Oxford student will not go to jail for stabbing lover because she has “extraordinary” talent

…by Jonas E. Alexis

Lavinia Woodward is an aspiring, 24-year-old student at Oxford University. She is also a top student and her parents are rich.

“Lavinia Woodward spends much of her time at her mother’s stunning Italian villa, perched on a hill surrounded by pines, a few miles from Lake Como. Her father, who also went to Oxford, is a senior oil company executive.”[1]

Woodward met her Cambridge-educated boyfriend in an online dating site called Tinder. Yet during a drink-and-drug fuelled row, she stabbed him in the leg and cut his finger with a bread knife.

According to Judge Ian Pringle, Woodward deserves a custodial sentence for her act. But Pringle declared that Woodward has an “extraordinary” talent, therefore jailing her would impede her career. Pringle added:

“It seems to me that if this was a one-off, a complete one-off, to prevent this extraordinary able young lady from not following her long-held desire to enter the profession she wishes to, would be a sentence which would be too severe.”[2]

Woodward has already published articles in the medical journals, but she has a history of drug abuse,[3] and it is just ridiculous for the judge to say that “this was a one-off.” In fact, it was reported that she has attacked her boyfriend, Thomas Fairclough, on two other occasions.

There seems to be more here than meets the eye and ear:

“She is not the first elite student whose abilities in the school room have atoned for their crimes: last year, Ivy League educated Brock Turner served just three months for sexually assaulting a woman. As a promising university swimmer, the judge expressed concern that a long sentence would have a ‘severe impact’ on his life.”[4]

This brings us to a central point here. The rich and the powerful think that the moral law and order does not apply to them. In that sense, they always fall into the Darwinian ideology, which revolves around trampling on the moral and legal rights of the helpless and needy. With respect to the Woodward case, the Telegraph said,

“So is this the rise of punishment by merit? Only those with the least talent and potential should suffer the inconvenience of paying for their crimes…

“In Michael Young’s dystopian novel, The Rise of Meritocracy, he paints a vision of a future Britain in which social standing is a result of ability – those with the most merit sit at the top whilst those with the least languish at the bottom, in the full knowledge that they don’t deserve to be anywhere else.”[5]

Well, “survival of the fittest” has been an English ideology since the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, which posits the claim that the “imbeciles” have no right to live. Darwin complained:

“We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment…Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”[6]

Darwin’s solution is that we ought to stop the “imbeciles” from marrying, thereby eliminating them from society by slow death. As we shall argue in the summer, Darwin was able to forge that crazy idea because he had already abandoned practical reason, the only source which forbids and condemns the rich and powerful from unleashing their wicked ideology upon society.

Schopenhauer considers a man a child until he has understood Kant. Kant put moral philosophy back into focus with his categorical imperative, and according Schopenhauer’s principle, Darwin was obviously a child because he could not understand Kant. Darwin, as we shall see in the summer, proved that Kant was right all along: you cannot dismiss practical reason and remain a rational human being.

As a corollary, any individual who dismisses practical reason in his project will inexorably end up propounding internal contradictions and incoherency. That’s what happened to Darwin, and his intellectual children have never recovered from that. Their feet are still dangling in the vortex of contradiction and intellectual madness. And many of them don’t want to see that their weltanschauung is incoherent because that is all they have.

[1] Paul Bracchi and Josh White, “Dark truth of Oxford student spared jail for stabbing lover: How medic, 24, has history of violence and drug use despite judge saying he didn’t want a ‘complete one-off’ attack to wreck her future,” Daily Mail, May 19, 2017.

[2] Caroline Davies, “Student who stabbed boyfriend may avoid jail as it would ‘damage her career,’” Guardian, May 16, 2017.

[3] Paul Bracchi and Josh White, “Dark truth of Oxford student spared jail for stabbing lover: How medic, 24, has history of violence and drug use despite judge saying he didn’t want a ‘complete one-off’ attack to wreck her future,” Daily Mail, May 19, 2017.

[4] Verity Ryan, “Lavinia Woodward can’t avoid prison just because she is clever,” Telegraph, May 17, 2017.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 161.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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