The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

36 The United Kingdom and Human Rights Thinking
persons, sustained by the thought of persons and
revised (or even destroyed) by the thought of
persons."
Prime Minister Thatcher's Court philosopher may well
have told her that Barker also emphasised that organisations
and societies were "never persons themselves, in
the sense in which individuals are persons." Speaking
philosophically, society is not a material "thing" and is
certainly not something tangible. Anyone who says
"there is no such thing as society" is not thereby
advocating unsympathetic social policies towards the
dwellers of run-down industrial centres or the groups of
homeless people sleeping on inner city streets. Their
support or otherwise for such policies must be a separate
matter for empirical assessment. Equally, insistence on
individual personal responsibility does not imply failure
to recognise that group behaviour, family experience and
living conditions affect attitudes and behaviour of
offenders, including football fans, vandals, petty thieves,
drop-outs and muggers. Perhaps the conclusion politicians
should draw is that it is dangerous to use
philosophical language to the lay public, because critics
are often less than clever by half. Press commentators
are not cognisant of theories of corporate and juristic
personality, which, while positing fictional personality,
also take the philosophical view that only individuals can
be responsible moral agents and that it is essential to
prevent individuals avoiding their personal responsibility
for advising, supporting or opposing action by notionally
offloading this onto a transcendent being. The result of
use of philosophical turns of phrase is likely to be
misinterpretation and the creation of new myths, in turn
affecting the conduct of their audiences.
I hope that my own use of philosophical language and
concepts has not obscured the crucial contribution