This holiday season, many of us will receive unexpected gifts. But Onora O’Neill, the British professor emeritus of philosophy at Cambridge University, has just collected a spectacular one: this week, in a swanky ceremony at the New York Public Library, she was awarded $1m for her contributions to philosophy by the Berggruen Institute, a research organisation based in Los Angeles and created by Nicolas Berggruen, the Paris-born philanthropist and investor.
There are a number of reasons why this makes me want to cheer. First, there are not many other women of O’Neill’s age (she is 76) who are collecting $1m prizes of any type for their intellectual endeavours – unfortunately, in Britain, many other older female icons around these days appear to be either cooking-show hosts or royalty.
Second, it is wonderful to see philosophy being celebrated. In theory, almost everyone knows that the discipline is ancient and worthy but, in recent years, the main focus of the government and academic world has been on technical and scientific fields; liberal arts and social sciences have taken a back seat, not just in terms of college and school courses, but in the ideas we decide to reward. McKinsey, the global management consultancy, has calculated that there is currently about $350m of prize money on offer in various competitions and awards around the world – a figure that has swelled dramatically in recent years because a host of philanthropic billionaires have been establishing prizes. But if you scroll down the list of awards (including the “XPrize” created by Silicon Valley whizz-kids), most of the money is going towards science, medicine, technology, clean energy and so on. Until the creation of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture (last year’s inaugural recipient was the distinguished Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor), there was almost nothing large that recognised “merely” smart philosophical ideas.
But perhaps the most important reason why the $1m awarded to O’Neill makes me want to cheer is what she has actually achieved. During her long academic career at Cambridge University, she not only earned acclaim for developing brilliant treatises linked to the work of Immanuel Kant but, as the judges noted, she was also “exceptional in combining pure theory – particularly, but not solely, of the Kantian kind – with its practical enactment”.
More specifically, O’Neill has written books on justice and human rights, chaired the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, run the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission and now sits in the House of Lords, as a cross-party peer. It is enough to make your head spin but it also illustrates a bigger point: it pays to break down some of the silos that haunt our professional worlds, and to get academics involved in public policy (and vice versa). Indeed, at a time when politics is so tribal and petty – in relation to Brexit and much else – we need this more than ever.
O’Neill has plenty of interesting ideas to share. Take her views on trust. In recent years (as I have noted in recent columns), there has been endless hand-wringing over the idea that, in the west, trust is declining. O’Neill believes this is misplaced. “[People say] the aim is to have more trust. Well, frankly, I think that’s a stupid aim,” she said in a recent TED talk. “I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy.”
Instead, O’Neill argues that “we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls” and focus “much more on being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you’re trustworthy”.
This requires better transparency. Another, less discussed, route to building trust is for institutions and individuals to make themselves vulnerable. Companies like Amazon that offer consumers the right to return goods do this: they build trust by making themselves open to criticism (and financial loss) when goods are returned. Online ratings on sites such as Uber and Airbnb do the same: they build so-called distributed trust by letting the seller and buyer rate each other. Maybe, O’Neill says, we should introduce this idea into British politics and government too.
But there is another key point: O’Neill believes we need to concentrate on the concepts of ethics and duty. This has gone out of fashion in recent years; instead, there is more of a focus on citizen rights and regulations. But O’Neill is convinced that it is impossible to cure society’s ills by simply imposing further rules. “You have this compliance mentality gone mad, and it doesn’t work,” she told me over lunch this week. Instead, she wants society to rediscover the forgotten concept of ethics – and to celebrate this.
This won’t necessarily be popular in the modern political world. But it is an interesting idea to ponder, particularly at this time of year. Perhaps it is time to put some of O’Neill’s thoughts – or those of any other modern philosophers – into our Christmas crackers. We could all do with a little more philosophy in the world, with or without a million-dollar prize.
Letter in response to this article:
New bishop and a great philosophical divide / From David J Critchley, Winslow, Bucks, UKBig Read took me back / From Stanley Hazen, Charlottesville, VA, US
If you are a subscriber and would like to receive alerts when Gillian’s articles are published, just click the button “add to myFT”, which appears at the top of this page beside the author’s name. Not a subscriber? Follow Gillian on Twitter @gilliantett or email her at gillian.tett@ft.com
Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017
2017 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Please do not copy and paste FT articles and redistribute by email or post to the web.
