Judith Sloan

It’s good to see Judith Sloan (Productivity Commission and Australian Fair Pay Commission Commissioner, Director of the Westfield Group and Board member of the Lowy Institute) moving into comedy:

In the Weekend Australian (Nov. 26-7), she writes,

…in a perfect world, the ideal arrangement is for employers and employees to reach agreement about wages and conditions by mutual and private consent.
(p. 22)

‘Bahahahaha’, as the youth say.

In the real world, there are more employees to choose from than there are employers. In the real world, employers hire trained negotiators to carry out their end of the bargaining.

In the real world, employers wield more power than employees.

So in the real world, employees increase their power by acting collectively.

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Andrew Bolt

As part of strike action against Baiada Poultry Pty Ltd, from Wednesday 9 November Baiada workers and their supporters set up a picket line to block access to Baiada’s Pipe Rd processing plant in Laverton. On Thursday 17 November the Supreme Court of Victoria issued an interim injunction against the ‘National Union of Workers [NUW] & Others’, the result of which listed parties were required not to block access to the Laverton plant. NUW employees and the listed ‘others’ left the picket line or were removed by police while Baiada workers and their allies who were not listed in the injunction continued to picket. Yesterday, Tuesday 22 November, the picket ended as management and workers reached an agreement on pay and conditions.

In defence of those who continued to hold the picket line, the NUW made the following argument.

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Noam Chomsky (pictured right) has recently claimed, repeatedly, that moving to a publicly funded healthcare system would provide sufficient savings to eliminate the deficit from the US budget. In what follows I show why his claim is plausible.

Here’s Chomsky’s claim in black and white. In response to current discussion about measures for dealing with the US deficit, Chomsky notes that it is

Not even discussed … that the deficit would be eliminated if, as economist Dean Baker has shown, the dysfunctional privatized health care system in the U.S. were replaced by one similar to other industrial societies’, which have half the per capita costs and health outcomes that are comparable or better.
(Chomsky 2011b)

Here’s a relevant excerpt from Baker’s blog:

The problem with Medicare is that our healthcare system is broken; we pay far more than other wealthy countries for our care and get worse outcomes. We don’t need to fix Medicare; we need to fix our healthcare system, and this is something we should have started yesterday.

The remedies are actually easy; the problem is that the political will does not exist to challenge powerful vested interests such as the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the doctors lobbies. Close to 20% (about $500 billion a year) of our healthcare spending is wasted on financing the insurance industry and the paperwork requirements that it imposes on providers.

We pay almost twice as much for prescription drugs as other countries. If we could get our costs in line, it would save us close to $100 billion a year. If drugs were sold in a competitive market without patent protection, we would save more than $200 billion a year. If we paid our doctors the same salaries as those in other wealthy countries, we’d save another $80 billion a year.
(Baker 2009)

That’s a potential total saving, on the most generous interpretation, of $880 billion. That’s exciting. The normative claim that people should have access to publicly funded healthcare would be all-the-more convincing if it could be shown to save the US a bucketload of money. But notice that Baker’s talking about total healthcare spending, public and private, not simply healthcare spending from the US budget. You cannot claim savings in the private sector as savings to the US budget. If a public healthcare system reduces private healthcare spending, those savings cannot be claimed as budget savings because the expenditure was never counted in the budget. Therefore, for Chomsky’s claim to be true, a public healthcare system would have to provide sufficient savings in the US budget alone to eliminate the deficit—no easy task for a country that has a largely private healthcare system and a massive budget deficit.

So let’s crunch the numbers.

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The following was delivered at the May 2011 Paideia Australia Philosophy Café.

Introduction and disclaimer

0.1 I’ll focus on ethics
Tonight, as the title of my talk indicates, I will argue that we don’t need God. And I will specifically discuss why we don’t need God in ethics.

Ethics deals with the question of how we should act — as individuals, and as groups. Insofar as each of us is concerned with the question of how to act well, ethics is a field that concerns us all — Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and atheist alike.

0.2 I’ll make a very simple argument as to why we don’t need God
The argument I will present is quite simple. It is simple because establishing that we don’t need something is quite easy. All one has to do is show that, when it comes to fulfilling some particular aim, the thing is question is redundant. We don’t need something that is redundant. This is the argument I’ll make about God in ethics — that we can act well without Him (or, if you fancy, Her, or It).

I’ll present my argument in three parts. First, as mentioned, I’ll attempt to show that we can act well without God. But I’ll also argue, second, that people who wish to invoke God as the basis for ethics face some irresolvable problems and, third, that we have a responsibility to avoid invoking God’s authority or command as the reason why actions are good.

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Offering a helping hand

No doubt you’ve heard someone complain that Occupy Melbourne lacks a clear aim. While advocates from many diverse causes are participating in the movement, they share a common concern. The Occupy Melbourne website states:

Our democracy is unwell. Our elected representatives no longer represent their constituents, instead their ears are turned by wealthy lobby groups, whilst the common interests of the people they were elected to represent, are ignored.

This grievance focuses on the lack of truly democratic representation. The passage could be taken as a call for what in democratic theory is known as a ‘delegate’ as opposed to a ‘trustee’ model of representation.

Though models of democratic representation go back much further, the particular distinction between the delegate and trustee models can be traced to conservative political philosopher and British parliamentarian Edmund Burke. As Burke proclaimed in his 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol, ‘Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion’ (1999, p. 11). For a number of reasons, from the physical absence of constituents during parliamentary debate to what Burke considered the sheer idiocy of dogmatically adopting the position of his constituency before the parliamentary debate had been had, Burke thought it appropriate to represent as a trustee—that political power had been entrusted to him by his constituents.

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This little revision of the national anthem’s first verse is inspired by Australian politics and is dedicated to the Queen’s visit—a suitable occasion for discussing Australia’s identity … moving forward.

Advance Australia Fair (Skinned)

Australia is a barren land,
Where bogans can be free;

With iron ore and coal from soil;
We’ll all drive HSVs;

“F#ck off, we’re full” our bumpers say
We like our refos rare;

From Herald’s page to talkback rage
Advance Australia Fair.

With drawn-out vowels, now let us sing,
Advaance Austraalya Fair.

Richard K Dagger opens his very good Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on political obligation with the following claim:

To have a political obligation is to have a moral duty to obey the laws of one’s country or state. On that point there is almost complete agreement among political philosophers.

There are two problems with this opening gambit.

Firstly, and of least importance, agreement in any amount—be it no agreement, little agreement, almost complete agreement or complete agreement—does not itself establish the truth of a proposition. One’s suspicion should always be roused by attempts to use claims of ‘near complete’ or ‘general agreement’ to establish a point.

Secondly, and more importantly, a political obligation is not always a moral duty. For a political obligation to always be a moral duty, one of two conditions must be met. The terms ‘obligation’ and ‘duty’ must be synonymous, thus rendering the proposition tautological or true by definition. If this condition is met then to have an obligation means the same thing as to have a duty. If this condition is not met, then for Dagger’s principal claim to hold all ‘political obligations’ have to fall within the set of what we consider to be ‘moral obligations’. To have a political obligation would then be to have a moral obligation because there would be no political obligations which were not also moral obligations. Let’s deal with these two conditions in turn.

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Simon Bogojevic-Narath's (2006) 'Leviathan'

In forming his theory of political obligation, Thomas Hobbes deliberately distinguishes between men and subjects. For example, Hobbes argues that a man can resist any attempt by the sovereign to kill him and any command issued by the sovereign that he kill or injure himself (Leviathan, ch. XXI). This seems to contradict the point Hobbes makes in the same chapter that it is not unjust for a sovereign to put an innocent subject to death. The apparent contradiction is resolved, however, when one understands that there is a distinction between men and subjects, just as there is between a man as a man and that man as sovereign. The political status attributed to men in the ‘subject’ and ‘sovereign’ cases are human fabrications—ones that Hobbes argues are required for peace and civil society.

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Before you get angry, get informed.

Deakin University Vice-Chancellor Jane den Hollander

On 22 July this year, Deakin University Vice-Chancellor (VC) Professor Jane den Hollander emailed Deakin students and staff proposing a number of changes to car parking at the university in 2012. The proposed changes include:

• • increasing the annual fee for general (blue) parking permits from $203 per annum to $250 for students and $400 for staff;
• • increasing fees for daily parking from $5 per day to $7.50 per day;
• • abolishing free car parks at the Geelong Waurn Ponds and Warrnambool campuses, converting them to permit parking areas;
• • discontinuing red parking zones, which are situated further from university buildings but which, at $101.50 p/a for red zone permits, offer a cheaper option than blue permits.

The proposed changes emerge from a review of parking at Deakin by the university’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Graeme Dennehy and the Finance and Business Affairs Committee (FBAC). The review was tabled at FBAC’s 10 May 2011 meeting and forwarded to the university Council. Council discussed (and presumably passed) the review at its 9 June 2011 meeting [1].

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The great individuals of world history … are those who seize upon th[e] higher universal and make it their own end. It is they who realise the end appropriate to the higher concept of the spirit. To this extent, they may be called heroes. They do not find their aims and vocation in the calm and regular system of the present, in the hallowed order of things as they are. Indeed, their justification does not lie in the prevailing situation, for they draw their inspiration from another source, from that hidden spirit whose hour is near but which still lies beneath the surface and seeks to break out without yet having attained an existence in the present. For this spirit, the present world is but a shell which contains the wrong kind of kernel. It might, however, be objected that everything which deviates from the established order — whether intentions, aims, opinions, or so-called ideals — is likewise different from what is already there. Adventures of all kinds have such ideals, and their activities are based on attitudes which conflict with the present circumstances. But the fact that all such attitudes, sound reasons, or general principles differ from existing ones does not mean to say that they are justified. The only true ends are those whose content has been produced by the absolute power of the inner spirit itself in the course of its development; and world-historical individuals are those who have willed and accomplished not just the ends of their own imagination or personal opinions, but only those which were appropriate and necessary. Such individuals know what is necessary and timely, and have an inner vision of what it is.

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