In 1983 the Royal Institute of Philosophy organized a conference for teachers of Liberal Studies, designed to help them to develop critical skills in their Sixth Form and Further Education pupils. The announcement said that the conference would ‘explore the competing claims of objectivity and relativism in different areas of inquiry, asking in each case to what extent there are objective ways of assessing competing views’. The event was innocently advertised under the title ‘Critical Thinking’. The innocence was in the intention more than in the effect. One transatlantic visitor, though he expressed himself with New World courtesy, accused the organ-isers of something between bad faith and false pretences. Unknown to Gordon Square, the phrase ‘critical thinking’ had by then (to speak with Old World candour) been hijacked by a new movement and taken out of the main current of its currency, like ‘peace’ and ‘gay’ and ‘anti-Nazi’ before it.

It is a curious thing about the philosophy of mind, that it includes surprisingly little about minds. In an average anthology on the subject, or a book like Ryle's, one finds discussions of thinking, imagining, believing, willing, remembering, and so on, but not of minds. It seems to be assumed that investigating these topics is investigating minds; but whether that is true is not itself made a topic for investigation.

Very often moral disagreements can be resolved by appealing to (nonmoral) factual considerations because in these cases the parties to the dispute agree as to which factual considerations are relevant. They agree, that is, with respect to their basic moral standards. Hence, when their disagreement about the non-moral facts is resolved, so is their moral disagreement. But sometimes moral disagreement persists in spite of agreement on factual considerations. When this happens, and when neither party is guilty of illogical thinking, we have a case of moral deadlock

Among moral attributes true virtue alone is sublime. … [I]t is only by means of this idea [of virtue] that any judgment as to moral worth or its opposite is possible. … Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition … is nothing but pretence and glittering misery.1

I shall discuss what I have chosen to call the phenomenon of ‘intellectual robotry’. Intellectual robotry is a disease which is manifested in various different ways by some intellectuals, though not by all. (I suffer from it myself so this is one of the reasons why I have written this paper. Writing is, one hopes, sometimes a form of therapy.) What do I mean by ‘intellectual robotry’? I mean, among other things, a habitual indulgence in clever words for their own sake (what I shall later refer to as a pathology of words), a fixation about the potency of arguments and a sort of involved commitment to certain fashionable ideologies. One of the main characteristics of intellectual robotry is that the practitioner of it invariably loses sight of the person he is talking to, or allegedly talking to. He, the intellectual, is intent on pursuing his own momentum of metaphysical or ideological or political or whatever talk because he believes he has something rather important to say, but as he talks—you can almost see it in his or her eyes—he is no longer talking to a person.

Utilitarians believe that personal decisions and public policies should be made so as to maximize the public good, or, as Jeremy Bentham put it, to produce the greatest good of the greatest number. Bentham identified the public good with the maximization of happiness, and believed that many traditional practices were inimical to the production of happiness. So in the name of maximizing the public good, Bentham advocated, for example, extending the franchise, reforming the criminal code and re-designing prisons. People's prejudices and traditional habits of thought must yield in the face of utilitarian-inspired reforms.

When we inquire into the nature of works of art we can see at a glance that there is a good deal of evidence against aesthetic idealism, the view that artworks are, in the final analysis, imaginary objects in the minds of their creators. We believe, for instance, that the National Gallery not only contingently but in some sense necessarily weighs more than merely the sum of the empty building, the people in it, and the assorted fixtures. This sum must also include the weight of canvases, the oils on them, carved stone and marble, and so on, all of which add up to substantially more than nothing, which is at least the approximate weight of imaginary things. We know that it takes considerably more than a verbal utterance or acoustical blast to transport an artwork, and we also know that a visit to the gallery is not going to amount to an afternoon spent with wax figures of unicorns, flying horses, present and bald kings of France or, for that matter, talking teapots. In short, intuition protests against the idealist theory that if works of art are imaginary objects, they cannot be the things we go to see in the gallery; and if they are imaginary objects then, like a waxen Peter Pan, they are surely not art. Mellon and Meinong simply have different kinds of collections.