Cogito
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After the Paris attacks Australians are nervous that we will be next. Their fears are justified. With news media often reminding us that Australia is second only to the United States in its military commitment…
On July 14, 1936, the 147th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, members of the French Popular Front, the broad progressive coalition against fascism, paraded through Paris. The people’s banners bore…
Asked what was presently vexing him, the bard’s troubled Hamlet replies “words, words, words”. Here as elsewhere, there is method to the disgruntled Prince of Denmark’s feigned madness. “A rose by any…
It’s been a bumper few months if you’re sceptical about the capacity of business ethics to enact moral change in the world. From VW’s emissions fraud to 7/11’s wage scandals and the apparent market for…
When I worked at the Resource Assessment Commission in the early 1990s we were asked to conduct a contingent valuation study of the environmental value of Coronation Hill in Kakadu National Park. Although…
Moral equivalence is among the standard logical fallacies identified by philosophers. “It seeks to draw comparisons”, goes a definition, “between different, often unrelated things, to make a point that…
In previous Cogito posts, I have defended freedom of speech, interpreted in a broad, non-legalistic sense. For example, I have defended Peter Singer’s liberty to express his controversial views on issues…
It’s fascinating to reflect on the different stories that philosophers have told themselves at different times about our profession’s history. For these stories have never ceased to change. “He whose mouth…
In his 2006 landmark report on how we should respond to the climate crisis, Nicholas Stern characterised global warming as an ‘externality’, a damage to others due to market activity whose cost is not…
You know the shocking story: in January 2015, two masked Islamist gunmen launched a paramilitary attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly magazine. The gunmen murdered 12 people…