The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.
A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
Powell, who died in 1998, has been castigated as a racist and condemned, not to say vilified, by the liberal left; but as Christopher Caldwell argues in his provocatively titled book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, his demographic predictions have proved remarkably accurate. In one of his speeches Powell shocked his audience by predicting that Britain’s nonwhite population of barely a million would reach 4.5 million by 2002; according to the Office of National Statistics, the size of Britain’s “ethnic minority” population actually reached 4.6 million in 2001. His predictions for the ethnic composition of major cities such as Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and Inner London were similarly on target. Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality predicts that by 2011 the population of Leicester will be 50 percent nonwhite, making it the first major British city without a white majority.
This pattern is being replicated in cities throughout Western Europe. According to Caldwell, Europe is now a “continent of migrants” with more than 10 percent of its people living outside their countries of birth. The figure includes both non-European immigrants and citizens of countries belonging to the enlarged European Union who are permitted to move freely within its territory. But it also includes a substantial body of immigrants—namely Muslims—whom Caldwell regards as posing “the most acute problems” on account of their religion (an issue never mentioned by Powell in his speeches).
The statistics are highly variable since many countries do not register the religion of their citizens. However, it is generally assumed that there are now upward of 13 million Muslims, and possibly as many as 20 million (Caldwell’s preferred figure), living in the European Union. The largest concentrations are in France with more than 5 million, Germany with around 3 million, Britain with 1.6 million, Spain with a million, and the Netherlands and Bulgaria with just under a million. Overall, the proportion of Muslims now residing in the European Union (including the indigenous Bulgarian Muslims) remains at 5 percent, a proportion twice that of the “nearly seven million American Muslims” mentioned by President Barack Obama in his Cairo University speech last June.
Editor: The fact that America is the land of Political/Moral Reinvention? Recall ‘The New Nixon’? Or is that an inconvient fact of political hacks, who must reinvent themselves in order to be in a usable catorgory? Consider the voice of Art Critic Harold Rosenberg in his ‘The Tradition of The New’ as a way of considering, in fact judging, what is actual, rather than resort to the prestidigitation’s of a political hack. The final paragraphs of Caldwells intervention, on ‘Imperial Decline’ offers ?
It is tempting to ask where in the process of imperial decline the United States now finds itself. It certainly has elements in common with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent. On the eve of World War I, Britain was dependent on Germany for industrial and even military technology — and unwilling to re-examine the free-trade system on which German supremacy had been built. By the eve of World War II, Britain was essentially bankrupt. There are parallels in America’s dependence on China today.
The skepticism about American hegemony that led Americans to turn to Mr. Trump was a healthy one. If a globalist system built on free trade, democracy promotion and mass migration is so great, Trump voters asked, then why have we had to borrow $35 trillion since we took it up? That’s a genuinely good question. Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.
Editor: The fact is that both Republicans and New Democrats, are not just amismal failures, but are bought and paid for political political minions, to the The Zionist Faschist State’s continuing Crimes! Not the speak of American Billionires whose alligence is the that Murderious State!
The bumptious Canadian Frontiersman Jordan Peterson has become the latest, in a long line of moral/political reactionaries, defending the waning power of the ubiquitous White Male, and his ebbing control over the lesser beings of the planet.
It is no surprise that he would mount a campaign against The New-New Dealers in the Democratic Party Ilhan Omar , Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Rashida Tlaib. Not to forget Tulsi Gabbard & Bernie Sanders as part of the reformer coterie. Peterson and ally defend the New Democrats i.e. Neo-Liberals who are the ‘hard-working mainstays’ of the Party of The Clinton’s i.e. Reaganites in Democratic Party Drag.
The Democrats will lose in 2020 because they will nominate Hillary Clinton or her clone, the current number of candidates is now 20? while ignoring the Reformers, that Peterson and his co-author find so insidious. While Rep. Nadler and his House allies fritter away their political capital on the Impeachment mirage.
That Mr. Peterson has gained fame, and or infamy, with his war on the self-invented ghost of ‘Marxist Post-Modernism’ ,while framing his own work in psychology in ‘Jungian Archetypes’ produces credulity of the most insidious kind in his acolytes. That leads some to believe that he is a Prophet, indeed a Visionary. Such is Mr. Peterson’s new status that he was asked to write an introduction to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago 1918-56. Stephen Kotkin voices a telling critique of Peterson, full time political/ cultural hysteric , in the TLS:
(The clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson contributes a new twelve-page foreword excoriating Marxism, which in its banalities adds nothing to Ericson’s original foreword.)
P.S. Note that Mr. Kotkin’s remark on Peterson is parenthetical!
Your last statement gives the game away, the preposterous ‘as if’ being, that the Posh Boys at the Financial Times,are callabos via an ‘apotheosis of certain Democratic outliers’ firmly places you in Trump Political territory!
Melissa Zinkin, Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason, Oxford University Press, 2024, 296pp., $99.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780197786802.
Reviewed by Anastasia Berg, University of California, Irvine
2026.04.1
In his review of Susan Neiman’s The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (1997), an early entry in the “unity of reason in Kant” scholarly genre, Paul Guyer complained that the things Neiman describes as evidence for Kant’s single conception of reason, one account which can unify the apparently disparate realms of inquiry—theory and practice—and, correspondingly, being—nature and freedom—were “really similarities in our use of reason in the various areas of our inquiry and conduct.” (Guyer, 1997, 292). With this, Guyer set a basic standard for any subsequent attempt to answer the vexing question of the unity of practical and speculative reason in Kant. The question, to be sure, is Kant’s own. The “two separate systems” of philosophy, that of nature and that of freedom, are, Kant claims in the first Critique, “ultimately… a single philosophical system” (A840/B868), and he similarly insists in the Groundwork that “in the end there can be only one and the same reason,” unified “in a common principle (4:391, cf. also 5:91). But what that common principle might be Kant never stated clearly.[1]
Melissa Zinkin’s Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason is only one of the most recent attempts to secure the common principle or function that will lay bare the unity of the Kantian conception of the faculty of reason. It joins a diverse list of entries: reason’s regulative use in positing the practical postulates of God, soul and freedom (Pauline Kleingeld, Paul Guyer); practical reason’s ultimate object: the highest good (Jens Timmermann); the categorial imperative (Onora O’Neill, Alix Cohen); the standard of healthy human understanding (Melissa Merritt); a conception of reason as ‘comprehension’, understood a capacity for a specific kind of systematic understanding (Karl Schafer) and the principle of purposiveness (Sabina Vaccarino Bremner).
Every attempt to discover the hidden key to the unity of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophies is ambitious, and Zinkin’s is no exception. Zinkin argues that what unifies reason is a principle, the principle of systematicity, which is the principle of “deep cognition and comprehension” (248). When reason judges in accordance with this principle, its judgments, theoretical and practical, have cognitive depth. (Zinkin’s argument thus, in its broad outlines, closely resembles Karl Schafer’s recent argument in Kant’s Reason: the Unity of Reason and the Limits of Comprehension in Kant, and indeed, it would have been helpful to hear more from Zinkin herself about how she views the differences between them.)
According to Zinkin’s Kant, human beings ought not only form correct judgments regarding the world, works of art and what to do but “become deep thinkers” (185), which means thinkers who strive not only to know what things are but why they are so: why horses are mammals, human beings rational and good actions good. Characterizing our mental lives as intrinsically aiming at depth is an attractive proposition, but I worry that the way Zinkin finds room for it in Kant risks depriving our so-called ordinary epistemic and moral lives of rationality itself.
The book is divided into two parts, dedicated to Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy, respectively, with about half of the first part dedicated to Kant’s reflections on aesthetic judgment in the third Critique. In its pages, Zinkin illuminatingly weighs in on a number of open questions, e.g., Kant’s seven levels of cognition (Ch.1), the moral worth of Huckleberry Finn’s refusal to turn Jim in, contrary to his conception of his duty (Ch.5), and the transition from Section I to Section II in the Groundwork (Ch. 6). Limitations of space prevent me from going into these discussions’ interesting details, and I will have to limit myself to introducing and commenting on her central, broadest claims.
Zinkin is on surest footing in her treatment of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. In the first chapter, Zinkin introduces the claim that, for Kant, reason is the faculty of deep systematic judgment, which she identifies with Kant’s account of both “comprehension” in the Jäsche Logic (9:65) and reflective judgment in the third Critique. Zinkin rightly emphasizes that Kant’s concern with reason is not merely a negative one: to deny us knowledge by means of reason of anything that is beyond the bounds of experience and restrict the use of reason to a formal logical function as the store of the rules of inference. Rather, reason emerges as “a transcendental faculty that contains the conditions for the possibility of the cognition of objects”, where the cognition in question is not that of determinative judgments about what things are but “the insight into or comprehension of why something is what it is, that is, its organizing principle” (47).
The welcome redemption of reason comes, however, at a high cost. Zinkin asserts a sharp distinction between ordinary determinative judgments of experience and reflective judgments of reason: while determinative judgments are superficial, relying on “pre-given” concepts, deep reflective judgments are ones that employ concepts I “discover for myself”. This is the distinction between making the judgment x is p, say an animal is a mammal, because “it matches a description I have read in a book” (72), and making the same judgment “by discovering for myself that it has mammary glands.”
In the second judgment, “I, myself, have acquired the reason for making this judgment” (72). We already encounter a difficulty: even if there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the way in which I know most mammals, i.e., by learning about them from others, and the way I know those few where I happen to have had the occasion to observe the presence of their mammary glands “for myself”, is it right to think of the latter, DIY concepts, as inherently less superficial than the former, which I obtained from experts via written text?
Zinkin goes so far as to claim that ordinary determinative judgments are “mechanical and automatic, determined by habit or some already-given concept” (84). And correspondingly claims that when we judge determinatively, we judge “unreflectively and automatically, as when I am influenced by prejudice” (85). This seems to fly in the face of Kant’s profound concern with securing the rationality of our judgments, the sort of rationality that makes them fit to be the basis of inferences.
By contrast, for Zinkin, deep cognition amounts to cognitive “Freedom”: “the flexibility to apply what we have learned to new contexts—to think further and more deeply about something” (80-81fn14). The strong contrast between ordinary determinative judgments and deep ones threatens to preclude the expansion from one to the other since, and this I take to be of Kant’s most basic lessons, the gap between the mechanical and automatic and the rational is not one that can be easily bridged.
It is, of course, undeniable that our conceptual mastery can expand, as when a basic ability to identify, say, a dog, by a few basic characteristics of its appearance and behavior, develops into a broader and more systematic grasp not only of its form of life but also animal life in general, the division into species and genera, the history of human’s manipulation of dog’s breeds, etc. At the same time, we want an account of this development to illuminate the possibility of this development. This is precisely what characterizing basic determinative judgments in an empiricist fashion as “mechanical” and “automatic” obscures.
Moreover, while in learning what makes dogs dogs, I am deepening my understanding; arguably, the possibility of this expansion is already implicit in my basic determinative judgment. It is, in other words, constitutive of my basic, initial determinative judgments that they can be expanded by means of my gaining further information about what makes things the things they are.
And, finally, the process by which I come to know more things about dogs than I did initially is often no different than the one by which I came to learn to make my initial, simple judgment: by means of others. If I go deep sea diving, I may first consult a quick guide to identify a new life form I have never heard of, but surely in order to expand that knowledge, I am not really required to perform any experiments myself. I may continue to rely on others, my diving instructor, the authors of my guides, as I grow my understanding of this life form and connect it, systematically, to the rest of my knowledge of marine life. This is not the contrast between “mechanical, superficial judgment” (90) and “good, deep judgment”. It is rather the transition from fully rational and adequate empirical judgment employing a rudimentary grasp of concepts to rational empirical judgments employing a better—we might say deeper—grasp of concepts.
Finally, if ordinary exercises of empirical judgment were defective in the way that Zinkin suggests, it would not only be a mystery how I go from the superficial to the deep myself, but it would be unclear how any humans have ever come to possess “comprehension”, for the mechanical prejudicial judgments would hardly be fit to perform the justificatory role that they must in the growing of our complex, systematic empirical knowledge, i.e., what Zinkin’s “comprehension” is all about.
Moving to aesthetic judgements, we find Zinkin assimilating them without remainder to the judgments of comprehension. Beautiful objects, Zinkin claims, give us pleasure because they “deepen our cognition”. The unity and coherence of the beautiful object is, however, not sui generis; it is rather “precisely the systematic unity of reason”, the unity that “makes comprehension possible” (108). Zinkin speculatively proposes that beautiful objects occasion the following cognitive process: we encounter a particular X (e.g., a human being), for which the understanding has a rule, Xs are Fs (e.g., a human being is a rational animal). Then the imagination comes up, of its own accord, with an image of something else, we know not why or wherefrom, that could serve as a possible counter example to the rule (in her example, a cyborg). This prompts a reflection on the original rule: “The imagination playfully asks, ‘Could this thing be an instance of that object (the human)?” (111)
Recall that this process of contemplating a counter example to a rule is meant to be the basis of the judgment, this X is beautiful. Indeed, Zinkin goes so far as to suggest that “for Kant genius is the ability to come up with a good counterexample” (113 fn39). But nowhere does Zinkin take up the question of how the alleged capacity of an object to provoke the imagination to come up with “counter examples” relates to any familiar conception of beauty.
For the sake of argument, let us accept this picture of what gaining further understanding of a concept entails (it is far from clear that we should: Kant’s attempt to answer what human beings are does not proceed by imagining counter examples but takes the form of, among other things, three Critiques of our mental faculties). Surely, any specimen of X, beautiful or otherwise, would do as a basis for the initiation of this kind of furthering of understanding. Why think that the beautiful horse provokes our imagination to come up with fanciful counterexamples more that an average one would?
With this, we arrive at Kant’s practical philosophy. Zinkin’s basic account here parallels the one she offers of his theoretical enterprise. The familiar distinction between performing an action from a motivation that can be traced to our self-love and performing it in recognition of a necessity that can be traced to the very form of our rational capacities is replaced with an internal distinction within moral motivation: the distinction between “superficial” moral motivation and “deep” one. Zinkin claims that this distinction is analogous to the distinction between a case where I do something inscrutable because a friend, whom I trust, instructs me to (“throw this egg outside right away!”) and a case where I understand the end that my action will promote.
In the same way, Zinkin claims, an agent can grasp their duty in an ordinary moral judgment “tentatively and mechanically” (128) or, when contemplating the end of moral action, deeply and systematically. What the end of moral action is exactly varies: one ought to act in order to “cause my will to be good” (158); “give its actions moral worth” (159); “for the sake of humanity” (159); “for the sake of its own reason” (162); to “promote my own rationality” (162) or further “my own rational nature as an end in itself” (163); for “the end of promoting one’s own rational nature ” (241); and “for the sake of humanity as an end in itself” (232). This seems not only to give up on the idea of securing the sense in which, in acting from consciousness of the moral law, we do something that is good for its own sake, but to get things backwards. We do not treat human beings as ends to cause our wills to be good, we treat them as ends because this is our duty, because this is what respect for the moral law means, because it is the right thing to do.
Now, to be sure, it is reasonable to suppose, as Zinkin does, that one is likely to be more motivated, if only because far less perplexed, where one has a sense of why one is to do what one should. And one welcome consequence of this position that should be mentioned is the idea that to respect someone’s humanity is to respect their capacity for deep thought (192). This means that what I owe another human being extends far beyond not interfering with their power to choose as they happen to see fit but includes treating others as capable of reflective thought and deep comprehension. It follows that respecting other rational agents implies a duty to provide them with the opportunities necessary to develop their cognitive capacities. Moreover, this means that it is not enough to not treat others as means in a technical sense, by obtaining bare consent by whatever means necessary; treating others as ends in themselves means engaging their capacities of understanding and judgment fully.
But it is far from clear that this distinction between the superficial moral judgments and deep ones is helpful in understanding the distinction between common moral cognition and the sort of moral cognition made possible by philosophical inquiry. In effect, Zinkin assimilates ordinary moral judgments, those I have not “thought through” in the relevant way, to actions performed merely in accordance with the law, not from recognition of duty but from empirical motives. Accordingly, and startlingly, she goes so far as to claim that ordinary moral judgments’ prescriptions are “arbitrary”, “not authoritative and cannot obligate us” (158), and therefore, acting in accordance with such moral judgments has no moral worth (196). The implications are intolerable: anyone without philosophical grasp of morality is not obligated by the moral law.
For his part, however, Kant insists on the moral adequacy and worth of common human reason and its moral cognition. In the introduction to the Groundwork, he writes that while common human reason may “not think so abstractive in a universal form”, it nevertheless has the moral principle “always before its eyes and uses [it] as the norm for its appraisals” (4:404). He goes on to insist that “all moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason, and indeed in the most common reason just as in reason that is speculative in the highest degree” (4:411).
Philosophy is not required to make moral action possible: “I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good” (4:403). We need moral philosophy not because without it, ordinary moral judgments remain without worth, but because though ordinary people are “capable of the idea of a practical pure reason”, their moral judgments “remain subjects to all sorts of corruption” (4:390). Innocence, Kant writes, is “splendid”, but “it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced” (4:405). By articulating the principle of pure practical reason vividly, practical philosophy helps us defend against these temptations. None of this is to suggest that it is prima facie unacceptable to advance a different, heterodox interpretation, but it is to say that such apparently straightforward statements must be addressed, and a case must be at least attempted to explain why we should be on better exegetical or philosophical ground in overlooking them.
Returning to Guyer’s standard: if Zinkin describes a single conception of reason, as a faculty of cognitive depth in theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgment, I remain skeptical that it is Kant’s. Even so, Zinkin articulates a valuable idea: our rationality finds expression in our ambition not only to get things right but to gain further and further insight, by means of expanding and systemizing our knowledge, whether of the world or of how we should conduct ourselves in it. I remain hopeful that it is possible to find it in Kant, and articulate it philosophically, without dismissing so much of our ordinary, pre-philosophical mental lives.
REFERENCES
Guyer, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 106, No. 2, April 1997.
[1] Kant’s works are cited according to volume and page number in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Deutsche (formerly Königlich-Preussische) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1900–19; De Gruyter, 1920–). The Critique of Pure Reason is cited according to the page numbers in the first (‘A’) and/or second (‘B’) editions. Whenever available, English translations are taken from Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, abbreviated as ‘CE.’
Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy
Benjamin Miller, Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy, Routledge, 2025, 290pp., $160.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781032960685.
Reviewed by Kirsten Welch, Baylor University
2026.05.1
Character education is having a heyday. Established in 2012 at the University of Birmingham, the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtue is just one among many organizations dedicated to furthering character education; the Centre claims to have influenced education in the UK and beyond, having formed partnerships with other character-focused organizations and individuals in over 175 countries (Harrison, 2023). The Jubilee Centre, in good company with many of its peer organizations, draws explicitly on Aristotelian foundations and centers its character education framework on concepts of human flourishing and phronesis (Jubilee Centre, 2022).
It is against this backdrop that Benjamin Miller presents the argument of his book Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy. Whereas many Aristotelians and neo-Aristotelians trot along their merry way, invoking ideas from Aristotle as they shape contemporary character education initiatives, Miller demands that these educators slow down and consider whether this path is in fact one they ought to be following. His book considers a simple but too often unasked question: Is Aristotelian character education actually compatible with liberal democracy?
Miller’s answer to this question is a firm “no”. His basic argument is as follows:
1. Either we can practice Aristotelian character education, or we can support liberalism, but we cannot do both.
2. We ought to support liberalism.
3. Therefore, we must not practice Aristotelian character education.
Against Aristotelian Character Education focuses primarily on establishing the truth of the disjunctive first premise; in other words, Miller’s main concern is to demonstrate the incompatibility of Aristotelian (and also any variety of neo-Aristotelian) character education with liberal democracy. Although, as Miller acknowledges, there are some thinkers who argue that the second premise is false (in other words, that we should give up on liberalism), he notes that most people who endorse some version of Aristotle-inspired character education also consider themselves to be staunchly in favor of liberalism. “Liberalism is the bedrock justification for civil liberties” (240) writes Miller; therefore, giving up on liberalism means giving up on “the types of personal freedom and equality that characterizes [sic] democracies around the world today” (41). This, he thinks, is not a bullet even most die-hard Aristotelians would be willing to bite.
Miller’s argument for the truth of the first premise above divides into two main steps. In the first half of the book, through some careful exegetical work focused on the Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Politics, Miller seeks to establish that, for Aristotle, being virtuous involves what he calls an “extensive knowledge requirement”. This extensive knowledge requirement takes the form of a “specifiable, detailed, and complete value theory” (43), which includes a correct conception of the best human life. Expressed negatively, the extensive knowledge requirement says that it is impossible to be virtuous without extensive knowledge of what is objectively valuable in the world, in what order those things are valuable, and why those things are valuable.
Miller offers three separate arguments in support of the extensive knowledge requirement. First, he surveys what Aristotle explicitly has to say about the knowledge needed for virtue, making a presumptive case for the truth of the extensive knowledge requirement. Second, turning to Eudemian Ethics 8.3 and Politics 2.9, he examines Aristotle’s critique of the Spartan regime in order to show that extensive ethical knowledge is required for virtue—the Spartan regime failed because the Spartans “get the order of the value hierarchy wrong” (96), which means that the Spartans are wrong about what it means to flourish as a human being. And third, Miller argues that extensive political knowledge is required for virtue because, for Aristotle, political expertise and practical wisdom are exactly the same thing: “the fully virtuous person must have extensive knowledge related to politics to be virtuous, because this knowledge is part of practical wisdom” (111).
Miller’s argument here relies on the way in which practical wisdom is an integral feature of Aristotle’s virtue theory. Miller’s interpretive argument is compelling, and in my view, one of the most significant contributions in this first part of the book is the way in which he reveals how many scholars within Aristotle studies “are at least implicitly committed” to the extensive knowledge requirement, even though they often leave this commitment unstated or even seek to deny it (79).
Miller’s main audience, however, is not other scholars of Aristotelian texts. Rather, he makes a point of identifying his intended audience as those who seek to apply Aristotelian thought to the sphere of education (4). It is to this audience that he turns in the second half of the book, addressing this question: If we’re going to do some version of Aristotelian character education, what must we necessarily import along with it? Must we also endorse the extensive knowledge requirement? Miller offers a resounding “yes!”, claiming that his main goal for the non-specialist applicators of Aristotle in his audience is “to recognize that the Aristotelian theory of virtue, even modernized versions of it, are inexorably committed to the view that Aristotelian virtues require Aristotelian values” (44). Miller argues that, if contemporary character educators want to hang onto the most attractive features of Aristotle’s theory—his focus on human flourishing and his integration of practical wisdom—then they too must endorse something along the lines of the extensive knowledge requirement for virtue.
The problem, of course, is that endorsing the extensive knowledge requirement is exactly the thing that makes Aristotelian character education incompatible with liberalism. The extensive knowledge requirement ought to make Aristotelian character education a non-starter for anyone committed to liberalism because of the way in which liberalism involves endorsement of two central features, pluralism and antipaternalism, both of which stem from and are necessary for liberalism’s commitment to equality and freedom. Pluralism, according to Miller, is “the idea that there are many different and incompatible ways of living a good human life” (152), and antipaternalism is “the idea that the government should not forcibly impose ways of valuing, believing, and living on its citizens using the argument that the government knows better than the citizens what is best for them” (152).
But, because “Aristotelian virtues require Aristotelian values”, practicing Aristotelian character education involves affirming and educating students into one and only one ultimate vision of the good life. Therefore, Aristotelian character education cannot allow for pluralism. Similarly, any attempts at this sort of character education will necessarily involve imposing ways of valuing on people that they themselves have not chosen. Therefore, Aristotelian character education violates the principle of antipaternalism. As a result, Aristotelian character education undermines equality and freedom and has no place in a liberal society.
Miller argues that even the best recent attempts to avoid these pitfalls fail to do so; he considers Kristjánsson’s (2015) ACE theory and Curren’s (2013) Aristotelian necessities theory as two influential examples. There are at least two ways in which neo-Aristotelian character educators might try to escape the strong demands of the extensive knowledge requirement. First, they might seek to “soften” the contents of Aristotelian value theory, hedging on what exactly constitutes “human flourishing”. This approach is an attempt to deny that the knowledge required for virtue must be extensive and is at the heart of the “thick but vague” strategy, which tries to present a conception of human flourishing that is thick (so that it can ground character education) but also vague (so that it can accommodate various understandings of the good life).
Miller’s contention is that gutting a conception of the good human life enough to make it compatible with liberalism requires us to give up on thinking about the good human life in terms of objective “flourishing” because of the way in which that flourishing, within an Aristotelian framework, depends on having extensive knowledge of what a good human life is. But backing away from the centrality of human flourishing undermines Aristotelian character education both by making it unfeasible (it depends on an appeal to flourishing) and by undermining one central motivation for pursuing it in the first place, which is to help people flourish as human beings.
The second way in which character educators who want to hold onto an Aristotelian approach might resist Miller’s argument is by rejecting the claim that knowledge of value is a requirement for virtue. If we need not convey knowledge of value to students in order to engage in character education, then we need not violate the principles of pluralism and antipaternalism, because we are not telling anybody what they ought to care about or believe. Miller argues that this sort of strategy likewise fails because to say that virtue does not require knowledge is to completely undermine the virtue of practical wisdom, which is a type of knowledge about value.
There are two main consequences of this strategy: first, practical wisdom is the virtue that makes all the other Aristotelian virtues possible, so throwing it out makes Aristotelian character education impossible; and second, practical wisdom is the other main feature of Aristotle’s approach that makes him so attractive, so throwing it out makes Aristotelian character education much less appealing. The upshot of the second half of the book is that Miller attacks Aristotelian character education where it hurts most: he shows how two of its most attractive features—a focus on human flourishing and the centrality of practical wisdom—are the very things that make it incompatible with liberalism and the very things that must be abandoned by anyone who is committed to supporting liberal democracy.
Miller’s argument is clear and compelling, and his book enters into a conversation that is crucial to continue within the field of character education. Against Aristotelian Character Education, nevertheless, leaves several important questions hanging. These questions do not undermine Miller’s project in this particular book—in fact, the two I bring up here are ones he notes that he does not have the time or space to address fully—but I raise them here in the spirit of continuing the conversation where Miller leaves off.
First, Miller notes early on that his argument is meant to apply only to public education (35). Private education, insofar as it is not mandatory, does not run the risk of undermining liberalism in the same way that state-sponsored public education does. Although Miller makes it clear that this is not his area of concern, it is an area that is worthy of exploration with respect to Miller’s argument, especially given that many Aristotle-inspired character education initiatives do happen in private educational contexts. Does Miller’s argument against Aristotelian character education undermine the projects of these contexts too?
Second, Miller’s suggestion at the end of the book is to shift the focus of character educators to the cultivation of “civic virtues”, especially civic virtues that “can help to mediate potential conflicts between citizens’ personal worldviews and their commitments to democratic freedom and equality” (31). Miller is sure to point out that his recommendations here are, in many senses, preliminary, and I agree that fleshing them out is a project beyond the scope of this current book. Nevertheless, I was left wondering about how exactly Miller conceives of “civic virtue” and whether such a virtue—especially one that mediates “potential conflicts” between personal worldviews and commitments to freedom and equality—could itself escape the demand of some sort of extensive knowledge requirement regarding a value hierarchy.
Against Aristotelian Character Education deserves the careful attention of both Aristotle scholars and those who seek to apply Aristotelian insights to the sphere of education. Aristotle interpreters, translators, and applicators alike should take note and seriously consider Miller’s challenge to interrogate more closely the commitments that underlie the work of character education.
REFERENCES
Curren, Randall, 2013, “A Neo-Aristotelian Account of Education, Justice, and the Human Good,” Theory and Research in Education, 11 (3): 231-249.
Live Updates: Elon Musk to Face Contentious Questions at OpenAI Trial
On his third day of testimony, Elon Musk will be cross-examined by lawyers from OpenAI and Microsoft. His answers on the stand grew testy on Wednesday.
Elon Musk will take the stand for his third day of testimony on Thursday, in a blockbuster trial that could help determine the future of companies racing to dominate artificial intelligence.
Mr. Musk has already spent two days laying out and defending his lawsuit against OpenAI, the A.I. start-up that he helped found and spent tens of millions of dollars funding. Mr. Musk has claimed that OpenAI abandoned its founding promise to remain a nonprofit and that his co-founders, including the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, took advantage of his donations.
Mr. Musk has spent hours of testimony describing himself as someone who was protecting humanity from the dangers of A.I. He painted Mr. Altman and another OpenAI co-founder and defendant, Greg Brockman, as merely hungry for money.
On Wednesday afternoon, the cross-examination became contentious as OpenAI’s lead lawyer, William Savitt, called Mr. Musk’s trustworthiness into question. Mr. Savitt tried to show that Mr. Musk behaved no differently from the OpenAI co-founders he is suing, pushing for the A.I. start-up to adopt a for-profit model. And Mr. Savitt pointed to evidence that Mr. Musk filed the lawsuit after he founded his own A.I. lab, xAI, in 2023, which has lagged OpenAI.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the case in federal court in Oakland, Calif., interrupted Mr. Savitt and Mr. Musk multiple times during the cross-examination on Wednesday.
“The classic answer to a yes-or-no question is not so simple,” Mr. Musk said. “For example, if you ask the question, ‘Will you stop beating your wife?’”
Judge Gonzalez Rogers cut him off, saying, “No, we’re not going to go there.”
The sniping is likely to continue on Thursday, when Mr. Musk faces further questioning by lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft, which is also named in the lawsuit.
Mr. Musk is seeking more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest financial partner. He is also asking the court to remove Mr. Altman from the board and to stop the start-up’s recent shift to operate as a for-profit company.
The trial could reshape the global A.I. race. OpenAI is a leading A.I. company, and a win for Mr. Musk would also be a win for its competitors, including industry giants like Google as well as young companies like Anthropic and xAI, which has now been absorbed by Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX.
A loss for Mr. Musk would mean that OpenAI, which is now valued at about $730 billion, would be free to continue its commercial course just as it appears to be heading toward one of the biggest initial public offerings in history.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Here’s what to know:
High-profile witnesses: Mr. Altman and several other key industry figures, including Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, are slated to testify later in the trial.
Trial logistics: The trial is expected to take about four weeks before a nine-person jury at the federal courthouse in Oakland. If the jury rules in Mr. Musk’s favor, Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who also oversaw a high-profile lawsuit against Apple over its control of the App Store, will decide on monetary damages and other remedies.
Musk’s social media: Judge Gonzalez Rogers on Tuesday called Mr. Musk, who assailed Mr. Altman on X before the trial, to the bench to discuss whether there should be a gag order preventing him from posting on social media about the trial. “How can we get things done without you making things worse outside the courtroom?” she asked. The judge asked him and Mr. Altman to start with a “clean slate” and “keep things to a minimum” on social media. They all agreed, and Mr. Musk has thus far mostly complied.
Meanwhile, he continues to bleed over the Mandelson affair, triggered by Epstein file details of the Labour grandee’s close relationship with the disgraced financier. The agency that vetted his appointment as envoy to Washington was also concerned about his lobbying firm’s Russian and Chinese clients. Mandelson had also resigned twice from the cabinet over probity matters.
Mandelson has been sacked, but the appointment is a bad meal that keeps repeating for Starmer. It has put his lack of judgement and curiosity, and a passive reliance on “process”, under the spotlight, and he has been found wanting.
Mandarins have told a parliamentary inquiry there was pressure from Downing Street to quickly shepherd Mandelson’s appointment through the bureaucracy so he could take up the role to coincide with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Starmer, by contrast, told the House of Commons “there was no pressure whatsoever” – a discrepancy that Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch moved to exploit by trying to refer Starmer to the privileges committee for misleading Parliament. The British media has dubbed it a “sleaze inquiry”, in that wonderfully tabloid way that made Fleet Street famous.
Just as Bill Clinton redefined “sexual relations” during his impeachment scandal, Starmer has opened the word “pressure” to interpretation.
What a civil servant might interpret as pressure from above to implement a decision, no matter what, could also be regarded as a minister’s expectation that their department be responsive and proactive.
As in Australia, the episode suggests the days of mandarins offering frank and fearless advice are well and truly over, and they are instead more intent on pleasing and appeasing their political masters.
On high alert that Tuesday’s (Wednesday AEST) vote could serve as a proxy vote of no confidence, Labour powerbrokers imposed what is known as a “three-line whip” to strongarm MPs to oppose Badenoch’s motion. The punishment for defying a three-line whip can be as harsh as expulsion from the party room.
The motion was easily defeated, but 68 MPs failed to vote with Labour, including 15 who crossed the floor to support Badenoch. Of the 53 who did not vote, some had personal reasons, but others abstained to protest against Starmer.
While the dissidents come from the hard left of the party and are known Starmer enemies, the large number of MPs who failed to fall into line will have the prime minister and his loyalists on edge.
In a party room of 403 MPs, just 80 are needed to nominate a rival candidate and force a leadership ballot. One reason Starmer has retained his job is that a consensus candidate has yet to emerge.
One civil servant who may have been a bit too frank is Christian Turner, Mandelson’s replacement as envoy.
A leaked recording obtained by the Financial Times of a Q&A Turner held with visiting British students in February has the ambassador saying it was “extraordinary” no one in the US had been held to account over their ties to Epstein, while Mandelson and “potentially the prime minister” had been dragged down by the scandal.
Turner told the students that Starmer was “on the ropes” and could be replaced after the May local elections.
In a backhanded compliment, Turner said Starmer was a “stubborn” person and unlikely to quit. We will soon find out how true that statement is.
Andrew Tillett is The Australian Financial Review’s correspondent for Europe, based in London. He was formerly foreign affairs and defence correspondent based in Canberra. Connect with Andrew on Facebook and Twitter. Email Andrew at andrew.tillett@afr.com
Editor: 10,818 words is a challenge to the reader! I recall reading Freud, Biologist of the Mind by Frank J. Sulloway in 1979, Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, Self Analysis by Karen Horney and Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud. And later I read with great interest Frederick Crews essays publiched in the New York Review of Books. It takes time for Amia Srinivasan to arrive at a viable point in her essay, after this interjection exposes her ‘methodology’ as fellow traveler!
As Jake Romm wrote in Parapraxis, a magazine founded in 2022 dedicated to psychoanalysis and left politics, ‘temporalities and geography mix and collapse in the ruins of the crematoria and emerge, reformed, from the barrel of a gun in Gaza.’
Editor: Amia Srinivasan declares the fact that ‘the unconscious never left the scene’
In fact, the unconscious never left the scene. Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of irrationalism that seems to be taking hold everywhere. No purely materialist or realist or folk psychological analysis seems to suffice. We need to go beyond talk of parties and platforms; of beliefs, values and identitarian affiliations; of class, jobs, wages and exploitation. We need to speak of phantasies and their repression, the libido and the death-drive, disavowal and displacement, trauma and its disfiguring aftermath. We need to speak of vulnerability: not just the sort that arises asymmetrically from poverty and racism and sexism; but the universal infantile vulnerability that haunts us all – including (and perhaps especially) the most powerful.
To what end? Despite more than a century of debate about the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de Beauvoir complained, seems to assume precisely what’s to be explained.) But can we doubt that there is more, much more, to our individual and collective lives than that of which we are consciously aware? Do we doubt that each of us encounters reality not directly, but through the thicket of our individual psychic realities, with their stubborn frames and secret desires, the vast sediment of our past histories? That, to put it mundanely but not inaccurately, each of us brings with us a helluva lotta baggage?
The interesting question to my mind is not whether there is truth in psychoanalysis, but whether its truth will set us free. This might seem an odd question for a philosopher to ask. Philosophers tend to be preoccupied with questions of truth and knowledge – and in the specific case of psychoanalysis, whether it deserves the status, as Freud thought it did and Karl Popper thought it absolutely did not, of a science. But insofar as a philosopher, or anyone, is interested in politics – interested, that is, not just in describing the world but changing it – the real question is whether psychoanalysis can liberate us, not just from the violent divisions of our individual psyches, but from the violent divisions and resulting despair of our political moment.
Editor: Amia Srinivasan forgets that the asention of Freud was fraught with problems of his own making: Cocaine papers Hardcover – January 1, 1974 by Sigmund Freud (Author), Robert Byck (Editor), Anna Freud (Contributor) and the time it took to arrive at a realized conceptualization of what Psychoanalysis might be?
There is reason for doubt. Psychoanalysis was born out of a collective retreat from politics on the part of the Viennese intelligentsia. In the 1880s, Austrian liberal hegemony, with its confident ideology of Enlightenment reason and social progress, was threatened by the emergence of new mass parties that channelled various anti-liberal currents – Christian, antisemitic, socialist and nationalist. In 1895, the electorate in Vienna voted for Karl Lueger, a populist antisemite and reactionary Catholic, as mayor. Emperor Franz Joseph, disliking Lueger’s antisemitism, refused to ratify his election; Freud, a liberal and a Jew, smoked a cigar in celebration. But just two years later, in 1897, the emperor bowed to the popular will, and Lueger became mayor, bringing the liberal era to a close. Describing the dying days of 19th-century Austria, the historian Carl Schorske writes: ‘Anxiety, impotence, a heightened awareness of the brutality of social existence … these features assumed new centrality in a social climate where the creed of liberalism was being shattered by events.’
Psychoanalysis, then, was born of a moment not dissimilar to our own: a moment when the image of the human as a rational animal seemed fragile if not preposterous, and the progressive liberalism founded on that image was revealed to be dangerously naive. In turning inwards to the drama of the human psyche, Freud was part of an aestheticised culture of feeling and self-cultivation that resulted from political paralysis. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, what mattered was not objective reality but one’s affective response to it. Freud took this focus on inner feeling and instinct, synthesised it with the scientific rationalism of mid-century liberalism, and created in psychoanalysis a theory that at once offered a powerful reckoning with human irrationalism and a welcome refuge from its terrifying political manifestations.
As Schorske observes, Freud would put psychoanalysis to use in explaining away his own sense of political guilt. In his pivotal work of 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reports one of his own dreams – he calls it a ‘revolutionary phantasy’ – in which he confronts an aristocratic Austrian statesman only to frantically flee the scene. The dream Freud rediscovers the statesman at a train station, now transfigured into Freud’s blind and dying father, whom Freud must help to piss into a urinal. On display in the dream is Freud’s guilt at having abandoned his youthful ambition to enter politics – to confront and conquer the old, antisemitic world represented by the aristocrat with the secular, liberal values that his father venerated. But Freud reads the dream as merely the phantastic fulfilment of his wish to take revenge on an overbearing father; a father who had once suggested that the young Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything. On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide. The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of Freud’s mature theory, thus promised to acquit an entire generation of politically disengaged sons from the accusations of their fathers.
Headline:Speaker has Keir Starmer snookered with privileges committee vote
Sub-Headline: Sir Lindsay Hoyle was in jovial mood, bantering about the baize action at the Crucible — then left the prime minister in need of a trick shot or two
Over recent weeks, the prime minister’s ever-more absurd refusal to answer questions put to him at prime minister’s questions has built to a rolling boil. The Speaker has received several highly abusive letters from members of the public blaming him for not making Starmer do better. Terse exchanges between the pair of them at the end of the sessions have become a regular occurrence. There’s not actually much the Speaker can do about it, but the public don’t necessarily know that. Though he can, of course, seek redress in more creative ways.
It was his duty as a “gatekeeper”, he said, to allow the House to decide. Specifically, it will decide on whether Starmer has been knowingly truthful at all times, to the House of Commons, especially in regard to a claim made at last week’s prime minister’s questions, that “no pressure existed whatsoever” on the Foreign Office to rush through Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the United States. Sir Olly Robbins, the sacked head of the FCDO, very much took a different view.
Team Starmer will now have to fight extremely hard to ensure the bucket doesn’t become airborne, but it can do nothing about the smell, which is already everywhere. Whatever the outcome, on Tuesday the Commons will debate whether or not Starmer has knowingly misled it — and while it does so, the foreign affairs select committee will hear from his sacked chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and the former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Philip Barton, will tell them what he knew about Mandelson. All three will be brutal.
Even Boris Johnson, who also had a large majority, didn’t try to prevent his MPs from referring him to the privileges committee. Not merely because it would have been too outrageous but it would have asked too much of them and he knew that many of them simply wouldn’t have gone along with it. Starmer, we are told, is considering enforcing a three-line whip on his MPs to oppose the motion. For the many who have already had more than enough of him, that might push them past the point of no return.
Not that long ago, Starmer was considered a lucky politician. Even after Johnson’s various Covid outrages, by the autumn of 2022 he was miles ahead in the polls and widely considered unstoppable. Then along came partygate, and the rest was highly poisonous history to which Starmer was meant to be the antidote.
That he now finds himself in the same invidious position is almost more damaging to him than it was to Johnson. He has so much further to fall.
(Courts minister Sarah Sackman says drug dealers and career criminals are ‘laughing in the dock’ knowing cases can take years to come to trial. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian)
Criminals will be stopped from “gaming the system” by choosing trial by jury in order to increase the chances of proceedings collapsing, the courts minister has said, promising to enact radical changes to limit jury trials by the next election.
Drug dealers and career criminals were “laughing in the dock” knowing cases can take years to come to trial, Sarah Sackman said, while warning that inaction would be a road to “chaos and ruin”.
Ministers will legislate to remove the right to trial by jury for thousands of cases in one of the biggest and most controversial overhauls of the justice system in England and Wales in generations – promising the changes will significantly shrink the court backlog by 2029.
The Ministry of Justice is braced for a backlash from barristers and the judiciary as it presses ahead with the measures to tackle a backlog of nearly 80,000 cases, which will create a proposed new judge-only division of the crown court to hear some cases.
Sackman said the “stakes are incredibly high” as she prepared to announce early next month that vast numbers of cases will now be heard by judges and magistrates rather than juries, a response to recommendations in a review by Sir Brian Leveson.
Speaking at Wood Green crown court, Sackman said victims of severe sexual assault were routinely told it could take four years for their cases to come to court.
On the morning she spoke to the Guardian, the minister watched a bail hearing for a case involving severe sexual assault, one unlikely to come to a full trial until 2028. Some of the offences in the case, including strangulation, beating and nonconsensual sexual images, took place as far back as 2020.
“I can’t think of a greater responsibility in government than ensuring that our justice system works,” she said. “The sense of duty that I feel is enormous.”
Trial by jury: a democratic right we cannot afford to lose
December 8, 2025
Sian Darlington
The crisis in the criminal courts
England and Wales’ criminal justice system is in crisis. The backlog of unresolved Crown Court cases has reached over 78,000, a record high. To put this in perspective, the Crown Court typically processes between 100,000 and 120,000 cases annually, of which around 30/40% proceed to full trial.
In 2024, under 31,000 Crown Court trials were completed. In the period from April to June 2025, the average wait time from a defendant entering a guilty plea to case completion was 13 months. When factoring in the duration of investigations, it’s unsurprising that many cases take years to reach a conclusion. New cases continue to pile up. As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied.
Proposed reforms to jury trials
To address the backlog, Justice Secretary David Lammy has announced plans to limit the right to a trial by jury in England and Wales. Under these proposals, jury trials would be abolished for defendants facing custodial sentences of three years or less. Only those accused of serious offences such as rape, murder, or manslaughter, or cases that meet a specific “public-interest” test, would retain the right to a jury trial.
These recommendations stem from a review of criminal courts conducted by former judge Sir Brian Leveson in July, commissioned due to the significant backlog. The government claims that removing the jury aspect from trials could cut trial times by around 20%.
Historical and constitutional importance of jury trials
The proposed change has sparked controversy owing to historical and constitutional significance. The principle of trial by jury dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215, which declared that no free man could be punished except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. At the Old Bailey, a marble plaque commemorates Bushel’s case of 1670, in which a jury refused to convict two Quakers of unlawful assembly, despite judicial pressure and being locked up without food or water. This case helped establish the right of juries to reach verdicts according to their convictions and confirmed that jurors could not be punished for their decisions. In short, juries safeguard against arbitrary rule, ensure community participation and provide a check on the state’s power.
The risks of judge-only trials
Eliminating jury trials removes a core safeguard from the criminal justice system, presenting several dangers:
Loss of independent public judgment. Without a jury, all fact-finding is performed by a judge, increasing the risk of unchecked institutional bias and decisions that fail to reflect community standards. It is perhaps unsurprising that, historically, the abolition of jury trials has been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.
Increased risk of wrongful conviction. Blackstone’s maxim, “better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent suffer,” underscores the importance of multiple perspectives and group deliberation in preventing individual mistakes. In judge-only trials, a single error or assumption could determine the outcome.
Reduced public confidence. Jury trials visibly demonstrate that justice is delivered by the people. Juries bring everyday reasoning and common sense into the process. Judges, relying on evidential and legal interpretation, may miss the human context and social realities of a situation.
Increased risk of discriminatory outcomes. Diverse juries help dilute individual bias. A single judge, whilst well-intentioned, may unconsciously reflect their own bias. Research suggests that limiting jury trials disproportionately impacts black, Asian, and minority ethnic people, both defendants and victims, where jury trials may be a glimmer of hope in a system where ethnic minorities are over-represented. Lammy’s own 2017 review of racial inequality in the justice system emphasised the importance of juries in making the system more legitimate particularly for minority groups: “Juries deliberate as a group through open discussion. This both deters and exposes prejudice or unintended bias: judgements must be justified to others”. The judiciary in England and Wales is neither sufficiently diverse nor representative. In 2025, while black, Asian, and minority ethnic people make up around 22% of the population, they make up only 11% of court judges.
In short, the implementation of judge only trials remove a key democratic safeguard against error, abuse and unfairness.
Underlying causes of the backlog
There is also doubt about whether the proposed reforms will achieve their intended goal of reducing waiting times. The backlog is not simply due to the suspension of trials during the Covid-19 pandemic or reduced operations due to social distancing. Rather, it is the result of years of chronic underfunding. Since 2010, the criminal justice system has faced deep budget cuts which have resulted in fewer judges, court staff, and legal aid practitioners, the closure or sale of court buildings, reduced sitting days, and less investment in digital systems. Meanwhile, the number of cases has risen, and technological advancements have made cases more complex and resource-intensive, leading to longer trials.
To put it simply, demand has gone up, capacity has gone down, and the system has no spare resilience.
Potential impact of the proposed changes
Because jury trials require more time, for selecting jurors, longer deliberations, and more procedural steps. Removing juries from certain cases may speed up proceedings. Theoretically, this could clear simpler or less resource-intensive cases more quickly. However, it is unlikely to be sufficient and may even prove counterproductive. The problems stretch far beyond the court system. Delays in pre-trial procedures, poor logistics (such as prisoner transport issues), the increased complexity of serious cases due to technological advances, and staff shortages across the entire system, police, prosecution, defence, and probation. Eliminating juries does not address these deeper structural problems. Transferring cases to judge-only trials could simply shift the bottleneck to lower and mid severity cases, rather than resolve it.
Lammy’s plans include a major increase in court capacity, with an additional 1,250 sitting days. However, increasing the number of sitting days is not in and of itself a solution. There are already shortages of judges and lawyers to staff the Crown Court, with a shrinking pool of criminal justice practitioners.
There is also a risk that increased conviction rates from judge-only trials could put further strain on the already overcrowded prison system, especially if the volume of convictions rises. Solutions must also address pressures on the prison system.
Criticism and alternative solutions
Legal bosies and politicians widely oppose the reforms. The Bar Council cautions that removing the right to a jury trial could exacerbate the crisis in the criminal justice system. According to Bar Council Chair Barbara Mills KC: “The current system is capable of working if sufficiently resourced. Funding for justice should be in line with the demands made of the system”.
Mark Evans, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, has described the proposals as an “extreme measure” that go “far beyond” Leveson’s recommendations, stating: “This is a fundamental change to how our criminal justice system operates and it goes too far”.
A survey of Criminal Bar Association members found that 88.5% oppose the creation of new “swift courts.” Opposition extends beyond legal professionals; Labour MP Karl Turner labelled the proposals “undemocratic” and misleading, and six Labour MPs, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, have signed a Commons motion against them.
A 2024 survey of 1,000 members of the public found that 75% believe the UK should retain jury trials. The majority considered jury trials to be fair (51%) and trustworthy (60%), and felt that more diverse juries are fairer (61%), with half believing juries should reflect the communities they serve.
Alternative solutions to ease the backlog have been suggested, such as diversion programmes for first-time, low-level offenders, who would, after admitting responsibility, avoid trial or prison and instead pay compensation, engage with victims, undergo rehabilitation, behaviour management, or training. Other recommendations include allowing judges to sit as many days as they are available, offering up to one third credit for early guilty pleas, extending District Judges’ sentencing powers to two years’ imprisonment, and greater use of cautions for low-level offences.
Conclusion
The right to a jury trial is not a luxury to be sacrificed for expediency. Dismantling it risks undermining the principles of justice, fairness and public confidence which are central to a democratic society. There is a crisis in our criminal courts that is real and that is urgent. The solution lies not in stripping away democracy, but in adequately funding a system that has been allowed to decay through years of neglect. The widespread opposition from those who work daily within the system should not be disregarded. While justice delayed is deeply troubling, it is far preferable to justice denied through a fundamentally weakened system. There are alternative measures available to address the backlog without sacrificing the constitutional safeguards that have protected British liberty for over eight hundred years.
Editor: Mr. Robert Colvile does not confront the fact British Political Dissidents, who await trial for Political Speech, against the Zionist Faschist States Genocide! Starmer is the front man for this exercise of jurisprudential chicanery. Colevile’s strategy is to muddy the waters just enough to make it worth his time, to chatter at lenkth, and ignight the animus of his auidence?
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