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A wonderful, unspecific day

A wonderful, unspecific day

Tuesday was a wonderful, exciting, day.   But the job of the philosophical blogger is to look beyond the general euphoria, and seek out discussion points.  

A commentator in the ChicagoTribune remarked that President Obama’s inaugural speech was ‘heavy on allusion, short on specifics’.   That was probably not intended as a criticism, however, and it would have been unreasonable if it had been.  If you are trying to engage everybody in a nation which has, as the President said, a ‘patchwork heritage’ of ‘Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers’ the only possible way to do it is to avoid specifics.  Everyone can unite round ‘mutual interest and respect’, having things in their ‘rightful place’ and  ‘a future of peace and dignity’, because these are terms that, as philosophers would say, have strong connotations but no particular denotation.  We know they imply approval of whatever is being alluded to, but we may not know much about what that is.

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Non possumus?

These days the Vatican’s statements sound a bit like a broken record, repeating continuously “Non possumus”. It started at the beginning of December when Benedict XVI refused to support President Sarkozy’s proposal that encourages the governments of the World to decriminalize homosexuality, proposal that should be added to the next UN Declaration of human rights.
It’s worth knowing that in the world more or less eighty countries have rules that punish sexual acts between homosexual people.

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Tattoos and taboos: making end of life preferences known when it matters

A 79 year old euthanasia campaigner in New Zealand has attracted local and international publicity after having the words ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ tattooed across her chest. Although this seems unlikely to be widely emulated her action highlights the problem that at the time when it might be most important to make one’s views known, patients are often unconscious or incompetent.

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I just don’t care about animals that much!

Despite the protestations of those opposed to the use of animals in research, the fundamental differences between people over the treatment of animals seems to lie with the weight that we are prepared to give to animal suffering and death in the pursuit of human goods and interests. Very few, I would have thought, would give animal suffering no weight and similarly, very few would give animal suffering more weight than human suffering.

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Open source censorship

The struggle against child porn goes on. An Australian judge has ruled that a cartoon showing a character from The Simpsons engaged in sexual activity is child pornography. Australia is also trying to implement Internet filtering for the whole population, although the project has run into serious opposition. Meanwhile Wikipedia ended up 'censored' in the UK due to a page with the controversial cover of an album.

The most interesting aspect of the Wikipedia debacle is that the decision that led to the censorship was not made by any government authority but an industry-sponsored group, the Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF maintains a blacklist certain ISPs subscribe to, and users trying to reach a site on it will be sent a blank page. Is this censorship, and is this bad?

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Statutes of limitations for serious offences: why Europe needs a reform

Last Sunday, 30th of November, Switzerland, by a
narrow majority, approved a constitutional modification doing away with any
statute of limitations for paedophile crimes. The initiative proposing that
modification had been opposed by the government and by most of the country’s
political parties, who supported instead the idea of maintaining the existing
statute of limitations of 15 years but making it start later than had so far
been the case (thus giving more time to the victims to decide whether or not to
take legal action). The surprise acceptance of the initiative in the popular
vote was criticized by much of the Swiss press as marking a triumph of
“emotion” over “reason” (see for instance here and here; in French). But leaving aside the question of what actually led most Swiss voters to
endorse the initiative, does the very idea of opposing a statute of limitations
for paedophile (and other equally serious) crimes necessarily lend itself to
such criticism? I want to suggest that this is not so.

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