Explores what it means to be human and how we should live, critiquing the failures of philosophy, law and academia while offering insights for more meaningful individual and societal existence

This book presents an inquiry into the sort of creatures we are. If we don’t know what we are, we can have no idea how to behave or thrive either as individuals or as a society. This book, in a series of short essays, addresses the most fundamental question facing each of us: We are not here long: how then should we live – as individuals and as members of society? Philosophers and lawyers have long asked the question, but their answers are often garbled, and they have not learned a language in which to talk to one another. The Academy, which should lead the debate, is often too riddled with presumption and systemic dysfunction to be either useful or interesting. Foster surveys the academic and legal landscape critically, and suggests how some of the ills can be remedied.

C.S. Lewis was moaning over lunch to Owen Barfield. Lewis referred to philosophy as a ‘subject’. ‘It wasn’t a subject to Plato’, said Barfield. ‘It was a way’. That is how the ancients saw it: as a search for practical wisdom – wisdom that would enable humans to live as they should. That would be a very unfashionable view today. Philosophy, in the modern academy, is typically just a subject: a subject to be taught and talked about from nine to five, and then left behind when the real business of life starts.

Lawyers, who seek to regulate the whole of human life, in all its complexity and glory and messiness, cannot leave their philosophical presumptions at the office when they come home. If they are practitioners, they are involved in brokering uneasy compromises between individual freedom and societal thriving. One would have hoped that the lawyers and the philosophers would have something to say to one another. Yet often they share no common language or interest. This book is an attempt to get them talking. It is also an indictment of the way that the Academy – in the fields both of philosophy and law – conducts itself. The Academy is often characterised by presumption, intellectual cowardice, conservatism, envy and downright nastiness. No wonder little that is done there spills over into the real world.

The book is a series of essays which, between them, cover many of the most pressing and foundational questions of our day and any day: the state of the Academy, religion and metaphysics, epistemology and the right use of intuitions, universal mind, quantum entanglement and causation, identity, freedom, human value and disability, genetics, animals, aliens, sexual ethics, abortion and other questions of reproductive ethics, the merits and demerits of culture, Brexit, the challenges of technology, research ethics, pandemic ethics, consent to medical treatment, end of life decision-making, environmental ethics, and the business of the law and its relationship to ethics. Behind them all are the most important questions of all: What sort of creatures are we? And how should we live?