To have your cake and eat it: social practices in British society and beyond Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps) Abstract. "To have your cake and eat it" is a British expression. What does it mean exactly? Probably there are multiple interpretations. On the interpretation I work with, a person or group manages to do this if they combine qualities which intuitively or by plausible argument are incompatible. Intuitively, you cannot have A and B, yet they manage to have A and B, contrary to intuition. I believe British society, as well as various other liberal societies, is pervaded by have-your-cake-and-eat-it practices. There are proposed examples in my previous papers or online contributions and I refer to these to illustrate the expression. An appendix includes my attempt at a coding task. Draft version: 4 (28th May 2026 minor edits; version 2 24th October 2025, appendices 1 and 2 added; draft 1 on 17th July 2025) Software used (freeware): Google docs PDFs available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396863412_To_have_your_cake_and_eat_it_social_practices_in_British_society_and_beyond And: https://www.academia.edu/142946760/To_have_your_cake_and_eat_it_social_practices_in_British_society_and_beyond My neighbour is swinging a belt of leather As we converse about the weather– Who does that, what is this type? I surely shall learn when the time is ripe! "To have your cake and eat it" is a British expression. It can be used in different ways. It seems to describe an impossible combination: once you have eaten the cake, you no longer have it, in the sense of having it as something you can behold in front of you. So the expression, or a slight variation on it, can be used to warn someone that they are trying to combine the impossible. You are trying to have your cake and eat it! What other way can it be used? It can be used, with greater sophistication perhaps, to describe a peculiar achievement: more specifically, a person or group has managed to achieve a combination that, intuitively or by some plausible argument, is impossible to achieve. It turns out that intuition, or one widespread intuition or the conclusion of the plausible argument, regarding this matter is false. In a number of online papers or else contributions of some other kind, I have drawn attention to what I suspect are have-your-cake-and-eat-it practices in British society and also beyond it. I shall refer to some of these below, but sometimes in greater detail and sometimes less, and sometimes I shall say things which are not in my earlier writings. Apologies if I have simply failed to register the subtleties of social life, in my proposed interpretations or explanations of what is going on! "Spare the rod, spoil the child." Spare the rod, spoil the child is another British saying. As I interpret it, it means: if you do not beat your child when they behave improperly (when they do significant wrong presumably), then you will get a spoilt child - one who is still a brat in their older years and unable to conform to the requirements of society and lacking sufficient self-control to achieve anything. Sometimes the saying used is spare the stick, spoil the child. Where does the saying originally come from? I believe an English rhyming "imitation" of Cervantes' Don Quixote from the Enlightenment era: Samuel Butler's poem Hudibras! Anyway, let us move on from this question of origins. Beating your child is frowned upon in contemporary British society, or English society at least. How did that happen? Here is a speculation. There was once a father (or a mother) who said, "With each age, there is a reduction in violence. And the more civilized social classes are less prone to violent acts than the less civilized. But we beat our children still. The next stage for us is to stop doing this." The parent was warned that the avoidance of beating would lead to spoilt children, but he (or she) insisted and faced the consequences. Others decided it was a bad idea, but not all of them. Some shrewd liberals agreed with the conclusion that progress involves no longer beating one's children and tried to figure out a solution to the problem of ending up with a spoilt child. How to achieve the combination of not beating and not having a spoilt child: how to have your cake and eat it? What is the solution? If you ask a person who frowns upon your practice of beating your children, he or she may not tell you. They may say, "Um, er..." They have a solution, but you merely have acquaintance with a taboo and no solution to the problem you fear will arise from abiding by the taboo. The solution may involve this: your child is sent to play with other children and these other children play a team sport involving a ball but they will not pass the ball to your child if your child is spoilt or on their way to becoming spoilt, despite your child's talent for sport. There are various non-violent incentives people can provide, including fellow children, to ensure that your child still comes out not spoilt. One does not literally have a rod, but one metaphorically does! (Even if the speculation about origins is not true, this is a plausible theory of how the problem of spoilt children is avoided.) An open department for only my people. In liberal societies, you generally have to advertise a job vacancy. Also job selection must be based on merit for the job. One should not select candidate B over candidate A because candidate B is one's relative, one's friend, or a member of the same race. "But I want to work with my people," a frank character might respond: "He might be worse at the job, but I like him - he is one of my people." How to have your cake and eat it here? Forgive me if this is too cynical but probably a lot of departments have their ways of achieving this. I want to focus on 19th century English philosophy: I wonder whether professional philosophy is a pioneer in relation to this goal. I shall have to "put together" some pieces of information to show you why I wonder this - and I may not have divided the information up with ideal neatness. (a) Today elite philosophy departments of the English speaking world - departments based in elite universities - mostly concentrate on what is called analytic philosophy. (b) According to legend, analytic philosophy was founded by the Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore when they broke with the fashionable Hegelian idealism of the time, the leading Hegelian being the Oxford-based Scot F.H. Bradley. An important predecessor to analytic philosophy was Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who also attacked Bradley (who lived and influenced for a long time). (c) Sidgwick says of Bradley, "really penetrating criticism, especially in ethics, requires a patient effort of sympathy which Mr Bradley has never learned to make, and a tranquility of temper which he seems incapable of maintaining." These words from an 1870s review are quoted with approval, it seems, by a recent figure of comparable stature to the Victorian titans, Derek Parfit (2011: xxxvii - Parfit who seems to me not at all tranquil; a captivating figure, I observed him lecture once and address questions). (d) Parfit also quotes a mid-twentieth century Cambridge philosopher C.D. Broad, on Sidgwick's writing style, in a broad sense. Sidgwick apparently "incessantly refines, qualifies, raises objections, answers them, and then finds further objections to the answer. Each of these objections, rebuttals, rejoinders, and surrejoinders is in itself admirable, and does infinite credit to the acuteness and candour of the author. But the reader is apt to become impatient; to lose the thread of the argument; and to rise from his desk finding that he has read a great deal with constant admiration and now remembers little or nothing." (2011: xxxxix) (e) Anyone who reads this description and has taken courses in analytic philosophy will probably think, "Yes, I have experienced writing just like that," even if they took the course recently and the readings were recent too, e.g. all post-World-War-Two. (f) C.D. Broad, elsewhere, while discussing invalid inferences in politics, describes the people of certain nations as phlegmatic (the English, the Swedes, the Dutch), in contrast to other races, whose members are of excitable temperament (1950). Perhaps his reaction to Sidgwick's review of Bradley was "Bradley is a Scot, so what do you expect?" How do we put all this together? Even if Sidgwick was a stylistic innovator, it was probably not a massive leap from before: there were people who did something like his style but less extreme (see Hume 1740). This style later ends up almost the official style of analytic philosophy. If you do not do that, people may well wonder: are you even an analytic philosopher? (I once suggested an essay structure to a postgraduate and he replied, "I am an analytic philosopher," to my puzzlement.) The reason for the style seems to be: this is what good philosophy looks like. But one only needs a touch of cynicism or pessimism, given the information above, to think the following: the style is promoted because it has been noticed that only (or largely - a qualification I shall omit) people from certain backgrounds are able to do it. And so one gets to have one's cake and eat it. On the one hand, "You can join our department but you must write philosophy properly to do so and this is what proper philosophy generally looks like." The department is therefore open to all. On the other, "We keep finding that only people from these countries can do the style (and probably only posh people from those countries) and we knew this when we started promoting the style, despite its obvious drawbacks." Thus it becomes a department of our people. (By the way, I have elsewhere coined the term quasi-racism for when one gets all the benefits of racism without any explicit racial requirement, e.g. an explicit requirement that only people from this race can apply. But am I being too harsh?) An open journal for only my people. I have some experience with journals. I have published in various philosophy journals, most of them unranked, though some of them are respected by some professional philosophers. I have some citations from some of these publications. I have also done some editing for a journal, which has now ceased to be. I am not a person of no success in philosophy, so I should not be too pessimistic! But I sent off a little paper to the esteemed journal Analysis and it was rejected at the initial assessment stage: a paper for all the ages, I thought. By the way, I also have some experience of trying to publish and actually publishing poetry. Unlike the poetry journals, the esteemed philosophy journals are all blind review. That means that the person evaluating a paper does not see the name of the author. The esteemed journals are actually double-blind review or more. (Double blind-review means that two independent reviewers both assess a paper, neither of whom knows the name of the paper’s author.) But who publishes in Analysis, for example, a famous journal for short papers? It used to be almost all Anglo-Saxon white men, with a few exceptions. (Does Hillel Steiner count as an exception?) Now the occasional woman publishes, I suppose, and more continental Europeans. But when I edited issues for Philosophical Pathways, I would just pick the articles I liked from a long list of articles and the philosophers thus published were from all over the world and a variety of races (if we can assume races exist). Also I have no idea who they are and whether I would personally like them or not. The journal did not have blind review. My worry is that there is a way of having your cake and eating it here: a philosophy journal has blind review but somehow mostly "our people" get in. The distribution is not what one would expect from fair-minded blind review. (Perhaps I am being unfair on the editor David Liggins though. There is another journal for short philosophy papers, entitled Thought. What is the difference? It is hard for me to say, apart from trivially that they have different titles, etc. Thought publishes white men from all over the world? Anyway, I am wondering whether: for expert insiders David Liggins will be considered a great liberalizer if Analysis is in the end as fair-jminded as Thought? By the way, I taught and marked for the University of Manchester for several years and the exam scripts are anonymized, but each student has a number and if you want to, you can look up the name associated with that number on the computer.) I tend to be critical of the philosophy journals with these suspect distributions because (or also because) after about a year of trying from late 2023 to 2024 (I tried in 2021 too), I managed to publish in two poetry journals - journals for very brief poetry. They do not have blind review, I have much less experience in poetry, but I still got through and justly I believe. That makes me wonder whether the contemporary blind review system in philosophy is a have-your-cake-an-eat-it system: from the official policy anyone sufficiently skilled who applies their skills has a significant chance, but somehow it is only these people of similar background who get published! ("We don't do what the poets do. That's mad - and you are not even one of the maddest by their standards"?) The variable-length sessions of Dr. Lacan. Psychoanalysis is of course associated above all with one name: Sigmund Freud. But after Freud or alongside him come a number of figures generally regarded as of a lower rank, such as Otto Rank, Marie Bonaparte, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, Wilfrid Ruprecht Bion, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. But one name amongst the lesser figures eclipses all the others in terms of fame: Jacques Lacan. Lacan is famous, amongst other things, for varying the length of the psychoanalytic session. In the psychoanalytic session, as we outsiders ordinarily conceive it, there is a couch and a patient lying on the couch, telling the analyst about their dreams and other gateways into the unconscious. The analyst asks the occasional question and sometimes provides an interpretation. The session lasts for about an hour. With Lacanian psychanalysis, the patient does not know how long the session will last for. It could be a minute, it could be an hour, it could be somewhere in-between. The official rationale for the variable-length sessions is that with a fixed one hour length, the typical patient only gives up useful information for the analyst towards the end of the session, after 50 minutes say. If the patient does not know when the session will end, the patient will provide useful information much earlier. Very clever, Jacques Lacan. (I am not sure where I read this rationale, by the way.) But my undergraduate degree was in social anthropology and I learnt about the structural-functionalist school, according to which social practices function to maintain social structure. This background of mine leads me to wonder whether there is another reason for the variable-length sessions. Many possible patients do not go in for Lacanian psychoanalysis then. After all, it usually costs but you may only get 1 minute of analysis in one week. The remainder who still join are probably very wealthy, very intellectual and probably very supportive of the Lacanian project. Forgive me for suspecting that there was an intention to get these patients and not others. (Intention or not, that seems a social function of the variable-length session.) If we attribute such an intention here, we have another have-your-cake-and-eat-it practice. Lacanian psychoanalysis is, by its official requirements, open to all, but actually the variable-length session serves to deter all but a desired patient, without actually saying that others should not apply. Lacan was a Frenchman and his psychoanalysis is popular in countries with Romance languages, I believe, but maybe he will increase in popularity in Britain, with this perspective on what he is up to by varying the length of the psychoanalytic session at the analyst's will. Alice Munro's paradoxical dance instructor. Alice Munro is a Nobel prize winning Canadian author. She is renowned for realistic short fiction, so hopefully the fiction I shall quote from bears a close relationship to reality. The opening paragraph of Munro's story Voices tells us about dancing in small-town Canada (Ontario is the province, I believe): "The square dancing had complicated patterns or steps, which a person known for special facility would call out at the top of his voice (it was always a man) and in a strange desperate sort of haste which was of no use at all unless you knew the dance already. As everybody did, having learned them by the time they were ten or twelve years old." What is going on here? It looks to be a have-your-cake-and-eat-it system. On the one hand, one has to have a dance instructor, or whatever the term is, so that the dance is available to any outsiders or people unacquainted with the steps. Otherwise one is simply illiberal and Canada is a paradigm of a good liberal country. On the other hand, one does not really want to let outsiders in and so the dance instructor is of no use for actually learning from. I suspect this dance, with its paradoxical instructor, is an imitation or reflection of liberal practices or superficially liberal practices in Britain and a reminder of a traumatic experience. "Once we tried to join in, or our ancestors did, and it was an unpleasant experience for us. 'Sure we could,' people said, but we found out the hard way that actually we could not." Poetry smuggling in a liberal society. So far I have discussed actual or strongly suspected have-your-cake-and-eat-it social practices. I want to end with a practice which perhaps belongs to the future, drawing upon a 2022 paper of mine. The idea of a liberal society, in its mainstream vision, is one that sets a minimal set of rules and leaves the set of individuals within it with considerable freedom to do as they please, as long as they abide by the set rules: liberalism gives liberty. Various liberals differ on what exactly the rules should be. Should they include rules to ensure that the worst-off position is not so bad or should they not? (See Rawls 1999.) Whatever the details, a liberal system of rules is supposed to enable people with significantly different religious and philosophical views and ethnic identities to live together in one society, though the rules may not be acceptable to some extreme characters. They are supposed to be acceptable to most. Now there are various worries about liberalism and one worry concerns the arts. When I was growing up, you learnt poetry in school, amongst other things: mathematics, natural sciences, foreign languages, and more. I assume things have not changed that much in Britain (though sometimes the assumption appears questionable). But how do you justify teaching poetry in a compulsory school curriculum? This person values poetry and this other person does not, or else not the prestigious stuff that secondary schools teach (or secondary schools as I envision them teach - North Americans call these high schools): Milton, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, William Blake, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth and his sister, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, A.E. Housman, Robert Graves (and Laura Riding?), T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, and more. "Who cares about all that? It is only there because people are overly deferential towards tradition," says the opponent. How can you justify teaching poetry in a liberal society, in which the rules are supposed to be acceptable to all but a few extreme characters. This person is just expressing an oft expressed view under liberalism. A solution I came up with is this: if you want students to know about that poetry stuff, you write textbooks in a permissible school subject given liberal rules, such as biology, and you include inspiring quotes from such poets, at the headings of chapters say. This is, I suppose, a have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach. It does not seem that liberal rules can be combined with teaching poetry, but this solution allows for it (to some extent). Some final reflection. A visitor to the United Kingdom, to Britain, is likely to be struck by the rules in this country, whether written or unwritten, argued for or mere taboo. "How can you have rule X and avoid this problem?" the visitor is disposed to ask, regarding various rules - they are disposed to ask questions of this form. To return to my opening example, how can you spare the rod and avoid (or prevent) spoiling the child? Unfortunately, one is likely to only be told the rule and offered no solution regarding the unwanted consequence that comes with this rule. Above I have presented various cases, from previous papers of mine, regarding how seemingly impossible combinations are achieved. What I fear is that a set of foreigners who come to live here really need a lot of brains, as they say today, in order to figure out how to abide by the rules of Britain without various unwanted consequences (and also some other societies beyond it - “brains” here means cleverness, by the way). Probably people with brains of this level do not want to spend a lot of their time working this stuff out, but what else can one do? They would rather be contributing to science or writing novels, and so forth. But are you going to beat your children and be frowned upon by the entire society, or a large section of it? My apologies if I have mischaracterized the society I live in and some others. I can be insensitive sometimes. (Anyway, if one gets into a saying battle with to-have-your-cake-and-eat-it, as Miriam Ronzoni seems to, from my standpoint, the outcome is likely to be working for the opponent.) Appendix 1: convergence I was reading a biography of Diane Abbott, the first black woman to become a member of parliament in the United Kingdom. The authors tell us about freedom of speech and anti-racism projects following the Notting Hill Riots of 1958. There were efforts to remove restrictions such as “Europeans only” and “no coloureds” from housing advertisements in newspapers: advertising rooms to rent or places to rent. But it was objected that freedom of speech is a British value and landlords were paying for the advertisement. The outcome of effort versus objection was a compromise. There was no law preventing specifying such restrictions but newspaper staff would advise that the language risked offence and advertisers were offered an opportunity to rephrase (2020: 9-10). The biography’s authors interestingly describe this as a very British compromise. It seems to me that they too view Britain as a society of have-your-cake-and-eat-it practices: in this case reconciling freedom of speech with no racist advertisements. It is probably a good idea for me to refer to others who perceive British culture as I do! Appendix 2: comedy sketch The Apprentice is a television show created by Mark Burnett, I believe. Each series features a set of candidates set tasks. At the end of each episode within a series, a candidate is fired, reducing the set until there is one winner (or that conception will do here I believe). In the UK, the person who fires is Lord Alan Sugar, who had much earlier founded the computer company Amstrad. When I watched the show, some years ago, he was assisted by businesswoman Karren Brady, lawyers Margaret Mountford and Nick Hewer and a character, Claude Littner - not all in each episode however. The show amuses me but I imagined a comedy sketch which undermines The Apprentice's image of being very British. I think a properly British Apprentice show should remove the iconic lines "You're fired" in favour of getting the loser to quit by less direct means than exercise of a right to fire, typically passive aggression. This all leads me to a question I have about have your cake and eat it practices, or some of them. They seek to combine seemingly incompatible qualities, e.g. getting rid of you from a company, while you are well within contract, but not firing you. What happens if such a practice is mostly successful, but has exceptions, e.g. this guy does not leave despite all of the passive aggression directed at him? I presume one person will say, "Bring back: you're fired!" Another person will say, "Tolerate the exception." There is also: move to active aggression, such as pushing you or elbowing you, etc. (Text lifted from academia.edu contribution.) Appendix 3: code This is my BASIC code for the programming task I set today in "What is romantic love? Cross-cultural problems." 10 CLS 20 LIST$ = "" 30 PRINT "Do you want to add your name to the list? Press N for No." 40 K$ = INKEY$ 50 K$ = UCASE$(K$) 60 IF K$ = "" GOTO 40 70 IF K$ = "N" THEN GOTO 110 80 INPUT "What is your name? ", N$ 90 LIST$ = LIST$ + N$ + "*" 100 GOTO 30 110 LISTLEN = LEN(LIST$) 120 IF LISTLEN = 0 THEN END 130 X = 1 140 G$ = MID$(LIST$, X, 1) 150 IF G$ = "*" THEN GOTO 200 160 PRINT G$; 170 X = X + 1 180 IF X <= LISTLEN THEN GOTO 140 190 END 200 PRINT CHR$(13); 210 X = X + 1 220 IF X <= LISTLEN THEN GOTO 140 References Broad, C.D. 1950. Some common fallacies of political thinking. Philosophy 25: 99-113. Available at: https://ditext.com/broad/political.html Bunce, Robin. and Linton, Samara. 2020. Diane Abbott. The Authorised Biography. London: Biteback Publishing. Butler, Samuel. 1663, 1664, and 1678 (years for three parts). Hudibras. Available at gutenberg.org at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4937/pg4937-images.html Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2022. Poetry smuggling in a liberal society. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWPSI Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. A function of the variable length session in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWAFO Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Analysis, blind review, and a modernist journals expert (a dialogue). Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWABR Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. C.D. Broad on Sidgwick's style. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWCBO Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Dialogue with O on requirements, the histories of analytic philosophy and psychiatry. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWDWO-5 Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. The paradoxical dance instructor in Alice Munro's Voices. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWTPC-2 Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. "No more are lovely palaces": a problem with my poetry smuggling solution in a liberal society. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWQMA (I did not refer to this, but it may be useful for evaluating the poetry smuggling solution.) Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. "Marilyn Strathern's" rules-persons circularity and Kundera's development of the poet. Available on academia.edu at: https://www.academia.edu/129708983/_Marilyn_Stratherns_rules_persons_circularity_and_Kunderas_development_of_the_poet Edward, T.R. 2025. The Apprentice and when have your cake and eat it goes. Available on academia.edu Hume, David. 1740. AN ABSTRACT OF A BOOK lately Published; entituled, A TREATISE OF Human Nature, &c. Available at: https://davidhume.org/texts/a/ Munro, Alice. 2012. Voices. Available from fallfromthetree.com: https://www.fallfromthetree.com/2016/11/02/voices-short-story-alice-munroe/ Parfit, Derek. 2011. On What Matters. Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John. 1999 (revised edition). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press. Available at: https://giuseppecapograssi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/rawls99.pdf Ronzoni, Miriam. 2019. Who Will Sustain Sustainable Prosperity? Available at: https://cusp.ac.uk/themes/m/m1-7/