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A Secular Foothold?

A Secular Foothold?

“Insofar as modern
liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the
course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow
from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”

And so
Stanley Fish concludes his recent
column about the role of secular reasons and religion in public life. While
he briefly touches on a number of issues that stem from this ongoing debate, he
focuses his commentary on the ideas of Stephen Smith, whose new book is called The Disenchantment of
Secular Discourse. Since much of Smith’s argument circles around the
notion of secular reasons, Fish begins by explaining what these reasons are all
about.

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Breakfast with Satan

At the beginning of my journalistic career I went to interview a chap called Magnus Malan.  It was in Pretoria, and early in the morning.  General Malan had been at the heart of South Africa’s apartheid government.  He’d been head of the army and the Minister of Defence.  He had, no doubt, been responsible for… Read More »Breakfast with Satan

Castration and conscience

A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal (Grubin D,
Beech A, BMJ 2010; 340:c74) discusses the efficacy and ethics of chemical
castration for sex offenders.  

Its efficacy is not in doubt. Recidivism rates of less than
5% over long periods are consistently reported. The expected rate, absent ‘treatment’,
is 50% or more.

But is it treatment? And if it is not, should doctors
participate in it?

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Jumping the Shark

Julian mentioned in passing the other day that he thought it would not obviously be immoral, and perhaps even morally desirable, to eliminate all shark species from the earth. The reasons he gave related to their limited ecological role, the fact that sharks only serve to further deplete the already under-populated reserves of bony fish (especially large pelagics like tuna and mackerel), and the suffering they inflict on other vertebrates (including other fish, aquatic birds and mammals, and higher cognitive mollusks) in the course of feeding. Lamentably (in my view), Julian’s off-the-cuff prescription is currently being fulfilled, if unintentionally: Humans are currently killing sharks at the rate of around 40 million per year (mostly for their fins alone), and since most sharks (unlike bony fish) have small numbers of offspring at a time, these rates of killing are quite likely unsustainable. Here I want to briefly touch upon the moral value of sharks, especially at the level of species.


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Our Lethal Moral Ideals: Having a Child to Save Another

By: Julian Savulescu

In an article in the New York Times, Lisa Belkin relates the story of Laurie Strongin Allen Goldberg who tried to use PGD to create a sibling to provide bone marrow to treat their son, Henry, suffering from Fanconi anemia. Congress, however, shut down the lab that was working on P.G.D., calling it illegal stem-cell research. “That led to an 18-month delay that may well have cost Henry his life. Laurie went through nine in vitro fertilization cycles before and after that pause, and each time the embryos transferred were not only free of the genetic flaw that threatened Henry but were also his bone-marrow match. Nine attempts failed to take, and Henry had to settle for an imperfectly matched unrelated donor. He died in 2002 at the age of 7.”

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Do the Arts and Humanities need to justify their existence?

There has been a recent controversy in the UK over proposed cuts to university Arts and Humanities budgets (see here, here, here). These cuts are to the scale of £600 million by 2013 and are joined with a call for stronger ties between universities and business. There are also moves to make research funding depend upon the 'impact' of previous research in that university department (see here). The moves have been very unpopular with researchers in Arts and Humanities and prompt questions about whether it is right to measure these areas in terms of their contributions to the world.

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Metaphors We Moralize By

“He has a heart of gold.” “There’s
not a mean bone in her body.” “They’re rotten to the core.”
“We’re going to show them what we’re made of.”

What do all these statements have in
common? They all cluster around the idea that people contain fundamental
moral properties that define who they are and determine how they behave.
In other words, they form a conceptual metaphor that understands morality
as essence. There are other common conceptual metaphors for morality
as well: morality as bounds (leading astray, deviating
from the path, transgressing bounds) or morality as uprightness
(an upstanding citizen, a lowly thing to do). These moral
metaphors can tell us quite a lot, according to George Lakoff, a cognitive
linguist and author of numerous influential books like Metaphors We
Live By and Moral Politics. In fact, Lakoff argues, metaphors may be
the key to understanding much of politics, culture, and human thought
itself.

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How many friends do you need?

The title of Robin Dunbar’s recently published book asks a good question: How many friends does one person need? (http://www.faber.co.uk/work/how-many-friends-does-one-person-need/9780571253425/)

Dunbar suggests that a human being can’t have more than about 150 friends (or ‘acquaintances’, as the book itself somewhat revealingly puts it). But of course it all depends on who we count as a ‘friend’. If we are talking about people with whom one spends a good deal of one’s time, then the number would usually be significantly lower; whereas if we allow friends to include what Aristotle called philoi, it could be much larger. People are philoi when they have some kind of goodwill to one another, and are mutually aware of that goodwill (Nicomachean Ethics VIII.2). On this generous view, even Facebook ‘friends’ one has never met might be genuine, if those extending and accepting the invitation do have some real concern for one another.

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