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How much should we care about MPs’ expense claims?

How much should we care about MPs’ expense claims?

Few people
in the UK could have missed the furious storm about MPs’ expense claims that has dominated the news headlines for the past several weeks.  A steady flow of stories has revealed not
only which MPs bent the rules on expenses, but also that many of the rules are themselves objectionable and arguably
facilitate a misuse of taxpayers’ money.

Of course,
few of us enjoy paying tax, but most of us grudgingly accept that it is
necessary if we want certain social goods like decent healthcare and a fair
justice system.  None of us likes to
think of our money instead being directed towards those who already enjoy a
higher income and better job perks than we do. 
What is most striking about the current focus on MPs’ expense claims,
however, is the fact that we are in the middle of a serious recession. 
And the amount of taxpayers’ money used to finance MPs' bogus
mortgage payments, luxury goods,
and furniture is but a drop in the ocean compared to the financial losses suffered by
homeowners due to falling property prices, by the half-million workers who have lost their jobs in the past nine months, and by those still employed whose tax payments must help support the newly jobless.  Given that the impact of a recession on
ordinary people is at least partly the result of government decision-making,
why does the recession consistently take second place in the headlines to the
relatively trivial matter of MPs’ expense claims?

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Biting into the sour apple: liberal society, abortion rights and sex selection

The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has recently declared that it is impossible to deny abortions to women who base their decision on the sex of the foetus. This ruling came about after a case where a woman twice aborted foetuses because they were female. This upset not only the medical personnel, but also social minister Göran Hägglund who declared that it was horrible that people valued sexes differently. But while the majority of Swedes probably do think sex selection is immoral, the right to free abortion is equally strongly held. This poses an interesting problem for socially and politically liberal societies like Sweden: allow gender selection, or try to restrict abortion?

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Yad Vashem and the Pope

Today I just want to put a question. 

Pope Benedict is in Israel.  When a visiting VIP is in Israel – and they don’t get more VI than the Pope – he or she is invariably taken to the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.  Walking around Yad Vashem is an overwhelming experience.  As a museum it’s more raw, less professional, more gut-wrenching, than the vast and stunning Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

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The flu paradox: is the WHO focusing too little on flu?

The WHO is in the news these days thanks to the H1N1 epidemic (alias the swine flu, or the Colbert flu), and it is doing an admirable job coordinating various national agencies in fighting a pandemic. Historically it has been at the forefront of fighting epidemic disease, whether tuberculosis or AIDS. However, since Gro Harlem Brundtland's director-generalship 1998-2003 there has been an increased emphasis on public health, in particular fighting alcohol and tobacco use but also traffic accidents. Has the WHO aimed at the right or wrong problems?

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Ian Plimer’s climate change skepticism

Well known Australian geologist and climate skeptic Ian Plimer has recently released a new book in which he continues to push the case for climate change skepticism, entitled Heaven and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science, and published by Connorcourt. See http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=103. See also http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25429080-7583,00.html.

 

This is not the place to review the book. What I want to do here is examine at an argument that is advertised as being made in the book in a puff piece written by Vaclav Klaus on the Connorcourt website (Klaus is a former EU president and a well know climate change skeptic). The argument, which Plimer has made before, strikes me as fallacious. In saying this I do not mean to imply that climate change skeptics have no arguments that might be worth considering. They might well. But if they do then it would be a good idea to focus on those arguments and avoid presenting fallacious arguments, which can only damage the case for climate change skepticism, at least amongst attentive readers. The argument of Plimer’s that I want to examine is the claim that we should not worry about changing temperatures because the changes that are under consideration are very minor compared to the large changes that have taken place in the past. Plimer expressed this view quite succinctly in a radio interview in 2007:

 

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Pandemic ethics: The boy who cried ‘flu’!

The headlines in the last week have been dramatic. California has declared a state of emergency. The World Health Organisation has raised its pandemic alert status to level 5 – its second highest level. The UK government is about to post leaflets to every household providing information on how to reduce spread of an outbreak of H1N1 influenza (swine flu).

It is not clear whether the threatened pandemic will eventuate. But the response to a possible or to a real pandemic raises a number of ethical questions. This blog will hopefully address some of those questions in the coming days. But here is one to start with. How ought the government to respond to the threat of pandemic influenza?

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Epistemic duty and conspiracies against the laity 2

Conspiracies against the laity frequently operate with an inverted morality. For example, honour among thieves includes the obligation not to snitch, that is to say, not to tell the truth about the wrongdoing of each other. By contrast, the professions have an epistemic duty to speak the truth about the success and failure of the deployment of their particular profession’s expertise, and about the success and failure of the professional activities in which they are engaged and for which they are responsible.

Margaret Haywood, a nurse, had sought to fulfil this duty, but the Nursing and Midwifery Council has treated her as a snitch.

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Intuitive pirates: why do we accept file sharing so much?

Piracy is in the headlines, whether in Somalian waters or Swedish cyberspace. A Stockholm court this friday found four men guilty of promoting copyright infringement by running the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay and sentenced them to one year in prison as well as a 30 million kronor fine (about $3.5 million). The case will no doubt go to a higher court and the circus (as well as the piracy) will continue. Legally, at least in the sense of the spirit of the laws banning copyright infringement, the case is pretty clear. But morally, what is wrong with file sharing? And why don't people care?

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