Thu 21 Mar 2019 17.58 GMT
Last modified on Thu 21 Mar 2019 22.18 GMT
The philosopher Mary Warnock, who has died aged 94, is most remembered for chairing the committee of inquiry into human fertilisation that laid down guidelines on embryo research and surrogate motherhood. She was never “a real blood-and-bones philosopher”, she said, or “much good” at the subject, and her books she principally wrote for money.
She recalled her dismay at the insistence by her fellow philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe that there should be at least one philosophical problem that she found agonising. She did not. Brisk, shrewd and energetic in all she did, she considered philosophy useful in analysing the practical issues debated on the numerous committees and commissions she chaired or sat on.
The books ran to more than 20, of which several were on education. She served as headteacher of Oxford high school (1996-72), and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge (1985-91).
A consummate chair, she was skilled at giving people rein in discussion (“there was no dragooning”), knowing exactly how long to let the members debate an issue and when to insist that the time had come to reach a conclusion. She also knew when to postpone troublesome issues so that, as one of the demurrers on the fertilisation report conceded: “When you came back you’d be surprised at how far the block had melted away.”
The human fertilisation committee (1982-84) was one on which feelings ran high, above all on the issues of embryo research and surrogate motherhood. Warnock believed that morality involves the engagement of feeling and that those dealing with public morality should respect ordinary people’s moral intuitions. She somehow managed more or less to satisfy the conflicting claims of science and religion.
It was finally decided that embryos under 14 days could be used for research – only at this stage does a pre-embryo develop the “primitive streak”, from which will emerge one baby, or identical twins, with differentiated cells – and that surrogate motherhood agencies should be made illegal. The paternity of a child born by donor insemination was automatically to be that of its mother’s husband, debarring the biological father from rights and duties.
There were also recommend ations covering the anonymity of sperm donors, how long frozen embryos could be stored and the inheritance rights of an embryo not yet in the womb when its father died. To enforce these proposed laws it was recommended that a new licensing body would be set up and that a statutory licensing authority was to supervise embryo research experiments and inspect in vitro fertilisation clinics.
The report’s recommendations, although opposed by “pro-life” campaigners, became law in the Human Fertility and Embryology Act 1990, which was applauded for its “sensible balance” and judicious catering for possible eventualities, although Warnock later regretted that they could not have foreseen and made provision for cases like that of Diane Blood, in which a husband does not explicitly authorise the use of his sperm before dying.
It was largely for her contribution in this area that Warnock was made a DBE in 1984 and the following year a life peer, sitting as a crossbencher.
Born in Winchester, Hampshire, Mary was the daughter of Archibald Wilson, a housemaster at Winchester college who had died two months after her conception, and his wife, Ethel (nee Schuster), the daughter of a Jewish banker. She was the youngest girl in a household dominated by a much-loved nanny and her distantly impressive mother.
That she grew up in this cultured matriarchy was probably conducive to the “inner self-assurance” which, she self-deprecatingly confessed, made her consider herself more musical, philosophical and well read than her fellow pupils at St Swithun’s school in the city.
While studying classics after obtaining a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, she was sexually harassed by one of her teachers, Eduard Fraenkel, but she brusquely dubbed this a price worth paying for his inspirational teaching, and later made him the subject of an article on the best teacher she had ever had.
Warnock temporarily left Oxford in 1942, having signed up for the army, but, rather than going to Bletchley Park, her war work came to consist of teaching for two years at Sherborne school, Dorset. Returning to the university in 1946, she got a first in her finals, then did a BPhil in only one year. In 1949, she married Geoffrey Warnock, a fellow of Magdalen College, and became a fellow and tutor at St Hugh’s.
Oxford in the 1950s and 60s, she later wrote, was the philosophical centre of the world, and the Warnocks were soon friends with eminent philosophers including Isaiah Berlin, Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampshire and David Pears, as well the writers Kingsley Amis and David Cecil. Yet, with her characteristic hurried, eager gait, Mary was also constantly rushing back from St Hugh’s to clean the house, cook “proper meals”, and look after the children (there were five eventually). Like any conventional 50s housewife, she even got Housewife magazine.
As a woman she was debarred from Oxford’s Saturday morning meeting of faculty philosophers. And although she was selected to form part of a group of philosophers (including her husband) who debated philosophical issues on the Third Programme, and did so for several years, she was, she said, cast as “the goofy woman” whose role was to help the audience by asking that things be explained again, or to make comments such as: “But surely there must be something deeper?”
Despite this experience, she was always impatient with feminism, which she considered self-important. Far from resenting her housewifely role, she merely found it another outlet for her boundless energy, and loved, for as long as that lasted, invariably being the token woman.
In the late 50s, she was asked to contribute the volume on contemporary ethics to the Oxford University Press series known as Home University Library. Bertrand Russell had written Problems of Philosophy for them, but Warnock was characteristically diffident about her commission. Before being offered to her, she later wrote, it had been refused by two other people, also women. Issues in moral philosophy were “soft options for the girls”.
When the book was practically completed, she had a phone call from JL Austin, a leading Oxford philosopher connected to OUP, to tell her that “there was this thing called existentialism, and this chap called Sartre”, and perhaps there should be a chapter on them.
So, during a cold and gusty summer, she sat on a North Yorkshire beach, while her children dammed the stream, wrestling with L’Être and le Néant (which had not yet been translated from the original French as Being and Nothingness), fascinated by the way it philosophised about love, sex, obesity, cooking and the domestic; repelled by its pretentiousness, verbosity and pornography.
The Existentialist, she later wrote, tends to “provoke in his readers the exasperated desire to rewrite what he says in plain language”. This is what she did in three books – The Philosophy of Sartre (1963), Existentialist Ethics (1966) and Existentialism (1970). “If choosing freely for oneself is the highest value,” she wrote in Existentialist Ethics, then “the free choice to wear red socks is as valuable as the free choice to murder one’s father or sacrifice oneself for one’s friend. Such a belief is ridiculous.”
For some years she was almost the only person in Oxford supervising graduate students working on Sartre or other continental philosophers. She probably relished the incongruity by which Sartre, at the time a Maoist and always so terribly keen to épater the bourgeois, should (apart from Iris Murdoch’s earlier book) have been introduced to the English by someone who loved Trollope and described herself as a natural Tory.
As well as her teaching, writing and child-rearing, Warnock became involved with the Oxfordshire local education authority and took over management of music in the county by inventing a music sub-committee and chairing it.
In 1966 she became headteacher of Oxford high school. She was typically enthusiastic and energetic, making friends with many of the parents, taking up the French horn because the school orchestra was low on brass, and racing home every evening in time to give her children their supper.
In 1972 she resigned the headship because, her husband having been elected principal of Hertford, there was a lot of redecorating and entertaining to do in the Hertford Lodgings, and also because she wanted to write a book on the imagination. She became a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, was a vociferous member of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (1973-81), wrote Imagination (1976) and three books on education in the late 70s, and from 1974 to 1978 chaired a committee of inquiry to debate the rights to education of what were then called “handicapped” children.
For all her down-to-earth brusqueness, Warnock was shocked when fellow members of this committee dubbed severely disabled children “vegetables”. She much preferred, despite her atheism, the metaphor that they were God’s children (although Telegraph journalists continually dubbed her a Utilitarian, her moral position was far more nuanced).
Spontaneously there had arisen in her mind the image of a single road down which all children walked, reaching different stages along it. One of the recommendations of the final report was that a “continuum of need” should be recognised, so that, rather than being lumped in different and defeatist categories, such as “educationally subnormal”, disabled children should instead be assessed according to their specific educational needs, which often cut across these categories, and placed in ordinary schools, which should make special provision.
Although these and other recommendations were enshrined in the Education Act 1981, Margaret Thatcher’s cuts meant that many of Warnock’s recommendations were not financed, and therefore fruitless. She urged alternative methods of funding and raged at the absurdity of imposing a market philosophy on the education of “the really helpless”.
Warnock was always game for education herself. What she enjoyed was learning new things from experts – chemistry and economics for the royal commission on environmental pollution (1979-84), biology on the advisory committee on animal experiments (1979-85) and then human fertilisation. She firmly believed that philosophers were valuable in such situations precisely because they did not have their own specialism and could diagnose the unexamined assumptions of specialists.
Although she had, as a 15-year-old, recognised her Tory instincts, during the second world war she increasingly came to feel that she should not indulge them, and recorded that “by 1945 I had talked myself pretty thoroughly round to the left”.
In the 60s, however, she began to feel a dissonance between theory and practice – belonging to a party that opposed direct grant schools while being head of one of them – and she left her local Labour party. She and her husband both lapsed back into Conservatism, but in the 80s were driven out of it by Thatcherism. Throughout the 80s and 90s she inveighed against Tory education policy in her column in the Times Educational Supplement, as well as in numerous articles and a Counterblast pamphlet, Universities: Knowing Our Minds.
Aside from what she saw as Thatcher’s “vendetta” against teachers and academics, Warnock also had a personal distaste for the Tory leader, whose rudeness she had encountered at an IBA lunch, and whose philistine style was so much at odds with her own careless patrician grace. While entertaining a journalist, she gave an aptly snobbish assessment of Thatcher’s “odious suburban gentility”, and how she “epitomised the worst of the lower middle class”, and he put it into print.
However, Warnock was probably hated as much by the left as by the right – she was impartial in her criticism, and in various books and articles on education excoriated the doctrinaire “child-centred” neo-Rousseauism that had provoked the Thatcherite backlash, criticised comprehensive practices, upheld educational selection and (in her 1985 Dimbleby Lecture, Teacher Teach Thyself) demanded reform in teacher training and condemned teachers’ strikes.
In general she was bravely forthright in her passionate defence of education, but she reproached herself and other academics for not opposing, for fear of being called elitist, the giving of university status to polytechnics in the 1993 Education Act.
At the age of 60, Warnock was appointed Mistress of Girton, but she felt guilty for not being on hand for her husband’s final stint as Oxford’s vice-chancellor. She retired six years later, and she and Geoffrey moved to a village near Marlborough, Wiltshire, where they could indulge their love of gardening. Yet while her husband just “footled around” in his retirement, she never stopped serving on education and medical ethics committees, and writing – The Uses of Philosophy (1992), Imagination and Time (1994) and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics (1998). She also edited Women Philosophers (1996) and in 1993 chaired an appraisal of the Royal Opera House.
After Geoffrey died in 1995, she described herself as “for a while … pretty dotty”, but soon became embroiled in arguments on euthanasia. In the debate in the Lords over legalising embryo research, Warnock at first supported the “pro-lifers” and bishops in opposing the extension of her Fertilisation Act to permit stem cell research and therapeutic cloning.
In principle she supported it, but felt that to introduce an unamendable order (which abrogates the customary requirement of three readings) was too precipitate to accommodate the public’s moral qualms. Ultimately Lord Walton appointed a select committee, which postponed the order, and she voted with his amendment.
In 2017 she was appointed CH. Her final book was A Critical Reflection on Ownership (2015). Last year she wrote for the Guardian on the potential of gene editing.
Unlike so many philosophers, Warnock was exceptionally clear-sighted about her own failings. At school she had begun to monitor herself for insincerity, arrogance and missing the requisite standards of goodness in thought, word and deed.
“Nothing was or ever could be truly intolerable,” she decided, “except the recognition that one had behaved badly in some serious, non-trivial matter.” This certainty, and her courage, cleverness and indefatigable energy, set her course through life.
She leaves her children Kitty, Felix, James and Boz (Maria); another daughter, Fanny, predeceased her.
• Helen Mary Warnock, philosopher, born 14 April 1924; died 20 March 2019
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/21/lady-warnock-obituary
