Applied ethics is the application of moral theory to the real world. I first read the five books that we are going to talk about here 25 years ago, which was the beginning of a burgeoning of applied ethics, with people like Jonathan Glover and Peter Singer applying theory to real issues like euthanasia, capital punishment, poverty, distribution of income, animal rights, abortion – questions of life and death.

Talking of which, I understand you’re a bit of an expert on “trolleyology.” What is a trolley problem?

There are two basic trolley problems. The first problem, invented by a philosopher called Philippa Foot, is that a trolley is going to kill five people on the rails. The question is whether you should turn the trolley onto another set of tracks on a spur where there is just one person. So you can save five lives at the cost of one life. Almost everyone, when you ask them that question, says you should do that and kill the one person.

Another moral philosopher called Judith Jarvis Thomson came up with another trolley problem, the “fat man” problem. The trolley is going along as before, and it is going to kill five people. But this time you’re on a footbridge, and you can stop the train by pushing a fat man onto the tracks who is so large that his bulk will stop the train and save the five lives. The question, again, is whether you should save five lives by sacrificing one. But 90 percent of people think it’s wrong to push the fat man.

Because it’s a more active way to kill the one man than in the first scenario?

That’s one possible psychological explanation. But there’s a third version of the trolley problem where instead of pushing the fat man, by turning a switch he will fall through a trapdoor, stop the train, and save the five people. When you ask people that, most people still say you shouldn’t kill the fat man. More people are willing to turn the switch than push the fat man, but not dramatically more. The first trolley problem has been around since 1967, the fat man version appears in the 1980s, and nobody agrees exactly what the distinction is between them. It doesn’t look like it’s to do with the different actions.

The point of the trolley problem is to figure out what principle distinguishes those two variations – and, more importantly, what that tells us about real-life cases. Can we apply that distinction to war, to medical ethics, to abortion? Originally the trolley problem was devised to explain the rights and wrongs of abortion. Today, it is often used in just-war theory, the distinction between targeting a military installation knowing that civilians will be killed as bystanders and directly intending the death of civilians.

At this juncture, will you give us a beginner’s guide to utilitarianism and how it impacts on these ethical dilemmas?

Utilitarianism is the view that you should do that which produces the most happiness or well-being. It’s a version of consequentialism, which is the view that you should do that which produces the best consequences – utilitarianism says that what matters most about those consequences is happiness. Utilitarianism has a wonderfully straightforward answer to all these thought experiments: that there is an algorithm or equation to working out what action produces the most happiness, and that is what you should do. Utilitarians don’t engage with trolley problems at all, for instance, because given a choice between five lives and one life, they say you should always take the one life.

What if it’s your mother?

I’ve never seen the trolley problem with your mother, but I have seen it put to the arch-utilitarian Peter Singer, whose own mother fell ill. He, of course, looked after her, but from a utilitarian perspective recognized that her life was of no more value than any other life. Utilitarianism has great difficulty in dealing with the special relations one has to one’s children, spouses, parents, friends and colleagues. They want to say that all lives are of equal value and that we throw them all into this casserole of well-being, stir it around, and see what the best result is, with no special obligation to our family and friends.

As such, utilitarianism seems common sense, but also cold and calculating.

I don’t mean to cast aspersions on utilitarianism, and when I was a student I classified myself as one. Scientists have subsequently discovered that when people are involved in car accidents and sustain damage to their ventromedial frontal cortex, they are more likely to reach utilitarian conclusions in some of these thought experiments than they were before. What that tells you about utilitarianism, I don’t know.

Let’s get stuck into your book selection, beginning with Peter Singer’s “Practical Ethics.”

“Practical Ethics” came out in 1979, just before I began studying philosophy. I loved its rigor, and I found Peter Singer almost impossible to argue with. I agreed with almost every position he took on every issue. There were chapters on abortion, on animal rights, on how much money we can give to the poor. It’s really the blueprint for everything he’s written subsequently. He is prolific, but if you want to know what Singer believes on a given topic, you may as well go back to “Practical Ethics.”

There’s a whole chapter on the fact that if we know that people are going to die in the Third World and we fail to do something about it, we’re as responsible for their murder as if we put a bullet through their heads. It’s a very practical book which addresses these controversial issues. I became a vegetarian at university after reading it, so it had a big effect on my life. I’ve since moved away from his very rigid utilitarianism on other topics, but I still find his arguments about how we should treat animals very persuasive.

What is his philosophical argument for vegetarianism?

He says that to claim that humans are more important than animals merely because they’re human would be what he calls “speciesist,” and no different from saying that white people are more important than black people merely because they’re white. If you say that humans are more important than animals, you have to give a reason. You have to say it’s because they’re smarter or have the ability to plan for the future.

Now if you accept that premise – and I don’t see how you can’t – then there is a real problem of humankind’s overlap with some animals. If you say that what matters is our ability to plan for the future, then what about babies, or people with severe Alzheimer’s, or those who are mentally retarded, who don’t have that ability any more than chimpanzees do? Why do you think they are more morally important than animals? So once you accept the premise, you have to take animal suffering a bit more seriously.

Singer says that suffering matters wherever it is produced, and we should care about the suffering of any sentient creature. If we think that the benefit we get from eating meat doesn’t outweigh the incredible suffering of factory farming, then we should give up eating meat. And that’s why I’m a vegetarian. But Singer is completely logical about it. He accepts that if you were to eat only free-range animals who lived a happy life at the end of which they were killed, there is almost nothing wrong with that. So there’s no reason why you can’t be an ethical meat eater, but you have to choose what meat you eat.

Next up is Thomas Nagel’s “Mortal Questions.”

This is a wonderful book, and completely different from Singer’s, although it’s also a series of chapters on different themes to do with life and death. He has a wonderful essay on equality, a great essay on war, and essays on consciousness as well, which is what makes living things different from dead things. What I love about Nagel is his ability to identify what really matters about a subject, and to write about it without getting caught in too much nitty-gritty detail. He’s a beautiful writer, and this and his subsequent book “The View From Nowhere” are two of my favorite philosophy books.

Nagel introduces in this book something that is completely counterintuitive until one thinks more deeply about it, namely panpsychism – the idea that inanimate objects might have atoms in which there is a conscious element. That sounds very weird until you think about human beings. We are created out of physical stuff, so where does the magical stuff of consciousness come from? Perhaps the answer is that the little bits of stuff that we thought were physical also contain within them some of this subjectivity, even if at a subatomic level. That seems crazy, but when you think about it, it has some plausibility to it.

Nagel has also written a lot about altruism. Wouldn’t the most moral solution to the trolley problems be to throw oneself onto the tracks?

That’s a very good question. The reason why you can’t throw yourself is because you’re not fat enough. That’s why the fat man has to be fat. The correct solution to the problem is to jump yourself and not kill anybody, but you can’t do that in this case, because you’re not fat.

Because you don’t eat meat, having read Peter Singer.

Quite possibly.

In “Utilitarianism: For and Against,” Bernard Williams is against.

This is a book of two halves. The first half is written by a very eminent Australian philosopher, and I can’t remember a word of it, but the second half was important to me. I was a pretty pure utilitarian until I read it, and it countered a lot of the influence of Peter Singer. Williams is a critic of utilitarianism – he thinks it is a deeply simplistic way to view the moral world. He gives a couple of famous examples that illustrate why, and which show the aspects of morality which utilitarianism can’t capture.

The first example is this. Imagine you’re in a Latin American country, and you come across a guerilla leader who is about to kill 20 Indians (a somewhat politically incorrect use of that term). He says, if you kill one of them, I won’t kill the other 19. Should you do it? Williams says that from a utilitarian point of view, of course you should kill the one person to save the other 19. But that’s to miss that it’s you who’s doing the killing. Utilitarianism sees everything from a bird’s-eye view and doesn’t realize that you’re involved with the consequences of your actions.

The second example is a character called George, who is very anti nuclear power. He’s short of money, needs work and is offered a job in a biochemical plant. The job pays well – which means he can look after his wife and kids – and although he doesn’t believe in the work, if he doesn’t do it, then someone else will do it even better and promote this industry that he objects to. Williams again says that, from a utilitarian point of view, George should take the job. But that fails to capture the question of integrity. Associating your life and career with something that you so deeply resent and oppose would be an attack on your integrity.

And surely you can’t calculate net happiness so simply. The dissatisfaction George might feel in the job could mean that he starts mistreating his wife and kids, who in turn take it out on others, and the unhappiness accumulates.

You could give that answer, but that’s an answer within the utilitarian framework. That’s saying that utilitarians have just got the calculation wrong – that they think this would make the world happier, but it won’t. To some extent you can quantify happiness. You know that 19 lives are better than no lives, for instance. Happiness is not an easy thing to measure, but you can say sensible things about what makes people happy and what doesn’t. But while your objection is saying that from a utilitarian point of view it might be wrong, Williams argues that even if utilitarians say the answer is clear-cut that George should take the job, that misses the issue of integrity.

Derek Parfit, “Reasons and Persons.”

“Reasons and Persons” was written in 1984, and Derek Parfit was one of my postgraduate supervisors. One of the blurbs on the back of book says “‘Reasons and Persons’ is a work of genius,” and I think it is. It’s an incredibly important book, and one written in a tradition completely different to Bernard Williams, even though the two were friends. Bernard Williams is an essayist, and he looks at the big picture, like Nagel. Parfit, more like Singer, is in the tradition of the 19th century philosopher Henry Sidgwick – he is a detailed, rigorous, almost mathematical philosopher who worked from premises slowly to conclusions. There’s nothing pretentious about it – it’s beautifully written, incredibly thoughtful and well-argued, with fantastically imaginative thought experiments.

I’m particularly interested in the final chapter, about our obligations to future generations. There are various paradoxes that he tries to resolve. Here’s one of them: Suppose you knew that if you were to have a child, the child would have a terribly wretched life – it would be miserable, suffer for some years and then die. Would it be a bad thing to bring that life into the world, if it was going to be unremittingly miserable? Most people would agree that it would be. So does that then mean that it’s a good thing to bring a life that is better than nothing into the world? If you say it is, you get involved in what he calls the “repugnant conclusion.”

Imagine a world with a trillion people in it, all of whose lives are only slightly better than nothing – they have enough to eat and drink, but there is nothing really fulfilling about their existence. They aren’t leading the sort of flourishing life that you have, doing FiveBooks interviews. Compare that with a world in which there are only a few billion people, all of whom have a very high standard of living. Most people would say that the latter is better than the former. But if you think there is something worthwhile about every life where there is more happiness than there is suffering, then you reach the repugnant conclusion, which is that the world with a trillion people is better, because of the cumulative happiness of that greater population.

Your final pick, “The Sceptical Feminist,” is conveniently by Derek Parfit’s wife, Janet Radcliffe Richards.

Parfit was my BPhil supervisor, Janet was my DPhil supervisor. I kept it in the family. This is another book that comes from the same generation of 25 years ago. It may be that books of that era have had more influence on me because I was young and impressionable, or it may be that it was simply a generation of really talented philosophers.

I love this book because it is again incredibly rigorous, analytic, and not at all sentimental or wishy washy. It is what it says on the cover – there’s a feminist component to it, and a skeptical component to it. It came out in the late seventies, a time when people were still barred from jobs on grounds of sex. Janet makes the point – which others had made before, including John Stuart Mill – that this makes no sense. If you say no women should be bus drivers because they’re not capable enough or whatever, then you don’t need a rule that no women should be bus drivers. All you need is a rule saying that no one who isn’t capable of driving a bus should be a bus driver, which removes sex from the issue.

That’s the feminist bit. And the book is skeptical because it doesn’t take a position on some of the empirical claims about sex, such as whether men’s and women’s brains are different in any way, or whether men and women have naturally different interests or approaches. It doesn’t take any position on that and leaves the empirical facts to be uncovered and argued about elsewhere. So she is feminist, but skeptically so.

She is also a leading thinker on bioethics. What are some of the new ethical questions which have been thrown up by scientific progress?

Janet’s most recent book is about the morality of organ donation. People die every day because there is a shortage of organs. One moral question is whether we should allow people to sell their organs. Would that help to solve the shortage problem? It might not. It might be that if you put a price on it, fewer people would sell their organs – or it might be that lots of people would, and you would solve the crisis. That’s the empirical problem. The philosophical dispute is whether it would be justifiable to have a trade in organs.

Somebody from the conservative wing of bioethics is Michael Sandel. He would be aghast at the commodification of certain things, including organs. But it’s difficult to figure out just why it would be wrong for you to be allowed to sell your organs. If you’re presented with all the choices, and you think this is your best choice, why should I deprive you of the opportunity of exercising your liberty? Who am I to say you can’t do what you want with your body? If you fully understand the implications, what right do I have to deny you that decision?

A couple of people in China now have sold their kidneys in order to buy iPads. From a utilitarian perspective, is that justified if your happiness from having the iPad is greater than the potential unhappiness of kidney failure and a painful death?

From a utilitarian perspective, it certainly could be. I think the reason why people recoil from that idea is because they think the person is making an empirical mistake. They think that they are falling for short-termism and will get a pleasure boost but in the long run will live to regret it. That may be true, in which case from a utilitarian point of view they are making a blunder. But perhaps they will survive to a good old age with one kidney, without noticing the absence of their other one, and get enormous pleasure from using their iPad to access The Browser.

What would you sell your kidney for? Not an entirely flippant question.

I would sell my kidney for my son’s life, or a Nobel prize.

Salon spoke with Edelman over the phone about the brain as computer, our cultural investment in happiness, and why knowing how our brains work might make us happier.

In the book, you approach neuroscience from a popular perspective, using language and allegories laypeople can understand. How can even a superficial understanding of how the brain works aid in one’s self-understanding?

Well, I think the principles in question are actually pretty accessible on what you call a superficial level. When we make decisions it basically boils down to value computation: Different options get weighed and chosen on the basis of mathematical processes.

Well, if pursuit is the key to happiness, is this kind of happiness sustainable? And if so, what might it look like?

Let me say firstly the answer is yes, and then I’ll have to elaborate a bit. There’s an example that made it into the book last minute because I’d just watched a movie, a Canadian film called “One Week” about a guy who gets diagnosed with cancer. He gets on his motorcycle and rides west and comes across all kinds of people and places. At one point, he goes on a hike, gets lost and meets another hiker there, a woman. They end up camping around a fire and he asks her at one point, “If you knew you had one week to live what would you be doing?” And she says without any hesitation, “What I’m doing now.” So what better definition of true happiness than that? And that’s definitely obtainable. If you just pause and ask yourself.

Your title, and indeed your book, seem to conclude that pursuit itself, rather than an end, is what makes us happy. What’s the best balance to achieve this happiness, what you call “flow”?

In the book I don’t attempt to come up with very specific advice for how to be happy, but just some general tools for understanding your own mind. Flow is the enjoyment derived from being engaged in an activity that is challenging, but not frustratingly so. Evolutionarily, we are selected for being good at certain kinds of things. You’re not challenged if you’re not tested, so I think we have this drive that pushes us to maybe overstep the boundary every now and then. And for success, we get rewarded incredibly with this feeling of well-being and excitement.

What distinguishes Americans’ attitudes toward happiness from those of other parts of the world?

Well, we are told happiness is our inalienable right, but we are not told what to do with it once you catch it. So in that respect I guess we’re exceptional because happiness made it into the foundational documents of this republic. This guy in Holland tabulates large-scale studies of well-being across different countries, and we are nowhere near the top. I don’t want to sound like someone who preempts or tries to write over scientific research, but I do speculate why. I think one scientifically, psychologically validated reason for not making the most of one’s happiness is investing in the wrong kind of acquisitions. If you have some money to spend and you spend it on buying goods that’s not nearly as effective in making you happy in the long run as buying experiences. If you buy an experience, you can basically revisit it and enjoy it over and over again, whereas with material goods, the fun goes away. Running the risk of sounding too corny, quality time with yourself, with your family and with nature is worth a lot.

You talk about the default human mind as constantly wandering in order to avoid the present moment, what you call “the tyranny of the here and now.” What about practices like Buddhist meditation, which aim to quiet the mind into a state of contentment?

That’s a really good question. I set out to write the book because I wanted to find out why I was restless in situations where I supposedly should have been perfectly content. You know, literally sitting on a mountaintop, seeing the countryside, I would still feel restless. And I think I found a kind of answer. To put it very bluntly, if you are successful in following the Buddhist precepts, you cease to be human. In fact, I think one can find support for this view in the Buddhist sources themselves. If you succeed to cease desiring, you’re no longer human. Of course, the Buddha himself supposedly remained enmeshed with humanity to teach others. But if you do succeed in obtaining the state that you’re supposed to obtain, then you’re no longer human. And that kind of invalidates the questions because a psychology would need to be developed for understanding those kinds of minds – they are not regular human minds.

One perhaps controversial claim your book makes early on is that the brain can literally, rather than metaphorically, be thought of as a computer – and following from this, that an identical, non-biological computational device could be created (as in artificial intelligence). Is this idea widely accepted in the field of philosophy of mind today?

In philosophy of mind I would say, maybe 50/50. It used to be very popular when Hilary Putnam formalized the solution of functionalism with regard to minds: the idea that what the system does is what matters, not what it is made of. But then he repudiated his stance and it gets a bit complicated. I think as far as the -isms go in philosophy, there’s a blend between an old-fashioned school (mid-1950s), which says the mind is literally what this brain does, it’s this brain’s mind. But then you have to admit there are very simple philosophical arguments that when certain changes are made to the composition of the system, its function would not matter. For instance, right now you and I are interconnected cognitive mental states. So if I tell you, Look at your hand and count your fingers, while I’m looking at mine, we both see five fingers. We have the number five in our minds; what does it reside in? It’s definitely not your neurons because your neurons are yours and my neurons are mine. So it cannot be those neurons specifically; it’s what those neurons do. So if you accept that, the question then becomes, is it a slippery slope? Where does it stop, what can you do with or to a system without disrupting the mind that exists in it? And that’s a question that would take much longer than a couple of minutes to get into.

You also assert that the idea of being a unified self with free will is an illusion, but that this can be seen as liberating. How so?

I guess in part this feels liberating to me because as a scientist I’m very pleased that this great big mystery dissipates into thin air. And then the question becomes kind of technical – what kind of free will is worth wanting and how to compare it with what you apparently have. This was done by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in “Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting” and I basically channel him in my take on those matters. I don’t think I can squeeze into a two-minute reply the technicalities of how one can reconcile what is known about the physics of free will (which is, there isn’t any) and the way we feel about it (which is, of course, that we feel we have it) and what can be done about that. But I think the starting point for this line of thought is clear so once we understand that the self is a web of cause and effect that is part of a larger web, I think everyone can translate this insight for themselves into how to conduct themselves. I guess the bottom line is, again, at the danger of sounding too corny, to realize that we have to be in tune with the rest of the world, which includes other people and the universe around us.

Is this what you mean when you say that our happiness depends equally on our inner selves as it does on the world around us?

I hope the impression you get from the book is not that the self is in a definite way distinguishable from the surrounding universe in so far as there are causal links. We are interconnected with the rest of the universe so I think it only makes sense that our own mental states when we perceive them will depend on what’s going on around us.

What do you think of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright-Sided,” an account of what she views as the current happiness industry of positive thinking and affirmation culture? Does our obsession with happiness go too far?

Well, if you’re preoccupied with your happiness at all times then it’s definitely counterproductive and can safely be called an obsession. No obsession is good, and an obsession with happiness will not make you happy.

What do you think of the current popularity of competition-based reality shows, where the end goal of getting married, winning a large sum of money or being America’s Next X, Y, or Z promises happiness? This formula seems an interesting combination of the idea that a goal promises happiness while at the same time, it’s really the journey that the contestants go through that people are watching.

Well, I’m hard-pressed to decide which of the two activities, between watching or participating in such a show, which is the worst possible thing you could do with your time and which is the second worst. But I guess I have to moderate what I said because I haven’t seen these shows, and only know about them by hearsay. Of course we humans have a long history of primates watching other primates fight, but I think the kinds of tools we have now for finding and experiencing happiness can be put to better use than watching these kinds of competitions. But I do watch TV, sometimes when the only pleasure one can get from watching is vicarious. I like to watch the Travel Channel, especially the food programs like Anthony Bourdain’s show “No Reservations,” and I can only be envious when he goes to Singapore because watching all those food stalls, I can only salivate.

The photographs have philosophical as well as artistic significance. An explanatory piece published by the university says:

The composite photograph [depicted in our first slide] could be said to mark the start of the development of Wittgenstein’s idea of “language game” and “family resemblance,” that things assumed to be connected by singular common features … are in fact connected by myriad overlapping similarities that weave complex networks, the possibilities represented in the fuzziness. Wittgenstein later uses human families to relate this idea, where “build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.”

For a full explanation of the exhibition, and more background on Wittgenstein’s photography, visit Cambridge Research Features here. The images in our slideshow have been reproduced by kind permission of the Wittgenstein Archives.

View the slide show

The implication is that where they failed, we cannot expect to succeed; the Socratic ambition, Miller says, represents “an unending quest, with no firm goal and no certain reward, apart from experiencing, however briefly, a yearning for wisdom and a desire to live a life in harmony with that yearning — come what may.”

There are two reasons for disagreeing with this conclusion. One might point out that a demand to seek self-understanding (in obedience to the Delphic oracle’s “Know Thyself”) and to reflect on one’s choices and values, is not quite the same thing as a demand to succeed in living accordingly. As the cliché has it — no less truly for being a cliché — it is the journey not the arrival that matters. Socrates put his point in the negative (“the unconsidered life is not worth living”) for a reason: Giving no thought to how one should live is by default to let chance or others decide one’s fate. So life can be worth living if we reflect and try to choose, even if we do not always succeed in acting as we should. Frailty or ill-luck (both of them common barriers, as Aristotle saw, to moral achievement) might get in the way; yet we honor people as much, if not more, for what they sincerely endeavor to do and be, as for what they achieve; and this is often more than enough.

Miller therefore need not have deduced so negative a conclusion from his 12 life studies, for one thing his subjects show is that they had the desire for, and an understanding of, the good and well-lived life, even if most of them failed to live fully up to their ambition for it. At least they strove to know, which is more than many so much as attempt; as Bertrand Russell said, “Most people would rather die than think, and most people do.”

The second reason is that Miller’s conclusion might have been different if he had chosen a different set of philosophers. The 12 he writes about (and Miller expresses the regretful inevitability that they are all men) are Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche. Nearly half of them do not figure in the canon of philosophy as studied in contemporary universities, these being Diogenes, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne and Emerson. Socrates is not studied at all, being taken as the mouthpiece of Plato in the latter’s dialogues (no doubt the method, and some of the doctrines, are genuinely Socratic, but it is impossible to peel the master and pupil apart). The closest Rousseau gets to philosophy is political science, cultural history and literature. Nietzsche is certainly studied in philosophy departments, but as something sui generis; unlike the remaining four fully paid-up members of the standard curriculum, he does not fit into the orthodox mold on epistemology or metaphysics, logic or ethics.

Now, Miller has a good point to make with this choice, which is that the selective nature of the philosophy curriculum in contemporary universities is not representative of the philosophical tradition itself. In classical and post-classical antiquity, a philosopher was someone who sought to live a reason-guided, ethically consistent life based on self-knowledge and a clear understanding of the world’s false blandishments. There was a compelling reason for this: The brevity and insecurity of life required counsels of fortitude, designed to help the ancient philosophers achieve “ataraxia” — peace of mind — in the midst of the chances, changes and dangers of an uncertain world. Cicero summed up the quest by saying that to learn to philosophize is to learn how to die, for when one has lost one’s fear of death, one has truly liberated oneself to live well.

One can and should accept Miller’s point here, therefore; as philosophy was in its Socratic origins a quest to know how to live, this emphasis is worth reemphasizing. But also one can and should point out that a different choice of figures would have led Miller to a different conclusion. Examples of philosophers who succeeded in living the Stoic or ataraxic life, philosophers who were martyred for their principles, philosophers who lived and died courageously, philosophers who stuck by their principles, can be found to illustrate the thesis that the power of reflection gives what the Socratic injunction asks for. So Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Giordano Bruno and Spinoza, Hume and Hazlitt, could have been among Miller’s partly offbeat choices, and they would all have been models of consistency and principle — unlike Seneca and Rousseau, who easily represent the great gulf between principle and practice that gives the lie to the Socratic ideal. Though to be fair to Seneca, he certainly died like a philosopher. Rousseau, who abandoned a series of his bastard newborns on the doorstep of a foundling hospital, never even began to live like one.

On the other hand, Miller could have made his portrait of philosophy’s failure to achieve the Socratic ideal even more dramatic: to the madness of Nietzsche he could have added Althusser’s strangling his wife, Russell’s philandering, Heidegger’s Nazism and Sartre’s Communism, Wittgenstein’s gratitude for war, and, if the definition of philosopher is extended further, a lot worse besides.

None of this matters. True, Miller presents his 12 mini-biographies as responses to Foucault’s remarks about “the problem of the philosophical life,” namely, the question of the relevance of philosophy to the questions of what one can know, and do, and hope for, given the conquests of science and the fragmented and competing voices of religions. But one need not take the essays as endeavors to see if philosophy still has a role in helping us identify the meanings of life. Each of them is a little gem in its own right as the portrait of an independently interesting individual and his thought. Miller is careful as well as eloquent, so we get penetrating vignettes of intensely interesting people who were moved in their several ways to contemplate the big questions, exploring themselves and others to achieve the kind of enlightenment that liberates, whatever form the truth appeared to them to take.

It is especially welcome to find Montaigne and Emerson included, as they properly should be, among philosophers worthy of the name. There is considerably more enrichment to be had from their writings on the question of what it is to be human than in, say, Descartes or Kant, great minds as these (and especially the latter) are. I think Miller might have profited us more by replacing Diogenes with Epictetus or Cicero, the latter not least because of the great influence he had over the European mind from Erasmus (who thought he should be called St. Cicero) to Hume (who vastly preferred him to the Bible). And whereas Augustine is a name to excite theologians, the reversion to an orthodoxy that is the end point of his intellectual quest makes for a less interesting story than the others.

The two best of an excellent sequence of essays are those on Emerson and Nietzsche, and most especially this last. Because of his strange and tormented genius, Nietzsche has been much biographied of late, and rather well; but Miller’s account is so well crafted that it illuminates him with wonderful clarity, like a sharp engraving on metal. His physical frailty, even femininity, and its contrast to his aggressively ambitious mind, are subtly sketched, and the harbingers of lunacy in his late works are made salient. Readers of this portrait will see Nietzsche from a slightly shifted perspective accordingly.

Miller gives us a fine read, and much to chew profitably upon. With luck we might get another dozen portraits from his pen; and with them, perhaps, a less pessimistic assessment of the profit philosophy offers.