Welcome to the monthly digest for March
Hi ,
During March, our contributors covered a wide range of important topics.
Richard Lugg explored arguments used in the debate over voluntary assisted dying and palliative care. David James shone a spotlight on the problems facing the Australian economy. Robyn Friend took a look at the decades-long debates on the question of overpopulation. And Paul Monk pondered our very nature as a species.
If you’d like to send a Letter to the Editor or submit an article for consideration, please contact me via editor@rationalist.com.au.
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Highlights from Rationale
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| Assisted dying and palliative care: An argument for ‘chewing gum’
By Richard Lugg
In his classic book Straight and Crooked Thinking – now in its fifth edition (2011) – Robert H. Thouless describes many dishonest debating tricks, often with catchy names, such as the ‘argument of the beard’. However, one that plagues so much of the debate over voluntary assisted dying, though well covered in the book, is given only the convoluted description “the argument that we should not make
efforts against X, which is admittedly evil, because there is a worse evil Y against which our efforts should be directed.” If ever there were a debating trick in search of a name, this would be it. I suggest the term the ‘chewing gum argument'.
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| Australia’s economic challenges – and the political implications
By David James
It increasingly looks like the financial shock of the pandemic was only delayed, not eliminated. There are signs of sharply higher consumer price inflation and possibly stagflation, the combination of negative economic growth and rising prices... So far, Australia has managed to survive the pandemic. But the delayed economic effects could become severe. The upcoming election may turn out to be a good
election to lose.
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MBJ's view on current affairs
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| Are we a failed species?
By Paul Monk
A very old friend and longtime mentor of mine, now 85 years of age, recently expressed the gloomy opinion that Homo sapiens is ‘a failed species’. He spelled out what he meant. He believes that we are, taken as a whole, self-obsessed, given to war and over-consumption, reckless in our spoliation of the natural world, ruthlessly exploitative and lacking in compassion to one another and addicted to patterns of
behaviour that demean us and leave our better possibilities to languish. The implication, which he was not hesitant in drawing, is that we are likely to become extinct in the foreseeable future and that we collectively deserve such a fate.
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| Population growth from Genesis to Revelations
By Robyn Friend
In 1968, when I was a young woman of childbearing age and the population of the world was 3.5 billion, Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published. The Ehrlichs estimated that one in four people on the planet went hungry. Population, which was increasing exponentially, had reached a point where there were too many people for the planet to adequately support at the current rate of
growth. Therefore, by the mid-1970s, an overpopulated world would lead to desperation, mass starvation, war, pollution, ecological degradation and the collapse of civilisation as we know it.
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| What social science is telling us about polarisation
By Noel Turnbull
There has been much social science research on polarisation recently – some assisted by AI-driven analysis of social media; some of it building on long-accepted social science findings; and some of it, sadly, a victim of the replication crisis which emerged in psychology some years ago. The concept of cognitive biases underlies many of the polarisation and conspiracy problems, such as belief perseverance in
the face of overwhelming evidence in things like a vaccine hoax.
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