Whig and revisionist historians alike have argued that the efforts of Samuel Romilly and James Mackintosh to reform criminal law between 1808 and 1821 were easily thwarted by a resolute Tory ministry and an ambivalent public opinion. The cause of reform was in fact more powerful than either perspective allows. Urbane public opinion lamented England’s increasingly unique adherence to a wide-ranging death penalty and viewed its victims in more compassionate terms than ever before. Conservatives clung to William Paley’s arguments that a selectively enforced “Bloody Code” was both genuinely deterrent and preferable to either preventive policing or the wider use of secondary punishments. There were limits to the logic of the positions espoused by reformers and conservatives alike. By the 1820s, however, there was good reason to believe that the reform cause was already won in the House of Commons and that victory in the Lords was at least conceivable.

The ability to respond critically to any text is a learnt ability which needs some innate ability before it can be developed. That is, critical thinking is a variegated talent, linked to intelligence and curiosity, which is hard-wired into the human brain but is not always fostered equally. We are all different according to aspects of biology, intelligence and personality. Likewise, we are all different according to our experience of being encouraged to use these natural abilities. Indeed, there is even some evidence that critical thinking is an ability that is only really developed at all after the teenage years. This idea is consistent with other theories of literacy, which state that there must be an inherent ability to decode language before it can be developed, and that any form of literacy is incremental. That means that each layer of literacy builds on previous levels, and that we must be cognitively ready for each stage. Critical literacy is, therefore, a higher level of literacy which builds on foundational forms of literacy. We need to be able to decode language systems at the semiotic, denotational and connotational levels in order to produce sense. Once we produce this meaning through textual reception, we can start to definitively question what we are being told, building on whatever latent critical ability we already have.

Plato’s philosophical writings have over the centuries evoked widely differing styles of response. Platonist metaphysical systems have been created, as by his first successors in the Academy, down to Plotinus and later Neoplatonists and beyond; while the questioning spirit they evince was what fuelled the scepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades in the Hellenistic period, and what most impressed James Mill and George Grote, the nineteenth-century British ‘Philosophical Radicals’. Both types of response agreed, however, in rejecting what the dialogues call ‘opinion’, the metaphysicians because it lacks the security and clarity of true knowledge, the sceptics and radicals because it leaves prevailing norms unquestioned. They all took from Plato the precept: Think for yourself, whatever opinion or the prevailing norms may be. And from the beginning they disagreed among themselves too, with Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and his successor as head of the Academy, already rejecting the dialogues’ theory of transcendent Forms. Where the theory was embraced, it was developed further than its originator ever did himself or perhaps could have done. Plato wrote for eternity, to open minds and encourage independent thought in any reader, whatever their historical circumstances.

In this chapter, we take a close look at a predominant feature of UK democracy – Prime Minister’s Questions – the weekly parliamentary event, most notable for the showdown between the Prime Minister and his/her main political opponent, the Leader of the Opposition. We begin with an overview of PMQs, including claims it has descended into an event characterised by antagonistic political point-scoring. We then consider its history, including apparent changes – procedural and behavioural – revealed by systematic research. Subsequent sections focus on two forms of behaviour: adversarialism and equivocation. In the first, we see evidence in support of those views expressing concern that impoliteness, incivility and personal attacks are salient features of PMQs; however, certain circumstances or topics of debate can prompt relative politeness. The section on equivocation reveals that, compared with other forms of political discourse (e.g., broadcast interviews), PMQs has some of the highest levels of question evasion. Those findings have generated not only national news headlines, but were also cited in a question at PMQs. Finally, we consider public opinion; the weekly showdown is the prime psychodrama of British democracy, and because people either love it or hate it, PMQs has aptly earned the soubriquet of ‘political Marmite’.

This chapter explains the sections of the Act and the common law principles governing the admission of opinion evidence. Critical to understanding the opinion rule is understanding what an ‘opinion’ is: this triggers the application of the rules on the exclusion or admission of such evidence.

The regulation of opinion evidence under Part 3.3 (ss 76–80) is relatively simple. Nonetheless, these rules have raised subtle problems in practice. Because of its inferential nature, opinion evidence is, in principle, excluded by s 76. However, exceptions are set out in ss 77–9.

This chapter thus explains opinion evidence, the exclusion of opinion evidence, the exceptional admission of opinion evidence and the scope of application of the opinion rule. In order to be admissible, an opinion must rationally affect, either directly or indirectly, the probability of a fact in issue in the proceedings, thus satisfying the requirements of s 55.

John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick grappled with the perspectival problem arising from Bentham’s full rejection of the theological justification for the legislative point of view. Mill’s intriguing suggestion that “wrong” refers to that which should be punished by law, public opinion, or private conscience combined with his assumption that all three are open to revision on utilitarian principles leads to the interesting conclusion that our moral statements about right and wrong are tacit legislative proposals. When deciding whether to voice our moral opinions we must think like legislators enacting a rule. This was in tension with the idea that our public expressions of moral judgment should be spontaneous reactions to the poor choices of others. Sidgwick grasped the implications of this issue more clearly and more self-consciously than did Mill, since it meant that there was a potentially deep disjunction between what is right according to utilitarianism and what utilitarianism tells us to publicly state as right. Sidgwick’s defense of an esoteric morality is the final outcome of the attempt to secularize morality as legislation.

In recent years, debates over voting rights have taken center-stage in American politics.

Immigration has become the most obvious point of contention between Whites and Latinos. Despite claims that anti-immigration sentiment is divorced of racism, this chapter demonstrates a sizable and stable relationship between White animus toward Latinos and public support for immigration policies ranging from a pathway to citizenship to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to building a wall. Even Whites who are open to the idea of free migration for US citizens oppose the policy when applied to citizens of Latino countries as a result of this belief system that Latinos fail to assimilate and adhere to Anglo-American norms.

Americans often rely on language about failed Latino assimilation and disregard for Anglo-American norms in justifying their support for policies that adversely affect America’s Latino population. This chapter documents how many Whites deny racism in the midst of expressing these beliefs and an overview of the debate as to whether such claims are genuine expressions of disagreement over acceptable forms of social behavior or an ignored for of racial animus toward Latinos.

Animus toward Latinos is seeping its way into supposedly race-neutral policies such as crime control and policing. This chapter documents how the “browning” of crime news can prime animus toward Latinos when people are asked to make judgments about criminal justice policies. This animus toward Latinos is demonstrated to have a strong relationship with a desire to increase criminal sentencing, devote more resources to law enforcement, and limit police accountability via body cameras. The connection between animus toward Latinos’ and Whites’ criminal justice policy preferences is consistent with the idea that, for many Americans, crime control policies are a means of social control over disliked minority groups.

Coetzee’s interest in, and ability to exploit, the conventions and expectations of genre is evident throughout his career; this chapter focuses on three examples in which the relation between fiction and non-fiction is put in question, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, and Summertime. In the case of the first of these works, the chapter examines Coetzee’s conversion of lectures into a fiction, and asks how we are to take the opinions expressed by the eponymous individual. In the case of Diary of a Bad Year, it discusses Coetzee’s framing of diary entries within a fictional narrative, and considers the degree of authorial endorsement of the resulting ‘opinions’ and the effect of the story unfolding at the foot of the page. In Summertime, the generic challenge of a memoir supposedly written after the author’s death is explored, and attention is paid to the work’s status as autobiography and as comic self-interrogation.

Arendt argued that political thought and discourse have traditionally been misconceived by philosophers, who have typically measured them against philosophical standards, and so conceived them as crude or defective forms of philosophy. This chapter explains how she reconceived the main faculties of political thought (opinion, judgment, imagination), the central forms of political thought (narrative thought, exemplary thought, and what she called “representative thought”), and the central mode of political discourse (persuasion). She saw political thought and discourse as primarily non-theoretical, in contrast to the theoretical forms of thought and discourse central to philosophy. Her project was to rethink these non-theoretical forms of thought and discourse in light of their powers in the realm of politics, rather than in light of their weakness in the realm of philosophy. This distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical thought and discourse sets up the question of the next chapter: How did the political theories of classical philosophers distort or obscure the non-theoretical understanding of politics implicit in Greek literature and history?