In the postwar period, philosophers smoked a lot. The French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus were rarely photographed without a cigarette or a pipe. Sartre devoured two packs of Gauloises a day. Camus, despite suffering from TB from the age of 17, was a prodigious smoker – he even named his beloved cat Cigarette.
The next wave of thinkers were tobacco addicts, too: most photographs of Roland Barthes show him with a cigarette hanging from the left side of his mouth or drawing on a Havana cigar. Jacques Derrida, king of the deconstructionists, smoked a pipe. Smoking was de rigueur for French intellectuals. No doubt part of their thought process, too.
It wasn’t just the continentals who smoked. Bertrand Russell liked a pipe. The best photographs of Iris Murdoch show her in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
The Oxford analytic philosopher Michael Dummett was a non-stop smoker. He used a cigarette holder. It made him look refined.
Dummett had a habit of pushing his hand through his slicked-back white hair while he thought, leaving a yellow nicotine streak. He didn’t seem to care.
When I interviewed him for the Philosophy Bites podcast in 2010 he was in his mid-80s and still chain smoking. I left the acrid fug of his room wondering how many weeks of my life I had sacrificed to capture his voice on audio.
In philosophy seminars at Bristol University in the early 1980s, students and some lecturers would light up. The students rolled their own – licking the cigarette paper rather ostentatiously, using a lighter that always failed on the first two or three attempts. They’d take a long drag before pronouncing on a line from the Philosophical Investigations. It made them seem more profound. Or so they thought.
There was no escape. Visits to pubs would leave our charity shop coats reeking of tobacco. At Cambridge, my PhD supervisor regularly lit a cigarette while discussing my work – he had once asked if I objected, but I hadn’t felt able to tell him the truth. As a non-smoker who’d been forced to endure long car journeys with both parents smoking and the windows tightly closed, I detested having to endure other people’s fumes.
How times have changed. And they are still changing and could change more.
We know too much about the dangers of passive smoking to tolerate others’ smoke in enclosed spaces. Cigarettes and vapes are now banned from seminar rooms, public transport, and workplaces. It’s no longer cool to be photographed with a cigarette.
But what of last week’s leaked news that Keir Starmer intends to ban smoking in many outdoor areas, including pub gardens, restaurant terraces, outside hospitals, sports venues, and schools?
Liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill argue that it’s good to leave responsible adults to their own devices just so long as they aren’t harming others by their actions. We need to be free to conduct our own “experiments of living”, including taking risks.
To intervene to protect adults for their own sake is a form of paternalism, acting as a parent would to a child, and in many cases an inappropriate affront to that adult’s autonomy. Just so long as we don’t put others at risk, we should be left alone.
I don’t know what the empirical evidence on outdoor passive smoking is. I suspect that in a well-ventilated pub garden the effects on other people are far milder than those of passive smoking in enclosed spaces.
The main argument that Starmer and his supporters seem to be using, however, isn’t tied to the dangers of passive smoking. It’s a pragmatic one.
Since we know that smoking kills around 80,000 adults in England every year, the theory is that we can reduce this number by outlawing smoking in public places. That will then relieve some of the burden on the NHS.
It is difficult to know if this prediction is accurate and what the consequences of an outdoor ban would be. Perhaps smokers will gather in indoor smoking clubs in private houses. Perhaps new laws will make smoking seem subversive and even increase its popularity. Perhaps philosophers will start calling their cats Cigarette again.
The fundamental issue underlying this, however, is how much coercive control of our behaviour citizens will accept for the sake of reducing health costs. Things have been improving steadily for non-smokers, and our numbers are increasing.
Many of us don’t want a heavy-handed government to blow that and produce a backlash.
