Warnock believed that morality involves the engagement of feeling and that those dealing with public morality should respect ordinary people’s moral intuitions. Before being offered to her, she later wrote, it had been refused by two other people, also women. The Existentialist, she later wrote, tends to “provoke in his readers the exasperated desire to rewrite what he says in plain language”. 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. Unlike so many philosophers, Warnock was exceptionally clear-sighted about her own failings.

Source: The Guardian March 21, 2019 17:58 UTC