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Interview

Sir Stuart Hampshire

Sir Stuart Hampshire has a new theory of justice based on the inevitability of conflict and on the importance of hearing the other side. Paul Sheehy asked him about his struggles with justice.

In his long career as an academic philosopher in Oxford, Princeton and London, Stuart Hampshire has had a major impact on moral philosophy and philosophy of mind. In his latest book, Justice is Conflict (Duckworth 1999), he turns again to political philosophy and develops the themes of his 1997 Tanner Lectures. Arguing that conflict is an inevitable and perennial feature of both our inner and social lives, he eschews the search for principles to regulate the political domain, principles which all reasonable and rational persons ought to endorse. He thinks it unlikely that any consensus on such principles can be found, given that the most profound conflicts include those about our conceptions of the Good and of how to settle questions of substantive value. Justice, says Hampshire, does not follow from the application of principles to establish harmony within the state, or to calibrate the fair distribution of goods, or from powers to impose order.

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