13 November 2024.

In conversation with Nigel Biggar about his career and the work of the Pharos Foundation

This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now they’re offering five issues for just £10.

What does history do? You read about human beings making decisions under constraints of time and opportunity,” says Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford until 2022 and now chairman of the Pharos Foundation. “Would I have acted differently?” is the practical test he has for his encounters with the past as a professional ethicist.

Encountering Biggar, as eirenic an Anglican priest as Scotland has yet to offer the rest of the country, is to meet a studious, thoughtful and engaged presence. Alternatively, he’s the monster of a 2017 letter that denounced him for his Ethics and Empire seminar, “signed”, as one of his admirers puts it, “by every postdoc in Oxford”.

We, the undersigned, issue this statement to register our surprise and concern … As scholars of empire and colonialism, we are disappointed that Oxford is prepared to support such a project … We welcome all scholarly enquiry into empire and its relationship with the present. However … We are not surprised that such an approach should be recuperated by Professor Biggar — a long-time apologist for colonialism — but we are alarmed that the University of Oxford should invest resources in this project … If it is interested in supporting a political project which connects ethics with the contemporary world, we suggest Oxford focuses on deepening our democracy and furthering social inclusion, including addressing its own repeated failure to diversify its own Faculty and student body.

The letter exhibited something of the intellectual atmosphere of Oxford. But why a transparently good man provokes his enemies to such furies is key to understanding the future of the university. In short, is there still a place in such institutions for scholars like Nigel Biggar?