Category Archives: Philosophy & Ethics

WORTHY BOTH OF CELEBRATION AND CONDEMNATION

September 22, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate about the legacy of David Hume, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) It was published on 20 September 2020, under the headline “David Hume was a complex man. Erasing his name is too simplistic a gesture”. “Learn, Mr Hume, to prize the blessings of Liberty and Education, for… had you been born and bred a slave, your Genius, whatever you may think of it, would never […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: david hume, david hume tower, edinburgh university, enlightenment, jonathan israel, racism, radical enlightenment, slavery

WHEN MONUMENTS FALL

September 12, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This is the opening section of my essay in the New York Review of Books‘ NYR Daily on the statues debate. Read the full article on NYR Daily. “We stand today at the national center to perform something like a national act—an act which is to go into history.” So said the great nineteenth-century former slave and staunch abolitionist Frederick Douglass at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., in 1876. “That we are here […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: abraham lincoln, black lives matter, boris johnson, confederate statues, edward colston, emancipation memorial, frederick douglass, iconoclasm, racism, statues, toppling statues, winston churchill

RACE, CLASS AND WHITE PRIVILEGE: A RESPONSE

August 30, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. The political philosopher Chris Bertram published two posts last week on Crooked Timber, the philosophy and social science blog, the first challenging critiques of the concept of “white privilege”, the second arguing that certain claims about race and class are irrational. As I was one of the targets of these articles (Chris linked to one of my posts as exemplifying the problem, and we had previously debated the issue on Twitter), this is a response. (It has been published on […]

Categories: Class, Philosophy & Ethics, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, chris bertram, inequality, police killings, racism, school exclusions, white identity, white privilege, working class

FAIRNESS IS A POLITICAL JUDGMENT, NOT A THING IN ITSELF

August 25, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on algorithms, political judgments and fairness, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 August 2020, under the headline ‘The cruel exams algorithm has laid bare the unfairness at the heart of our schools’. . What children know and too many politicians seem not to: a few years ago, the psychologists Alex Shaw and Kristina Olson ran an experiment in which they told young children about two boys, Dan and Mark, who had cleaned up their […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: algorithms, boris johnson, british politics, education, fairness, michael gove, ofqual, scottish qualifications authority

HIROSHIMA AND THE MORALITY OF VICTORS

August 11, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 August 2020, under the headline ‘Don’t let the victors define morality – Hiroshima was always indefensible’. ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945. LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who […]

Categories: International, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: a bomb, chester nimitz, curtis lemay, douglas macarthur, eisenhower, harry truman, hiroshima, japan, john dower, manhattan project, martin harwit, nagasaki, nuclear weapons, racism, robert mcnamara, second world war, war crimes, william leahy

CULTURE WARS CAN MAKE YOU BLIND TO SOCIAL CHANGE

June 23, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on how the fog of culture wars can obscure the degree to which societies have become socially liberal, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 21 June 2020, under the headline ‘Culture wars risk blinding us to just how liberal we’ve become in the past decades’. ‘Prime minister Boris Johnson stirs culture war over Churchill statue.’ So ran a recent New York Times headline. The Washington Post agreed. As ‘counter protesters’ took to the streets to ‘protect’ statues and as controversy […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: black lives matter, british politics, culture wars, immigration, racism, social liberalism, statues, usa, working class

IDENTITY POLITICS: THE INTERVIEW

June 13, 2020 by Kenan Malik

Last year, I gave an interview to the philosopher Stine Jensen, for a series she was making for the Dutch TV company Human on the politics of identity called Dus Ik Volg (‘So I Follow’). The programme in which I appear is broadcast this Sunday, and here’s a video of the whole of my interview uncut (including the coughing fit…).

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: identity politics

A HUMAN NECESSITY NOT A PROFIT-MAKING MACHINE

June 9, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the dysfunctional pharmaceutical market, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 7 June 2020, under the headline ‘If drug firms take public funds they must make their finds available to all’. ‘It’s tragic that we won’t have a vaccine ready for this epidemic,’ Peter Hotez told a US congressional committee in March. Tragic, because we could possibly already have had one. Hotez is director of the Center for Vaccine Development at the Texas Children’s Hospital. In 2016, he and his team […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: astrazeneca, cepi, coronavirus, gavi, global south, jenner institute, just treatment, market ideology, medical research, msf, nationalisation, oxford university, peter hotez, pharmaceutical companies, sars, vaccine nationalism, vaccines, wellcome trust, world health organization

VIKTOR FRANKL’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

May 26, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Viktor Frankl’s existentialism,, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on deserving and undeserving migrants.) It was published on 24 May 2020, under the headline ‘What the lessons from Auschwitz teach us about the choices we make’. ‘To speak about the meaning and value of life may seem more necessary today than ever.’ It’s a quote that might have been plucked from any number of op-eds over the past couple of months. […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: auschwitz, choice, existentialism, holocaust, human agency, human nature, man's search for meaning, meaning, responsibility, social, vienna, viktor frankl, yes to everything

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND HUMAN JUDGMENT

May 19, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the difference between human and artificial intelligence, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the return of football in Germany.) It was published on 17 May 2020, under the headline ‘For all its sophistication, AI isn’t fit to make life-or-death decisions’. Artificial intelligence is searching for the drugs to combat Covid-19. It enabled the pandemic to be tracked and information about it to be synthesised. It is diagnosing patients, triaging them, and identifying those in […]

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, brian cantwell smith, coronavirus, human nature, judgment, reckoning

HOME IS A FOREIGN PLACE

May 16, 2020 by Kenan Malik

Home is a Foreign Place. The title of Zarina Hashmi’s perhaps most famous work, a set of 36 ideograms, sums up many of the tensions that suffused both her work and her life. Zarina (she preferred to be called simply by her first name), who died last month, was one of the most important postwar modernist artists, for whom displacement and loss was the key theme. ‘Memory’, she once said, ‘is the only lasting possession we have. I have made […]

Categories: Culture & Books, International, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: art, home, india, modernism, nasreen mohamedi, pakistan, partition, zarina hashmi

HEROISM AND THE QUALITY OF BEING HUMAN

April 26, 2020 by Kenan Malik

When we think of heroes, we usually think of superhuman figures, fictional or mythologized, from Achilles to Churchill, from Boudica to Superman, from Joan of Arc to James Bond. They are heroes because they are able to accomplish that which mere mortals cannot. Over the past few weeks, we’ve discovered new kinds of heroes – nurses working with inadequate protection, care workers with exceptional dedication, bus drivers who continue to transport key workers. Few of them would want to be […]

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: helder camara, heroes, heroism, human nature

SONGS OF LOVE AND HEARTBREAK

February 14, 2020 by Kenan Malik

For Valentine’s Day, BBC Radio 6 challenged people to make a mixtape of their six favourite love songs. Of course, I couldn’t resist, though it was a task reducing the list down to six. I just about managed it, though there are dozens of others I might included – from Aretha Franklin to Radiohead, from Bob Marley to Lauryn Hill. And just to add a twist, I’ve added six of favourite heartbreak songs, too. And I’m sure nobody else agrees […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: music

AMERICAN DIRT, IDENTITY AND IMAGINATION

February 10, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the controversy over the novel American Dirt, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on citizenship, moral principles and hard cases.) It was published on 9 February 2020, under the headline ‘Stop telling authors what they can write. The only limit is imagination’. ‘What insults my soul’, Zadie Smith has written, ‘is the idea… that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics

FROM THE GREAT MIGRATION TO THE SYRIAN WAR

February 8, 2020 by Kenan Malik

Jacob Lawrence was one of the great painters of 20th century America. His Great Migration series is an extraordinary work both of art and social history, documenting the migration of African Americans from the South to the Northern cities. I have published the full set of 60 paintings over a series of six posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Helen Zughaib, a Lebanese-born American artist, has taken Lawrence’s series as a template for a new set of paintings on […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: america, art, Helen zughaib, jacob lawrence, painting, syria, the great migration

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