h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi.

A rare logon to ask if you saw the Harvard lecture on BBC4 last night? Rather good.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y4y46

And lurking elsewhere while I'm here...good answer to Twiggy/Tiggy/SoRB/Hoo on the qualifications to the Human Rights Act. There seems to be an implicit assumption by some that Law (or even Morality) involves the application of an all-embracing, logical formula. It's far better thought of as our best guess of how we should muddle through. The HRA is a good example, when you think of when and how it came about: 'How can we avoid certain mistakes that we know that some countries fell in to recently ...?"

I haven't watched any of Michael Sandel's stuff yet. I've got a few things recorded, and I understand there's more on the Harvard website. I've heard very good things about it, and yet... and yet.... it's probably undergraduate political philosophy, and may not even be quite at that level. I *should* watch it, especially the newer stuff. I think I'll start with that and then see if it grabs me.

Thanks for your kind words about the HRA stuff. It's funny.... whenever anyone complains about the HRA, I issue that challenge and invite people to spell out their objections in detail. Because surely they're familiar with the text, and they've thought it through, right? Actually what I think is most striking about the HRA is how modest a document it actually is.

"There seems to be an implicit assumption by some that Law (or even Morality) involves the application of an all-embracing, logical formula."

And when it turns out that there is no such simple formula, the temptation is to flee to the nice, safe, judgement-free land of the PoMo.... Not in that thread, through, fortunately.....

Another useful tack on the HRA can be to talk about where it came from and why. Not something Big Bad Europe imposed on us, but something that *we* got the smouldering remains of Europe to sign up to. When we hear the word 'derrogation', we should get nervous.

That's an interesting point, although it sails rather close to Godwin's Law, perhaps.

I suppose the response to that argument would be that we live in a different world now, blah blah blah. I think that's complacent, given everything that we've seen since the fall of the Berlin wall. But the kind of people who don't like a notion of Human Rights Law/anything from Europe tend also to believe in some magic moral superiority of the British that somehow prevents us from doing nasty things. Common sense will keep everyone safe.