Daily Telegraph obit.
Jun. 15th, 2004 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
favorovHampshire had a horror of the moral certainties of Left and Right from his time in British intelligence during the Second World War. He valued freedom over equality and rejected the classical philosophical tradition that set up reason as an absolute arbiter of disputes. Nor did he believe that liberal or socialist values had any special moral or historical significance, regarding all claims to moral universality as bogus.
His distrust of those who believe that they alone have a monopoly on truth led him to examine, in his later years, how justice could be done and seen to be done in a pluralist society. In Justice is Conflict (1999), Hampshire acknowledged that it is inevitable that people should hold irreconcilable views - on, say, the morality of warfare or abortion or even whether a motorway should be built through a beautiful valley. The popular idea that politicians should aim to find consensus on such issues, he suggested, was not only misguided but wrong. Conflict presumes the right to question authority and is a fundamental safeguard against tyranny.
Instead of consensus, Hampshire argued, a free society should aim to perfect the intermediate institutions that arbitrate between contending parties so that all sides feel, whatever the eventual outcome, that they have been given a fair hearing.
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NB Born in 1914, he married, first in 1961, Renee Ayer, the former wife of the philosopher A J Ayer. She died in 1980, and he married secondly, in 1985, Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE, with whom he had two daughters.
His distrust of those who believe that they alone have a monopoly on truth led him to examine, in his later years, how justice could be done and seen to be done in a pluralist society. In Justice is Conflict (1999), Hampshire acknowledged that it is inevitable that people should hold irreconcilable views - on, say, the morality of warfare or abortion or even whether a motorway should be built through a beautiful valley. The popular idea that politicians should aim to find consensus on such issues, he suggested, was not only misguided but wrong. Conflict presumes the right to question authority and is a fundamental safeguard against tyranny.
Instead of consensus, Hampshire argued, a free society should aim to perfect the intermediate institutions that arbitrate between contending parties so that all sides feel, whatever the eventual outcome, that they have been given a fair hearing.
***********************************
NB Born in 1914, he married, first in 1961, Renee Ayer, the former wife of the philosopher A J Ayer. She died in 1980, and he married secondly, in 1985, Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE, with whom he had two daughters.
