Apology.

Posting this from my phone, as I haven't had access to a computer for the last couple of days. I have a post planned for today but it's going to have to go up tomorrow. See you all then!

The Parent Licence: Update.

Just a short entry today, because I’m running a little late, but I read these articles this morning and thought I’d share. It could be that we’re heading toward implementing the Parent Licence sooner than I could have thought possible.

Call to sterilise parents who abuse kids

NZ mayor in call to sterilise underclass

The group Mr Geschke refers to is known as Project Prevention, which deals with drug addicts. I read an article on the BBC a few days ago about its introduction in the UK after years of operation in the USA; unfortunately I can’t find the link now.

Of course, the proponents of these ideas are being publicly derided for them — the founder of Project Prevention has been labelled a Nazi, and it looks like Geschke’s facing similar slurs, not helped by his Germanic surname — but it’s a start. It’s also, I believe, largely a matter of PR: people don’t want to be seen to support such a radical, authoritarian proposal. In private, the majority of people I’ve spoken to have voiced cautious or even more commonly enthusiastic support of the idea.

Heaven and Hell.

Contention: That heaven and hell cannot coëxist in the same universe.

This argument draws largely on the same premises as the concept of “degrees of separation”. Take the saying “hell is other people” and turn it on its head. It is reasonable to expect that most people would not be content in heaven unless all their closest friends were there with them. (It doesn't matter if they don't arrive straightaway - they have their earthly lives to live out first, and some theologies hold that no matter when you die, everyone enters heaven at the same time because heavenly ‘time’ is different from earthly time — this also has the side-effect of allowing God omniscience without denying human free will. It also doesn’t matter exactly what your definitions of heaven and hell are, so long as they fit the overall category of “places of utter reward and punishment where you go depending on how you’ve lived in life”.)

Now, even assuming each and every one of those friends deserve to be in heaven too, they will want all their friends with them too. We can assume the heavenly deserts of every friend to a certain small number of iterations, if we began with a very saintly, intelligent and discriminating person to begin with - but the process goes on forever and our saintly person is a friend of a friend of a friend of (to the whatever power) someone who by the moral standards of even the most lenient judging God does not deserve a place in heaven, if the last judgment is to be at all meaningful. I mean, what sort of test is it where you are guaranteed to pass?

And if you were sent to hell, the exact same argument applies. So there could be heaven (if God is blindly kind, and doesn’t judge us after all), or hell (if God is sadistic and evil and everything we’ve been told he’s not). But there doesn’t seem to be any reason for either of them to exist any more.

The Problem of Freedom.

I’d like to discuss what freedom really means. Not in terms of political freedom, or freedom from slavery, or anything so obviously good. My issue here is with free software, and one piece of it in particular: Android.

Android is quite a solid OS, from what I can tell. I haven’t used it, so I can’t comment on the user experience, but (as I’ll get to in a little bit) even if I had there’s a lot I couldn’t tell you about that anyway.

Partly in response to the closed, controlled situation of iOS, and partly due to Google’s own philosophy, Android’s design and marketing both emphasise its status as free software. iOS is available on a sum total of three devices, all sold by Apple. It can access the open web, but the only way to get native apps for it is also from Apple, which vets and classifies every app submitted. Android is both free as in speech, for anyone to modify as they wish, and free as in beer, able to be installed on any phone (or any device, for that matter) without paying a cent to Google. Google intends to make money by selling ads on Android devices.

This sort of model works fairly well for Linux on the desktop, although it does have some of the same problems Android does. Nevertheless, almost every copy of Linux in use is installed and customised by the end user, which fits its niche as an OS for hobbyists, software libertarians, and other assorted nerds. This isn’t the case with Android, which comes preinstalled and pre-customised on the phone you buy, and is intended for a much broader consumer market.

One problems that desktop Linux and Android share is platform fragmentation, although it’s much less of an issue for Linux. There are four different “core” versions of Android floating around: 1.5, 1.6, 2.1 and 2.2. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, if users could actually upgrade to the latest version of the OS. There’s no hardware-based reason they shouldn’t be able to in most cases — even the oldest Android phones are fast enough to run at least the core features of Android 2.2. The actual reason you can’t upgrade most Android phones is twofold.

The first reason is vendor-side customisation: both the manufacturer of your phone and the network you’re signed to have modified the OS so as to have a unique UI, access to network-specific features, and sometimes to preinstall apps. These modifications have to be worked into the updated OS before it can run on your phone. (This vendor-side customisation is also problematic because it means that, compared to other mobile OSes, there’s a lot less consistency and familiarity between devices.)

The second is that Google doesn’t take responsibility for distributing software updates, so it falls to the manufacturers and carriers, who are much more interested in selling you a new phone with 2.2 on it than adding value to your old one. (Microsoft’s mobile OS has this same problem — and Windows Mobile 7 isn’t even backward-compatible with apps for earlier versions.) Result: no updates for you.

The biggest issue, though, is with the intransitivity of Android’s much-touted freedom. The idea is you can install whatever you like on the OS: it’s completely unregulated. But think about the effects of this. There are very few quality commercial apps for the platform, because as soon as one appears it is effortlessly pirated. You’re not free to sell an Android app, because others are free to steal it. On top of this, you have no guarantee of any kind whatsoever as regards the apps you download. The result is that millions of people have had their personal information stolen, or their phones infected with viruses.

Vendors — manufacturers and especially carriers — are free to modify the OS as they see fit. The result is that they in their turn lock it down, giving you a phone that’s less free than an iPhone or a BlackBerry. They remove the Android Market and instead install their own app store, which invariably has fewer, lousier apps at monopoly prices. They preload their own apps — adware, music stores, etc. — and make them impossible to remove or replace with an alternative. In America, the Galaxy S ships with Google search disabled in favour of Microsoft’s Bing search. You can’t even choose to use Google search on this phone, despite the fact that it’s running Google’s OS!

Freedom is all very well, but is the sort of freedom Android offers of any real use to the consumer? And even if it is, and even if it isn’t snuffed out by meddling carriers and handset makers, is it worth dealing with the rampant piracy and malware inherent in the system?

In Defence of Choice.

What gives us the right, as one commenter on Tuesday put it, to “snuff out a human life”? What gives a woman the right to abort a pregnancy?

The same basis that gives her the right to contraception. Or, to take an example that even the Catholics reading this can’t consider controversial, the basis that gives a married woman the right to have a natural menstrual cycle without conceiving.

She has the right to sovereignty over her own body, and she has no obligation to bring any given potential future person into actual existence. This right is not absolute — she may not use her body to harm another, of course, and (as I’ve explained elsewhere) I don’t believe she has the right to create a child for whom she is unable to adequately care, even if there is no direct harm involved.

Notice that I say “potential future person”. This is all that an embryo is and has: potential. It is potential in the same way that an ovum or a sperm cell is potential. It is defensible to say that, in the general case, we have an obligation to create some future persons; but that is an obligation that we hold to ourselves, because we desire the survival of our species; remove that desire, and the obligation is removed — and even though it does exist, it doesn’t translate to an obligation to procreate in any specific case. An embryo may become a person, given the right (fairly specific) conditions; but so may an ovum — it’s just one step earlier in the chain. Yes, it’s human life in the literal sense — it’s alive and it’s genetically human — but the morally relevant factor is not whether it is alive but whether it is a person, and without a functioning nervous system it’s no more a person than it is a telephone. If we create human tissue in the lab, we don’t give it moral rights. Biological independence also plays a role — a fœtus has the sort of relationship with its mother that in interspecies cases is called parasitism, and the only reason we don’t always treat it as such is because other motives, such as the desire to actually have a child, come into play.

Ultimately though, practical arguments can be brought to bear. Banning abortion doesn’t stop it from happening, any more than Prohibition stopped people drinking or abstinence education stops them shagging. It just drives it underground, making it far less safe as a procedure in its own right and also making it harder for people to find unbiased, factual information. At the end of the day, the decision to criminalise abortion is not a case of deciding between an abortion and a baby. It’s a case of deciding between a competent doctor in a sterile hospital, or a criminal in a back alley with a dirty coathanger.

My Choice Is No Crime: an important message.

It's hard to believe this is happening in Australia. This week, a young couple from Cairns goes on criminal trial for attempting to have an abortion.

Teagan was just 19 years old when she was charged under archaic, 111-year-old laws that classify abortion as a criminal “offence against morality” in the same league as bestiality and incest. They have lain dormant for over a century — until now. If found guilty, she faces up to 7 years imprisonment, and her parter Sergie, 22, could spend 3 years in jail for assisting her.

How can this happen in Australia? Because in Queensland, and in other states, abortion is still illegal in the criminal code. And despite the fact that 90% of Australians believe early-term abortions should be legal, an extreme minority has our politicians scared into inaction.

An anti-choice organisation has organised a petition in defence of these archaic laws, with over 6,000 signatures. The opposing petition, calling for the laws to be scrapped, has less then 3,000. Help fix that right now, so that no politician has an excuse for inaction:

http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/my_choice_is_no_crime

As a result of this case, public hospitals in Queensland have started refusing abortions — even to women whose pregnancy is due to sexual assault. Doctors fear criminal prosecution and up to 14 years imprisonment for providing advice and treatment, leaving young couples in impossible situations.

How on earth could this happen in Australia? The Queensland Parliament has failed to act, because MPs have been flooded with phone calls and emails in support of these archaic laws. Some extreme anti-choice activists have even thrown flaming molotov cocktails at Teagan and Sergie's house. We can't stand for this in Australia.

Please add your name to the national petition for choice today, and forward it to friends and family:

http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/my_choice_is_no_crime

Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, said she would support a bill to repeal the laws — but won't introduce one herself. She says there isn't enough support — and her colleagues in Parliament have been silent so far.

We can't let politicians hide behind a thin facade of opposition put up by extreme anti-choice activists. As a national movement of 380,000 strong, let's remove their excuse today with a huge national petition to repeal these archaic laws. Please add your name and forward this to friends before the petition is printed in huge newspaper ads later this week.

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Text and image courtesy GetUp!. My own commentary to follow on Thursday.

Good God.

Contention: That we are both morally superior to and much more powerful than any God who is completely and only good — no matter what your definition of good happens to be.

Theism tends to take the free will path as opposed to the fatalist path; for if it is fatalist, it concludes that we are doomed to our fate by God and that any evil we perform or suffer is his fault. If we have free will, however, theology attempts to explain precisely why. Some have fared better than others; the strongest position, to my mind, is the one espoused by J. L. Mackie. It basically holds that there is no merit in being good if one cannot do otherwise. If a man is not free to do evil, ought he be rewarded for doing good? After all, he had no choice in the matter, especially if you take the common Christian angle that evil is the defiance of goodness, only existing in reaction to it. One might as well reward an arrow for hitting its target. So we have free will, and thus the capacity for evil, so that our good deeds may have meaning and merit. Free will (or per se freedom if you prefer) becomes, in a way, the ultimate good.*

So far, so hoopy. But then we run into a problem. God, by his very nature, cannot do evil. He is completely and only good, isn't he? (This argument of course does not apply to gods who might not have this particular characteristic, but there are many who do.) You could argue that the past is not a reliable indicator of the future, that just because God happened to do the ‘right thing’ the last 10 million times doesn't mean he necessarily will next time, does it? But many want to believe in a God who is ‘good’ in and of his very nature, rather than a Supreme Creator who merely happens to be good so far. (Of course, if you take most of the stories told about him, the moral dissonance between his behaviour and what we now consider to be good does you no favours if you want to hold this belief.)

However, we have already established, in trying to explain why God would give us free will, that a being that is good of its very nature does not possess a free will. God is therefore inferior to us, because we have the power of choice, and so our acts, when they are good, are much more so than the same acts were they to be performed by God.

One might pick out that I claimed freedom as the ultimate good (because it is that which gives all other goodness meaning) and choose to use this in his definition of God, so that “completely and only good” becomes “completely (and only) free”. That seems a lot more attractive; but it’s a case of equivocation, and it winds up making God no less capable of or inclined to malice than anyone else.

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*Even as an atheist I find this argument useful to my own worldview, but in the opposite direction. Rather than deciding that I have free will because otherwise my actions are morally meaningless, I decide that my actions are meaningful because I have the freedom to do so. Even on fatalism this holds true, because even on fatalism I make my own meaning; I was merely fated to do it, and I ought to act as though I am free because that way I am never responsible for making the wrong choice.