A selection of the latest news from Afghanistan.
November 1, 2009
Episode 11. Christopher Heath Wellman on Immigration
There is no denying that international borders—coercively upheld and protected—are a huge factor in determining the distribution of wealth and opportunities throughout the world. From education and health care, to access to credit and the rule of law, a host of factors that influence quality of life depend simply on which side of a border a person is born on. Yet what could be more arbitrary, morally speaking, than where a person happens to be born? And why is it that inequality and poverty traceable back to this factor is generally considered less objectionable than deprivations that result from factors such as race, ethnicity or gender?
To get a grip on these questions, Public Ethics Radio discussed immigration and citizenship policies with Christopher Heath Wellman. Wellman is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, and a Professorial Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre. His views on immigration are also set out in his recent, “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” Ethics 119, no. 1 (2008): 109–141.
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October 15, 2009
Understanding Afghanistan: Reading Material
Once a week or so, we’ll be rounding up recent reading material on Afghanistan. After the jump, the inaugural list.
October 13, 2009
Understanding Afghanistan: The Original Assessment
This post is the first in a series of examination of the moral issues at stake in the war in Afghanistan. Today: the initial assessment of the resort to war in 2001.
October 13, 2009
Understanding Afghanistan: The Application of Just War Theory
I’m pleased an announce a special project for Public Ethics Radio. Christian and I, along with the talented producer Barbara Clare, are in the process of producing a special episode on the war in Afghanistan. The roots of this project are simple: we want to understand the war. As any observer can tell you, this isn’t easy.
September 25, 2009
Episode 10. Hilary Charlesworth on Bills of Rights
The widespread agreement on the importance of human rights in liberal democracies masks sharp differences between governments’ methods of protecting these rights. What does a country gain by enacting a bill of rights? Do countries that lack bills of rights, like Australia, protect human rights as well as those, like the United States and Canada, that have them? Does it make a difference if such rights are written into a foundational government document, as they in the United States, or if they are at least ostensibily on par with all other legislation, as they are in the United Kingdom?
In this episode of Public Ethics Radio, human-rights lawyer Hilary Charlesworth leads us through the challenging questions posed by the institutionalization of human rights.
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August 17, 2009
Episode 9. Michael Selgelid on Infectious Diseases
Can we infringe individual rights to promote public health? Should, say, individuals be allowed to determine for themselves when they are too infectious to get on a plane? What happens when an individual contracts a new disease that is of unknown virulence? How do we deal with patients who don’t take their prescriptions correctly and risk allowing dangerous pathogens to mutate?
These urgent questions are the domain of the bioethics of infectious disease. On this episode of Public Ethics Radio, we are aided in the search for answers by the philosopher and tuberculosis expert Michael Selgelid.
July 20, 2009
Thanks, ANU
In other good news, we’re thrilled to announce that PER has been awarded a grant by the Australian National University’s College of Arts and Social Sciences E-Research and E-Learning Sub-Committee. We’re very grateful to the university for its support.
July 20, 2009
And we’re back!
Hi, everybody.
I’m very pleased to say that Public Ethics Radio is back from a little impromptu hiatus. We’ve recorded three brand new episodes: Michael Selgelid on infectious diseases, Christopher Heath Wellman on the theory and practice of immigration, and Hilary Charlesworth on bills of rights. We’ll start posting these very, very soon.
March 25, 2009
Episode 8. David Grewal on Network Power
The evolving global order has liberalized trade in goods, capital, ideas, and, to a lesser extent, people within a multilateral and market-oriented framework. Debates on globalization have focused on the question of whether this order is morally defensible.
The arguments are as diverse as they are forceful. Some decry the order entirely, or claim that at the very least it is much inferior to alternative forms of globalization. Others object that is coercively imposed by powerful, affluent countries—a new and pernicious kind of imperial control. Even apparently voluntary processes, such as learning English or joining the World Trade Organization, are viewed as the result of the use of power of a morally problematic sort. Still others have rushed to defend globalization in its current form, arguing that it is certainly the best that can be feasibly be hoped for, at least for now. These enthusiasts argue that increasing globalization is developing not through the use of power, but through the free choices of people and countries throughout the world.
How is one to make sense of this debate and evaluate these claims? Today on Public Ethics Radio, we discuss globalization with David Grewal of Harvard University.
