When a thug or a bully or a terrorist is threatening you to stop you doing something they don’t like, not doing it is not defying them, it is submitting to them. Even if you otherwise would not, to defy them you must do the very thing they are forbidding. You must do it just… Read More »On the nature of defiance
Apparently some UK doctors have been aborting babies because their parents don’t want a baby of that sex. In response the government is now planning to outlaw abortion on the grounds of sex. It is already illegal, however, so we must wonder what the politicians are up to. A question being ignored is whether it is right or wrong to abort on the grounds of sex. I am going to consider various grounds on which abortion is considered permissible and examine whether that permissibility is consistent with abortion on the grounds of sex being forbidden.
You do not have a right not to be offended, insulted or verbally abused. You do not have that right because it might be right to offend, insult or verbally abuse you. You might believe stupid things, or even sensible things, and take offence at any and all critiques, rebuttals and refutations. You might be a pompous prig, a sanctimonious sop, an officious orifice. Even if you are not these things, there would be very little wrong in telling you you are. After all, you are not a six-year old child: you’re an adult. You can take it.
What of someone expressing their detestation of you, their hatred of you, wishing you ill, wishing you dead?
One argument that has been put forward against voting for Scottish independence in the Scottish referendum is that it would be irrational for Scotland to break free of the rest of Great Britain. The grounds for this claim are that the Scottish economy would be significantly worse under independence. This is an empirical claim and for the sake of argument I am going to grant it. What I am interested in is whether, supposing that to be true, it would in fact be irrational. There are a number of things seriously wrong with this inference.
One of the difficulties of getting people to behave better epistemically is that, whilst intellectual dishonesty is wrong, it is difficult to convict people of intellectual wrongs. As David Stove showed in his wonderful paper ‘What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?’ (The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies Chapter 7 ), there are indefinitely many ways of cheating intellectually and for most there is no simple way to put one’s finger on how the cheat is effected. There is just the hard work of describing the species in detail.
Some time ago I wrote a paper entitled The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology (here or here or here ) in which I described and named a number of such cheats that I detected in postmodernism. One of these I named the Motte and Bailey Doctrine. There has recently been a flurry of use of this concept to analyse ethical, political and religious positions (e.g. here, here) so I am taking the opportunity to have a look at it again.
In an article at The conversation Professor Torcello has proposed that ‘an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent’. I am wholly in agreement with him. I cannot think of a political party whose campaign can be characterised as anything other than an organized campaign funding misinformation and I would be delighted if we could bang them all up in chokey for it and be rid of them. Sorry, what’s that? He wasn’t talking about politicians? Well who was he talking about then?Read More »Political speech crime
Well wouldn’t you know it. A surgeon who transmitted antibiotic resistant superbug during operations on people’s hearts doesn’t want you to know he did.
Read More »Conspiracies against the laity part 3298: the medical profession.
Do you like the ambiguous title? No, I don’t think illegal kidney markets are intrinsically abominable. Insofar as they are abominable in various respects it is entirely a further consequence of the abominality of making them illegal. The abominable politicians who passed the law and sustain the law are to blame for thousands of deaths every year.
A fundamental argument for a market in kidneys is that they’re my kidneys and it’s up to me what I do with them, so keep your nose out of it. I would also direct you to an earlier argument of mine based on the ultimatum game, in which I show that if it is true that the offers in that game should be fair, then failing to pay donors for kidneys is unfair. But perhaps you’d prefer an argument based on better consequences. Let me give you one:Read More »Time to stop the abominable illegality of kidney markets
According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (Prabhat & Peto 2014),
Tripling tobacco tax globally would cut smoking by a third, and prevent 200 million premature deaths this century from lung cancer and other diseases. (here)
This should, of course, be instituted immediately. It is almost the perfect public policy: self-interest dressed up as sanctimony. Not only will we make the lives of non-smokers better at the expense of smokers, but we can do so whilst telling smokers we are doing it for their own good!Read More »Oppressing smokers for fun and profit
You have no right to be free from insult. Indeed, sometimes you may deserve to be insulted. Let us take a case that brings this into sharp focus: the Tory chief whip who lost his job because… well, we still don’t know exactly why because it now turns out that what the police claimed at the time wasn’t true. And maybe he should have lost his job: I don’t know. But one of the underlying assumptions throughout seems to have been that nobody should ever be sworn at. And that is flatly false. Sometimes people deserve to be sworn at. People in power deserve it when they stupidly, arrogantly or indifferently muck up our lives, something they do routinely. They deserve it most especially when they misuse their authority, such as when they do so to display their power by make someone’s life worse or for the purpose of getting their own back on someone who resists their misuse of power.Read More »In praise of insult
