Guest Post: Self defence and getting sacked
Written by Dr Nicholas Shackel
Cardiff University
If you were attacked at a work party you would expect the person who attacked you to get sacked. In this case (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11846084/London-Zoo-love-rivals-in-vicious-fight-over-llama-keeper.html) it seems to be the person attacked who got sacked, apparently because the boss doesn’t understand the right of self defence. Continue reading
Guest Post: No fortune of birth
Nick Shackel
Cardiff University
Suppose you are born with valuable talents or to wealthy parents. What is added if we say that your talents or wealth are a fortune of birth? I say, nothing! This is merely a misleading way of repeating that you were born with good possessions. It is misleading because it seeks to insinuate what requires proof and in fact, as I shall now show, cannot be proved.
On the nature of defiance
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 because they threatened you. If you don’t, they will not be fooled by your high falutin’ excuses. They will know that you did not dare. And so will you.
Publishing worthy articles about free speech, tweeting that you are Charlie, drawing cartoons of pens confronting swords, standing around with your fellow world leaders, these are all worthy gestures of revulsion. None of them are acts of defiance. Defiance would be publishing the cartoons, tweeting the cartoons, drawing Mohammed and standing around with your fellow world leaders holding up the very editions of Charlie Hebdo for which their artists were slain.
Abortion on the grounds of sex
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.
Free the trolls
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?
Rationality and the Scottish referendum
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.
Motte and Bailey Doctrines
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.
Political speech crime
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? Continue reading
Conspiracies against the laity part 3298: the medical profession.
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.
Oppressing smokers for fun and profit
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! Continue reading
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