by David Edmonds
Follow David on twitter @DavidEdmonds100
Are you a Fox or a Hedgehog? In practical ethics, far better to be a hedgehog.
Isaiah Berlin drew a famous distinction when discussing great writers and thinkers of the past. The hedgehog knew one big thing. The fox knew many things.
It’s a brilliantly useful division, though naturally not everyone falls neatly into one category or the other. But Marx, for example, was a hedgehog. He knew that capitalism and class tensions would inevitably play out to produce the revolution. (Aristotle and Shakespeare were foxes, according to Berlin).
It’s a fun parlour game to classify contemporary thinkers. Take the focus of our practical ethics blog, moral philosophy. Peter Singer? Definitely a hedgehog. He has a fully worked out utilitarian theory that he can apply with ruthless logic to a broad range of issues – abortion, embryo research, capital punishment, charity, the environment, animal rights. The recently deceased Bernard Williams? Definitely a fox. If he knew one thing, it’s that there was not one thing to know.
Ethicists who have influence beyond the seminar room have some of a basket of qualities – compelling intellectual arguments, powers of persuasion and rhetoric, the will to engage in public debate. But, as in the worlds of marketing and advertising, a message which is too nuanced or cluttered, will be lost.
Almost everyone who met Williams was struck by his luminous genius. And he did engage in public debate. He chaired an important committee on pornography and indecency, for example. But Singer has had much more influence – he’s the father of the modern animal rights movement, for starters. And the difference in their impact has something, I believe, to do with foxes and hedgehogs.
My problem? I think I’m a fox.
