Nick Cartwright's Blog

On Tuesday I was leaving the house to go first to Oxford and then, on Wednesday, further south to pitch for some freelance work.  The email inviting me to pitch was sent while I was on holiday so, other than a cursory glance at it on my phone on the beach in Trogir, I’d only looked at it to put the postcode into my SatNav.  Stood by the car I had a niggling feeling that I should just check the email, I returned to the house to discover that I was meant to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on ‘jurisprudence’.  In simple terms jurisprudence is the philosophy of law – whilst most of what lawyers concern themselves with is what the law says and how it applies jurisprudence asks the big why questions.  Short of time I typed some quotes from the key theorists – a bit of Aristotle, John Austin, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill – onto a few slides and hoped for inspiration at a later point.

Oxford was disappointing, my good friend who I was meant to be meeting had to cancel at the last minute and I was left alone to discover why Lebanese cuisine had never really taken off in a big way.  A quick hotel breakfast of salmon and scrambled egg and I began what turned into a marathon 3-and-a-half hour drive, still unsure as to the shape my presentation was to take. Inspiration came from Radio 4, Stephen Hawking’s new book was being reviewed. Apparently Hawking not only refutes the existence of God but also argues that science is making philosophy redundant. On both counts Hawking is clearly wrong. He may have demonstrated that a creator is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe, but as necessity is not a condition for existence this goes no way to proving, or disproving, the existence of God. I was less concerned though with whether he had disproved the existence of God, scripting a rebuttal to Hawking’s claim that philosophy would no longer be relevant once the ‘theory of everything’ had been completed.

At the tender age of 23, having secured my first permanent teaching post, the Dean of the Law Faculty breezed into my office and asked ‘so what exactly is jurisprudence’, I gave the simplistic answer that it was the philosophy of law and she turned on her heel and breezed back out, remarking ‘oh just that airy fairy nonsense’. Like Hawking she believed that if we could explain what everything is then we have all the answers – the why questions that allow us to explore what everything ought to be were unnecessary. The law tells me what I am permitted to do and imposes sanctions if I disobey, but it is not only for fear of sanction that we recognise and respect laws. Aristotle hit the nail on the head when he asked ‘why should I obey the law?’ Hawking may be able to explain what human life is, he may even be able to break rational thought down to a description of the firing of neurons but this does not explain why we should value human life. Kant gives a categorical imperative, a fundamental moral obligation, that we should respect others as ends in themselves and not merely treat them as ends in themselves. I believe Kant’s right, not because I understand what makes humans rational agents but because I believe rational agents should have their autonomy respected.

The presentation went down well and I have been offered an exciting project. The drive home afforded me the opportunity to rationalise my thoughts in response to Hawking’s claim that God is redundant. I think the idea of a necessary creative God is unpleasant; if God is proved or disproved then faith is redundant. The simple fact is God may exist, God may not exist and it is an individual act of faith to decide what we choose to believe in. As Descartes demonstrated all we can know with absolute certainty is the existence of our own mind, everything else could be illusory and simply getting up in the morning is an act of faith.