False perceptions harm organ donation

"In 1923, Lord Hewitt said that it 'is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, it should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.' Listen carefully, and you'll hear his words echoing in the recommendation by an independent inquiry, accepted by the government, that organs donated to the NHS will not be sold to private patients. Echoes, however, can distort as well as repeat, and in this case, Hewitt's key message seems to have been lost."

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World Have Your Say - BBC World Service

I'm due to be on World Have Your Say today, talking about the death penalty. The particular focus is the Mumbai gunman who has pleaded guilty and wants the death sentence. The question asked is, If a killer asks to die, should we kill them? The programme will be available here as a podcast for a week after broadcast.

World Update - BBC World Service

On this morning's programme talking about whether it is right to keep money (or lottery tickets) you have found. For the rest of today, at least, you can listen again by following this link. It's about 40 minutes in.

Throckmorton, Warwickshire - 20 September

I'll be talking about my new book (which will be published by then) Should You Judge This Book by Its Cover? It takes a fresh look at 100 tired sayings, quotations and proverbs. Full details here.

You & Yours - BBC Radio 4

Read another essay on today's programme, this time on memorial plaques. Listen here, or read script below.

142 years ago, the Society of Arts erected a plaque in Holles Street, London, the birthplace of Lord Byron. Now the capital alone has 800 such memorials, and all over the country, towns and cities have set up blue plaque schemes commemorating their most notable sons and daughters.

But that’s not all they do. Consider for example, another plaque that went up in 1867. At 1c King Street, Westminster, it was noted that “NAPOLEON III, Emperor of the French, lived here, 1848.”

He wasn’t born there, he didn’t die there, he didn’t even do anything particularly notable there. He just lived there for less than a year. Is that really so impressive?

Apparently, it is. It seems blue plaques and other similar memorials are not really about history, but the almost superstitious frisson we feel when we realise that the space we currently inhabit was once filled by a legend. Knowing that James Joyce lived at 28 Campden Grove, London in 1931 doesn’t make the perplexing prose of Ulyssess any clearer – not that much does. But that’s not the point. He touched this earth with his magic, and now his magic touches us.

The former poet laureate Andrew Motion echoed these mystical sentiments when he spoke in support of listing the seaside shelter in which TS Elliot probably wrote some lines of The Wasteland. “To anyone that cares about poetry,” he said “the shelter is a shrine, a temple."

Once you start down this road, how far can you go? If “lived for a bit” is as important as “was born”, then why not commemorate someone simply passing through? Some blue plaques do just that. For instance, at 35 Russell Road, London, you’ll discover that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Founder of Pakistan, “stayed there” in 1895.

Association with a great dead famous person is so powerful that the mere possibility that a locale might one have sheltered a celebrity is often used as a claim to fame. Great House Farm in Leigh-on-Mendip, for instance, boasts that Henry VIII is believed to have stayed there when he came to hunt in the area. The Old Black Lion in Hay-on-Wye boasts as “an earlier visitor of note”, one Oliver Cromwell, even though it too can claim no more than he “is believed to have stayed here whilst the lads laid siege to Hay Castle.”

I am as much in the grip of this irrational vice as anyone else. When I visited Athens, I walked miles through uninspiring residential streets just to stand on the site of Plato’s Academy. Not somewhere he once stayed, mind, or “is believed to have once had a glass or two of retsina”, but the forerunner of the modern university, which he founded and ran. If it were in Britain, there wouldn’t just be a blue plaque, there’s be a visitor centre, a café and a souvenir shop. In Athens, you wouldn’t even know what it was.

If we are too impressed by the magical thinking that connects us to people long gone by mere coincidence of geography, then it’s a vice that comes at a small price. But perhaps we should question whether the spell it casts is too strong. The plaque at Byron’s birthplace was not enough to stop it being later demolished, and nor should it have been. “TS Eliot was here” is a romantic and stirring thought, but it is not a blessing that can consecrate a humble shelter and make it sacred.

Science & Faith - Guildford, 10 September

I'm talking at this event organised as part of the British Science Festival. I'm one of three speakers, the others being Usama Hasan (Middlesex University and imam at Tawhid Mosque) and John Bryant (University of Exeter and former Chairman of Christians in Science).Details are here, but not, oddly, who's actually taking part!

Without fear of trespass

"The commodification of personal data is an often-overlooked factor in the erosion of community. It explains, in part, why society is becoming a collection of individuals vigilantly guarding their own individuality, suspicious of anyone who comes too close to it. This is the darker side of the cult of privacy, with its belief that privacy is a right that needs defending. That kind of privacy needs attacking. Privacy is indeed important, but if the private sphere grows, the public square shrinks. And as the etymology suggests, that is a privation."

Article in Saturday's Guardian

The comfort of your convictions

"Anyone who values truth, including atheists, has to strive very hard try to compensate for belief in belief's distorting effects. And that's no less the case when it appears in the guise of belief in unbelief."

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July podcast

In the latest edition of Baggini’s Philosophy Monthly, I’m talking to two philosophical antagonists, AC Grayling and John Gray, discussing belief in progress and the power of reason. Plus I meet Labour MP and political theorist Tony Wright, who reveals how much Blair and Brown really care about ideas.

Download from here or from iTunes.

Human animals

"We all accept we're animals now, don't we? But even those who would agree often find that a residual desire to deny our animality remains. They imagine a future in which we leave behind all that is beastly in us and live more rationally, no longer slaves to our primitive emotions."

Short article in Gravity Guide.

Why all deaths are not equal

These two facts – that we can assign all lives the same value, yet value some lives more than others – can look like a paradox. But there is no contradiction, merely a difference between the value of lives when viewed objectively and subjectively. This creates ethical conundrums only when you assume that the moral person must always take the objective view.

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