Philosophy, Politics and Economics

Interviewer: Cecile Fabre, Lincoln College (now of All Souls).

'I agree that air transport contributes to harmful climate change. But whether or not I make a given plane journey, the plane will fly anyway. So there is no moral reason for me not to travel by plane.' Is this a convincing argument?

The interview is not meant to test candidates' knowledge of Philosophy, since more often than not, they have not studied this subject before. Moreover, we are not trying to get them to guess or arrive at 'the right answer'. Rather, the interview is about candidates' ability to think critically, to deal with counter-examples to the views they put forward, and to draw distinctions between important concepts.

This answer raises the difficult question of individuals' responsibility, as individuals, for harmful collective actions. Some candidates might be inclined to dispute the premise that air transport contributes to climate change: that’s fine, but we would then ask them to accept that premise for the sake of argument. Whether they are able to do that is in itself an important test, since much of philosophical thinking proceeds in this way.

Some candidates might say that the argument is a good one: given that what I do makes no difference, I have no moral reason not to do it. At this point, I would want to know what they consider a moral reason to be (as distinct from or similar to, for example, a practical or prudential reason).

I would also push them to think about other cases: for example, the bombing of Dresden (one jet fighter less makes no difference to the collective outcome – so why not go and fight); or voting (why should I vote in a general election, given that my vote makes no difference)? Are the cases the same? Are they different? If so, are the differences or similarities relevant?

That is to say, do those differences and similarities help us think about the original case? Do they help us to work out a view about individual responsibility in those cases? For example, in the Dresden case, the individual jet fighters act together as part of an organisation – the air force – whose aim is to bomb Dresden. But we cannot say of companies such as British Airways that they aim to cause climate change. And the air passengers cannot really be described as acting together. Does this make a difference?

Suppose that you could plug yourself into a machine for the rest of your life, which would give you all the experiences you find enjoyable and valuable. Once in the machine, you would not know that you are plugged in, and that these experiences are not real. Would you go into the machine? If so, why? If not, why not?

The interview is not meant to test candidates’ knowledge of Philosophy, since more often than not, they have not studied this subject before. Moreover, we are not trying to get them to guess or arrive at ‘the right answer’. Rather, the interview is about candidates’ ability to think critically, to deal with counter-examples to the views they put forward, and to draw distinctions between important concepts. Thought-experiments are an important part of doing Philosophy.

The experience machine is a thought experiment (it’s also at the heart of the movie The Matrix, of course.) It invites candidates to think about what makes a life worth living. Some candidates might be tempted to go into the machine, on the grounds that a good life is a pleasurable life. If so, we would invite them to consider the case of the addict with unlimited supplies of pleasures-inducing drugs. We would also invite them to consider the distinction between ‘experiencing’ and ‘doing/acting’: could actually carrying out those pleasurable activities be a better measure of a good life than merely experiencing those pleasures?

Other candidates might say, on the contrary, that they would not go into the machine, precisely on the grounds that a good life is not merely one in which we experience pleasure. Depending on how they construct their argument, we would try and see what they make of the distinction between what is pleasurable and what is valuable (some experiences might be valuable precisely in so far as they are not enjoyable.) In all cases we want them to reflect on whether a good life, for me, is simply what I say it is, or whether a good life must be objectively good.

Interviewer: Tim Mawson, St Peter's College

Are our deaths bad for us?

I quite like this question because whichever way one answers it, new questions open up. One can distinguish between the process of dying and the state of being dead. The first seems non-problematically something that might well be bad for us (involving suffering), but the second is harder to assess – not least because one can have differing understandings of what the state of being dead is: is it permanent annihilation? Is it somehow waiting unconscious for a resurrection? Is to die simply to be transported instantaneously to some new realm? Or is it something else again? And can one know which? Whichever way the discussion goes, interesting topics branch off. These can include the nature of the self and personal identity; the rationality (or otherwise) of religious beliefs.

There are also different understandings of what ‘badness’ is or would be – are all bad things that happen to us things which affect our consciousness, in which case how could annihilation (if that’s what being dead is) be bad for us? And wider discussions of the nature of value might open up from there. Is there a world of value in some sense ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered, independent of what we might happen to think or feel about it? Or is value more ‘in here’, waiting to be created, depending on our own individual (or societal?) thoughts and feelings?

Students might also have different understandings of the ‘us’ in the original question: perhaps it’s good for us as a species that individuals die off; perhaps it’s bad for each of us as individuals that we die off. Perhaps there isn’t an answer that applies across the board to all of us considered as individuals – some individuals' deaths are bad for them; some aren't. Questions in practical ethics come up here – to do with euthanasia and the like.

Most people have instinctive reactions to these types of questions, answers that feel right to them without argument. In Philosophy, we are less interested in what that answer or series of answers might be, but how the person developing their thinking justifies it with argument or adapts it in the light of counterargument; how they respond to new considerations – new conceptual distinctions, new evidence, and so on; how (or if) they spot inconsistencies or growing implausibility as their series of answers and ideas develop, or bonds of mutual support between their answers and ideas.

Interviewer: Brian Bell, Lady Margaret Hall.

Why is income per head between 50 and 100 times larger in the United States than in countries such as Burundi and Malawi?

The question is focused on perhaps the most important economic question there is: why are some countries rich and some countries poor? As with most economics questions, there is no simple or unique answer.

Candidates need to think about all the potential reasons why such income gaps exist. A good starting point is to think about whether the amount of capital and technology available to workers in different countries is the same and if not, why not?

US workers are much more productive because they have access to the best technology - the US is at the technological frontier. But why do poor countries not just buy the same technology and be as productive? Possibly, the education levels are too low to allow for the use of such technology or perhaps there are insufficient savings to purchase the technology or the infrastructure might not exist.

Good candidates should recognise that institutions matter a lot - respect for property rights and the rule of law appear to be pre-requisites for sustainable development. Other factors might include trade restrictions by the rich world on poor countries exports, civil wars, disease (eg AIDS, malaria) etc. The trick is to think widely and not try and fit the answer to some lesson that has been learnt in school.

Interviewer: Dave Leal, Brasenose College.

When I was at school in the 1970s, there was talk of a pensions crisis that would one day hit. The talk persisted in the 1980s, and the 1990s – and then there was a pensions crisis, and little had been done politically to prepare us for it. Is there a fault with the British political system that means we can't sensibly address serious medium and long-term problems when they are identified?

This question was an invitation to think about democracy and its limitations – it's a big question, but an important one. I have had candidates come up with good discussions about voting methods – for example, how having proportions of parliament voted in for much longer terms might promote more long-term policy thinking.

Another approach might be to reflect on the responsibility of the electorate; if they do not think in long-term ways, it may not be politicians who are to blame, and the problem may be down to education. One might reflect upon the importance of having an unelected second chamber to which all really important business could be delegated. One candidate suggested that no one should be allowed to stand for parliament unless they have dependent children, with the thought that this would ensure a personal motivation towards longer term thinking on a variety of matters.

There is no single 'right answer' to the question; most answers given serve as the basis for further elaboration. For example, in the case of longer parliamentary terms: What would be the wider consequences of that change? Would they be desirable? We are testing the capacity to begin to locate the source of a problem, and try out solutions through discussion. The precise solution students suggest matters much less than evidence of the refining of ideas and of self-correction where necessary.

I'm having trouble with the meaning of three words: Lie, Deceive, Mislead. They seem to mean something a bit similar, but not exactly the same.  Help me to sort them out from each other.

When I used this question, candidates adopted a number of strategies. One was to provide definitions of each of them - which turned out to be less easy than one might think without using the other words in the definition. Or they could be contrasted in pairs, or, like a good dictionary, examples might be given of sentences where they are used.

No particular strategy was 'correct', and a variety of interesting discussions developed. A few candidates were inclined to think that it might be possible to lie without intending to; most reckoned that one could unintentionally mislead. A fertile line of discussion centred on misleading someone by telling them the truth. When Lucy tries to console Mr Tumnus, the faun, in Narnia, she tells him that he is 'the nicest faun I've ever met'. Which does sound comforting. She's only ever met one faun, though - him - so he's also the nastiest faun she's ever met. If he had felt comforted by her remark, would he have been deceived? And, in saying something true, had she deceived him, or had he deceived himself?

Questions of this sort help us to test a candidate's capacity to draw nuanced distinctions between concepts, and to revise and challenge their own first moves in the light of different sentences containing the key words.

Discussion may well lead into areas which could crop up during a degree in philosophy, including questions in ethics, the philosophy of mind and of language. It's not, though, a test of 'philosophical knowledge', and the content of the discussion begins from words which candidates should have a good familiarity with.

Until asked this question, they would probably think that they knew their meanings pretty well. Those for whom English isn't a first language might be thought to be at a disadvantage, but they often do strikingly well at such questions, better indeed than native speakers. There may well be reasons for this, which could form the basis of a different interview question.

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