Mostly not a bad paper today, but I must say it makes me angry that the Globe gives op-ed space to the drivelings of Margaret Somerville. God knows how she got to be "founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University"* but her reasoning is never less than excruciatingly embarrassing, and probably quite a few readers draw the natural inference about academic ethics as a whole. There really should be some kind of consumer warning tag-line: "plays an ethicist on teevee" or similar.
Today's column, so you don't have to torment yourself as I did: religion is kinda useful, Richard Dawkins is a meanie, and if you don't have a religion then that's your religion so there! So let's all be nice to religion.
Four hundred years of rather sophisticated and detailed argument about the genuinely difficult issues raised by the relations of church and state, modern liberalism pluralism and secularism ... all bypassed in blithe ignorance for maunderings so contentless as to be unfiskable. There's just no way they'd print something of comparable murk and incompetence about sports or business -- you know, stuff that matters -- but hey, you're an expert in ethics if you think you are.
* OK, she's a lawyer. And a licensed pharmacist in Australia! I have a feeling that Wikipedia is not giving me the full story here, but her lack of relevant credentials is certainly confirmed.
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I used to think Margaret S was put on earth solely to drive me mad, but I now know that was a very egocentric belief, and that she was actually put on earth to drive many people mad, including the illustrious Dr B. I've written numerous letters to the G&M concerning conceptual and empirical problems with Dr S, a couple of which have actually gotten printed, and now I just poke my fingers in my ears and chant la-la-la until the words on the page go away. I don't know where one would even start with this particular column.
Well, okay, I do know where to start. I would start with the rhetorical ambiguity. Is she describing? Analyzing? Exhorting? I suspect the latter, but if so, who is her imagined audience? The phrase "we are secular, diverse societies" makes me think she thinks she's talking to a whole pile of "societies" which read the G&M, as distinct from individuals. Societies do not read newspapers. People do. This is a reification error which would probably be caught on most sociology undergrad honours papers.
We could also start with the abuse of words. "Sportism" is not a word, not should it be. "Secularism" does not reduce to the exclusive and exhaustive categories of atheism and humanism, as she suggests. And etc, etc, etc. I think I need to stop now and give the meds time to work ...
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