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

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jan 29, 2025 · 1h

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…