However, human tribalism will out, and in recent years a new form of us-versus-them thinking has taken the place of racism: intolerance of creed. By creed I mean the central beliefs people use to steer their own lives and to make important decisions on behalf of their children. These beliefs might be religious, scientific, pseudo-scientific, or whatever: all they amount to are beliefs. They issue in behavior, of course, as do all beliefs, but they remain mere beliefs.

Although disagreement is a valuable thing, and we should welcome attempts to rationally persuade others that their beliefs are mistaken, creed-intolerance takes the form of treating the offending beliefs not simply as false but as immoral, and indeed so severely immoral as to oblige the rest of us to overrule them. You can see the difference in the language used to condemn an offending creed: not the epistemological language of truth and falsity, knowledge and ignorance, reasons and evidence, but the moralistic language of shame and disgrace.

Racism and religious intolerance have always masqueraded as “concern for defenceless women and children”. White women supposedly needed protection from the advances (and allure, one suspects) of sexually voracious men of other races. Children had to be sheltered from the corrupting influence of various “great infidel” types, from David Hume to Salman Rushdie. And so on.

And today, creed-intolerance does the very same. For example, those who are sceptical of climate change catastrophe are not treated as simply having a different or factually erroneous opinion: they are condemned for committing future generations of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren (etc.) to the fires of hell. Oh yeah, and climate change is going to be worse for women, we are given to believe. See the pattern?

Another classic example of creed-intolerance is the current “scientific” attitude to vaccination. Anyone with an inkling of science knows that vaccination is a good idea, that measles is a very unpleasant and possibly life-threatening disease with life-damaging complications, and that the MMR vaccine is very unlikely to do any sort of harm. You’d be doing your children and other people’s children a favour if you had them vaccinated.

Yet others think differently. Some people honestly – although erroneously – think vaccination may do more harm than good. By all means let us try to persuade them rationally that they are in error, but let us not make any attempt to overrule their judgement, even though we disagree with it.

Why? – Because we should encourage or at least allow “experiments in living”, and parents must have the final say in what is done in their children’s interest, unless it is obviously and very seriously harmful. But the science of vaccination is science: therefore it is attended by uncertainty, and some doubt is appropriate. If that surprises you, you have misunderstood the nature of science.

Many other practices might be considered harmful. For example, I consider the circumcision of boys to be harmful, but not so seriously harmful as to overrule parents’ decisions to have it performed on their sons. (The so-called “circumcision” of daughters is a different matter.)

It is often said that opting out of vaccination is harmful “to society”. To which I reply: there is no such thing as harm to society apart from harm to the individuals who constitute society. And as JS Mill argued, society (so understood) must be prepared to absorb a limited amount of harm for the greater good of individual freedom. In the present case, the harm occurs to those who do not have immunity, meaning mostly those who have not been vaccinated. As long as a significant proportion of the population do get vaccinated, or acquire immunity by actually getting the disease, there is little danger of an epidemic.

What is a “significant proportion”? – It depends how infectious the disease in question happens to be. Suppose the average carrier of a disease infects two other people: then a potential epidemic is in the offing. To ensure that that disease has a downwards trajectory, more than half of the population would have to be made immune. As long as this proportion is maintained, the disease will eventually become extinct. These proportions change with range of factors, of course, but no disease is so virulent that the entire population would have to be vaccinated.

Despite that, people often talk as if everyone had to be vaccinated to curb a disease, and about those who shun vaccination as if they were treacherous “fifth columnists” who let society down by making us all vulnerable. But nearly all of the vulnerable ones are those who avoid vaccination.

“But they expose their own children to risk!” is the next plea of the creed-intolerant. To which I reply: OK, but so what? We all expose our children to risk, knowingly or otherwise, as well as taking risks ourselves, knowingly or otherwise. It is up to us as individuals and as parents to judge whether the risks are acceptable. Most of us drive cars, and bring our children along as passengers. Some of us smoke cigarettes in houses where our children live. Personally, I wouldn’t take the risk of sending my own children to a Catholic school, but I accept that other parents deem this to be a wise decision or an acceptable risk for their own children. Fine, that’s (mainly) their business.

Let’s be honest. Most people don’t like other people to express different opinions from their own. Some don’t like others to even have different opinions from their own. And they tart up their own narrow-mindedness and intolerance to look like “concern for children”. As per usual.

I’m not religious, but one thing must be said in favor of religion. Anyone whose creed is honestly religious cannot but admit the simple fact that others have other creeds. I have my religion, and you have your religion, and we live in different ways as a result. Occasionally, an admirable pluralism springs up where these differences are routinely acknowledged and tolerated.

To see “meaning” where there is none – or to see more of it than there really is – is a very common human weakness. “Primitive” societies see agency where there is none – such as gods, ghosts, or spirits in the rivers and forests – and where there is agency there is purpose, which is a sort of meaning. “Non-primitive” societies do the very same. James Lovelock sees agency in the Earth’s “ecosystem”. Physicists see semantic “information” where there is nothing more than co-variation. Even a sensible chap like myself sometimes has to remind himself that there is no malicious agency in packaging that defies my efforts to open it.

We see too much “meaning” in things. There is less in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.

I will cease putting the word ‘meaning’ in scare-quotes from here on, as it is getting tiresome. But in what follows you should read the word as if these warning-signs (and sneering-signs) were still there. The use of a single word for a wide range of complicated and fuzzy relations has a dangerous ability to bewitch our intelligence.

Something has meaning when it points towards, stands for, symbolizes, or more generally represents something else, somehow or other. This can be achieved in a wide variety of ways. A primitive type of meaning can be seen in a colour swatch that exemplifies a colour. It can get much more sophisticated, as when a scientific law describes what would happen if an imaginary (i.e. “counterfactual”) state of affairs were realized. There is denotation (e.g. the name ‘Jeremy’ stands for me), and there is connotation (e.g. the words ‘grassy knoll’ may remind you of the Kennedy assassination, but doesn’t directly refer to it). And there’s other stuff. Many other word-world relations are possible, all of which involve some variety or other of meaning.

Philosophers are mostly interested in the way words refer to things, and in the way sentences are true or false of states of affairs. Mental entities such as concepts and mental states such as beliefs and desires mirror the representational capacities of these items of language.

Until fairly recently, it was assumed that meanings were determined by our inner experiences. This fits in with traditional ideas in epistemology: we have distinctive experiences, which are the magic link, supposedly, between our thoughts and things outside our heads. So according to this traditional (“Augustinian”) view, meaning essentially involves naming these external things using words associated with the internal experiences.

The “inner experience” idea of meaning began to crumble in the nineteenth century. For example, Freud thought that some of our behaviour (such as slips of the tongue) and thought-like processes (such as dreaming) have a meaning that is not determined by inner experience, either because they don’t involve conscious experiences at all, or else because the experiences involved are superficial and hide a deeper meaning.

Freud’s ideas about the meaning of slips of the tongue and other behavioural “parapraxes” were part of a larger movement away from the traditional Cartesian focus on inner experience, towards pragmatism, which is focused instead on external behavior. Almost all of the great thinkers of the early twentieth century took this pragmatic turn, from the leaders of the American Pragmatist movement to Heidegger.

Wittgenstein famously repudiated some of his earlier work by changing his mind about meaning. His earlier view was mistaken, not only because it assumed inner experiences determined “meaning”, but also because its “atomism” assumed that the “primary vehicle of meaning” was the word. His later, corrected view is expressed in slogans like “meaning is use”. In this newer pragmatism, there is a complex interplay between sentences and words, but if anything could be called the primary vehicle of meaning now, it is no longer the word but the sentence. The meaning of words is determined by sentences whose truth-value can be readily agreed upon. Only after the reference of words has been fixed – by the semantically important sentences they occur in – can they be re-combined to construct new sentences, some of which can be false. There is a clear asymmetry between truth and falsity here that may seem jarring to some. But I would argue that that is a symptom of not yet having taken the crucial step away from the “inner experience” of Descartes towards pragmatism. It is quite remarkable how persistent the traditional way of thinking has been, despite its rejection by so many great philosophers.

We can see how meaning is determined by use in the rudimentary sentence-like noises made by animals. For example, some birds make a distinctive sound (like the blackbird’s scolding “pink” sound) when a cat is in the garden. The noise they make is recognized as a warning by other birds, which fly up whenever they hear it. Depending on how closely correlated it is with the actual presence of a cat, the noise is true when a cat actually is in the garden. In bearing a truth-value, the entire noise is analogous to a declarative sentence in a human language. Part of the noise (quite possibly the entire noise) specifically refers to a cat, and so functions like a word.

The fact of what it refers to is far from immutable: if birds utter the same sound whenever a sparrow-hawk or a cat is in the garden, the reference is not specifically to cats, but to members of the broader category of sparrow-hawks-and-cats. And it may yet refer to a great many things we haven’t thought of yet, such as lifelike robotic cats, or four-legged scarecrows, or what have you.

This pragmatic way of understanding meaning makes it quite a bit fuzzier than it seemed before. The fuzziness of reference is especially troubling if we are used to thinking of words as if they work like names, or like name tags attached to objects by invisible pieces of string. With our new awareness, we see that words are attached to things only within the context of the ways they are used. Inasmuch as use is messy, reference is too. That indeterminacy does not make language use impossible, obviously, but it does shake the earlier conception of language to its foundations.

Let us take stock by noting a few consequences of this way of thinking. First, although nothing is certain, and it can be very hard to test the truth of theoretical claims made in science, truth itself just is an everyday fact of life. We must routinely utter truths for words to refer to things, and even to enable us to utter falsehoods.

For example, let us return to our garden birds. One clever bird might notice that uttering the cat-in-the-garden sound has the convenient effect of emptying the garden of other birds. So when food is put on the bird-table, he utters the sound, and is rewarded by getting more food for himself. This avian equivalent of crying wolf can be over-used. If it became the routine sound uttered when food is put out, it would no longer mean there’s a cat in the garden but there’s food on the table. The new reference to food rather than cats is determined by the requirement that most of the time, most of what is uttered is true, and indeed is recognized as being true by most of those who use the utterance (by uttering it themselves, or hearing it uttered by others and reacting appropriately).

A second consequence of the pragmatic way of thinking is that language is necessarily public. Sadly, this important fact tends to lie buried beneath the verbiage generated by Wittgenstein’s “private language argument”. We can see how obvious it is by considering the “inverted spectrum” thought experiment. Imagine someone who sees colours in reverse, in other words, someone who when looking at blue objects has experiences of the sort that normal people have when looking at yellow objects, and so on. Such a person would have to have an abnormally-wired brain, but this would not be revealed in his use of language. His reports of colour would be the same as everyone else’s – he would still call tomatoes “red” and bananas “yellow” and so on. Such words describe objective features of these public objects’ surfaces rather than his own inner experiences. They have to refer to public objects, because otherwise the truths that fix their reference could not be publicly affirmed.

A third consequence of pragmatism is that in general, meaning or content is determined by interpretation. Things that have meaning are just things that meaning can be assigned to in a more or less rigidly constrained way by someone trying to make as much sense as possible of them. The constraint involved might be something as simple as reliable correlation. For example, the noise the birds make means what it does because it is correlated in a reliable way with whichever state of affairs makes it true, and this correlation constrains what an informed interpreter could assign as content. But with more abstract sorts of content, the constraints can get more complicated. In formal sciences, these constraints often take the form of definitions, which work like laws. But there are no such laws in everyday human discourse – the definitions found in dictionaries describe how words are actually used, rather than fix their meaning independently of use.

The bird noises I am using as a rudimentary example of “things that have meaning” is stolen from Quine, who wrote of a tribe whose members say ‘gavagai’ when a rabbit crosses their path. I prefer my own example of the bird noise, because it is tempting to assume tribe members know something we don’t – that their language contains details we haven’t noticed yet, so that their utterances mean more than what we have so far been able to interpret. With birds, there is less of a temptation to think there is anything more to what their utterances mean than what they should be interpreted as meaning.

And that is where the “limits” of meaning are to be found – there is no more detail in meaning than what an informed interpreter would assign as meaning. This is every bit as true mental content as of linguistic meaning.

Mental content basically consists of beliefs and desires. The other “intentional” mental states (i.e. those that “point” to states of affairs) such as hopes and fears can be analysed in terms of their belief and desire components. We ascribe, describe and even individuate these states using “embedded sentences”. For example, at one point Frodo believed that Gandalf was dead. The sentence ‘Galdalf is dead’ expresses the content of Frodo’s belief. But this embedded sentence schema can be misleading, because it may suggest that beliefs and desires are themselves “sentences written in the head”. Thus having a belief would involve having a sentence in the “this is true” register somewhere in the brain, and having a desire would involve having a sentence in the “would that this were true ” register somewhere else in the brain.

Although this idea has its supporters, I think it’s pretty obvious that it can’t be right. Many kinds of animal clearly have beliefs and desires. If brains work by handling linguistic entities just to accommodate those mental states, why have so few animals gone the whole human and started to talk into the bargain? It would be a small extra step for each animal, but a giant advantageous leap in evolutionary terms.

The idea that thought is essentially linguistic activity in the brain might be completely empty. We may be free to call the patterns our brains “manipulate” the “symbols” of a “brain language”, but this would be a very different sort of language from any we are familiar with. It is not used for communication, and we cannot easily discern or individuate its “symbols”. Why call it a “language” at all, and how much does it explain to do so?

Here’s a bad place where it may lead us: if we assume thought and language are too closely connected, we are liable to see as much detail – as fine a grain, if you prefer – in the mental states we describe as is in the language we use to describe them. There is often more detail in language than in the mental states it describes. If so, the extra detail is artefactual and therefore misleading. We have already seen how a bird noise might apply broadly to sparrow-hawks-or-cats, while our human linguistic description of what it applies to narrows it down more specifically to cats only. Like the mistake we met earlier of thinking life itself can have a meaning, this is to see more meaning than is really there. As language-using humans, we have to entertain alternative hypotheses and consider rival theories, which are usually expressed linguistically. But the beliefs we end up with generally do not have content of so fine a grain.

Daniel Dennett had a much better idea. He noted that whenever we describe, explain, or predict anything, we adopt a “strategy”. The strategy we adopt when describing the behaviour of an agent is to posit goals, combined with information-bearing states that co-vary with the world in which these goals are pursued. These are rudimentary analogues of desires and beliefs respectively. For example, a thermostat has the “goal” of keeping a room at a steady temperature, and it opens or closes a circuit to turn on a heater depending on whether the room is warm enough or not warm enough. The content of these states are assigned through interpretation of its behaviour as an agent. That interpretation involves assuming at the outset that the agent’s “beliefs” (or rudimentary analogues thereof) are all true, that he is fully rational in his pursuit of his goals, and so on, reluctantly lowering our expectations as we  “work our way into the system” and are compelled to assign the occasional false belief to maximize consistency.

Thermostats are ultra-simple agents, if they count as agents at all, but there is a smooth scale of complexity. A cruise missile has a target, and uses a video camera and an onboard computer map to keep track of its own position as it approaches the target. The detail of the content involved gets richer as we move up this scale. The fineness of its grain increases, if you like.

But it never becomes richer or more fine-grained than what can be assigned by an informed interpreter. This has profound implications for many human practices, including philosophy. For example, consider a man who looks at the sky and says, “oh dear – I think it’s going to snow!” He then proceeds by putting on Wellington boots and a raincoat, grabbing an umbrella, and so on. If his behaviour is consistent with someone who thinks it is going to rain rather than someone who thinks it is going to snow, interpretation leads us to assign the belief that it is going to rain, and that he has misunderstood the word ‘snow’, or that maybe he is trying to mislead us. We do not assign both the belief that it is going to rain and the belief that it is going to snow, because these are inconsistent. To be a little more precise, to the extent that they are inconsistent, we cannot ascribe them both.

It is hard to see how an interpreter could assign inconsistent beliefs to the same agent. But suppose, as Donald Davidson said, that there is nothing more to mental content than what a fully informed interpreter would assign as content. Then it is very hard to see how an agent could actually have inconsistent beliefs. Yet much philosophy assumes that the main purpose of logic is to remove inconsistencies in our belief system. Why make efforts to remove inconsistencies if they cannot be there in the first place?

That is not to say that logic serves no useful purpose. I would say its principal purpose is to draw out the logical consequences of hypotheses (including the axioms of any branch of mathematics). In that way, the hypotheses of science and everyday life can be tested against observation. Often, observation casts doubt on our hypotheses. We can certainly have false beliefs galore, although true beliefs are the “default”.

Many other human practices involve efforts to discern meaning, from a jury trying to determine the motive for a crime, or an art critic trying to understand a work of art, to a psychoanalyst trying to uncover unconscious mental states or internal conflicts. Some of these efforts may be an over-interpretation of the subject matter. Anish Kapoor’s “Orbit” tower sculpture might be nothing more than an interestingly convoluted shape.

Personally, I think Freud had some valuable insights, but I think much or most of his writing does not survive the criticism that he over-interpreted the contents of the mind. In some forms of behaviour – passive aggression, carelessness, etc. – there are indeed cues enough to assign modest mental content such as “she doesn’t like me” or “the criminal must have sort-of-wanted to get caught”. But ambitiously ascribing a much more complicated, convoluted substructure of unconscious beliefs and desires to an agent is unwarranted, because an interpreter assigning such content would have to do so in an unconstrained way, or in a way that was constrained by something irrelevant, such as the ideology of a school of thought rather than the behaviour of the agent.

I would aim a somewhat similar criticism at the writings and talk of many other specialized disciplines in the humanities, including philosophy. Much of the detail is assigned not through honest interpretation with an eye to the world, but rather with an eye to the affirmation of a group of like-minded specialists. The meaning of what is said or written is not checked against the world in which what is said is mostly true, but against a social milieu in which experts agree or disagree. These experts speak a “semi-detatched” rather than a genuinely public language. In such a language, much of the detail comes from shared ideology rather than factual aspects of the world. Typically, the technicality of this sort of language is artifactual and therefore unwarranted. To paraphrase AJ Ayer: the technical writings of philosophers are, for the most part, as unsustainable as they are uninteresting.

I suggested above that there could be no conflict of belief within the mind of a single agent. But I think it’s undeniable that there are conflicts of desire within a single agent. This is possible because agents do not act to achieve conflicting goals at the same time. You can have the goal of giving up smoking every morning, and the goal of enjoying cigarettes every evening, but you can’t have them both at the same time. I hope this is obvious from the way an interpreter would manage to assign the content of these desires, which is all their content amounts to.

The necessity for time management – boring as it may sound – is in my opinion one of the keys to unlocking the secrets of consciousness, and such other apparent mysteries of the mind as conflict of desires. Just consider the way men and women are equally passionate and committed lovers, yet set “hurdles” for each other at different points along the course of life (typically, women are slower to agree to first-time sexual intercourse than men, and men are slower to agree to first-time parenthood than women).

As Shirley Bassey sang: “Love you hate you love you hate you till the world stops turning”, which I think says more about conflict of desire and time management than anything any philosopher has said (including me).

Polishing and softening ideas is a bad habit on the part of speakers, but it gives rise to an even worse malaise on the part of their listeners. Politeness fosters harmful expectations – that people will not be offended by what they hear. If we expect not to be offended, we will find the inevitable occasions when we are offended a greater discomfort. And we will try to avoid them. We will mix with “people of like minds”. We will follow on Twitter only those who give us the warm feeling of agreement. We will never hear moral opinions opposed to our own, because it is what we disapprove of that we find “offensive” above all else.

Teachers are in a position of power, of course, and must be careful not to insult their students, as such insults can be threatening or inhibiting, and thus harmful. But students need not observe symmetrical niceties towards their teachers. If they do, discussion becomes leaden and “mannered” rather than free. Everyone must think carefully before they speak lest they “say the wrong thing”. Thinking aloud is not allowed.

That is no way to do philosophy.

Worst of all, when people are obliged to vet their utterances, to care so very much about the effect their words are having on others, there is no playfulness. And playfulness, frivolity, teasing, silliness, even childishness are the lifeblood of creativity.

We live in a prissy age, which rates polish above straightforwardness and sophistication above silliness. Would you kindly cut it out, you self-important morons?

So when moralists say that people doing bad things must be acting out of “self-interest”, say, or when scientists say that people who have mistaken views should adopt “evidence-based” theory instead, they reveal that they are in the grip of a strange sort of parochialism. They seem not to acknowledge the mere existence of alternative opinions to their own. It isn’t simply that they think their own opinions are right and that alternative opinions are mistaken – we all do that – rather, they assume that there simply are no such alternative opinions. Hence those who act in ways they disapprove of are acting out of “self-interest” – self-interest conveniently being an entirely non-moral motive rather than a more troubling one inspired by a different moral theory from their own. Or again, those who believe non-approved opinions aren’t simply interpreting the evidence in a different way or counting different facts as evidence – they are ignoring evidence altogether, according to this way of thinking. Thus people who disagree with the approved opinion are not simply opponents, but “deniers” who must be scoundrels (or may be suffering from a debilitating mental illness).

This sort of parochialism would be a venial sin if those who committed it could correct themselves and move on. But that cannot happen – this is an unusually immovable vice, because it has its own incorrigibility built into it. In effect, it is designed not to allow correction. Why? – We engage with people who disagree with us, whose opinions are opposed to our own, but none of us could be bothered to engage with people who simply don’t have an opinion at all. Anything they say can be waved away as an irrelevance, because they have changed the subject. If what masquerades as an alternative opinion has nothing to do with evidence, then it isn’t an opinion at all, just a rude noise made by an insincere scoundrel.

For example, in disputes over moral questions, Kantians and utilitarians speak different languages because they appeal to very different basic principles. Too often, one side assumes the other has so misconceived morality that it “doesn’t have a moral view at all”, so that all its verbiage is an expression of something else. If so, anything said in its defence is irrelevant and can safely be ignored. During my own brief career as an academic, I saw far too much of this very unbecoming and lazy habit of thought. It is a discredit to anyone who professes to be a thinker.

This sort of dispute doesn’t just engage philosophers. Both sides to practically every political dispute – from the Falklands to Northern Ireland to Israel – are entirely sincere, but talk right past one another because they assume the other side is not sincere.

In discussing science, Baconian inductivists and hypothetico-deductivists speak different languages, because they count different sorts of facts as evidence, and different practices as scientific. It isn’t that one side is “evidence-based” and the other isn’t, but rather what counts as evidence to one side doesn’t count as evidence at all to the other. (For example, Newton rejected hypotheses, or so he thought, and Popper rejected induction, or so he thought.)

Thomas Kuhn saw all this decades ago, not in the philosophical discussion of science but in science itself – proponents of an old “paradigm” die out rather than convert to a new paradigm. They cannot convert, because the new way of thinking is so alien to them that the meaning of the terms they use – and even what they count as evidence – is different.

Personally, I find it very odd that anyone who has understood Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions could use the word ‘denier’ or ‘denialist’. I want to ask: Have you learned nothing from the mistakes of others?

Many contestants do not switch, but it is easy to see why they should. Suppose I ask you to try to pick the Ace of Spades from a deck of playing cards whose faces are hidden. You draw your card at random, and place it face-down in front of you. Then I systematically go through the rest of the deck, looking at the face of each in turn, saying “that’s not it”, “not that one”, and so on, eventually discarding all but one.

At this point, you and I have a single card each. In this new situation, would you swap your card for mine if offered the chance? – I think it’s pretty obvious that you should, because repeated plays of this game would end up with my card being the Ace of Spades about 98% of the time (i.e. in roughly 51 out of 52 attempts). The Monty Hall game is structurally similar – all that differs are the numbers involved (the win/loss ratio is 1:2 instead of 1:51).

To me, the interesting question is why so many contestants don’t switch. Most of those who don’t switch assume that the probability of their door being the winner is a sort of “property” of the door, something like the “potential for a car being behind it”. It’s as if they suppose the potential presence of the car behind it is “attached” to the door in a ghostly sort of way, so that it cannot change when Monty Hall opens some other doors.

I think these contestants are anxious to avoid treating probability as if it had a “memory”, rightly recognising as erroneous the gambler’s fallacy of supposing that a run of bad luck increases the hope of some good luck to “balance” the account. So they feel the probability of their own chosen door being the winner must be independent of or insulated from what goes on elsewhere, before or after. That is an understandable error. But it is still an error, and we can learn from it.

The first lesson is that probability is not a property of any thing or type of event in isolation – it depends on the context. In the Monty Hall game, the probability of a door being a winner changes as new events unfold – in contrast to its colour, say.

The second lesson is that there are (at least) two concepts of probability, one of which is entirely “objective”, despite its dependence on the context. This objective sense of probability is relative frequency. In the long run, those who do switch choose winning doors twice as often as those who don’t switch. This is a fact about a numerical proportion that does not differ from one individual to the next. It is a fact about the world rather than something whose reality depends on the mind of any contestant (as beauty exists in the mind of the beholder).

There is another concept of probability, which we might label “subjective” because it does differ from one individual to the next, and it does depend on their minds. This is the traditional sense in which an idea or proposition is “probable” when it ought to be believed. Personally, I doubt very much whether we could ever have a numerical measure of how much an idea ought to be believed, because it depends so much on the other things that an individual already believes. For example, in the Monty Hall game the contestant doesn’t know which door the car lies behind, but the stage hands who put the car there beforehand do know. At the very least, they are able to say which door is the winner with much greater confidence.

The third lesson we can learn from the error of not switching is that these two concepts of probability are often confounded. It should be obvious that one applies to things such as repeated events that are neither true nor false, while the other applies to ideas and propositions, which are true or false. One applies to things in the world, while the other applies to representations of the world that exist in language or in the head of a believer.

Yet the two concepts are often confused. For example, philosophers sometimes talk about the “frequentist interpretation” of probability, as if several rival interpretations can be given of a single thing. But clearly, there is more than a single thing here – we have just seen that there is the relative frequency of events, and there is the credibility of ideas. And there may be more besides, once we take account of “the calculus of chances” – the branch of mathematics concerned with permutations and combinations.

I think that in the Monty Hall game, some reluctance to switch is driven by “doxastic inertia” – stolidly continuing with an opinion rather than changing one’s mind in the absence of any compelling reason to do so. The random choosing of the first door is not a decent reason for thinking the car is behind it, but nor is the opening of the second door anything like a convincing reason for thinking that the car is behind the third door. So there are no compelling reasons for belief or mind-changing here. So the contestant doesn’t change his mind.

But really, he shouldn’t be concerned with how much he is entitled to believe anything. He should be thinking instead about the best strategy for winning the game. In other words, he should be thinking about objective relative frequency.

Perhaps the most insidious effect of confusion between our two concepts of probability is the way it spawns further confusion in related fields. For example, in 1948 Claude Shannon developed a mathematical formalism for measuring the way events at two separate locations co-vary with each other. This was important for the then rapidly expanding telephone system. When events co-vary in a statistically reliable way, the occurrence of events at one location can work as “indicators” of events at the other location. This is a statistical matter of relative frequency, in other words of probability understood in the “objective” sense. It is not a matter of probability in its “subjective” or mental sense of “how much a proposition ought to be believed”. When Shannon used the word ‘information’ for reliable co-variation, he cautioned his readers not to construe it in its familiar cognitive sense of “potential knowledge”. Alas, his warning has gone largely unheeded, and confusion of the two wreaks conceptual havoc wherever discussion of thermodynamics goes off the rails and on to ideas of “order” and “disorder”, or dubiously extended senses of “entropy”.

Or again, sometimes scientists claim to be “90% certain” or an even more impressively precise-looking “95% certain” that a theory is true. The combination of the word ‘certainty’ and a supposed numerical measure of their certainty should set off an alarm-bell. It is a sure sign of confusion, or worse, intellectual dishonesty.

Scientists are far from immune from either. Like any members of society who are accorded unusual levels of respect, it is widely considered bad-mannered or foolish to question their judgement. This is a disaster waiting to happen – a disaster that has already happened in many countries with Catholic priests.

The population of any species in any closed habitat would rise geometrically, but it cannot, because it always hits a “ceiling”. This ceiling is mostly set by supply. I mean to construe “supply” in the most general terms – usually what matters is the availability of such necessities for living as food, water, and light. But it can include more, such as the availability of ornaments used by bower birds in sexual selection.

Where weeds can grow, weeds do grow. The weed population expands, and only stops expanding when overcrowding prevents further expansion. Where bower birds can build ornate bowers, bower birds do build ornate bowers. The bower bird population expands, and only stops expanding when the quality of the poorest-quality bowers is too low for their builders to have realistic hopes of getting chosen by female bower birds, and hence to reproduce. In both cases, the population bounces along the ceiling like a helium balloon that has slipped out of a child’s grasp. The ceiling is set by supply, although what needs to be supplied differs sharply from one species to the next.

Of course there is an attrition rate: some members of the population are picked off by predators. But that rate is set by the population of the predators, which in turn is set by their food supply – in other words, by the replacement rate of the population they prey upon, which is exactly where we started.

How much each individual consumes of the supply decides how many individuals there are. For example, a given field that can sustain a population of 100 rabbits might only be able to sustain 10 sheep, or 50 rabbits and one fox.

So two components determine the number of individuals: the supply and the rate of consumption. (Perhaps I mean “demand” here, but I know nothing about economics, and I don’t want to suggest that I am talking about anything other than biology.)

The human population rose dramatically in recent centuries, not because humans decided they wanted to have more children, or because they became more sexually promiscuous, or because many generations have passed since The Great Flood, or even much because advances in sanitation and medicine lowered the attrition rate. It was mostly because food became easier to procure, thanks to cheaper energy and advances in agricultural technology.

So although there may be a human overpopulation problem, an increase in the population is a sign of good things happening, or at least of good things having happened. Although there may be trouble ahead, the trouble will not be that the expanding population finally “hits a wall” of the Earth’s “carrying capacity”. That “wall” is better understood as a ceiling, and the population has always been already at that ceiling. It is hardly ever acknowledged that the normal condition of the Earth is to be at “carrying capacity”, and that at all times some places enjoy a surplus while others suffer a famine, with the same statistical inevitability as floods and droughts. The trouble is not that we hit a wall or a ceiling but that the ceiling might start to get lower. This could happen if energy to produce food became significantly more expensive. The reality of a lowering ceiling is famine.

There are two obvious ways to lower the population, if indeed that is a good thing to do. The first is to artificially lower the ceiling by limiting the supply. The second is to increase consumption of each individual so that the same habitat can sustain fewer individuals. Suppose we are again considering grazing animals in a given field of grass. In effect, the first solution is to lower the number of rabbits by having less grass. The second solution is to lower the number of grazers by turning the rabbits into sheep.

In the case of rabbits and sheep, the “supply” is of grass. In the case of humans, the “supply” is of more costly and abstract items, things more like the ornaments of bower birds. All humans need an education, for example, although giving a child a good education generally entails having fewer children. In increasingly affluent countries, humans get increasingly ambitious about their need for houses, and cars, and expensive clothes, and foreign holidays, and memberships to golf clubs. Although we may disapprove of the levels of consumption here, we should remind ourselves that such levels are a good way of keeping the population down. People who have high expectations for their children have fewer of them, and invest more in each. This explains why as societies become more affluent, life becomes less cheap, and the birth rate generally drops.

I think that is silly, disappointing and wrong. In taking this “turn for the mental”, physics has become conceptually pathological. There are two obvious reasons why it took that turn. The first reason is that physics and modern Western philosophy have drifted apart over the decades, so that physicists no longer recognise the virtues of clarity, realism and materialism. And they give little thought to genuinely mental entities such as beliefs and desires. The second reason is that no one understands quantum theory, and many quantum phenomena are frankly weird. Some physicists (such as Richard Feynman) honestly admit that they don’t understand it. Others pretend that that they do understand it, and use the weirdness as a pretext for all manner of conceptual immodesty and metaphysical extravagance.

We have to accept weirdness as a last resort when it is thrust upon us – but that’s quite different from going straight for it as a first resort. Some recent physics warmly embraces “spiritualism” of a sort usually associated with primitive religions.

At one time, there was no distinction between physicists and philosophers. But as science grew more technical, philosophy grew more envious. Communication between the two grew more difficult. We have now reached a stage where there is almost no communication or mutual criticism at all. Philosophers do not dare to question physics, and physicists do not care enough to question philosophy, because they couldn’t be bothered to learn any. This is a tragedy for both of them. Philosophers squirrel away at irrelevancies, engaged in the narcissistic exhibition of technical prowess. Meanwhile physicists try to answer the big questions – and often fall flat on their faces because they’ve learned nothing from the mistakes that philosophers have made before them.

However, I think there is light at the end of the tunnel: it seems to me that sooner or later, the “spiritualism” of much modern physics will become testable. My money is on its being disproved by careful observation. In the spirit of adventure rather than the spiritualism of disembodied mind-stuff, I hereby offer some criticism.

For an example of how physicists have become purveyors of mind-stuff, consider probability. The word ‘probability’ is ambiguous, often dangerously and misleadingly so. In statistics, it refers to relative frequency, or more precisely to a limiting value of relative frequency. For example, the probability of throwing doubles with a pair of dice is one sixth: what that means is that in repeated throws of a pair of dice, a proportion of about one sixth will end up as doubles. The more throws there are, the closer that proportion tends to get to one sixth. So we can fine-tune this statistical understanding by saying that one sixth is a limiting value – it is approached as the limit of the relative frequency of doubles as the number of throws increases.

That statistical sense of the word ‘probability’ is relatively new. For most of history, and in everyday usage, words like ‘probable’, ‘probably’, ‘likely’, etc. express something quite different. They express not relative frequency but credibility: not a numerical proportion, but the idea that another idea ought to be believed. If I say “It will probably rain tomorrow”, I mean the idea, claim or proposition that it is raining tomorrow deserves belief. The two senses are often confused, especially in contexts where relative frequency is taken as the basis for belief. For example, most hands in poker do not contain four of a kind. When playing poker, I might actively adopt the belief that my opponents do not have four of a kind, because it is statistically such a rare event. (However, as professional gamblers know, that would not be a wise long-term strategy: in a long enough series of hands, four of a kind becomes a statistical inevitability.)

Relative frequency is a wholly “objective” feature of the world. It has everything to do with what numerical proportion of members of a class of real things have a real property, and nothing to do with truth or falsity, nothing to do with beliefs, nothing to do with oughts, nothing to do with ideas about ideas, nothing to do with rationality. Physics just doesn’t measure epistemic probability – the “subjective” matter of how much a claim ought to be believed. So probability in quantum theory must be construed statistically – that is, in objective numerical terms of relative frequency. That’s because physics doesn’t “do” beliefs, or propositions, or anything that has “meaning” like that.

Only representations have “meaning” – representations as found in the mind, in art, and in language. Representations as not found inside atoms, or between the galaxies of the cosmos. Things inside brains have “meaning”, of course, as does communication between brains in the form of human language. And brains are physical. But physics is not the study of brains or languages.

Epistemic probability is “subjective” in the sense that it always depends on what is already believed. How much the claim that it will rain tomorrow deserves to be believed depends on whether you have heard the weather forecast, on how much you trust the weather forecast, and so on. It depends on you. Since different people believe different things, epistemic probability differs from one individual to the next. And since an individual’s beliefs change with the passing seasons, epistemic probability also fluctuates with time. Because it is subjective like that, this sort of probability cannot be measured using numbers. In fact it is hard to say what a number could possibly refer to or quantify in this context. A belief either can be attributed to an individual, or else it cannot be so attributed. It’s an all-or-nothing matter, not a matter of degree. We might speculate that a number might measure the “depth” to which a belief is “entrenched” in the believer’s belief-system – in effect, the agent’s relative reluctance to abandon it in the face of countervailing evidence – but this is an extremely complicated and abstract sort of metric.

It doesn’t matter. As long as we remember that truth and falsity are “objective”, it is salutary to be reminded that credibility is “subjective”. It is a matter of judgement, and often a matter of intuition, not numbers.

The confusion of relative frequency and credibility tends to really get going when we jump from thinking about a class of events, plural, to thinking about an individual event, singular. Suppose quantum theory tells us that 50% of electrons from a given source have a particular property. This is like saying that 50% of tossed coins will result in “heads” rather than “tails”. In both cases, it might be tempting to think that we have some useful knowledge about how individual coins or electrons will behave. But all the knowledge we have is already fully expressed by the statistical claim about the class. We don’t know anything about individual electrons, or individual coin tosses.

If we fail to acknowledge our own ignorance here, we are liable to think we can attach a credibility of 50% to the idea that an individual electron or coin has a particular property. Next,we might imagine that the individual electron or coin has a “diluted” version of the property, one diluted by having a weaker “potential” to command belief. Now remember, apart from the conceptual murkiness of the move here, the credibility of an idea depends on the mind contemplating it, whereas genuine properties are objective features of the world. So it’s a completely nutty idea that individual electrons or coins could have a property of more or less “diluted credibility”. Such a bizarre property would be almost literally “attached” to the electron or the coin itself, like a price tag. This imaginary “tag” supposedly quantifies its “worth” – not its monetary worth, but how much it is worth believing that it will yield this or that result when observed or tossed.

If we’re honest, I think many of us will admit to thinking about probability in that way. We “objectify” something subjective, rather as we might suppose that the worth of a desired object is given by its price tag rather than by how much we desire it (which also depends on the mind). “A picture holds us captive”, as Wittgenstein would say. And it holds us captive because our intelligence has been bewitched by language, specifically, by an ambiguity in the word ‘probability’.

We needn’t be held captive if we insist that claims about probability in coin tosses and in quantum theory should be understood statistically rather than as ghostly disembodied “ideas about ideas” attached like price tags to as-yet untossed coins or as-yet unobserved electrons. Perhaps that commits me to some sort of (non-local) “hidden variables” interpretation of quantum theory. So be it – the alternative is grossly immodest conceptual madness, and avoiding that is as essential to decent science as avoiding ouija boards.

The malaise in physics isn’t limited to quantum theory. The word ‘information’ is as ambiguous as the word ‘probability’, and once again many physicists embrace a wonky “spiritual” interpretation as a first resort. I’ll return to the topic of “information” in a few days’s time. (In physics, it should be understood as reliable co-variation rather than as any sort of weird disembodied mind-stuff.)

Caplan calls Mill’s principle of utility his “ultimate” principle, which is a fair enough description, as Mill was a utilitarian and explicitly wrote: “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions”.

But On Liberty is an extended defence of another “simple principle” – the famous harm-to-others principle – which Caplan calls Mill’s “absolute” principle. That is again a fair enough description, as Mill himself does call it a “principle”, and he does says it is entitled to “govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion.” (My italics.)

Caplan’s main claim is that Mill is not being consistent – worse, he is a bad philosopher – because he doesn’t base his defence of the “absolute” principle on his own “ultimate” principle.

I think Caplan’s idea here is interesting and worthwhile, first because I agree that Mill is not clear enough about how these principles stand to each other, and second because it exemplifies Mill’s pragmatism – something we tend to associate more with conservatism than liberalism. But Caplan is mistaken. His error illustrates something important about knowledge and the nature of justification: it’s “contextual”.

I will illustrate how the two principles are related by using an analogy from mathematics: Mill’s two principles are related to each other in the same way as a definition in number theory is related to a rule of thumb in arithmetic.

Number theory is one of the more “basic” branches of mathematics, and its purpose is to put our various number systems (counting numbers, real numbers, etc.) on a firm conceptual footing. The idea is to “reconstruct” numbers in terms of set theory, relations, etc., so we can be clear about what numbers are. (And be clear about what they aren’t: an “imaginary” number is not imaginary in the usual sense of the word, but one member of an ordered pair of real numbers.) The counting numbers (0, 1, 2, …) are defined in terms of sets, and higher-level numbers are constructed in terms of lower-level numbers.

There are various ways of proceeding in number theory. For example, constructing real numbers (which include √2, π etc.) out of rational numbers is a bit tricky. There are at least three alternative ways – all legitimate – of getting around the problem. But whichever route is chosen, it doesn’t affect the way we do arithmetic. We still teach our children practical arithmetic first, because this has a direct bearing on how we conduct our everyday lives. We all use rules of thumb when doing arithmetic, such as “whenever you multiply one side of an equation by a factor, multiply the other side by the same factor”. These rules of thumb are not affected by the route chosen in number theory to construct real numbers out of rational numbers.

Mill’s “ultimate” principle expresses his utilitarianism, and it is analogous to a basic definition of number theory, the sort of thing that can differ between different schools of number theory. To utilitarians like Mill, his principle is the ultimate appeal on all moral questions, including matters of “private” morality. But different individuals have different moral opinions, and they can differ at this most fundamental level about what makes human actions right or wrong. For example, a follower of Kant judges action by asking himself whether he is following a universal law – a rule of conduct he could happily wish everyone would follow such as “we must not tell lies”. That is a very different sort of appeal from the utilitarian focus on consequences.

Mill’s “absolute” principle – that society is only entitled to interfere with any of its members’ action if it causes harm to others – is more like a rule of thumb in arithmetic. It is “absolute” in that it is supposed to apply to all action without exception and to everyone in society apart from children and incompetent adults such as those suffering from severe mental illness or disability. A lot of rules of thumb are absolute in this way too, so being a rule of thumb and being absolute are not mutually exclusive.

To guide public policy – to help frame laws, decide government policy and so on – Mill’s “absolute” principle has to be influential. It must command respect and broad agreement from a large section of society. If Mill appealed to his “ultimate” principle to defend it, it would only win the agreement of other utilitarians like himself. So instead he has to appeal to more universal values.

For example, unless there is a proliferation of different opinions, we are more likely to overlook the truth, which is often found between extremes. If we merely parrot truths instead of challenging them and defending them, we cannot properly know them. If we prevent others expressing their ideas, we assume our own infallibility, which is an error. If we force people to do things for their own good, they cannot grow as human individuals, and growth is an essential element of human well-being. Truth, knowledge, the avoidance of error, and human flourishing are values shared by utilitarians and non-utilitarians alike.

In arguing for his “absolute” principle in that way, Mill reveals a pragmatic side that we more often associate with conservatism, or at least with people who are suspicious of root-and-branch reform. In the present context he doesn’t care what basic moral opinions other people have in their private lives, as long as they can agree to leave each other alone as much as possible in their political lives. He is not trying to sell an ambitious or radical utilitarian “system”, just to argue in a piecemeal way for a rule whose widespread observance would make society better.

Mill mentions his own utilitarianism just once in On Liberty: when he explains why he will not be appealing to the increasingly-popular concept of abstract “rights” to defend his “absolute” principle . His “ultimate” principle plays a negative role here: it’s merely a passing mention of his attitude to abstract (as opposed to legal) “rights”, which is similar to that of Jeremy Bentham (who dismissed the idea as as “nonsense upon stilts”) and Edmund Burke.

So much for Caplan’s claim that Mill is simply confused about his two principles. It is remarkable that Caplan expects Mill to justify his “absolute” principle by attempting to put it on a “firm foundation” in the manner of Descartes in his Meditations. This is a common expectation, and it is greatly to Mill’s credit that he confounds it. He seems to have had an insight about the nature of knowledge: truth is objective, but justification depends on the context. An opinion is more worthy of belief when it has soldiered it out in the clash of opposing opinions. In other words, it is a discursive matter, something that gets hammered out when people engage each other in debate.

The biological purpose of erotic love is committed parenthood in monogamous species. These are species in which offspring are a big investment for both parents, so big an investment that both parents have to be firmly committed to their role as parents and bonded to each other as a pair. Public “ceremonies” seem to add “cement” to such pair bonds. The extra “cement” is advantageous in species whose offspring represent an unusually large investment, such as humans. There’s a selective pressure for a more durable bond, because monogamy is always threatened by infidelity, which also serves a biological purpose (although a slightly different one for each sex). No species is perfectly monogamous in that none of its members cheat, although in many species some pairs are perfectly monogamous in that neither member ever cheats. At the level of entire species, monogamy is always less than perfect, even among those whose fidelity is legendary such as swans. Thus the presence of cheating among some members of a species does not diminish the claim of the species as a whole to be a monogamous one.

If love and the institution of marriage are “natural” for humans because we are a monogamous species, changing them or common perceptions of them might be more difficult than we think. It doesn’t matter what other people think about love, because that only exists between two people. Homosexual love obviously exists and always did exist regardless of homophobic attitudes of the surrounding culture. But marriage is another matter. For it to exist in the proper sense of the word, it has to be widely recognized as marriage by the surrounding culture, and I’m not entirely convinced that’s possible with homosexual marriage just yet. I wish it were possible, but I’m being realistic.

Since homosexual sex cannot result in parenthood, it is not surprising that many people see homosexual love and marriage as “not quite the real thing”, as biologically secondary to heterosexual love and marriage. Of course we must not draw any “oughts” from that unpalatable fact, but I think we should at least acknowledge it as a fact.

As I write, proponents and opponents of gay marriage are being urged to sign online petitions for or against. The “anti” vote currently stands at almost ten times the “pro” vote. If those numbers reliably reflect popular opinion, that would be disappointing, but hardly surprising, as it simply reflects human biology. It would be disappointing, because it probably means that for now, even if gay marriage were made possible in the full legal sense, it would not be widely recognized as marriage.

This isn’t always a sign of homophobia. Humans are intensely interested in erotic love, for the obvious biological reason that human children are a sort of “life sentence”. A single human childhood is easily the longest and most resource-consuming project in the living world, so the choice of who to marry and/or have children with is a biologically momentous decision – it’s literally a matter of life and death, not only for the children but also for the occasional suicidal abandoned spouse or murderous cuckolded non-parent. Erotic love is the central preoccupation of human art. We are all fascinated by the many variations on the theme of love, and we all speculate about how well or badly the old, the young, the rich, the famous, above all the different will fare in the dangerous game of marriage.

If we’re honest about it, we all wonder how well or badly things will turn out where there are big age differences, religious differences, racial differences, or differences in social class. And we see the importance of sameness as well. Most of us see various strengths and weaknesses in the various possible similarities and differences. For example, most of us are ready to accept a big age difference if the man is older than the woman, but raise an eyebrow if the man is younger than the woman – especially if the man is poorer than the woman.

If we’re honest about it, most of us realise that marriage between a man and a woman can be hard going, but the long trek unto death is made slightly easier by a sort of complementarity between them. If the man is a boor and the woman is a shy accepting little mouse, that is horrible – but at least their minds are made for each other like sex organs. If the man is a hen-pecked weed and the woman is a harridan, that is not quite so bad, but again: at least they are made for each other.

This brings us to the crux of the problem: Why are so many of us apparently not yet ready to recognize marriage between two people of the same sex? – I think we see (or think we see) a lack of complementarity between the people involved. I for one do not see any such complementarity, bad and all as heterosexual marriages often are, and I would be amazed if the mean length of non-married homosexual partnerships was anything like as long as the mean length of non-married heterosexual partnerships. That is one of the reasons I support homosexual marriage: it might add “cement” to homosexual partnerships in the same way as it does to heterosexual partnerships.

No doubt what I’ve written here will strike many as homophobic. And I am a heterosexual, which does not portend well. But I have had unusually intimate relationships with homosexual men and women for much of my adult life, through one accident of fate or another. Much of what I know about evolutionary biology I learned from the greatest – and incidentally homosexual – philosopher of biology there has ever been. I think all of them would agree with what I have just written, and all have expressed views very similar to my own.

The liberal impulse began with Socrates. Socrates encouraged open debate, plain-talking, but above all thinking for yourself. When “the gadfly of Athens” was finally sentenced to death by a “jury” of 501 – in other words, by a judicial mob – his crime was essentially political incorrectness. Instead of saying what people wanted to hear, he had talked himself into a courtroom of morally outraged mainstream thinkers.

A guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion, as he had said the wrong things, and was deemed to be a source of immorality. As his inevitable execution drew near, he said that a man’s soul cannot be harmed by mere damage to his body. This very fecund idea entails that any individual’s good is a matter of what he himself – i.e. his own mind – thinks is good. It is not a matter of what others regard as harmful to him, or harmful to his body, or harmful in general.

I suggest we pause for a moment to reflect on how profound this thought is. It means that an individual decides for himself what counts as harm to himself. He defines his own good. No one else can overrule him. For example, if he freely chooses to be a smoker – if he willingly and knowingly accepts the risks of smoking – then the unavailability or high price of cigarettes is harmful to him. If he is a homosexual, and willingly commits the (in UK former) “crime of buggery”, he is harmed not by buggery itself but by the laws that forbid it. If he chooses to end his own life, laws that prevent him doing so harm him. If he freely chooses to drink alcohol, and supermarkets freely choose to sell alcohol at a low price, then a law that forces a minimum price for alcohol harms both of them.

The idea that “we define our own good” is central to liberalism. And it brings liberalism into direct conflict with paternalism. ‘Paternalism’ is the word for forcing someone to do things that others regard as being for his own good. Inasmuch as minimum pricing laws for alcohol force drinkers to drink less – rather than protecting drinkers’ victims from the bad things drinkers do – these laws are paternalistic.

JS Mill’s essay On Liberty is an extended series of arguments against paternalism, and a passionate rebuttal of the way paternalism cramps human growth. Apparently a great many present-day politicians have not read it, or else have not understood it.

It seems to me that liberalism is right. Yet anti-liberal sentiment seems to be everywhere. Why? Whence the anti-liberalism that seems to be more popular now than it was in Victorian times, when Mill wrote On Liberty? Apart from a poor education – can anyone really imagine Róisín Shortall reading On Liberty? – I blame moral narcissism. People want to be seen to be doing the right thing, to be seen to be “caring”, and so on.

And liberalism tends to make people look bad. For example, liberals are in favour of free speech, including crucially the expression of wrong ideas. So liberals are in favour of letting Holocaust-deniers deny the Holocaust. This leaves them open to the charge that they themselves deny the Holocaust.

Liberals are in favour of individuals deciding what’s in their own interest. Thus they are “individualists”. But to people such as Michael D Higgins, ‘individualism’ is a dirty word, synonymous apparently with being “in favour of greed”. Thus liberals leave themselves open to the charge that they are in favour of greed, or are greedy themselves.

Liberals are in favour of letting people make their own mistakes, including such mistakes as harming their own bodies through the abuse of alcohol. So they are opposed to minimum pricing laws for alcohol. Thus they leave themselves open to the charge that they promote alcohol abuse, or that they are themselves drunken yobs.

Most liberals are not Holocaust-deniers, or greedy, or drunken yobs. But most anti-liberals have a narcissistic yearning to be seen not to be Holocaust deniers, or greedy, or drunken yobs. In my opinion that is a tragedy.