RAMSEY SOCIETY

There were several clear themes pervading this year’s Ramsey Soc. papers: firstly, the quality of the papers, and of the discussions they generated, was at least as high as any I can remember; secondly, it was impossible not to see the currency – and, indeed, prescience – of the topics on which papers focused, and so how engaged the members of the Society are with the changing world in which they live. Lastly, and just as edifyingly, it was striking how independently the Society’s members worked, and how little input they required from teachers in the preparation and development of their papers. Any random selection of this year’s papers would be worthy of gracing the pagers of the Reptonian, but the following gives a flavour of the quality we enjoyed this year.

Manav C and Christina M explored the duality of technology and AI. Christina focused on their utility to Medicine – the facility to search multiple data-sources at speed, to diagnose conditions; the precision with which robotic surgery can operate; the ability to produce a replacement-heart via 3D-printing. She also considered the downsides: AI’s lack of a “bedside manner”; the potential creation of a two-tier healthcare system, with only a few able to afford the most up-to-date services; and the risk to data-protection (and the healthcare provision itself) posed by cyber-attacks.

Manav kicked off with the revolutionary Neuralink chip, inserted into human brains, which could be a gamechanger for those suffering from dementia, as well as its more obvious recreational uses. This immediately led into a discussion of the control and regulation of such technologies, and the lack of accountability of those companies that promote and provide them. Manav also considered to what extent technology’s advances – eg the ability to go to Paris for lunch – are necessary or desirable: are there limits within ourselves to how efficiently and immediately we want technology to serve our needs? What did the pandemic teach us about these ceilings? With considerable foresight, Manav demonstrated that the future of technology is not necessarily determined by design, but by human nature itself: is there a human need for the Metaverse? What does the fact of online abuse and virtual assaults tell us about humanity? Can these ever be policed effectively?

Sophie D, Joe J and Max H all shone a spotlight on Sportswashing and asked some very searching, and, at times, admirably discomfiting questions: should athletes from nations with human-rights abuses be banned from competing internationally? Should the British government ban such regimes from investing in British sports franchises? Is the UK itself on sufficiently dry moral high-ground to comment on other nations’ practices? What is the best way to effect change in other countries? Boycotts? Setting criteria for inclusion in the international sporting community? Using sports staining to pressurise them? What approach is fair to the athletes who train for years in order to compete? Is there a qualitative difference between our treatment of one-off events, such as a World Cup or Grand Prix, and a franchise competing throughout the year? Does realpolitik come into play at all? These papers typified what are often the most engaging Ramsey papers, in that they perhaps asked more questions than they answered, but they also honed our understanding of the parameters of these questions and forced us to reconsider our own values and perceptions.

Martha B, using the perspective accorded by a few years, examined the vectors for Brexit in one of the most thoroughly-researched papers of recent times, and blew away some cobwebs for those of us who actually lived through this recent history. With characteristic intellectual originality, rigour and courage, she stepped nimbly from an apostasy of the orthodoxy on Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with Europe to the lessons about the media learnt by Tony Blair at the 1992 election, the significance of his landslide victory in 1997 in allowing him so swiftly to sign up to the Maastricht Social Chapter, thence to his alignment with the US, rather than Europe, on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and finally to his decision not to hold a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon. Martha’s paper was suffused with independence and clarity of thought, enlightening her audience with her scholarly contextualisation and refusal to accept received judgements uncritically.

A paradigm of this interrogation of ideas was achieved by Louis A’s paper on Justice, which married a philosophical overview of Distributive and Corrective Theories of Justice to their practical applications, and Justice’s role within Law and Politics. Louis introduced us to the conceptions of Justice proposed by Bentham and Rawls, Isaiah Berlin’s Positive and Negative Liberties, the distinction between equity and equality, and the question of whether Justice should be a function of merit or need. He then explored the ramifications of these conceptions to the practical application of justice in the Law, through the prism of the Kyle Rittenhouse case. This fecund and heated discussion segued neatly onto considerations of the questions raised by the dynamics of the US Supreme Court – to what extent should a country’s laws reflect public opinion? Should these be in the hands of a (very) few unelected individuals? Should there be limits to their terms?

In many ways, Gonzalo M’s paper, on Climate Change, Denialism and Conspiracy Theories, drilled down to the core of what, if anything, Ramsey Soc. is for: finding a way to navigate an increasingly post-truth world, and honing the skills necessary to identify wilful fallacies, flaws in argumentation, and basic hypocrisies. We were, therefore, exposed to the frightening weaponisation of rhetoric and (often against itself) science. Gonzalo was, however, not content to stay on such relatively uncontroversial ground: he flipped the discussion to force us to confront our own shortcomings and biases: our instinctive desire to avoid any potential dissonant grain of sand in our cognitive oyster-shell; our confirmation biases; our desire for “truths” that are practically convenient for us; or simply our faith in logic itself, susceptible as it is to manipulation and the veneer of infallibility. I have rarely left a Ramsey meeting with more to disentangle and contemplate!

In all, then, this can only be viewed as a vintage year for Ramsey Soc., and one that will live long in the memory. These fine young minds will light up the university seminars fortunate enough to welcome them in the coming years, and have proven that they are more than a match for the challenges, both intellectual and practical, for the lives on which they are embarking.

CSD