Nature and Mortality: recollections of a philosopher in public life, by Mary Warnock

The philosophy of self-justification

Can you be too honest writing about yourself? Mary Warnock turned to her diaries to produce her new book and, early on, announces that that re-reading them bored even her. The difference between an autobiography and a memoir is that the former has to be "transmuted into something durably significant". The latter, it seems, is allowed to be transitory and trifling, even with a title as portentous as this.

Warnock is the Oxbridge philosopher best known for reports on everything from the education of what she unfashionably calls "handicapped children" to the administration of the arts – taking in human fertilisation and embryology and the welfare of laboratory animals.

What you might have expected was some kind of philosophical reflection that unites her approach to these disparate subjects. What you get is an odd mixture of self-justification, gossip and bald judgements on the people she encountered on her various committees. It is full of curiously uninteresting remarks about her secretaries' skirts and whether some civil servant was Jewish, and the occasionally intriguing aside, such as the woman who "walked as old-fashioned ladies did, with her toes turned out". For a philosopher who is a consequentialist there is something unnervingly inconsequential about it all.

But she does throw some light on the background to those reports. I don't mean the creaking of Warnock's hobby-horses: on the decline in excellence in the arts, the need for more élitism in education or her curious assertion that experimentation on two laboratory animals is no worse than on one. It's more what is revealed about the process of public committees, and how they make decisions.

On that, it is less than reassuring. There is something of an undergraduate essay about the process. You start with a subject about which you know nothing, get all the books out of the library, become an instant authority and then forget all about it as you move to the next task. The book reveals there is something petty about the interaction of the Great and Good summoned to compile these landmark reports. And it shows the conclusions they reach are post-factum justifications of prejudice as much as first-principle examinations of issues. Which is why Warnock is able so casually to announce that she was probably wrong about recommending the statementing of children with special needs or banning surrogate parenthood: "my distaste was surely more a matter of aesthetics than of morals," she says of the latter.

Most disquieting is her conclusion that, on public policy, her decisions were made not by distinguishing "between right and wrong but between what would be acceptable or unacceptable". In legislation, she concludes, it is impossible to avoid consequentialist arguments. What makes this utilitarianism so alarming is the dogmatic nature of so many of her statements. We expect philosophers to show their working more, and to offer critiques rather than mere rebuttals of their opponents' arguments. Warnock's writing style is careless, repetitious and prone to cliché. One fears that her thinking is, too.