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I must be mad. I’ve just started writing an essay without any prospect of academic credit. This is something I never would have done while at university; it was enough of a struggle to get mandatory terms essays down on paper. You see my head is frequently crowded with thoughts, but they tend to resist being developed fully into printable form without the carrot and stick of deadlines. They’re quite happy to zip around in my head, preferring not to be directly observed - like streetwise Schrödinger’s cats.

But I’ve decided I need to get something clear in my head. For some years now I’ve had the feeling that there some peculiar underlying moral assumptions common to the loose assemblage of identity politics, progressive social agendas and discourse that is sometimes collectively referred to as “political correctness”. But I haven’t yet managed to pin it down - and the increasingly hackneyed status of the ‘PC’ label makes any such analysis perilous indeed (if you’re like me, you probably now cringe a little whenever you hear the expression - particularly if is followed by “gone mad”). But let’s forget about that term for a moment, because I’ve noticed something else. When an advocate for progressive social change puts their message into the media, I am fascinated by what often appears to be a dissonance between the stated moral principles and the spokes person’s implicit moral reasoning. The question is: Is ‘political correctness’ a confused concept in more ways than one? Or is there a relatively coherent ethical framework underpinning the various movements grouped under that label? I want to answer this question soon - my thoughts on the subject are cluttering up the attic of my head, and I’ve decided I need the space. It’s time to let out those cats.