Tag: Politics & society

Local versus global is not the real issue

Articles & Essays, Food

Spot the contradiction. Today, a conscientious, ethical consumer might celebrate the start of Fairtrade Fortnight by walking into a local, independent grocery store in the South-west of England and filling his basket with honey, herbs, chocolate, dried apricots, bananas, even wine from the developing world. He might then go to the till, walking past innumerable signs boasting of how much of the shop’s stock is sourced locally, and pay in a local currency, the Bristol Pound, which uses the slogan “Our city. Our money”. To say there is a tension here is to put it mildly. Yet both Fairtrade and the new localism can be reconciled as two parts of the solution to the same problem: the injustice and unfairness of the current market economy.

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The demolition man

Articles & Essays

John Gray has given us a lot to think about, and has done so provocatively and eloquently. But The Silence of Animals suggests he needs to push his own thinking too. The work of demolition is done and there is little to be gained from continuing to swing the wrecking ball over the ruins. Gray needs to say more about how civilised westerners should live, at least as individuals if not as a society, once we have given up the most egregious myths and illusions of western civilisation.

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Huhne case highlights the end of privacy

Articles & Essays

The social networking genie is out of the bottle and it is far too mischievous to be tamed. Discretion was hard enough to maintain when it could count on the support of social mores. Now that honesty, openness and sharing are the supreme values, it stands no chance. There is no turning the clock back to the days when the four walls of home contained more secrets than anyone outside could imagine. With denial and cover-up no longer an option, we are going to have to become more forgiving of others and of ourselves.

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Character Through Thick and Thin

etc.

​ABSTRACT: Concerns about making character formation a strand of public policy centre around both doubts about the empirical basis of such policies and the appropriate role of government in shaping and directing private life. To address both sets of concerns it is helpful to think of two key aspects of character in terms of their “thickness”. First, research in psychology has suggested that many aspects of character are highly variable according to situation. We can call these “thin” character traits are opposed to “thick” traits which are more robust. Second, some of the aspects of character being advocated as the appropriate object of public policy are based on capabilities and are normatively “thin”, in that they are not tied to any specific substantive conception of the good life. Some character traits, however, are normatively “thick”, and so their promotion would be tied to a substantive ideal. In both cases, thick and thin are matters of degree and there is not sharp distinction between the two. Nevertheless, the distinction is important and I will argue that a basic liberal position is that state policy should, in both respects, be as thin as possible, and I will attempt to sketch a means of determining what this is.

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Joy in the task

Articles & Essays, Food

We are not simply hedonic machines who thrive if supplied with things that tick certain boxes for sensory pleasure, aesthetic merit, and so on. We are knowing as well as sensing creatures, and knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them. Chocolate made from cocoa beans grown by people in near slave conditions should taste more bitter than a fairly traded bar, even if it does not in a blind tasting. Blindness, far from making tests fair, actually robs us of knowledge of what is most important, while perpetuating the illusion that all that really matters is how it feels or seems at the moment of consumption.

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