Weekend reading in ethics, featuring Marie Kondo

Here are three pieces that have been open in my browser for a few days now, while I kept postponing the urge to write something substantial about each of them. Instead, I’ll simply present them for your consideration, with a paragraph or two on selected areas of possible interest.

First, Bruce Schneier on blockchains, and how it’s debatable that they live up to what many consider one of their key promises: to “displace, reshape, or eliminate trust“. Schneier is an American cryptographer who has written extensively on security issues (his work on airport “security theater” is well-worth reading), and he certainly speaks with authority, even if you might not agree with his analysis.

The Civil Union Amendment Bill

A month or so ago, I wrote about Deirdre Carter’s Private Member’s Bill that seeks to remove Section 6 from the Civil Union Act. Section 6 allows government officials to opt-out of officiating gay marriages on grounds of “conscience”.

The call for public comment on this Bill has now gone out, and you have until 4pm on October 23 to send your comments to Mr Eddy Mathonsi [email]. We can be sure that the likes of Errol Naidoo and other homophobes will be writing in to object, so please consider indicating your support for this Bill.

What follows is some text that you are free to copy-and-paste, or amend as you see fit, in order to make your submissions as painless as possible. The text is a variation on the blog post linked above, so if you read that, none of the content will be new to you.

COPE and the Civil Union Act

In addition to her Private Members Bill on Advance Directives, which I wrote about earlier this month, Deirdre Carter of COPE has also been pushing for changes to the Civil Union Act, and I’m pleased to report that the Parliamentary committee meeting (15/08) seems to have gone well, with all present agreeing that Section 6 of the Act needs to be reconsidered.

Section 6, for those not familiar with the Act, is the clause that allows for Department of Home Affairs (DHA) officials to opt-out of officiating same-sex marriages. It reads:

DignitySA and COPE to bring advance directives Bill to Parliament

I’ve written plenty about assisted dying (and DignitySA, an NGO dedicated to securing the right of South Africans to a good death) over the years. It’s a topic that is understandably emotive to most people, but also one that’s the source of great tension between secular and religious views on how states should be governed.

For example, South Africa’s Minister of Health, Aaron Motsoaledi, mistakenly believes that “only God can decide when a person dies“, which is a motivation that can only be taken as legally relevant if you are living in a theocracy. In a secular state, people should of course be free to exercise their religious commitments if those commitments don’t violate the law.

On Trump and bullshit

As part of a series of events celebrating what would have been Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday, President Obama gave a speech in Johannesburg yesterday, in which he made reference to “the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and lie some more”.

While it seems clear that he was making a direct reference to President Trump, his remarks bring to mind broader issues such as the value of truth to democracy, and the difference between lies and liars on the one hand, and bullshitters on the other.

A (partial) autopsy of pseudoscience: Natasha Bolognesi and WAVEEX

Earlier this month, Prof. George Claassen of CENSCOM (Stellenbosch University) published a piece on GroundUp, detailing how science journalist Natasha Bolognesi became the subject of disciplinary action after refusing to copy edit a study on the cellphone-attachment WAVEEX, described by the manufacturers as

a composite chip of seven superposed layers, outside of plastic, inside five layers with silver ink printed circuits, which, if they are exposed to the electromagnetic waves, weaken the passing harmful radiation and balance it with the magnetic field of your body.

I won’t spend time focusing on how it’s well-established that low-frequency EMF radiation doesn’t pose a risk to humans, nor on the journalistic ethics of Bolognesi’s choice to refuse to copy edit the piece in question.

Free speech and the problem of binary responses

Leaving character judgments aside, videos such the one made by Mark Meechan, of his dog responding to the phrase ‘gas the Jews’ with a Nazi salute, should be legally permissible.

Legal questions don’t answer ethical questions. I think that this joke’s concept is grossly insensitive, and I do think that people need to spend more time worrying about what they find funny, and why.

Social media, and productive discourse on Twitter

A friend of mine once remarked that we can either have democracy or the Internet, but not both. Even if the point is perhaps overstated, interactions on social media, and omnipresent clickbait, certainly contribute to the perception that there’s far more noise than signal on the Internet.

While it’s certainly possible to have productive conversations on social media, those seem – in my experience at least – to have become increasingly rare. Charlie Brooker once listed Twitter as his top pick in the category of video games (in the 2013 show How Videogames Changed the World), and it’s easy to see his point – the platform should perhaps simply be thought of as entertainment rather than as an opportunity for an exchange of ideas.

Free speech, Virgin Trains and the Daily Mail

An earlier version of me regarded free speech as not only an absolute value, but additionally as one that should be shoved to the front of just about every queue. A value, to put it another way, that trumps most others (but not all – for example, it wouldn’t trump the value of continuing to exist, for most people).

Noakes and vaccination: if it quacks like a duck…

On November 29, Professor Tim Noakes was interviewed on the Gareth Cliff Show. Much of the interview focused on his new book, and his reasons for co-writing it (with Marika Sboros). I’ve previously described some of this book’s inaccuracies and falsehoods in respect of its mentions of me, including the assertion that I’m part of some conspiracy against him.

Today, I’d like to briefly focus on a more worrisome theme – vaccine scepticism – that Noakes has tweeted about in the past, and one that he returns to in this interview with Gareth Cliff. The relevant segment’s audio is transcribed below, and embedded at the end of the post. It takes place between 44m07s and 45m37s of the full interview.