(Mary Warnock reflects on her involvement in the philosoph...)
Mary Warnock reflects on her involvement in the philosophical world of Oxford during its heyday in the fifties and sixties and on her life as a major, yet controversial, player in British politics. When Margaret Thatcher made her Chairman of the highly charged Enquiry into Human Fertilization, Mary entered the public spotlight. Her potent dislike of areas of British society, as well as her trenchant criticism of the changing nature of the educational system under Thatcher, give this book a unique insider's edge.
(For this edition of her well established book, Mary Warno...)
For this edition of her well established book, Mary Warnock has made a number of additions, in particular a discussion of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. These bring up to date a well-informed and discriminating account of the main ethical problems of the twentieth and 21st centuries.
(This book constitutes a defence of a discipline in danger...)
This book constitutes a defence of a discipline in danger of being neglected. Warnock addresses areas of inescapable public concern: the philosophy of biology and medicine; the philosophy of education; and the uses of academic philosophy. In each area her concern with public issues and her analytic sophistication lead to perceptive and accessible interventions, collected together in the form of linked lectures. The lectures demonstrate the kinds of use to which a life-long habit of philosophical thought may be put when problems, moral, legal or epistemological, arise in the public sphere. The book, in its entirety, represents a clear and provocative attempt to highlight both the past failures and the future hopes for the philosophical discipline. As such it will be of interest to all philosophers.
Easeful Death: Is there a case for assisted dying?
(Easeful Death sets out in straightforward terms the main ...)
Easeful Death sets out in straightforward terms the main arguments both for and against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. The legal choices confronting those caring for the terminally ill, and indeed those patients themselves who may be facing intolerable suffering towards the end of their lives, have been the cause of fierce public debate in recent years.
The book takes as its starting point attempts in Britain and other countries to bring compassion into the rules governing the end of a patient's life. Drawing on experience in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the US state of Oregon, where either assisted dying or euthanasia have been legalized, the authors explore the philosophical and ethical views on both sides of the debate, and examine how different legislative proposals would affect different members of society, from the very young to the
very old. They describe the practical, medical processes of palliative care, self-denial of food and water, and assisted dying and euthanasia, and ultimately conclude that the public is ready to embrace a more compassionate approach to assisted dying.
This sensitive and authoritative short volume is informed throughout by a strong sense that, whatever the results of the legislative argument, compassion for one another must be both the guide and the restraint upon the way we treat people who are dying or who want to die.
(
Imagination is an outstanding contribution to a notorio...)
Imagination is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to be related to its use in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who she considers to be the creators of a new kind of awareness with more than literary implications. The purpose of her historical account is to suggest that the role of imagination in our perception and thought is more pervasive than may at first sight appear, and that the thread she traces is an important link joining apparently different areas of our experience. She argues that imagination is an essential element in both our awareness of the world and our attaching of value to it.
Dishonest to God: On Keeping Religion Out of Politics
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Here is a pugnacious book by a philosopher who often hi...)
Here is a pugnacious book by a philosopher who often hits the headlines. The book reflects on the nature of religion and how it relates or ought to relate to the rest of life.
Many people today are totally indifferent to religion but religion is far from dead. Indeed religions are intensely defended and aggressively pursued. Religion is a cause for dissension and death. This is beyond dispute.
Mary Warnock is concerned with Christianity. She argues that to value religion as the essential foundation of morality is a profound and probably dangerous mistake. Warnock's overriding purpose is to prise apart religion and morality. Judges for example are constantly being asked to pass judgement on moral issues in court. Because of The Human Rights Act, the law perforce is involved. Morality is therefore increasingly a public and not just a private matter.
This book attempts to clarify the foundation of morality in a society largely indifferent to and ignorant of religion. Religion nevertheless emerges as a source of deep and unique imaginative experience.
(This lucid and concise examination of the difficult moral...)
This lucid and concise examination of the difficult moral issues of today explores the nature of ethics and how we make moral decisions. Options expressed in this highly controversial book have caused uproar among thinkers and campaigners of different persuasions. In no uncertain terms, the renowned philosopher Mary Warnock explains in this book how to distinguish right from wrong in areas ranging from euthanasia to genetic engineering. Drawing on vivid examples from her personal and political life, Warnock illustrates difficult cases to make her point succinctly and persuasively, and with intellectual rigor and keen insight, she clarifies where her views agree and depart for those of contemporary ethical philosophers in the academic mainstream.
(Is there a such thing as a universal right to have childr...)
Is there a such thing as a universal right to have children? Should medical assistance to have children be available to everyone? Are all methods of assisted reproduction legitimate?
Mary Warnock steers a clear path through the web of complex issues underlying these questions. She analyzes what it means to claim something as a "right," examines the ethical problems faced by particular types of assisted reproduction, including artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, and surrogacy, and argues that in the future human cloning may well become a viable and acceptable form of treatment for some types of infertility.
Helen Mary Wilson Warnock is a British philosopher, one of the leading lights in the philosophical community of the 20th century.
Background
Warnock was born Helen Mary Wilson on April 14, 1924 in Winchester, England, to Ethel Mary Schuster and Archie Wilson. Warnock's father was, by the time of her birth, already dead seven months. Archie Wilson had been housemaster and teacher of Modern Languages at Winchester College. In late 1923 he died, leaving behind five children and a newly pregnant wife. Warnock's eldest brother Malcom Wilson had what would later be diagnosed as a sever case of autism. After Malcom came Jean, Duncan, Grizel, Stephana, and finally Helen Mary.
Education
Mary was educated at St. Swithun’s School where she concentrated on classics. She won a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall Oxford and began her studies there in 1942. In 1984 she was made Honorary Fellow.
Career
In 1959 Warnock became the first married fellow of her college, St Hugh's; she was a regular on Radio Three, discussing philosophy, and because she had written two books about existentialism, she found herself with a heavy load of graduate students. No one else at Oxford would teach them about this.
Yet in the early 60s, Warnock grew dissatisfied with her job. She loved teaching but did not feel she had a great gift for her subject: what interested her was not philosophy in itself but the history of ideas and the business of tracing the connections between philosophers. So, despite five children and a full-time job, she started to interest herself in secondary education. She got on to the Oxfordshire education authority, and took over management of music in the county by inventing a music sub-committee. In 1966 she was invited to apply for the headship of Oxford High School, where two of her daughters were students. She got the job without fuss, to her own astonishment; she loved the next five years.
Being a headmistress gave full scope to her bossiness, a quality she rather admires in others. Of course, she worked ferociously hard: she even taught herself the French horn to boost the school's orchestra. The job rewarded her passion for teaching in a way that undergraduates had not. In 1970 Warnock’s husband was elected principal of Hertford College and the couple moved from their rambling North Oxford home into the grander, ambassadorial principal's lodgings in the centre of Oxford. Her position as his wife and co-worker seemed to demand more time than could be spared by the school and she left, in 1972, to write a book on the imagination.
Warnock was on the Independent Broadcasting Authority for 10 years from 1973, and considered as a possible chair of governors of the BBC in 1980. She was especially active in British committees that examined the moral issues of governmental, political, and educational institutions; included are the United Kingdom's National Commission for UNESCO, the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology, the Committee of Inquiry into Validation of Public Sector Higher Education, and the Committee on Teaching Quality. She chaired the Advisory Committee on Animal Experiments, and sat on a Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. She helped award Harkness Fellowships and was a Dimbleby lecturer and a Whitbread judge. She chaired an Arts Council committee on the cost- effectiveness of the Royal Opera House, and a government commission into the education of children with special needs, which revolutionised the way they were taught by bringing them, as far as possible, into normal schools, though she is dissatisfied with the effects of those reforms. From 1985 to1991 she was also mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, England.
Over a long career in academia Warnock demonstrated a keen understanding of many and disparate fields of philosophy. Her intellectual interests were broad and varied. But it was the discipline of ethics that dominated her interest, as demonstrated by her books on the history of Ethics Since 1900, Utilitarianism, and Existentialist Ethics. Her book Ethics Since 1900 presents the broad sweep of moral philosophy from what is called metaphysical ethics to the philosophy of existentialism in the 20th century.
Warnock's book The Philosophy of Sartre (1965) provides the reader with a splendid introduction to the complex, at times unintelligible, thought of the French literary genius, the existentialist who later became a Marxist. Warnock confessed that as a reader of Sartre she at times could not understand what he was talking about. Sartre espoused a radical view of human freedom and argued that "They are free not only to do as they choose but to feel as they choose – in short, to be whatever they choose. " Warnock called Sartre "a metaphysical moral theorist" who offered little or no prospect for individuals who attempt to answer the question "What ought we to do?" The world is a perverse place for Sartre, and there is little that individuals in their freedom can do about it. But then Sartre underwent what Warnock calls "the radical conversion" and offered to desperate individuals a new way out, that of becoming Marxists. Warnock did not believe that this was an attractive option, and proceeded to demonstrate the contradictory nature of the later Marxist Sartre over against the early existentialist one. She did find in her study of Sartre that he at times made interesting philosophical moves, but moves which finally lead away from a coherent philosophical system.
She was well versed in the distinctive analytical philosophical methodology of England, but she also introduced into the British philosophical discussion the continental existentialist tradition and wrote a definitive philosophical study of the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as surveys of Existentialism and Existentialist Ethics. Her books on Imagination (1976) and Memory (1987) are careful analyses of these complex subjects, much discussed by contemporary philosophers in England, the Continent, and the United States. She continued her publishing activity with substantial studies of educational and university issues.
Achievements
Warnock has published a number of books on topics including existentialism, imagination, reproductive rights and research ethics, euthanasia, the place of religion in politics, as well as several memoirs. She was awarded a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1984 and was created a baroness a year later. She participated in several national UK committees of inquiry that dealt with ethical and policy issues from animal experimentation, pollution, genetics, and euthanasia to educational policies for children with special needs. The 1985 Warnock Report led to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990, passed in the British House of Commons, and to the creation of the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in 1991.
Warnock saw ethics not so much as the categories we use to describe the world, but rather "as our own impact upon the world, our relation to other people and our attitude to our situation and our life. " Moral philosophy ought not to distinguish between those who theorize about the logic of moral discourse and the moralists who act as moral agents in the world. Ethics is all about "deliberating, wishing, hating, loving, choosing; these are things which characterize us as people and therefore as moral agents. " Warnock believed, too, that the future of ethics (to save ethics from boredom, as she said) must be characterized by an appreciation of the philosophical significance of feelings, scruples, desires, intentions, and other psychological phenomena.
Warnock argued that there is a substantial difference between moral formalism – that is, the view that there is just one right thing waiting to be done in each situation – and the existentialist's attempt to "interiorize" morals, to make them both individual and concrete. She believed that the latter attempt is both worthwhile and necessary, given the hypothetical and ultrarationalistic nature of the former. However, to assert that moral theory consists only of the assertion that there is no moral code is to assert something that is meaningless.
Warnock believed that what the existentialists ultimately did in their earnest endeavor to expurgate the worthless, the insincere, and the disingenuous from the moral discussion of the philosophers was to destroy morality altogether.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Jean-Paul Sartre
Connections
In 1949 Mary married Sir Geoffrey James Warnock, another British philisopher. He died of degenerative lung disease in 1995. The couple had five children.
Father:
Archie Wilson
He died of diphtheria caught during a school-wide outbreak.
Mother:
Ethel Mary Schuster
Sister:
Grizel Wilson
Sister:
Stephana Wilson
Sister:
Jean Wilson
Brother:
Duncan Wilson
Brother:
Malcom Wilson
He lived most of his life in various medical and mental-health institutions.
