What would you include in a citizen’s guide to justice? An outline of citizens’ legal rights? Details of the legal aid system? Or a list of the names of all the teenagers murdered in 2009 and a series of abridged lectures from an introductory course in moral philosophy?
BBC4 has opted for the latter. It’s running a season of programmes entitled ‘Justice—A Citizen’s Guide,’ exploring justice from the points of view of perpetrators, victims, and witnesses of injustice, as well as judges, philosophers, and members of the public. Some of these have been fascinating. The Highest Court In The Land, for instance, interviewed four of the Justices of the new UK Supreme Court, who revealed themselves to be personable, thoughtful, and almost touchingly in awe of the law that they themselves administer. Others have been gruelling: Scenes from a Teenage Killing chronicled the death of every teenager murdered in 2009. Interviews exposed not only the hopelessness and deep sadness that murder leaves in its wake but also the divisions between people that even such a terrible episode may not prompt them to heal.
The season’s centrepiece, though, is a series of introductory lectures in moral philosophy, given by the Harvard Professor and 2009 Reith lecturer, Michael Sandel (Prospect interview here). These lectures appeal to our judgments about unlikely or extreme hypothetical situations (fat men being pushed onto the tracks to halt runaway trams, murderous axemen asking the whereabouts of their intended victims) in order to draw out competing moral theories. Sandel is an excellent lecturer, eliciting arguments and opinions from his students in order to build an overall picture with the skill of a maestro conducting an orchestra. This makes the programmes an enjoyable spectacle even apart from the philosophical content. Unfortunately, the BBC is showing only half of the lectures in the series, which has made for some jarring references to issues covered in the unseen lectures. (The complete series is available, as it happens, here) All the same, these are an excellent introduction to the debates and methods of contemporary moral philosophy.
Sandel also kicked off BBC4’s season, less successfully, with a debate on fairness and the Big Society. This felt like Question Time, only without the politicians. Once again Sandel played the conductor—but here it was as if he had no score. In the first movement, a variety of conceptions of fairness were raised, countered, forgotten, and raised again amid a mixture of assertion, argument, and outbursts of mild moral outrage. Here there was no sense that Sandel was guiding the audience to a new level of understanding—or indeed that it was particularly interested in reaching one.
There was less disagreement later on in the programme, when the focus of discussion moved on to the Big Society. So Sandel thought, at least. By the end he had discerned agreement on the idea that there’s space for “a new kind of civic activism and engagement” between the state and the individual. What it looked like to me was agreement on the idea that some services that are, at present, supposed to provided by the state, might conceivably be funded and provided by non-state organisations instead. The question about whether these services should be funded and provided in that way, however, was left open.
Similar difficulties arose in Sandel’s one-off documentary A Citizen’s Guide to Justice, which gave us a brief overview of the Harvard lecture series. At least this time Sandel knew where he was leading us, but the real substance of that conclusion remained vague nevertheless. Campaigns against injustice and inspiring rhetoric about making our society a better place were lauded as instances of the right sort of thing. But just what counts as injustice, and just how much money should businesses and the wealthy have to contribute to society? And while an active citizenry is surely crucial to achieving and maintaining a truly just and democratic society, is it actually sufficient for a just society? Sandel left all this unanswered.
A “wide-ranging debate on the state of justice in the world today,” which is how the BBC describes the season, is surely an excellent thing. Outside the programmes fronted by Sandel, however, there hasn’t so far been much presentation of competing arguments. And although most of the programmes that BBC4 has shown have been well worth watching, they don’t really add up to much of a Citizen’s Guide. The most edifying of the programmes operate at a level that is rather removed from the questions of justice and injustice that most immediately confront the average citizen. Moral philosophy and the clarity of thought it requires, for instance, are hugely valuable, but a series of abridged introductory lectures and some one-off documentaries aren’t going to give people anywhere near enough for rigorous philosophical analysis of the details of specific policies, let alone an idea of what to do or think about the injustices, major and minor, that they face in their ordinary lives. The workings of the supreme court, meanwhile, may be of the utmost constitutional importance, but don’t give much insight into practices further down the judicial hierarchy.
Although the BBC’s ambition may outstrip its programming ability, ‘Justice: A Citizen’s Guide’ is still worth following. If it inspires some deeper forays into philosophy via the links to the Open University on the BBC website, or if the miserable costs of murder are made more vivid, for example, then it will have been a resounding success. Since it’s on BBC4, however, it will probably be viewed by no more than a handful of non-murderous junior lecturers hoping, like me, for a few real-life examples and some classroom tips from the master.
Tom Porter is a lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Manchester
The BBC's justice season: fair to middling
February 23, 2011
