First-Generation Philosopher

I was the first person in my immediate family to attend high school, let alone university. This was not due to any conspicuous merit on my part, but rather down to sheer luck.

My parents were both born in Dasyllio, a small village in the mountains of Northern Greece. My father, who was a man of exceptional intelligence and moral goodness, left school at the age of eleven to help support his family. At that very young age he embarked on the physically arduous work of a builder’s labourer and eventually became a bricklayer. This was around the time of the start of the Second World War, a very difficult period in modern Greek history. My mother has always been a dynamic and very loving person with great practical skills and a hugely positive attitude to life. But even though she was born quite a few years later than my father, girls in her village were not expected to go on to secondary school. Instead, she was sent to train as a seamstress.

My parents emigrated to Australia in the early 1960s, driven by economic necessity, and I was born there in 1964. They were part of a large wave of ‘Southern European’ migration to Australia around that time, after the Australian government had relaxed its attitude regarding ‘acceptable’ types of immigrants (still, the notoriously racist ‘White Australia Policy’ would not to be abolished until some years later).

My father (in the picture on the left) worked at a succession of jobs – steel worker, shopkeeper, factory worker, tram driver. My mother worked in a variety of factories, making clothes or shoes. I was always conscious growing up that both of my parents were tremendously hard workers who were making enormous sacrifices so that my brother and I could have the opportunities for a flourishing life that were denied to them. I felt I had to do all I could to honour their sacrifice.

The family home created by my parents was full of love and materially comfortable.  That initial investment of love was the foundation for everything else that I have been able to accomplish in my life. In my father’s case, in particular, that love was supplemented by powerful encouragement to aim as high as I possibly could in my academic work. And he valued academia in the rather idealistic manner of many of those who have been denied academic opportunities themselves, not as a source of status and income, but as a noble quest for truth. In addition to their love and support, my parents also gave me the invaluable gift of understanding that we do not live in anything approaching a meritocratic society. Rather, people of great talent often find themselves in humble occupations simply through injustice or bad luck. The flip side of that, of course, is that there are many people in fancy jobs who owe them more to luck and connections than merit.

But not everything was easy growing up. Discrimination towards ethnic minorities – primarily, Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavs  – was a marked feature of Australian society at that time. In some ways, the comparative classlessness of Australian society magnified the effects of the discrimination, since the same hostile attitudes were manifested at all levels of society, from factory-workers to teachers, doctors, and university professors. Of course, the original sin in this respect was the appalling treatment and marginalisation of indigenous Australians.

I think in many ways my decision to pursue philosophy as an academic subject was a product of this background. This is partly because I came to realise that philosophy was a name for the kinds of conversations I would regularly have with my father when I was a boy. Partly because philosophy was a way of keeping faith with my Greek roots in a wider society that instructed me in various ways that my Greek heritage was something of which I should feel ashamed. Partly, also, I think, because philosophy was a way of engaging with serious issues, about justice and rights, but without dirtying one’s hands through direct complicity in a flawed system. However, I was fortunate to be able to study for combined degrees in Law and Philosophy at the University of Melbourne without having to pay tuition fees, because this was still the era of free tertiary education in Australia (a transformative, opportunity-expanding reform of the Labor government of Gough Whitlam). Whether I would have made the risky choice to pursue a career in academic philosophy without the safety-net of a law degree is something I will never know.

Aside from the good fortune of having loving and incredibly self-sacrificing parents and the benefits conferred by a radical Labor government, another kind of luck played an important part in my life. When you are a student from a working class background, you are particularly reliant (probably overly reliant) on the advice and encouragement of your teachers, since they are among the few people with whom you have close contact who have personal experience of the path you are hoping to travel. All too often one encounters, instead, the tyranny of stereotypes and the low expectations that come with them.

Here, again, I had the good fortune to be admitted to Melbourne High School at the age of fourteen. This is an academically outstanding selective state secondary school where admission is by competitive examination and much is expected of the students who gain admission. At Melbourne High, I had some inspiring teachers, like Gary Allen (Economics) and Mary Bryan (English Literature), who provided great encouragement. Similarly, when I progressed to the University of Melbourne, I was strengthened in my decision to take the risk of pursuing an academic career by supportive lecturers, such as the late Graeme Marshall and Hilary Charlesworth (now a Judge on the International Court of Justice). I will never forget the reply I received from Graeme when, speaking to him about graduate study in philosophy, I expressed the concern that there were very few jobs in philosophy – ‘There’s always room at the top, John’. It was also Graeme who encouraged me to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, something that I would never have otherwise considered doing. My father died not long after I got the Rhodes, but I am grateful he got to witness that achievement, as it meant a great deal to him. Later, at Oxford, I had the invaluable support of my supervisor, Joseph Raz, as well as the exceptionally generous mentorship of James Griffin, two philosophers I admired immensely and from whom I learnt a great deal.

My first generation status perhaps became increasingly less salient after my graduate studies, although I have always retained a sensitivity to issues of unjust disadvantage. But that, I think, is largely a matter of my academic generation. I was appointed to a permanent lectureship at the University of Glasgow only two years into my Oxford doctoral studies and with no publications. This would probably be unthinkable in today’s environment in which the normal path to a permanent job is long and drawn-out and typically involves various low-paid short-term jobs. I honestly don’t know whether I would have persisted with my academic aspirations at the price of that sort of precarity and the infantalisation that goes with it. Academia, it seems to me, has in many ways become a more hostile place for students with working-class origins than when I was a student.

John Tasioulas  is Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.