Peter Brian Barry, "George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Jan 29, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Peter Brian Barry, a Philosophy Professor and ethicist, sheds light on George Orwell's profound philosophical insights. He challenges the conventional view of Orwell as anti-philosophical, revealing his deep commitments to equality, free will, and moral decency. Barry explores Orwell's critiques of social class and his anti-consequentialist stance, emphasizing the importance of personal relationships. The conversation enriches our understanding of Orwell's relevance today, particularly in discussions of justice and political morality.

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INSIGHT

Orwell's Philosophical Depth

Dr. Barry, a philosophy professor, noticed philosophical themes throughout Orwell's work.
He decided to write a book applying philosophical concepts to better understand Orwell.

INSIGHT

A Philosophical Lens

This book offers a philosophical reading of Orwell, using contemporary theories.
It aims to uncover the core of Orwell's ethical thought, addressing his perceived inconsistencies.

ANECDOTE

Orwell's Philosophical Reputation

Biographer Bernard Crick suggested Orwell lacked the ability to resolve philosophical problems.
However, within the philosophical community, Orwell is considered a deep thinker.

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George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell's written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality.

In George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality (Oxford UP, 2023), philosopher Peter Brian Barry avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of Orwell's corpus, including his fiction, journalism, essays, book reviews, diaries, and correspondence, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions.

While Orwell is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and the philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. Barry illuminates Orwell's philosophical sympathies and contributions that have either gone unnoticed or been underappreciated. Philosophers interested in Orwell now have a text that explores many of the philosophical themes in his work and Orwell's readers now have a text that makes the case for regarding him as a worthy philosopher as well as one of the greatest Anglophone writers of the 20th century.

Peter Brian Barry is Professor of Philosophy and the Finkbeiner Endowed Professor in Ethics at Saginaw Valley State University. He is the author of Evil and Moral Psychology and The Fiction of Evil as well as several papers in ethics, applied ethics, and social and political philosophy. He has contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell, and George Orwell Studies.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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