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  NO BRAIN NO PAIN, AND THE FUTILITY OF HAVING AN UNINFORMED PUBLIC DEBATE Maltese Politicians from all sides are always harping on about the “need” to have a public debate about abortion. This is like having cooks discuss mechanical engineering and making decisions on laws regulating the building of cars based on the cooks’ majority decision. What legislators need to do is not have endless public discussions, as if the world has only just discovered abortion, but for them to read the relevant academic bioethics and philosophical literature (and I mean books, not lazy internet searches), understand them, decide, and legislate whichever way they are persuaded. Of course, this requires intelligent non-populist politicians who understand the issues involved and are prepared to do the right thing even if it may cost them votes. But that is another matter. Far from being conductive to anything but exasperation to those who are cognisant of the issues (both philosophical and scientif...
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A CULTURE OF SADISM? Let me start off by making it clear that my choice of heading is hyperbolic – I do not think most anti-choice people actually derive pleasure from the preventable suffering of others, although there may be some exceptions, particularly when some people believe that the suffering in this life will win them or others eternal bliss in an afterlife.  But I think the reader will allow me some hyperbole given that lawyer Mark Said, in his opinion piece entitled “ We have devalued life ”, describes (presumably not at all hyperbolically) people who are pro-choice and pro-euthanasia as proponents of a “culture of death”. Count that as just one of the numerous unsupported assertions he bandies about as if they are undeniable and self-evident truths.  Given that his whole opinion piece is just a case of saying much but really saying nothing at all – no substance whatsoever – I will only provide a cursory response.  An evidence and argument based response to most...
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BEING “PRO-LIFE” IS NOT ABOUT RELIGION, BUT LET’S SMUGGLE IN “GOD” AND “SOULS” When confronted with irrefutable evidence-based pro-choice arguments, religious pro-lifers unfailingly end up smuggling in “God” or “souls” without even realizing that even if we disregard the fact that religion is necessarily faith-based and therefore should not be imposed, the insertion of religious concepts in the abortion debate brings several problems of its own. I have many times mentioned some of these problems and have as yet only been faced with complete silence. So, I’ll give it another try here. Perhaps someone might surprise me. There are two suggested explanations for consciousness which is defined as the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings: the scientific and the religious one. The scientific explanation, derived not least from neurological experiments and the study of victims of severe brain injury, says that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain resulting...
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  WITHOUT CRITICAL THINKING RATIONAL DISCUSSION IS IMPOSSIBLE Nothing exposes the deficiency in critical thinking like many comments in online newspapers, where logical incoherence seems to be the order of the day. I will illustrate this with an example, without even the need of presenting the worst case. The example will show that deficiency in critical thinking makes rational discussion practically impossible, and hence demonstrate the urgency that critical thinking in education deserves. Replying to a comment in The Times of Malta , where Victor Laiviera, who is pro-choice, had suggested that “whether a person comes into existence at the moment of conception, when it acquires a brain or when it becomes viable are, in (his) opinion, secondary issues”, I had replied by saying that “here is where (the commenter and I) part ways. As pro-choice Kate Greasley convincingly argues in her book ‘Arguments about abortion’, the question of whether foetuses and embryos are ‘persons’ is ...
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