Manic Random Linkage

Some of these are old. I point out I had no internet access for three weeks. Enjoy.

A Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford says the kind of erudite, reasonable things one would expect a Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford to say about proposals to criminalise speech which could be construed as attempting to justify terrorism and excuse killings of civilians as long as they are committed by the police, i.e., he rips the piss, but in a very calm and collected way. This pleases me (I've forgotten where I found this link: apologies to whoever).

Andrew Bartlett gets quite annoyed about people trying to erase or diminish the point that it's not really the done thing in a country which allegedly prides itself on its adherence to the rule of law for the police to extra-judicial executions. Especially when those people include the police. One might be tempted to think that they didn't always have our best interests at heart. Phil of Actually Existing had some stuff to say about this as well.

Brian Leiter, wholly reasonable man that he is, reproduces the text of a statement by Cindy Sheehan which is just quite appropriately vitrolic about the absolute moral vacuum that is George Dubya Bush and his government. Then he notes that Pat Robertson - as I'm sure several others have also done - may have some difficulty getting into Britain if Charles Clarke gets his way. On this note, I think it could probably be rather important that the legislation is well drafted, as, for example, I'd be quite happy to describe the US assault on Falluja as terrorism, and since doing something seemingly without qualms and not then apologising for it is presumably a kind of attempt at justification, we could be ending up deporting, well, the leader of the free world.

Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling is his typically provocative self, and proposes a new use for Saddam Hussein in light of the difficulties for animal testing created by various animal rights organisations, who, frankly, should be picketing halal butchers instead. I'm not sure that this isn't a 'Modest Proposal' type satire, but if it's not, I think there may be very good reasons why we shouldn't do what Chris suggests, but it depends on how bad the testing would be for the convicted criminals who would replace the animals. If it would be relevantly like torture, then I think the argument I made here stands against it. I'm not even going to get started on David f*cking Gauthier (count to ten, then all after me: to each according to his threat advantage is not a principle of justice).

Next, Chris asks about the role of intuitions in ethics, which he must know is a whole big can of worms. Without going into it in any great depth, I think intuitions must be central to any ethical theory, to the extent that it tells fatally against utilitarianism, for example, that it counts the pleasure of the torturer as equal to that of the tortured, because intuitions are closest thing we have to evidence in ethics. This is because I tend to think of ethics - or at least, what philosophers mean by ethics - as a kind of tidying-up exercise, the goal of which is to produce increasingly coherent, holistic accounts of our ethical thinking. This is for epistemological reasons I have outlined here, amongst other places.

Chris also wonders about the extent of our obligations to those we don't share a polity with. I tend to think Pogge, is probably right about this. Pogge's argument is something like the claim that we have an obligation to ensure that any institutions we participate in treat other whom they affect reasonably, and that various institutions - or indeed, institutionalised lack of institutions - which connect the global North to the global South fail to do that, meaning we have an obligation to rectify the situation. That seems like a good Rawlsian argument to me, although I haven't read 'The Law of Peoples', where Rawls denies the implications that Pogge draws from his work.

Finally, things which I'm not going to say anything about: Blimpish gainfully tries to make conservatism sound plausible, again, and the Law West of Ealing Broadway sets another one of their quizes.