31 July 2006

The Epistemology of Temperance

What is the epistemology of temperance? IOW, how do we know enough is enough? Does anyone have any thoughts on this? As I see it, the three main approaches to this traditionally have been:

1) consult a religious text and do what it says blindly

2) some kind of Aristotelian naturalistic theory of human flourishing (I take it this is the line you are most interested in pursuing, Jim...?)

3) stop when it starts to feel bad (a.k.a. 'intuition')

Could there be any way of integrating 2) and 3)? It strikes me that 3) on its own is not enough - that this what "The Sixties Experiment" showed. OTOH one might argue that the way 12-step programs work at the end of the day is purely by forcing one to sit with the true consequences of one's own excessive behaviors and feel them.

Violence in Maori Communities

There was a horrible murder in NZ a few weeks ago - twin babies Chris and Cru Kahui were given injuries in their family home which resulted in both of them dying in hospital. The police have been as yet unable to charge anyone with their murder as the extended family have closed ranks. According to the media, a self-dubbed 'Tight 12" who were all present at the scene have pledged to not tell the police anything so that the case cannot be solved.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3748316a10,00.html

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3744911a11,00.html

Anyway, this has prompted a certain amount of public soul-searching amongst prominent Maori concerning the violence in Maori communities. Alan Duff, author of "Once Were Warriors", has come out with a very conservative (though perhaps excessively jaundiced) line, and once again, liberal welfare reaps criticism rather than praise:

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1674147.htm

28 July 2006

NZ Again: Encouraging People to Commit to Education

Another set of ads on New Zealand TV at the moment encourage the population to "get there with learning". I like these ads - they exude a positive, inspirational tone which could be well worth emulating. I see now that they are targeted solely at the Maori community:

http://www.moe.govt.nz/index.cfm?layout=document&documentid=6662&indexid=8733&indexparentid=6508

but they do air on the mainstream channels.

New Zealand Govt confronts Kiwi obesity...

27 July 2006

More On The Alcohol Issue: New Zealand Status Quo

The de facto drinking age here in New Zealand, since 1999, is 18 (before that it was 20). Though strictly speaking (I just found out) this is not actually the legal drinking age but the legal alcohol purchasing age.

In 2005 there was a bill put forward in Parliament to raise the drinking age back to 20. Doctors were significant campaigners for it:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/feature/story.cfm?c_id=550&objectid=3549473

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/organisation/story.cfm?o_id=447&ObjectID=10124327

But the bill was defeated.

Recently, there has been an ad campaign on TV, "It's not the drinking. It's how we drink" (!) with quite vivid scenarios depicted of people making idiots out of themselves in various ways. More details here: http://www.alcohol.org.nz/CampaignItsNotTheDrinking.aspx. It would be interesting to look at some statistics regarding these ads' effectiveness.

10 July 2006

Tom Frame on temperance

The latest (July/Aug) Quadrant has a most interesting article on temperance by Tom Frame, the Anglican bishop for the Australian Defence Force. With his permission I've put it on our website. It's at http://www.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/frameontemperance.pdf