Reasonableness

An English jury, in a criminal trial, must decide whether the prosecution has shown, beyond reasonable doubt, that the accused committed the crime. Normally, all 12 jurors must agree, but judges sometimes allow verdicts agreed on by only ten jurors.

Suppose that a jury starts its deliberations, and after some discussion, takes a vote. Eight say that the prosecution has shown guilt beyond reasonable doubt, but four say that it has not. All of these opinions have been reached by considering only the evidence presented in court, and comments by jurors on that evidence. After more discussion, it becomes clear that no juror is going to change his or her opinion, so long as only those things are considered.

Jurors might then consider the pattern of voting. Any one of the eight might reason as follows.

"Some people in the jury room think that the prosecution has not discharged its burden of proof. There is no ground to think that they are not reasonable people, and in any case, it is unlikely that one would get four unreasonable people among 12 randomly chosen people, although one might get one or two. If the prosecution had discharged its burden of proof, they would probably have been convinced, because reasonable people generally hold reasonable views on such questions. They are not convinced, so I should change my view and vote for acquittal."

(It might be thought that there would be a mirror-image argument for the four: "Eight apparently reasonable people have concluded that the prosecution has discharged its burden of proof, and they would not have concluded that if it had not, so I should change my view". But that argument should be excluded by the fact that the burden of proof is on the prosecution. Doubt trumps certainty. The views of the four could plant doubts in the minds of the eight, but the views of the eight could only plant doubts over whether to acquit in the minds of the four, and a doubt as to whether to acquit is not enough to convict.)

Clearly, this reasoning is not always followed in practice. If it were, we would never get deadlocked juries, because the reasoning would transform deadlock into acquittal. The psychological explanation may well be that at least some jurors think their job is to decide whether the accused is guilty, rather than to decide whether the prosecution has shown guilt beyond reasonable doubt. A seemingly more respectable reason would be that jurors made up their minds individually, on the basis of the evidence presented and other jurors' comments on that evidence, and did not consider that their views should be influenced by the views of other jurors. And yet, we may ask whether that reason really would be respectable. It would imply that each juror should decide on the basis of the standard of reasonableness of doubt that he or she would use when he or she had no-one else's guidance available, rather than on the basis of a standard of reasonableness of doubt that had been tested by reference to the conveniently available sample of 11 other people in the jury room. Would not such a test be likely to improve one's grasp of the appropriate standard? The concept at work should be as objective as possible: doubt that is reasonable, not doubt that an individual, with his or her foibles, might happen to consider reasonable.

Occasionally, comparable considerations are tackled explicitly in legislation. The UK is about to have a general anti-abuse rule put into its tax legislation. Assuming that the legislation follows the draft that was published in December 2012, the use of a tax avoidance scheme will only be caught by this new rule, removing the anticipated tax saving, if that use "cannot reasonably be regarded as a reasonable course of action in relation to the relevant tax provisions". (Even if the use of a scheme is not caught by the new rule, it may very well be caught by other rules.) For the text and commentary, see GAAR Guidance Part A, 11 December 2012, section 5.2, available here:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/budget-updates/11dec12/gaar-guidancepart-a.pdf

This is known as the double reasonableness test. If there are reasonable views on both sides, both that the use of a scheme was a reasonable course of action and that it was not, then use of the scheme will not be caught. It is natural, and very likely to be correct, to determine whether a view is reasonable by considering whether it is supported by arguments that a substantial proportion of people who are well-informed about the subject matter would consider to be reasonable, and whether there is an absence of any manifest objection that would lead most well-informed people to reject the view.

We should note a subtlety here. The legislation focuses on the reasonableness of a view, not of people who hold it. A reasonable person may happen to hold some unreasonable views. As the official commentary points out, it is not enough simply to produce an eminent lawyer or accountant, who states that a course of action was reasonable. (Ibid., paragraph 5.2.2.2)

If, however, a substantial number of eminent lawyers and accountants stated that a course of action was reasonable, it would be hard to maintain that this view was unreasonable. When we test for reasonableness, as distinct from correctness, the number of votes among experts carries some weight. (It may also carry weight in relation to correctness, but in a rather different way, and a minority of one can be correct.)

This reflects the fact that reasonableness is a normative concept that is directly related to the adoption of views, in a way that, where there is real debate among experts, correctness is not. What should you do? In fields in which there is such a thing as expertise, and in which you are not yourself an expert, you should limit yourself to adopting reasonable views, or suspending judgement. How can you avoid adopting unreasonable views? See what the experts think, and limit yourself to views that are adopted by decent numbers of experts (or to suspension of judgement).

Correctness of views is an aspiration, at least in relation to views of a type that have any prospect of being classified as correct or incorrect, but in areas where there is real debate among experts, views do not carry labels, "correct" and "incorrect", so the concept of correctness does not regulate the conduct of non-experts directly. We can only adopt strategies that are likely to lead to the avoidance of incorrect views, like limiting ourselves to reasonable views, or making ourselves experts and studying the evidence ourselves.

Artificial brains

The Human Brain Project aims to give us a computer simulation of the human brain, or at least to work towards that goal. Plenty of people are sceptical about the feasibility of the project. But there are also ethical questions. Some of them are mentioned on the project's website, here:

http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ethics.html

The issues mentioned relate to what people might do, among, with and to other human beings, having learnt in detail how real human brains worked. Even if the simulation did not, at the neuronal level, work in the same way that actual brains worked, it could still mimic the brain at a larger scale, for example the level of processing ideas, in ways that would, for example, help political propagandists to work more effectively.

There is, however, another issue, related to the simulation itself. What, if anything, would make the simulation a moral client, so that ethical concerns would bear on a decision to modify its thoughts by direct intervention (rather than by talking to it and inviting it to accept or reject some new idea), or would bear on a decision to switch it off?

It would not, we may assume, have a power of action, or a power to move around the world. One might therefore argue that it would not have a well-grounded sense of self (compare some of the arguments in Lucy O'Brien's book, Self-Knowing Agents). But it could still have the internal configuration that would correspond to a sense of self, a configuration that was artificially engineered by the researchers, as if it had had a history of action. I assume here that such a sense could be retained, and would not be lost over a long period without action, just as a human being who became totally paralysed and immobile could retain a sense of self. The artificial brain would, however, need to think of itself as one who had become paralysed, or would have to be fed the delusion that it was in an active body in the world, or would have to remain puzzled about its sense of self. Given the nature of the project, it is most likely that the artificial brain would be fed the delusion of being in an active body.

Likewise, the artificial brain could have artificially engineered senses of pain and of fear, like those that were appropriate to a being which moved around in the world and needed to act to distance itself from dangers, and that had been evolved in the species, or developed in the individual, through encounters with dangers.

The sense of self, and the feelings, would have dubious provenance. If we were to think that such senses were given their content by the external reality that grounded them - a kind of meaning externalism - we would have to think of them as not having the content that they had for us. That might let us off recognizing the artificial brain as a moral client, but it seems unlikely that it would do so. Even a convinced meaning externalist would, after all, hesitate to turn off the nutrients that fed human brains which had been put in vats years ago, and had been plugged into the usual delusive inputs for long enough for the presumably externally grounded meanings of their thoughts to have changed.

Moreover, while the sense of self might be based on a fabrication, it is not clear that the sense of self would itself be unreal. It would be even harder to show that the artificial brain's theory of mind, used in its encounters with people, was unreal. And the researchers would be very likely to apply their own theories of mind and intentional stances to the artificial brain. At least, some of them would, entering into social relationships that would, between human beings, stimulate moral concern, while other researchers measured the results in order to understand how real human brains behaved in encounters with other people. Possession of a theory of mind looks like something that ought to make the possessor a moral client. It has certainly been argued to have that consequence in relation to great apes other than human beings, although the extent to which they really have a theory of mind is controversial.

On the other side, there would be arguments that the simulation would just be a large piece of software, that it was not even fully integrated into a single person because it was shared between several computers (although this might reduce the accuracy of the simulation, because large-scale co-ordinating electrical activity does seem to matter to consciousness), and that it would not even know if it were modified, slowed down or turned off - although modifications, and processing speed adjustments, would have to be made carefully in order not to leave traces of the old state or speed that would give the game away.

The software point has strength if we think that when an entity is not intrinsically dependent on its hardware, that makes it less of a moral client. We are intrinsically dependent on our hardware, or at least, we are now, and will remain so until we work out how to copy the contents of a brain onto some computer-readable medium. Even then, it would matter which body someone was, and what the history of that body had been; that degree of hardware-dependence would remain.

The point about lack of awareness of changes needs to be elaborated. It is utterly wrong suddenly to kill someone, even without their knowledge or any kind of anticipation. It is also wrong to manipulate people's thoughts or attitudes, in the way that politicians, spin-doctors and the advertisers of products do, without people's awareness of what is going on, rather than using open and rational argument. If it were to be acceptable to turn off an artificial brain, the reason would have to go beyond its own lack of anticipation of this fate. It would be likely to have something to do with the fact that a piece of software would not have existed within a caring community. It would have had no relatives to mourn it, and it would never have had a potential beyond what its creators had planned for it. (It would have had a potential beyond what its creators had coded: one of the features of neural nets is that they develop in their own way.) But that move in the argument is dubious, because the question is that of whether the software should have been surrounded by a caring community, one that regarded it as a moral client. Something similar could be said about the far lesser offence of manipulation. This might look acceptable, because the software would only ever have had the potential that its creators had planned. But whether that ought to have given them ownership of its mind is the point at issue.

I remain unclear as to whether a full simulated brain should be regarded as a moral client. I predict that if its creators did not so regard it, the rest of us would not reprove them. But they might reprove themselves for turning it off, and then comfort themselves with the thought that they had kept the final software configuration, so that it could be re-awoken at any time.

Dostoevsky on deciding what to do

There is an intriguing view of human decision-making and freedom in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, part 1, chapters 7 and 8. Here, I shall analyse an argument from chapter 7.

Dostoevsky starts with a question. Why do we, again and again, knowingly and deliberately act in ways that are contrary to our own advantage? He promptly moves on to another question. What is a person's advantage? Then he claims that there is an advantage that cannot possibly be included in any catalogue of advantages.

The advantage that cannot be included in any catalogue is that of making an unfettered choice, in defiance of any careful computation of advantage. The argument may be reconstructed as follows. (This reconstruction goes beyond what Dostoevsky says, in order to secure the argument against some obvious logical objections.)

1. Suppose that a person, D, is aware of the contents of a supposedly complete set, S, of advantages to him or her, along with information about their relative importance, about how to obtain the advantages, and about the possibilities for obtaining various combinations of them. "Advantages to D" has a broad meaning. It may include advantages of benefiting others, at no obvious gain to D. There is no suggestion that D need be selfish in making the best possible selection of advantages from S.

2. D can now make a careful computation of what to do, in order to maximize the net advantage to D.

3. D can also exercise freedom, by going against the result of the computation.

4. The exercise of freedom is in itself an advantage to D, but it cannot be the result of the computation, otherwise it would not be an assertion of D's freedom. D could freely decide to act in accordance with the result of the computation, but that would not be the kind of unfettered freedom that is required here. It would not assert D's ability to live unconstrained by such computations.

This argument does leave space for action in defiance of the result of the computation to be included in S. But defiance could not coherently appear as all or part of the result of the computation. Its inclusion in S would therefore be idle.

Suppose, first, that the computation produces a single recommendation, to act in defiance of the result of the computation. Compliance with the recommendation would amount to defiance of it, and defiance of it would amount to compliance with it. (There would be the additional, substantial, difficulty that D would not know what to do. "Act in defiance of a recommendation to eat healthily", would give D an idea of some specific action. "Do not do what this sentence tells you to do", would give no idea of any specific action.)

Now suppose that the computation produces several recommendations, say "Eat healthily", "Move to another city", and "Act in defiance of the result of the computation". If we read this list as a conjunction, as I think should, we find that D cannot comply with all conjuncts. Suppose that D eats healthily and moves to another city. Then if D complies with the final conjunct, it can only be by defying that conjunct, since that is the only remaining way to break the terms of the conjunction. If, on the other hand, D defies the final conjunct, then D must comply with the whole conjunction, which must mean complying with the final conjunct, as well as with the other two.

The one apparently coherent option would be to defy either or both of the first two conjuncts, and thereby comply with the third. But on closer inspection, we can see that this would not work either. The reason is that it would be known in advance that "Act in defiance of the result of this computation" would amount to "Discard at least one of the specific prescriptions". Given that acting in defiance of the computation was considered to be an advantage, a member of S, this discard would be required in order to yield the optimal solution, if the prescription to act in defiance of the result were to be part of the result. Therefore, the discard of at least one of the specific prescriptions would form part of the calculation, before the result was given. (The prescriptions to be discarded might be chosen by some rule, or at random.) But then the result would be a conjunction of the remaining specific prescriptions and the prescription to act in defiance of the result. Again, at least one of the specific prescriptions would have to be discarded, in order to achieve the optimal result while still keeping the prescription to defy as part of that result, and this too would have to form part of the calculation. We would continue until only the prescription to act in defiance of the result was left. But as already noted, that would lead to incoherence.

We may therefore conclude that while the prescription to act in defiance of the result could be included in S, contrary to what Dostoevsky asserted, it could not coherently feature in a prescription of what to do in order to maximize advantage, so its inclusion in S would be idle.

Relics and agency

For many years, I have made a point of visiting the graves of philosophers, writers, artists, composers, mathematicians and scientists. I have made substantial detours for major philosophers. But a short walk from home today gave me pause for thought.

The walk was to St Paul's Church, Covent Garden, which is particularly associated with actors. I went there in search of Samuel Butler (Hudibras), Samuel Butler (Erewhon), and Janet Webb (the lady who comes down at the end, from Morecambe and Wise). I found none of them. Tombstones were too worn, and smaller markers had disappeared or become hidden in undergrowth. But the church is full of fresh, clear memorial tablets to many well-known actors. The bones or ashes of most of them are, so far as I know, elsewhere. The tablets may remind those who knew those commemorated, but for the rest of us, they do not seem to count anywhere nearly as much as the graves themselves would count. Why is that? Bones and ashes are not people, and after a few decades in damp soil, nothing will be left, as was found when an attempt was made to dig up relics of John Henry Newman in 2008 (although there is controversy about exactly what happened there).

One explanation of the magic of a real grave would be the existence of direct material connections between the living person, the fresh body and whatever now remains. But there is an alternative. This would be to say that what is important is not that the remaining matter was once part of the person, placing the emphasis on mereology, but that it was once intimately bound up with the person's activity, placing the emphasis on agency.

Why should we consider this option? One reason is that a person matters to those of us who did not know him or her because of what he or she did, so if things matter, it should be because of their roles as instruments of agency. (I use "instruments" in a broad sense, so as to accommodate both the view that our limbs are outer tools of an inner agent, and the view that an action is performed by the body as a whole, with no part of it being a mere tool of some inner agent.)

Another reason is that it would allow us to merge an account of the magic of graves with an account of the magic of writers' notebooks, artists' palettes, and the other items that one often finds in museums. Those items were also instruments of their owners' agency. Indeed, if one were to follow the line of thinking of Andy Clark, they would be extensions of the person, rather than mere external tools (see, for example, his paper "Reasons, Robots and the Extended Mind", Mind and Language, volume 16, number 2, March 2001).

A third reason is that a focus on agency would allow us to limit the extension to items in museums, so that it stopped at a sensible place. Items that anyone might happen to own, such as walking sticks or items of clothing, would be excluded from being legitimate possessors of magic. We would not become like Chick in L’Écume des jours, who obsessively collected anything associated with Jean-Sol Partre.

It might, however, allow us to continue to find magic in a great person's home. Home is where creative work is done, influenced by the atmosphere, the surrounding streets or fields, and the view. There are some things that are not directly instruments of agency, but that are so bound up with what someone did, that an agency-based approach to relics could accommodate them.

Liberty, not Leveson

Brian Leveson's report, "An inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press", published on 29 November, makes for depressing reading. It is reassuring that David Cameron has indicated that he is not minded to introduce a statute-backed regulatory body, but it would have been more reassuring if the other party leaders had said the same. The risk now is that Leveson's work will give respectability to the idea of new regulation, and that some future government will follow his recommendations. It is therefore worth setting out just how much is wrong with his ideas, although I shall not catalogue every criticism that could be made.

References in what follows are to the Executive Summary, with page numbers being those printed on the pages (that is, 1 less than the PDF file page numbers, on account of the front cover). I encourage people to read his own statement of his proposals. I shall quote some of his words here, and outline some of his points and proposals in my own words, but I shall not attempt to give my own overall summary. The Executive Summary, and the full report, are available on the enquiry site, here:

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/

The first general point to make is that any regulatory system is much worse in its effects than would appear from a description of the system. The reason is that people self-censor in order to keep themselves out of trouble. So if Leveson's recommendations strike anyone as superficially reasonable, one should think of the real impact they would have. Under his system, would we have found out about MPs stealing our money under their expenses system? Or about the massive failure of police and social services in some parts of the country to prevent the sexual grooming of teenagers? Or about entertainers engaging in highly aggressive tax avoidance? Or about recently retired service chiefs offering to help weapons companies make their case to the Ministry of Defence?

The second general point is that it is one thing to say that some bad things have happened (which they have). It is quite another to say that there should be a new law, or a new regulatory system. Given the wide effects of new laws, or new regulatory systems, on people whose actions would not have been considered wrong in the first place, it may well be that on balance, it would be better to deal with problem cases using laws that only apply to the people who do wrong, and only on the occasions when they do wrong. Indeed, we have laws against telephone hacking, against harassment, and against libel, already. The problem has been a lack of enforcement, not a lack of law. One can argue about whether the laws in place are the right ones, but one cannot argue that the enforcers were rendered incapable of acting in the cases that have come to light. When Leveson draws attention to examples of hacking and harassment (paragraphs 30 to 35, pages 9 and 10), he does not make succeed in making any case for new laws. He tries to let the enforcers off the hook in paragraphs 47 and 48 (page 13), but his attempt to do so, and thereby to justify changes to the regulatory system, is unconvincing.

The third general point is that freedom matters, enormously. My own view is that we should have complete freedom of expression, to the strong standard of the First Amendment (with the "imminent lawless action" limit that was laid down in Brandenburg v Ohio in 1969), not to the weak standard of Article 10 of the European Convention, with all its ifs and buts. And our freedom to publish and to read should be seen as ours, automatically and unconditionally. We should never let it be seen as a generous gift from the state, that the authorities may legitimately restrict.

The fourth general point is that allowing newspapers freedom to print the stories they get, is not enough. A lot of hard journalistic work is needed to get the stories, and to gather enough evidence to defend oneself against lawyers who threaten injunctions and libel suits in order to stop us learning the truth about their clients. Newspapers need the freedom to use a decent range of methods. Telephone and e-mail hacking may be beyond the pale. But taking on a false identity, so long as it is done without intent to defraud of property or the like, and rummaging through dustbins, should be acceptable. The story about service chiefs relied on impersonation, as have stories about businesses that arrange fake marriages. (I would extend the same permission to citizen journalists, bloggers and the like. I don't think the established newspapers should have any special privileges.) The general point is that regulation of what journalists do, can be as oppressive just as much as regulation of what gets printed.

The final general point is that the horse has bolted. Blogs outside the jurisdiction can do what they like. They are unregulated, and there is nothing at all that the UK authorities can do about that, unless they go down the route of China and Saudi Arabia and build a national firewall, or achieve a similar result by pressuring Internet service providers to block whatever the courts say should be blocked. Not only would that place the UK firmly in the same box as the regimes just mentioned. It would also be circumventable, using proxy servers and encryption. I hope that it would also lead to mass civil disobedience on Twitter, using rhyming slang or the like to repeat what we were not allowed to read, just for the hell of it. As readers might guess, I regard this new impossibility of regulating communication as a very good thing.

I shall now pick out a few passages in Brian Leveson's report.

In paragraph 6 (page 4), we read: "As a result of this principle [of a free press] which operates as one of the cornerstones of our democracy, the press is given significant and special rights in this country which I recognise and have freely supported both as barrister and judge. With these rights, however, come responsibilities to the public interest: to respect the truth, to obey the law and to uphold the rights and liberties of individuals".

Leveson here falls into the language of the schoolroom, with the state as the teacher. Your rights are conditional. Behave, or they might be taken away, and it would be acceptable to take them away. The attitude is echoed in the second paragraph of Article 10 of the European Convention: "The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties ... ". We must reject this attitude, utterly and completely. Our right to express and publish what we want should be ours, unconditionally. If, in the exercise of that right, someone does harm to another, deal with that as an individual instance. But do not suggest that our right of expression and publication, in general, should be limited.

In paragraphs 32 to 37 (pages 10 and 11), Leveson expresses concern about the stories that the press choose to pursue, and then to print. Are these stories in the public interest? That is not a judgement the press should be asked to make. If newspapers are required to stop and think whether publication would be in the public interest, they will be greatly inhibited in their work. Moreover, it is not their job to worry about the public interest. They are private businesses, fully entitled to plough their own furrow, not public services.

Leveson proposes a body grounded in statute, but run independently of the Government and of Parliament. Membership would not be compulsory, but there would be incentives to join. (He says legislation would be essential in order to give those incentives - paragraph 70, page 17. That is, he attempts to justify the use of legislation on the basis of a minor feature of the system - not a good justification at all.) I shall turn to his specific recommendations in a moment, but first, we should note his claims about the status of what he proposes.

In paragraph 71 (page 17), we read: "It is worth being clear what this legislation would not do. The legislation would not establish a body to regulate the press: it would be up to the press to come forward with their own body that meets the criteria laid down". That strikes me as mere sophistry. If there is a law telling people to go and set up a system, that is not much different from a law that sets up a system but leaves the details to be worked out.

In paragraph 72 (page 17), we read: "[The legislation] would enshrine, for the first time, a legal duty on the Government to protect the freedom of the press". That sounds very nice, but it is really just a little bonus to make us feel better about the legislation. And it is a fake bonus. We have that freedom anyway. The only legislation that would really make a difference would be a British version of the First Amendment - couched in the same terms, "Parliament shall make no law ...", rather than "Parliament decrees that ...", to avoid giving the impression that our rights are in the gift of Parliament. What is more, any legislation guaranteeing freedom of the press that was useful, could be enacted independently of the rest of Leveson's proposals.

In paragraph 73 (page 17), we read: "Despite what will be said about these recommendations by those who oppose them, this is not, and cannot be characterised as, statutory regulation of the press". That is more sophistry, bordering on terminological inexactitude.

In paragraphs 74 to 76 (pages 17 and 18), we read: "In the light of all that has been said, I must recognise the possibility that the industry could fail to rise to this challenge and be unable or unwilling to establish a system of independent self-regulation that meets the criteria. I have made it clear that I firmly believe it to be in the best interest of the public and the industry that it should indeed accept the challenge. What is more, given the public entitlement to some accountability of the press, I do not think that either the victims or the public would accept the outcome if the industry did not grasp this opportunity. Neither do I think the public would find it acceptable if I were to overlook the consequences of the industry doing so. For the sake of completeness I have therefore set out in the Report the options that I believe would be open to the Government to pursue, and some views on the potential way forward, in that regrettable event. ... I would very much prefer that the focus of all concerned should be on attempting to deliver the effective self regulation that I have set out - organised by the industry to a standard  that the public can accept. In my judgement, this provides the least burdensome method of ensuring some form of adequate independent regulatory oversight of press standards for the future. ..."

In these paragraphs, Leveson takes us back to the schoolroom: "Now children, you really ought to comply. The public won't accept it if you don't. We have alternatives if you don't comply, and they would be more trouble for everyone". The only appropriate response to these unveiled threats is a raspberry.

Now we may turn to the recommendations. Leveson recommends the establishment of an independent board, with the power to require compliance with a code. It would also have the power to impose penalties of up to 1% of turnover with a maximum of £1m for serious or systematic breaches (recommendation 19, page 34). Newspapers would not have to join, so they would not have to expose themselves to these extra-judicial fines, but if they did not join, they could expect to be given a harder time than members in any civil legal proceedings, both in respect of damages (paragraph 68, page 16) and in respect of costs (recommendation 26, pages 35 to 36). That is, there would be a potential financial squeeze on newspapers, in one way if they joined and in another way if they did not. This is a new type of voluntary: you can choose to be boiled, or to be fried. I do not suggest that it should no longer be possible to take actions against newspapers, only that it is wrong to force a move away from the current position, even if one has a choice between making the penalties extra-judicial or making them higher than they are now.

Recommendation 38 (page 37) is: "In conjunction with Recommendation 11 above, consideration should also be given to Code amendments which, while fully protecting freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, would equip that body with the power to intervene in cases of allegedly discriminatory reporting, and in so doing reflect the spirit of equalities legislation".

This recommendation shows how far we have fallen away from the ideal of freedom. Leveson would like an element in a code of practice that would require newspapers to be politically correct. How could any friend of liberty possibly think that would be a good idea?

The luck of ancestry

A letter by Maurice Winter in Cambridge Alumni Magazine, issue 67, Michaelmas 2012, commenting on an article in issue 66, includes the following: "Luck is of fundamental importance to all sportspeople. Take Usain Bolt. It is pure luck that his parents provided him with the genes that built him in the way they did".

One reading of that, which may very well be the reading that the author intended, makes it straightforwardly true. We have different genetic endowments, and the result is that many of us would never be able to keep up with the best in sports, however hard we trained. But there is another reading, and it is one that draws our attention to the question of what kind of luck may be said to be associated with ancestry.

The reading is that the future Usain Bolt was there, before conception, waiting to be assigned genes, and perhaps waiting to be assigned parents. On this reading, it was pure luck that the genes that made great sporting achievement possible fell to him, rather than to someone else, or to nobody.

It is certainly pure luck that this particular combination of genes came together in a human being at all. When two people have a child, with a particular genetic make-up, there are many other genetic make-ups that could have been embodied in a child of the same parents, but that were not so embodied.

But this does not mean that we should accept the picture of a future Usain Bolt, waiting to be given a genetic endowment. While the term "Usain Bolt" now has a referent, it does not have any referent in temporal slices of the world that come before his conception. There is a connection with Kripke's thoughts on a person's being essentially the person made from that particular sperm and egg. They could not be that person until the relevant sperm and egg had come together. It is the coming together that makes the operation of a Kripke-type criterion of identity possible. Quine's slogan, "No entity without identity", has a use at this point.

If we are not to accept the picture of a pre-conception Usain Bolt, it was not luck that Usain Bolt had his genetic endowment. It was luck that this genetic endowment was embodied, but not luck that he got it. And we should not be distracted by the (probable) fact that only his parents could have given precisely that endowment to a child. Again, it was not luck that he was conceived in that family, rather than in any other. He did not exist, in any sense, until conceived.

So much may look obvious, once it has been said. But it is worth thinking it through, in order to understand the nature of the luck that is involved in inheritance.

I would not draw any conclusions about what to do. These thoughts might make it illegitimate to say things like, "It is most unfortunate that X got saddled with those genes", in a sense that would imply that X could have had different genes. Someone with different genes would not have been X. But these thoughts would not make it illegitimate to say things like, "Someone with X's genes finds life tougher than the rest of us, so we should make special provision for X, offer changes to X's genes (when that becomes possible), and so on". That is, there is no ground here for a fatalistic conclusion that people should simply live with their genetic inheritances. Nor is there any ground for an anti-welfare-state conclusion that we should not care for people with genetically based difficulties because those difficulties are so bound up with what makes them who they are.

Now let us consider an area in which we are free to vary a basic mechanism that determines a significant consequence of parentage, in a way that we are not free to alter the mechanism of genetic inheritance. There are still some hereditary monarchies left around the world. The next monarch is whoever happens to have been born to the right couple, and in the right place in the order of their children. No-one from any other family has a chance. Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is appropriate to have a lifetime head of state, and let us confine ourselves to constitutional monarchies on the modern European model, to avoid having to discuss the evils of absolutism and of arbitrary rule. Is a hereditary system unfair? Would it be fairer to have an elected lifetime head of state, a modern-day Doge of Venice?

There is a sense in which it is not unfair to have a hereditary monarchy. No-one can say, "I was excluded from that position by the luck of my parentage", because no person could have had different parents from those that they actually had. Anyone with different parents would have been a different person.

On the other hand, it is not possible to say, "The hereditary principle is as good as any other, because we need to pick someone, and a lottery would be fair, and picking whoever has the right parents is equivalent to a lottery". One cannot say that, because it is not as if we were all there, pre-conception, waiting to be allocated our parents at random. That is, we were not participants in a lottery, so the analogy with a lottery would break down. Anyone who wanted to maintain that the hereditary principle was as good as any other, would have to find some other grounds for that claim.

Finally, the lack of a certain sense of unfairness about the hereditary principle would not prevent one from putting forward other arguments against its use.

Turing's secret papers

This year, we mark the hundredth anniversary of Alan Turing's birth. One celebration, among the less publicised but also among the most fitting, has been the release into the public domain of two of his wartime papers on mathematical aspects of cryptography. The release was announced by GCHQ, here:

http://www.gchq.gov.uk/Press/Pages/turing-papers-released.aspx

It seems that the papers were not released earlier, because their contents were still considered to be sensitive. It was thought to benefit the UK to have the information while others did not have it, and (presumably) while others did not even know that the UK had information of this precise nature.

This raises an interesting general question. If a country's authorities have scientific or technical information, and feel that the country can gain a significant advantage over other countries by keeping it secret, should the information be kept secret?

An argument for release of the information would be that if the information is useful to someone, it is likely to be useful to others too, and its release might well promote economic development. It is not hard to think of examples. Encryption systems help commerce, by facilitating financial transactions where there would otherwise be a risk of diversion of funds to criminals. Knowledge of the vulnerabilities of encryption systems helps developers to make the systems more secure. Algorithms for the management and distribution of military supplies could be useful in commercial logistics, allowing goods to be stored and distributed at the lowest possible cost. If the detailed technology of radar and of jet engines, both largely developed in the run-up to war and during wartime, had been kept as military secrets, long-distance travel would not have become as convenient as it did in the 1950s and 1960s. And so on.

It is tempting to say that decisions must be made on the facts of each case, and that general principles would be very difficult to find, and of far less importance than specific facts. But we should not give up quite so quickly.

One could, for example, adopt the reasonably general principle that when the usefulness of information to others would be purely military, there would be a strong presumption in favour of keeping it secret. It may be desirable to help the world's economy, but when it comes to potential military uses, a country could be argued to be fully entitled to put its own interests first. One difficulty in applying this principle would be that it is all too easy for the military, and the security services, to see only the military uses of information, and to be unaware of commercial possibilities.

Alternatively, one could adopt a utilitarianism that gave no special weight to one's own country. Then, if the consequences of secrecy and of disclosure could be computed (which they could not be), or plausibly estimated (which might be possible), the decision on whether to disclose each piece of information could be reached by a mechanical procedure.

One could row back a little bit from this generous principle, and adopt a utilitarianism under which the interests of the citizens of one's own country were weighted more highly than the interests of others. But it would be hard to make a case for a precise difference in weighting. There would only be a plausible range. Counting each of one's own citizens as twice as important than each non-citizen might be defensible, particularly when one's own citizens formed a small minority of the world's population, so that the total weight assigned to one's own citizens was still considerably less than the total weight assigned to all non-citizens. Counting each of one's own citizens as 100 times more important as each non-citizen would not be defensible, regardless of population. One would also have to balance the potentially incommensurable economic and security interests of one's own citizens (and of non-citizens, to the extent that their security would be affected by the release of the information). And one would have to bear in mind that a boost to the world economy from an invention that new information makes possible can lead to a boost to the economies of many nations, including those that do not directly exploit the invention.

It is never going to be easy to make the right decisions, even assuming that there are right decisions to be made. One reason why this is so is that the specific facts of each case are bound to have a substantial influence on the decision, and it is in the nature of the case that those facts must be kept secret unless the decision is to publish. Only general principles can be debated publicly, and those general principles can only take us so far.