Political correctness and a desire not to offend are bad enough when they chill reasonable debate and dissent, but another possible consequence is that we might not even be able to insist on robust standards when it comes to science.
Cardinal Napier seemed to be wanting to point out something like this – that paedophiles need to be identified, and treated, rather than being treated as criminals. Because they are not yet criminals.
I was recently invited to give a talk at the launch of the UCT Student FSI. Here is the video of that talk.
Giving up on some of the comfortable fictions that come bundled with religion – like the idea of an afterlife – does not mean that we have to give up on commemorating the lives of those we’ve lost, or that we’re inconsistent in wishing that something like an afterlife did exist.
It’s wrong to impute negative intentions – that’s where the principle of charity comes in. And while an insistence on people setting aside any pre-existing perceptions regarding your motives might be logically coherent, it’s not sufficient in this world of real insults and (at least psychological) harms.
Thanks to columns and arguments like Dowden’s that it becomes ever clearer that the debate should ideally not be around whether the next Pope should be African or other, but rather around how long the Papacy – and Catholicism in this form – can survive at all.
Even though the vast majority of rape victims could have done nothing differently to prevent their rape, that doesn’t mean there aren’t strategies available to mitigate against the risk of being raped. Talking about those strategies is a matter of thinking about the evidence – even and perhaps especially when discussing so emotive a topic.
While it is perfectly legitimate for our aesthetic preferences regarding technological innovations in food to determine what we eat, they shouldn’t dictate policy – evidence should. And if we have no clear understanding of the evidence, perhaps we should stay out of the policy debate entirely.
Did you perhaps think that right-wing talk show hosts couldn’t say anything more absurd than you’ve already heard? Not even the homeschooled ones? Well, you’d be wrong.
Nobody expects more from de Botton than vaguely inspirational “deep thoughts”, so it’s entirely possible that part of my annoyance is mere jealousy at how he’s cornered the atheist version of the Deepak Chopra market.
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