- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday March 27 2007 23.44 BST
- The Guardian, Tuesday March 27 2007
One of the advantages of the Oxbridge collegiate system is that you are given a ready-made community of fellow graduates from across the disciplines to befriend. We're a fairly diverse bunch in my college. Well, as diverse as a group of almost exclusively young, white, middle-class Anglophones can be. What I mean is, we have a range of interests - both inside and outside academia - and personalities. But what links the New Zealand physicist, the Australian lawyer, the American anthropologist and the English political theorist? Well, we're all totally anal.
We've gone through three or four years of undergraduate education and come out saying: "Well, thanks for that. It was very interesting. I have a few questions." Postgraduate programmes are stuffed full of the people who asked lots of questions at the end of lectures while the rest were bursting to leave so that they could play sport, take class A drugs, have lots of casual sex, run for elected office, or do any of the other things I thought I might do at university but never got round to.
This habit of questioning everything is particularly difficult for those, like me, who study moral and political philosophy. If you're studying something empirical - something about how the world is - then it's unlikely your findings are going to alter your behaviour much. But if you're spending all your time thinking about how the world should be, and what principles should govern what we do, this will have an impact on how you live your life.
The problem is, it's difficult to know what's demanded of you and difficult to live up to it (I know of one philosopher who's concluded that he should give away everything he ever earns over £10,000 a year). And it's really bloody difficult if, like me, you keep changing your mind according to which convincing argument you've just come across.
My friend Tony the Marxist told me in December that he was looking forward to Christmas and the new James Bond film. James Bond? A film about a misogynist protector of the nation state made, distributed and screened by huge multinational corporations? Christmas? A religious celebration hijacked by decadent capitalists?
I worry about the incongruence of my principles and behaviour. I spend my days working on theories of equality, but have a secret desire to win the lottery. And not so I can redistribute it (in accordance with John Rawls's difference principle). I want an Aston Martin and a big house. Recently, however, I have been able to ease my mind. Luck egalitarianism, an idea I find intuitively attractive, says we should equalise where inequalities are due to brute luck (for example, talents) but not where they are due to option luck. A lottery is the archetypal example of option luck - we could all play it, and we all know the risks and potential rewards. So I can have my Aston and not be a hypocrite.
Beggars also cripple me with angst. I believe people should not be disadvantaged by circumstance - be it the family into which they're born or their abilities and disabilities. So most beggars must be worthy of compensation as a matter of justice. But which ones? I need to know who is on the streets as a matter of brute luck and who is there because of the choices they have made. But it's not really the sort of thing you can ask someone as they plead for money for food and shelter.
Then I came across the philosopher Thomas Nagel's argument regarding excessive demands on the will. This basically states that where choices are too onerous, we can justifiably refuse to give voluntarily, even where we believe that the transfer in question is demanded by justice. I like this argument, because I think it excuses me from having to give precisely because I care so much. The more I worry, the less I'm obliged to give.
This doesn't excuse you - you don't care enough, you haven't thought about it enough. Justice demands that you give, but moral and political philosophers are excused because the demands of deciding are too excessive. Philosophy is a wonderful thing.
· Patrick Tomlin is researching a doctorate in political theory at Oxford University. His column appears monthly
