>What is the role of punishment and how far should it go?
>Is punishment to reform? For justice? for vengeance? For the public’s safety?
Should we have capital or corporal punishment?
If so where? Should we bring back the cane to schools?
thebigqs
>Do you agree with the Pope?
>Pope Bennedict XVI attacked equality legislation in the UK for running contrary to “natural law”. It’s been taken as an attack on the Sexual Orientation Regulations that came into effect last January. The regulations forced Catholic adoption agencies to consider gay couples as potential adoptive parents.
Do you agree with the Pope that religious groups should be allowed to discriminate?
>Can we know it all?
>This has been one of the biggest implicit questions since the time of Aristotle. The Judeo-Christian view is that our powers of knowledge are limited, and that there will always be some things we can neither know, nor understand. The scientific view is that we can learn everything. Aristotle thought we could learn everything through pure reason. After the Scientific revolution scientists now tend to think we need evidence too.
What do you think? Can we know it all? And if so what does this mean?
>Are we progressing?
>Many famous theorists and authors have argued, or even presumed, that humanity is inevitably marching forwards. Two of the most famous examples are Hegel and Marx. They argued that human history was split into phases, with each phase giving way to the formation of something better. In other words they said progression occured in a linear and forward direction.
There is some evidence for this. We are making progress in curbing poverty for example. But there are a great many examples of the opposite. There are 27 million slaves in the world today, wheras less than half that number were brought to the Americas throughout the entire history of the slave trade. Happiness has stagnated in the last 60 years throughout the developed world. World opinion about democracy is radically changing, with countries as different as Germany, Congo and Russia all gaining more anti-democratic favour.
What do you think? Is change equivalent to progression?
>Arbotion: For or Against?
>The origin of the anti-abortion argument displayed in Catholic theology does not come from a desire to protect a life that is believed to already exist. In fact it originates from the Aristotelian philosophy that the true nature of something is in what it has the potential to be. For example the true nature of an acorn is that it will one day become an oak tree. Hence the true nature of a feotus is that it will one day become a person. Is this a valid argument or do you have a better one?
>Can war ever be justified?
>What’s the purpose of life and existence?
>Commonly the question asked on films as the one with most importance. Now people are increasingly saying that such a question has easy answers (though be careful to distinguish between the purpose of life and the purpose within life). But with these relatively new answers come significant implications. And of course not everyone will be able to agree. So would it ever be possible to find evidence for such an answer?
>Charity, and what it says about human psychology
>http://news.uk.msn.com/uk/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=151763828
This article says that £10 million was donated by the British public in just 24 hours from Friday to Saturday evening (15th-16th Jan). Indeed this was when my wife and I made a donation too. But why not earlier? Outside of this 24 hours Britons only raised £2 million. And I for one did know about the issue before. So is it just that we needed time to process all the information and breach some sort of barrier within us that made us think donating was necessary? Are we so selfish that we are able to delude ourselves into not donating until the evidence is just too strong? If so this has profound implications about the synchronizations of human psychology in that so many people felt that barrier breached at the same time. On the other hand there is a possibility that people simply did not have time to think about the news until they got to the weekend. In this case it is an extremely sad indication of how much pressure and work people are put under that they can’t even find 2 minutes to donate to a good cause.
What do you think?
>Is humanity about to face disaster? A conversation with Geoff Hasselhurst
>Geoff Hasselhurst is the owner of http://www.spaceandmotion.com, a popular philosophical & scientific site. The first few comments are a record of the conversation I’ve been having with Geoff this last week. We now want to open the conversation up to others so please feel free to chip in!
>On good and evil
>Do you think good and evil exist? If so what are they? Are they in people or actions? Or they innate qualities that all can recognize or are they completely subjective concepts?
Battison's Blog 