Early life, education, and marriage

Archibald Wilson died from diphtheria seven months before Mary Wilson’s birth, but the family enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle thanks to Felix Schuster’s support and moved to a large Edwardian house with domestic servants. She remembered childhood as ‘amazingly old-fashioned, even for the 1920s’ (Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places, 3). The only sibling in the house was the Wilsons’ sixth child, Stephana (1922–2012), later head of music at Ripon Cathedral Choir School. The eldest brother, Malcolm (1907–1969), had a lifelong illness and was cared for in a nursing home, and three other siblings—including (Archibald) Duncan Wilson (1911–1983), later ambassador to the Soviet Union and master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge—had left for boarding school (the Wilsons’ fifth child, Alexander, died from pneumonia aged four in 1921). Mary and Stephana Wilson were raised almost entirely by their nanny in the nursery. Ethel Wilson visited occasionally and saw the two sisters for an hour in the drawing room each evening. On Sundays she led the children in hymn singing round the drawing-room piano, ‘playing in her curious clumsy style, every chord slightly broken’ (ibid., 200).

In 1937 Mary Wilson became a boarder at St Swithun’s School in Winchester. Success there was measured in sporting prowess, religious piety, and a sense of moral responsibility, and although teachers believed Wilson fell short on all three counts, she considered herself ‘more musical, better read, more philosophical than the other girls’ (Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places, 10–11). The headmistress closed the school in 1940, fearing a German invasion, and Wilson spent a year at Prior’s Field school in Godalming, Surrey. Wilson’s new teachers admired her self-assurance, and with their support she won a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, one of five women’s colleges at the university.

Wilson arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1942. Despite fulfilling a long-held ambition by reading literae humaniores, she did not enjoy university life during the war. Food rationing was severe and students only received one scuttle of coal to heat their rooms each week. Degrees were also shortened as a result of staff shortages, with younger dons conscripted to the armed forces or intelligence services. Students could only stay for five terms and were awarded a war degree. This had a particular impact on literae humaniores, which usually lasted four years. Students in part one of the degree undertook honour moderations, or ‘Mods’, which involved translating Latin prose and reading classic texts. Although she got a first, Wilson struggled with translations and looked forward to part two, or ‘Greats’, which centred on ancient history and philosophy. But Greats was shortened considerably and Wilson left Oxford so that she could take it in full after the war. She spent two years teaching Latin to sixth formers at Sherborne School for Girls, in Dorset, and found herself at home in the classroom.

Wilson considered herself a natural Tory as a teenager, but came ‘pretty thoroughly round to the Left’ (Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places, 135) and voted Labour in the 1945 general election. She returned to Oxford to start Greats in the summer of 1946, sharing the optimism that now permeated the university. Undergraduates coming from school were joined by those, like Wilson, who had interrupted their studies, and by ex-servicemen finally taking their places. Wilson got a first in her finals and then took the BPhil, a graduate qualification designed to equip students with ideas that they could pursue in research and teaching. Keen to start an academic career, she persuaded tutors to let her complete the BPhil in one year instead of the usual two. She was helped in writing her dissertation by the former army captain Geoffrey James Warnock (1923–1995), who was studying philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE, or ‘modern greats’); they had first met when she approached him to take over as secretary of the philosophical Jowett Society in 1947. They were engaged the following year, after Warnock was elected to a fellowship at Magdalen College and Wilson was appointed tutor in philosophy at St Hugh’s College. With their immediate future now secure, the couple married on 2 July 1949 in the chapel of Winchester College.

Oxford

Philosophy at Oxford was internationally renowned in this period. Undergraduates came from all over the world to study Greats, PPE, or a new degree in philosophy, psychology, and physiology (PPP), and many stayed on for the BPhil. The university accommodated demand by employing over thirty philosophers, nearly all of whom showed no interest in moral philosophy. Led by Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin, philosophy at Oxford was known for work that focused on the logical grammar of specific propositions. Ryle and his followers argued that philosophers should confine themselves to studying the form and content of moral claims and refused to commit themselves to moral opinions. While she admired this approach, Mary Warnock remained interested in moral questions that most colleagues disparaged, such as what made an action ‘good’. She was similar in this respect to Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch, which led some to dismiss moral philosophy as a ‘woman’s subject’. Warnock subsequently found herself teaching compulsory moral philosophy elements in Greats, PPE, and PPP. Students who attended her tutorials discussed the work of Hume, Kant, Locke, and Marx, describing her as a careful listener who used real-life examples to illustrate moral problems.

Despite having five children between 1950 and 1961—Kathleen (b. 1950), Felix (b. 1952), James (b. 1953), Stephana (Fanny) (b. 1956), and Maria (b. 1961)— Warnock managed to juggle her career with motherhood. She left St Hugh’s to cook supper each day and ran a well-ordered household. There were set mealtimes, daily music practice, and an expectation that adults would not be disturbed in the evenings, when the Warnocks sometimes held dinner parties for a social circle that included Kingsley and Hilly Amis, Peter and Ann Strawson, and Isaiah Berlin. In the mid-1950s the Warnocks also formed part of a quartet that debated philosophical issues on the BBC Third Programme. Mary Warnock was the only female panellist and spent each broadcast pretending to be confused so that an issue could be explained more clearly. This undoubtedly reflected sexist attitudes in academia and broadcasting, but Warnock enjoyed being ‘the only woman’ and had little sympathy with the more radical feminism that emerged in the 1960s.

In 1959 Oxford University Press commissioned Warnock’s first book, Ethics since 1900, as part of its Home Library Series. Warnock used the book to state that her colleagues’ refusal to voice moral opinions had rendered the subject boring. The proper subject matter for ethics, she argued, was not how we describe the world but how we conduct ourselves in it. Yet she closed on an upbeat note and claimed this boring phase was ending, thanks to Foot’s work on ethical naturalism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, which discussed how people encountered ethics in their everyday lives. Warnock included existentialism after a request from Austin, who felt it would distinguish her book from competitors. Though she acknowledged her debt to Murdoch’s 1953 work on Sartre, Warnock did more than anyone to familiarize British readers with existentialism during the 1960s. In three subsequent books she analysed Sartre’s work in detail and as it related to the ideas of Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. Warnock admired Sartre’s use of realistic examples but rejected his view of individual freedom as the source of all ethical values, claiming that it ignored how notions such as ‘wrong’ had to mean ‘wrong in general’ for social bonds to function.

Warnock left academia in 1966, having decided she was an unoriginal thinker. She was then appointed headmistress of Oxford High School, despite only working briefly as a teacher in the 1940s. Oxford High School was a girls’ direct grant grammar school, where the majority of families paid fees and the government subsidized one-quarter of places. Warnock favoured this arrangement, both as headteacher and parent, and stopped supporting Labour in the mid-1960s after Harold Wilson’s government sought to abolish grammar schools. Popular with pupils, staff, and parents, she found the job rewarding and only resigned in 1972 to support Geoffrey Warnock once he became principal of Hertford College. The family moved into the top floor of Hertford Lodgings, and Warnock returned to Lady Margaret Hall as a research fellow.

Special educational needs

Warnock was appointed to the Independent Broadcasting Authority in 1973. Surprised at being approached, she soon enjoyed dealing with issues in a way that ‘would not be merely theoretical, like discussions in a philosophy tutorial, but would have to be refined into recommendations, which might have influence on what happened next’ (Warnock, Nature and Morality, 14). Warnock’s desire to work on practical subjects was shared by philosophers who now felt constrained by the focus on language and wanted to discuss the morality of war, abortion, animal rights, and political violence. She encountered this new perspective on her return to academia and closed an updated edition of Ethics since 1900 by noting that philosophy was becoming a more interesting and relevant subject. Serving on advisory committees appealed to Warnock as it provided ready-made opportunities to engage with topical questions. ‘Somebody else had set one the problem’, she claimed, which ‘exactly suits my cast of mind’ (ibid.). Her enthusiasm was such that Geoffrey Warnock remarked that she said yes to everything, and she quickly became a valued member of the ‘great and good’ who populate government committees.

This was clear in 1974, when Warnock agreed to a chair an inquiry into the teaching of children with special educational needs and disabilities. The Conservative secretary of state for education, Margaret Thatcher, convened the inquiry after the 1970 Education (Handicapped Children) Act discontinued the arrangement whereby children with a range of physical and mental health conditions were taught outside mainstream education, under the jurisdiction of health or social services. The act shifted responsibility for teaching all children, whatever their disability, to local education authorities, who promptly sought guidance on how to manage their new duties. Thatcher instructed the committee to review existing arrangements and make recommendations for ‘the educational provision in England, Scotland and Wales for children and young people handicapped with disabilities of body or mind’.

Warnock had little say in choosing committee members and was dismayed at its size: there were twenty-six full members, drawn from teaching, social services, and medical fields, in addition to observers from Scotland and from the Department for Education. She quickly divided committee members into sub-groups that assessed educational provision, training, and curriculum development by visiting a range of facilities across Britain and abroad. During this fact-finding stage she learned how education improved the lives of even the most severely disabled children and made the difference between freedom, however limited, and dependency on others. This awareness fostered the committee’s vision of what Warnock called ‘the common path’ (Warnock, Nature and Morality, 51), which defined education as a basic good with two long-term goals: to enlarge an individual’s knowledge, experience, and imaginative understanding, and to enable them to participate in society. Committee members believed these goals were the same for all children, but that attaining them was harder for some than others, and they sought to recommend how teaching should be delivered wherever a pupil encountered physical, sensory, emotional, or intellectual obstacles.

The committee’s report was submitted to government in March 1978. It rejected provision based on medical categorization and focused instead on how best to meet each child’s educational needs. This widened scope meant that the report not only looked at integrating disabled children into mainstream education, where possible, but also dealt with providing support for children with educational needs who were already in regular schools. It recommended that all teachers be trained to recognize and manage special educational needs, and that parents be viewed as ‘partners’ who had a right to discuss their child’s support with dedicated staff members. While the report acknowledged that special schools should continue, since children with complex needs could not always be taught in mainstream settings, it recommended that they build stronger links with regular schools and act as centres for advice and resources.

To identify which children should attend special schools, the report proposed a new system whereby different services worked together to provide a statement of needs that local authorities were legally obliged to meet. Warnock later considered this ‘statementing’ system to be a mistake. The outcome was often less a true judgement of a child’s needs and more a reflection of what local authorities felt they could afford, leading to frequent appeals from parents. But the report received universal support when it was first published. Politicians, teachers, and the press welcomed its inclusive outlook, and it was passed into law by the 1981 Education Act.

Human fertilization and embryology

Shortly after the report on special educational needs was published, Louise Brown, the first baby resulting from in vitro fertilization (IVF), was born in Greater Manchester on 25 July 1978. This marked the culmination of work by the developmental biologist Robert Edwards and the obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, who had been developing IVF since the late 1960s and promoted it as an opportunity for infertile couples to have their own children. Scientific concerns that IVF might cause developmental problems were dispelled by the birth of a healthy girl. Newspapers greeted Louise Brown as the ‘baby of the century’ and highlighted the lack of moral and ethical outrage surrounding the procedure.

But this enthusiasm soon evaporated. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government pledged a return to ‘traditional values’ following its victory in the 1979 general election, and critics now claimed that IVF threatened social norms by allowing single women to have multiple embryos implanted, or gay couples to have children through commercial surrogates. Controversy peaked early in 1982 when Edwards admitted to experimenting on spare embryos which he had no intention of implanting into patients. Amid calls for legislation, ministers at the Department for Education and Science announced a Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology. Warnock was the preferred chair from the outset. She was considered well-qualified thanks to her handling of the inquiry into special educational needs and her current role leading a review into legislation for animal experiments. Initially concerned about the publicity that would follow her appointment, Warnock agreed to chair the inquiry as it gave her a chance to engage with long-standing questions about the values we attribute to life before birth.

The selection of committee members reflected an emerging political belief that external involvement with science and medicine was the best route to public accountability. Doctors and scientists were outnumbered by members of other professions, and Warnock, herself an ‘outsider’ in medical matters, argued that oversight was now vital. These claims placed her at the forefront of bioethics, a new field in which doctors, lawyers, religious figures, and others discussed and helped to regulate biomedical research. Aware of this changing climate, and worried that IVF might otherwise be banned, medical organizations agreed that policy should no longer be left solely to doctors or scientists.

There was less consensus when it came to embryo research. Some committee members wanted a total ban, arguing that embryo experiments violated the sanctity of human life. Others believed that they were essential for understanding development and improving fertility treatments, but disagreed over when to introduce a legal cut-off. News of this split became public early in 1984 when one member spoke to journalists, and newspapers reported that the committee was unlikely to provide firm guidance. Warnock responded by claiming that divisions among committee members made them an accurate proxy for the country. She took pains to state that neither view of embryo research was wrong, and stemmed instead from deep-seated and irreconcilable beliefs. Convinced that embryo research was important, but should be regulated to retain public confidence, Warnock believed the solution lay in finding a compromise that ensured social benefits yet horrified as few people as possible.

Warnock relied here on the biologist and committee member Anne McLaren, who claimed that embryo research should be allowed up to, but not beyond, fourteen days after fertilization. This is roughly the point at which cells in part of the embryo form precursors to the spinal cord and nervous system, known as the primitive streak. McLaren told committee members that embryos did not feel pain before this stage, and that the formation of the primitive streak could be said to mark the beginning of individual development as it was the final point at which an embryo divided to form twins. Her arguments persuaded Warnock and most committee members. Their report, published in June 1984, recommended that embryo research be permitted up to fourteen days, with licenses granted by a new statutory body that had a broad membership and a lay chair. This licensing body was also to be tasked with overseeing the provision of IVF and artificial insemination by donor. The permissive outlook did not extend to surrogacy, which the report argued carried an unacceptable risk of exploitation and should be banned. Two committee members opposed this in an expression of dissent, endorsing surrogacy on a non-profit basis and subject to licence. Warnock soon regretted the surrogacy ban, claiming that it had reflected her own unease at someone giving away a child, and blamed herself ‘for not seeing the good sense in this minority report’ (Warnock, Nature and Morality, 104).

But the most striking expression of dissent centred on embryo experiments. Arguing against any form of research, three committee members criticized the fourteen-day limit for allowing the destruction of something with the potential to develop into a human individual. Seizing on division within the committee, in 1985 the former health secretary, Enoch Powell, now an Ulster Unionist MP, introduced a private member’s bill that would prohibit research at any point after fertilization. The bill stalled after high-profile figures, including Warnock, warned that a total ban would stifle medical progress. Attentive to the uses of language, Warnock claimed research would only be conducted on ‘pre-embryos’ rather than the ‘embryo proper’. She also portrayed the primitive streak as a scientific and philosophical milestone. It was misleading to speak of potential individuals before the primitive streak, she argued, as few of the criteria which distinguish us from each other were satisfied by pre-embryos at this early stage. These arguments gradually won support for her committee’s recommendations, which were passed into law by the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. The licensing body proposed by the committee was established the following year, as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

Widespread interest in these ethical issues made Warnock one of Britain’s most recognized philosophers and its leading bioethicist. She was made a DBE in 1984 and a life peer as Baroness Warnock, of Weeke in the City of Winchester, in 1985. She discussed her committee’s recommendations in a popular edition of the report, published in 1985 as A Question of Life, in public talks and press interviews, and in 1989 the BBC claimed she was one of the decade’s most influential people. Although Warnock publicly criticized Conservative cuts to the higher education budget, and made headlines for belittling Thatcher in what she thought were off-the-record remarks, she remained a trusted source of advice for government and was asked to represent the UK on a European bioethics council in 1991.

Assisted dying

Warnock was appointed mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, in 1984. While she was flattered to be offered the role at the age of sixty, when women had to retire as teachers, she later considered it ‘the only time of my life I would not live again’ (Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places, 126). She found it hard to establish good relations with college fellows and struggled to implement changes. Geoffrey Warnock remained principal of Hertford College and they only saw each other at weekends and holidays. Mary Warnock left Girton in 1991, three years after Geoffrey Warnock retired, and they enjoyed gardening and cooking together at their house in Axford, Wiltshire.

In 1992 Geoffrey Warnock was diagnosed with an incurable lung disease. The following year Mary Warnock was appointed to a House of Lords select committee that investigated whether there were circumstances in which doctors might legally end a patient’s life. Their 1994 report recommended that the law remain unchanged: doctors who ended a patient’s life should be charged with murder, and those who helped a patient end their own life should be charged with aiding or abetting suicide. But Geoffrey Warnock’s death, in 1995, transformed Warnock’s outlook. In an interview with the Sunday Times in 1996 she called for greater leniency towards cases of assisted dying, and argued that the main consideration should be quality rather than length of life. In 2003 and 2006 she supported two unsuccessful private members’ bills in the House of Lords that sought to remove punishment for doctors who helped terminally ill patients end their lives. In their book Easeful Death (2008) Warnock and the clinician Elisabeth Macdonald called for laws that permitted assisted dying, and claimed that helping someone to die with dignity should be part of a doctor’s role in future. Frustration at religious opposition to assisted dying underpinned the book Dishonest to God (2010), in which Warnock maintained that Christianity should not be the basis for morality or public policy.

Warnock’s views on religion and assisted dying attracted criticism from some Conservative politicians, who worried that her public standing legitimated ‘entirely immoral viewpoints’ (Daily Telegraph, 18 Sept 2008). But her claims that people with dementia were a burden to their families and had a duty to die, first made in 2008, caused broader disquiet and were framed by opponents as the next step in a ‘slippery slope’ to involuntary euthanasia. They were also seen as unhelpful by cross-bench supporters of assisted dying, who did not include Warnock in a group that canvassed support for another private member’s bill in 2014.

Later life and legacy

Following the death of her daughter Fanny in 2009, Warnock moved to London to be nearer her daughter Maria. Despite problems with hearing and mobility, she continued to work after retiring from the House of Lords in 2015. She gave talks and interviews recalling her work on education and ethics, and supported the continuation of the fourteen-day limit when some wanted to extend it. Her final book, Critical Reflections on Ownership (2015), scrutinized the values behind our desire to preserve the natural world. Like much of Warnock’s later work, it was partly autobiographical, combining her love of gardening and birdsong with a discussion of environmental ethics. These personal reflections were key for Warnock, who argued that motivation to prevent environmental collapse had to emerge out of an individual’s sense of connection with nature.

In 2017 Warnock was made a companion of honour (CH) for services to children with special educational needs. In May 2018 she travelled to Israel to collect the prestigious Dan David prize, the first time it had been awarded for work on bioethics. She spent time in a care home following a minor stroke later that year, but discharged herself after recovering. Keen to remain independent, she returned to her London flat at 101 Moremead Road, Lower Sydenham, where she died on 20 March 2019. She was survived by two sons and two daughters. Her life and work were celebrated in a thanksgiving service at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on 22 October 2019.

While she considered herself ‘not much good at the subject’ (Warnock, Nature and Morality, 14), Mary Warnock was one of Britain’s most significant twentieth-century philosophers. Despite writing twenty-four books, on existentialism, teaching, bioethics, and other subjects, she will mostly be remembered for chairing inquiries into education and human fertilization that had lasting policy impacts. The recommendations for IVF and embryo research, in particular, established Warnock as a key figure in bioethics and modern biology, and underpinned a regulatory system that still commanded support at the time of her death. The enduring success of these recommendations lay in her ability to forge compromise and reconcile competing interests. She respected other people’s views rather than dismissing them outright; and though she had little time for those who claimed to be unhappy without giving clear reasons, she recognized that morality could not be fully divorced from sentiment. Her skill at navigating complex issues ultimately led to her reputation as ‘a philosophical plumber to the establishment’. The portrayal would have horrified many academic colleagues, but it was one she fully embraced.