man!

B: Indeed, always volunteering his view...

A: Ah... had that been true I should have listened with interest.

We tend to think that there must be a coherent position held by the author of a text, and that all the parts of that text contribute to it; but we should be able to see that a book is a series of propositions, each of them satisfying in some way, and not necessarily quite coherent, though that is often and admirably the aim. It is even possible that the juxtaposition of two incompatible propositions may be a source of attraction for both reader and writer, for in passing from one to the other without raising the question of their compatibility we may gain some extra sense of security. That is to say, one of the greatest talents of poets and philosophers may be to so collocate propositions from warring families that the conflict becomes invisible. – We have the impression of peace.

This impression may not be very difficult to create, for the simple fact that a series of propositions is printed as if it had continuity may mask what would be, in another form, speech say, palpable discontinuity. Those volumes which are assembled from several essays, written over a long period of time, but pretending to cohesion, are obvious examples; however, there is no guarantee that a chapter written at one sitting, or a paragraph, or a sentence, or a phrase, is any more integrated. All these could be said to function as forms invented to the give the appearance of a developing and internally integral argument. They are binding agents. It is most important to see that this does not discredit the book or paragraph, since any means of reconciling opposites is welcome. In the experience of reading a book or a poem, it is actually the case that the warring propositions are at peace; and that peace is not an illusion, even though the propositions will quickly trade blow for blow outside these forms.