Month: June 2003

PM=GG?

John Quiggin24 Comments

I kept away from the Hollingworth issue, but I enjoyed the Monday Message Board discussion on a possible replacement so much I started thinking a bit about it. The main argument against an elected President, as far as I can see, is that Australian democracy is built on the premise of Prime Ministerial dictatorship (similarly with discussions about ‘mandates’ and the Senate).

If you accept this argument, it seems that the best Governor-General is the one who does least, and therefore that the best option is to leave the position vacant, with a stand-in to do the necessary attendance at Parliamentary openings and so on.

An even better solution, and one which would surely appeal to John Howard, is for the PM to appoint himself as GG. This would resolve the 1975 problem once and for all, while making any challenge to the monarchy that much more difficult. There may be constitutional obstacles, but they’re not obvious to me. After all, the office of PM doesn’t appear in the Constitution, so it can’t be ruled out explicitly.

Update Glenn Milne gives a cogent exposition of the theory that the GG should be a clone of the PM.

The organ bank

John Quiggin17 Comments

I mentioned recently the gratuitously violent nature of lots of philosophical examples. Here’s another one quoted by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and also alluded to by Eric Tam in his criticism of one of my earlier posts

Another problem for utilitarianism is that it seems to overlook justice and rights. One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operation would save their lives, while killing the “donor”. There is no other way to save any of the other five patients (Foot 1966, Thomson 1976; compare related cases in Carritt 1947 and McCloskey 1965).

We need to add that the organ recipients will emerge healthy, the source of the organs will remain secret, the doctor won’t be caught or punished for cutting up the “donor”, and the doctor knows all of this to a high degree of probability (despite the fact that many others will help in the operation). Still, with the right details filled in, it looks as if cutting up the “donor” will maximize utility, since five lives have more utility than one life. If so, then classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant. Most people find this result abominable. They take this example to show how bad it can be when utilitarians overlook individual rights, such as the unwilling donor’s right to life.

I don’t know if it’s been pointed out before, but this example doesn’t work as claimed. The proposal of killing the test patient is dominated by the following alternative: With the agreement of the five needy recipients, draw lots. The unlucky one is cut up (but of course, they would have died anyway) and their healthy organs are transplanted into the others. The number of lives saved is the same as in the proposed case, no rights are violated, it’s a Pareto-improvement on the status quo ante and so on. We even save one transplant operation relative to the proposal.

Of course, you can impose some sort of ad hoc assumption to rule this out, but this just points up the other flaws of this example.
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Troppo Kaput ?

John Quiggin2 Comments

Along with the rest of infinitebabble, Troppo Armadillo has been inaccessible for a day or so. Hopefully, this is just a permissions error, but Ken is threatening that, if the data is lost, Troppo Armadillo will be gone for good.

I don’t know how seriously to take this – threats to swear off blogging, [and, even more so, promises to avoid particular topics] are far more common than actual departures, but I certainly hope it doesn’t come to pass.

What I'm reading, and more

John Quiggin3 Comments

Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips. It’s a good time to be reading it in parallel with the ongoing debate on wealth and inequality being pushed along, among others, by the blogosphere’s #1 Kevin, Kevin Drum at Calpundit.

Having completed unpacking, we were sufficiently relaxed yesterday to take the CityCat ferry to Southbank (cultural/cafe precinct including State Museum, Library, Art Gallery etc). I always love riding on the ferry. In fact, I’d say that, in terms of enjoyment/dollar a ferry ride is the best bargain available in transportation. And of all ferry rides, fast catamarans are the most fun. The museums were pretty good too.