Should morality be enforced?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2024
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Here are the instructions for your office Christmas party, issued by the Public and Commercial Services Union: “Sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour are just as unacceptable at social events as they are in the workplace. This includes unwelcome comments, gestures or physical actions. Alcohol is not a defence for such conduct and employers are obligated to address these issues seriously.” This could be considered an example of Moral Managerialism - a philosophy of enforcing, by rules and regulations, behaviour that once was left to the individual’s sense of decency. Since human beings are fallible, is this a welcome institutional safety net or an attack on an individual’s agency to do the right thing? Philosophically, can – and should – we try to make people better behaved? There’s one approach we haven’t tried, but it’s exciting some scientists. It’s called ‘moral bio-enhancement’ – basically a drug that can make you good, a do-as-you-would-be-done-by pill, a statin for the soul. If all you have to do, to be a good person, is obey the rules or take a tablet… can human virtue exist?
Chair: Michael Buerk Panel: Anne McElvoy, Mona Siddiqui, Giles Fraser and Inaya Folarin-Iman. Witnesses: Ros Taylor, Zoe Strimpel, Julian Savulescu and Andrew Peterson.
Producer: Dan Tierney Assistant Producer: Peter Everett Editor: Tim Pemberton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Good evening. If you're listening to this, presumably you're not at the office Christmas party. |
| 0:09.4 | Or maybe you are. |
| 0:10.7 | And the reason it's so boring you've turned to Radio 4 is that the new laws and guidelines for such events are being followed to the letter. |
| 0:18.7 | Employers can now be held liable for sexual harassment and other misdemeanors |
| 0:23.4 | at workplace social events and have a positive legal duty to prevent them. Guidelines suggest |
| 0:29.7 | limiting free drink and senior management staying off the pop altogether to keep a beady eye on |
| 0:35.1 | things. Offences are helpfully defined as unwelcome comments, |
| 0:39.8 | gestures or physical actions, which calls to mind the late Alan Clark MP, a serial offender by |
| 0:45.7 | these standards, asking plaintively on this programme, how do I know my advances are unwanted until |
| 0:51.7 | I make them? These are perhaps the latest examples of what's being |
| 0:55.8 | called moral managerialism, the tendency to enforce by rules and regulations, behaviour that |
| 1:01.8 | used to be left to an individual's sense of decency, for law and bureaucracy to replace what |
| 1:07.2 | previous generations with perhaps a more unified moral vision did with shame and |
| 1:12.5 | stigma. Is it the government's job to make us behave better? If so, there are infinite |
| 1:18.1 | possibilities just round the corner, a drug that can make us good or at any rate less bad. |
| 1:24.0 | Philosophers are very excited about what they call moral bio-enhanagement. |
| 1:29.9 | But if all that it means to be good is to stick to the rules or pop a tablet, what's left of virtue? |
| 1:36.5 | That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:37.7 | The panel, Anne McElvoy, executive editor of the News and Commentary Site Politico, |
| 1:42.2 | the commentator and campaigner Inaya Fulari Niman, |
| 1:45.1 | Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies at Edinburgh University, |
... |
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