Daso-Blog

Peter Singer, the utilitarian Professor of bioethics at Princeton University has written about whether the use of performance-enhancing drugs in athletic competitions is immoral. Given what you know about Singer’s work, what do you think his position on that important moral question would be?

Here’s a snippet:

At the elite level, the difference between being a champion and an also-ran is so minuscule, yet it matters so much that athletes are pressured to do whatever they can to gain the slightest edge over their competitors. It is reasonable to suspect that gold medals now go not to those who are drug-free, but to those who most successfully refine their drug use for maximum enhancement without detection.

As events like the Tour de France turn farcical, bioethics professor Julian Savulescu has offered a radical solution. Savulescu, who directs the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and holds degrees in both medicine and bioethics, says that we should drop the ban on performance-enhancing drugs, and allow athletes to take whatever they want, as long as it is safe for them to do so.

Do Americans believe that the United States is doing enough good in the world? Is the US government spending enough money and exerting enough effort to combat global poverty and improve the health care of the world’s less fortunate? Are American voters more likely to support those candidates who are making international moral issues a priority in their foreign policy? have surveyed some Americans and come up with some revealing responses:The bipartisan research team of Peter D. Hart Research Associates and McLaughlin and Associates conducted a survey of likely voters in the New Hampshire Democratic and Republican primaries and here are some of the findings:

Nearly all Democrats (97%) and 70% of Republicans agree that America’s standing has suffered in recent years. In addition to a strong military, Democrats (91%) and Republicans (78%) agree that the United States also needs to improve diplomatic relations by doing more to help improve health, education and opportunities in the poorest countries around the world. Both Democrats (81%) and Republicans alike (70%) agree that reducing poverty, treating preventable diseases and improving education in poor countries around the world will help make the world safer and the United States more secure.

Remember that we have to be careful about generalizing to other Americans from the results of this survey of New Hampshire likely primary voters. Are residents of New Hampshire similar to other Americans in their views on this topic? Are likely primary voters different from other Americans in a manner that would affect the results above if the survey were aimed more broadly?

Here is another important finding from the survey:

Democrats and Republicans agree that America has a moral obligation as a compassionate nation to help the world’s poorest people through foreign assistance. More than nine in ten Democrats (93%) and 84% of Republicans agree that when millions of children around the world are dying from preventable diseases and hunger, we have a moral obligation to do what we can to help. Similarly, Democrats (90%) and Republicans (85%) agree that it is in keeping with the country’s values and our history of compassion to lead an effort to solve some of the most serious problems facing the world’s poorest people.

From the Guardian newspaper:

Gordon Brown scored a dramatic first foreign policy victory last night when the UN security council voted to deploy a 26,000-strong international force to Darfur, with a mandate to stop the massacres of civilians which have driven 2 million people from their homes.

Mr Brown has made Darfur a foreign policy priority, and the UN resolution was an initiative he promoted 10 days earlier with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, aiming to end a year of international drift on the issue. This week he secured George Bush’s support for the draft.

The vote was passed unanimously after China, the Sudanese government’s main defender at the UN, dropped its objections. British officials said that China’s oil interests in Sudan were eventually outweighed by anxiety about a possible international human rights backlash over Darfur aimed at next year’s Olympic Games in Beijing…

Hours before the vote, Mr Brown went to the UN headquarters to endorse the resolution, describing Darfur as “the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today”.

There is justified measured skepticism as to whether this deployment of UN troops will even happen

“It is not time … to pop open the champagne bottles. The true test of this measure is not what happens today in New York, but what happens over the coming weeks in Darfur,” Allyn Brooks-LaSure of the Save Darfur Coalition said last night.

Given the history of the Sudanese regime’s intransigence over Darfur, there is every reason to believe that the current government will insist that other member states of the UN respect the sovereignty of Sudan to as large an extent as possible.

If you’re an FSP, then you’re going to have a tough time being successful in this unforgiving world.  If, however, you’re an FSP and a journalist, then you’re a perfect candidate for an editorial slot at the Los Angeles Times.   All of which leads me to wonder whether Jonah Goldberg has ever taken an introductory course in International Relations?  If he has, then why does he not know the definition of “realism” used in IR and if he hasn’t why is he writing about topics dealing with international politics in the editorial pages of the LA Times?

Hello all:

I’ve often thought that it would be useful to maintain a post-course link to all of you where we could keep each other informed of EIPA-related material that we’ve come across. This “blog” marks an initial attempt to achieve that objective. I’ll generally just provide links to what others have been writing/saying about topics related to EIPA, so don’t expect any deeper analysis on my part.

Welcome, and feel free to make friends, classmates, family members, and your parole officer, aware of this site.

JD

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