Today’s Reading

Last updated on: June 13, 2014 at 12:14 pm by David Mills

Today’s Reading 2014-06-13T12:14:10-04:00 David Mills

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Trojan Horse debate: We were wrong, all cultures are not equal, by Allison Pearson, from the Daily Telegraph. Responding to the news that five Muslim schools the government had declared “outstanding” will teaching radically anti-Western versions of Islam, the writer points out that cultures are not equal.

A Muslim girl who winds up in Bolton or Luton should thank her lucky stars she doesn’t live in Sudan – or Pakistan, where, only last month, a woman was stoned to death by her family for the crime of marrying a man of whom they disapproved. Farzana Parveen’s father explained: “I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it.”

Are British values superior to Mr Parveen’s? I do hope so.

Unfortunately, the great lie underpinning the creed of multiculturalism, as spouted by Francois‑Cerrah and her ilk, is that all cultures are “equally valid”. Well, patently, they’re not. The reason irate Pakistani patriarchs are not chucking bricks at their errant daughters in the Birmingham Bull Ring is because Britain has a basically uncorrupt police force, a robust judiciary and an enlightened, hard-won system of liberal values that regards women and girls as equals, not third-class citizens.

Poland’s PM: doctor’s duty is above his faith, from the Daily Mail. Disturbing news:

In Poland, abortion is legal until the 25th week of pregnancy when the mother’s life is at risk or if the fetus is badly damaged or the result of rape or incest.

“Regardless of what his conscience is telling him, a doctor] must carry out the law,” [prime minister Donald] Tusk said. “Every patient must be sure that . . . the doctor will perform all procedures in accordance with the law and in accordance with his duties.”

Francis, Rome, and the Community of Morality, by Andrew Haines, editor of Ethika Politika. Part of a series reflecting on “the connection between Francis, Benedict, and the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre” (it offers links to others in the series), it argues that “maybe the simplest way to describe our historical moral situation is indebted” and that in particular our “moral vocabulary is overspent.”

The greatest “debt” occurs in terms of community, which for most people has little to no moral intelligibility (this precisely according to the fact that “community” works as the banner mantra for our age). What’s more, this debt against community is significant: It’s not a paper debt that can be over-leveraged for long periods of time; instead, it’s entirely real, since community is the source of our language, of our concepts and terms, and even of our knowledge of what’s best, and what will make us happiest.

Modern morality operates at at a sustained and ever increasing deficit. And the amount of money we owe back before we can trade on its terms is staggering.

B.C. lawyers vote against religious school, from the Canadian website Global News. The story begins:

Lawyers in British Columbia have rejected a Christian university’s plans to open a law school — a result that, while not binding, represents a strong rebuke of the school’s policies forbidding sex outside heterosexual marriage.

The vote is the latest setback for Trinity Western University, a school with about 4,000 students in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, and is sure to amplify an ongoing debate over the rights of a private institution to impose its religious views about homosexuality on students.

PETA’s Gay Bunnies and the Holocaust on Your Plate, from the Tablet. A struggle between incompatible values on the moral left:

A clue can be found on PETA’s website: “Whether it’s based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or species, prejudice is morally unacceptable.” Eating meat, then, should be just as morally unacceptable as discriminating against blacks and gays. This is of a piece with PETA’s broader campaign to bestow upon animals the rights afforded to human beings. That it does so under the cover of likening the gay community’s hard-fought (and still incomplete) struggle for equality with that of circus lions yearning to be free is, frankly, odious.

5 Shocking Dave Brat Quotes the Media Will Never Report, by Matthew Gerken writing in the Intercollegiate Review. The now suddenly famous Congressional candidate questions modern economic thinking, including the “conservative” version of Milton Friedman and his peers.

2) On the claim that modern economics is neutral on ethical questions:

“It is by no means apparent why humans are or should be treated as equals in the modern world of economics! Make sure you reread that sentence. In fact, modern economics by definition refuses to make such normative claims.”

The refusal to make normative claims is par for the course in an introductory economics class. Economics, it is said, is a science, and as such ethical considerations must be left out of it. Economics simply describes the way things are.

Brat questions whether such an approach is even possible, but here he wants to emphasize that even if it were, we would be left with profoundly troubling conclusions. A discipline that cannot acknowledge even the most basic moral principles is open to the most horrendous abuses. It is disturbing for Brat that on economists’ own terms, the inherent dignity of the individual so often invoked by modern free-market advocates in the political sphere has no basis in reality whatsoever.

The common objection to this observation is that economists are simplyneutral with regard to morality, which is different from saying that there is no morality at all. But Brat’s survey of economic theory shows that this position is incoherent. Economics claims to be value-neutral because it defines itself as a modern science similar to physics or chemistry. But modern science as a whole is based on a theory of knowledge that renders all normative or metaphysical claims false or meaningless. There is no neutral ground.

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