Category Archives: Ethics

Mental Health

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Here we are at the start of Mental Health Week, and I read in my morning newspaper that “one in seven children and young people experienced a mental disorder in the previous 12 months.” Then on the radio I heard that the same proportion of adults had suffered anxiety disorders in the same period.

How can this be?! If any mental condition is as common as that, how can we call it a ‘disorder’? Surely we’re defining as disorderly aspects of normal human experience. Surely we’re setting the bar too low and steering people into treatment who don’t belong there.

This is not an original thought, of course. Medicalising normal human states is an international sport for Big Pharma. The rest of us are free to laugh at it and carry on with our messy lives, balancing sadness with joy, anxiety with hope.

Actually, with the world in its present state, I’d say that if anyone is not experiencing extreme anxiety they are by definition suffering a mental disorder.

Ice Epidemic

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There seem to be news stories every day about the damage being done by meth­amphetamine (‘ice’) in Australia. Personally, I cannot understand why any sane person would knowingly take their first dose, its effects and its addictive properties being so well-known.

But within the past few days I heard that someone I know has done just this. He’s married with a young child and another on the way. He’s a skilled tradesman, employed full-time and well-paid until he was made redundant. To overcome his boredom – or so I have been told by a third party – he decided to step into the dark, tragic world of ‘ice’.

The outcome is predictable. His addiction will drive him and his family into poverty. He will become unemployable. He will become abusive toward his wife, and perhaps to his children. Eventually his wife will leave him. She will have to work full-time to support herself and her children. Her mother will have to abandon her own part-time job to look after the children.

Perhaps things will not work out as badly as this, but the risk is there. The urge to self-destruction, visiting great suffering on family and friends, seems to lurk in many hearts. I just don’t get it.

My anger is directed equally to those to make and sell this vile product and to those who become its willing slaves. And yet the addicts are often portrayed as victims. I don’t get that either. There would be no supply without demand. How can the willing buyer be less culpable than the willing seller?

The same inconsistency applies to other products and services too. How can a people-smuggler be a criminal while his/her customers are innocent victims? How can a prostitute be a victim while his/her clients are vicious exploiters? Please explain.

Corporate Shame

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When I heard the news story about Volkswagen and its ‘defeater’ system designed to cheat US emission testing, I thought I must have misunderstood it. Directors and managers have a duty to maximise shareholders’ profits, but Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” attracts laughter because it’s just too obvious to require formal expression. In any case, the damage that discovery of an offence like VW’s is bound to wreak upon the company would surely be so great as to deter any board from allowing it.

But cast your mind back. Remember the revelations about LIBOR fixing by major banks? Remember Goldman Sachs’ complicity in Greece’s fraudulent entry into the Euro Zone? Remember the tobacco industry’s persistent denial of the harm for which its products were responsible? The list is much longer than this. I invite you to add your own recollections.

Now allegations are being made about similar malpractices by the sugar industry. It’s too early to use words like “crime” or “criminal”, and perhaps in the strict legal sense no crimes have been committed. But there is plenty of evidence that the food manufacturing industry as a whole has a pretty casual attitude to its customers’ wellbeing.

My first ever post was about dieting. I wrote about Mrs SG’s success with the 5+2 diet and I offered 8 rules to follow for a healthy diet compatible with a modern lifestyle. Here they are again. Numbers 6, 7 and 8 will not make me popular with the food industry:

  1. Consume 1,100-1,300kcal/day normally, but no more than 500kcal on 2 days per week (the ‘fasting days’).
  2. 1,300kcal/day is less than the normal maintenance level for an adult, and it may be exceeded on special days when we entertain guests or go out to eat.
  3. Consume 30-50 grams of protein every day, including the fasting days.
  4. Every day consume less sugar than protein.
  5. Eat small amounts of a wide variety of things.
  6. Don’t buy anything without reading the nutritional data and comparing with other products.
  7. Always eat unprocessed food in preference to processed.
  8. Prepare meals in your own kitchen as much as possible. You don’t know what’s in a restaurant or take-away meal.

When Is Killing OK?

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There is a much-loved comedienne in Australia called Magda Szubanksi. She recently revealed that her father, when a boy in Poland, had killed Nazi collaborators as an assassin for the Polish Resistance. This was considered shocking news. I was not shocked at all, however. Magda’s father was quite rightly fighting to free his country from a cruel invader. He was a hero.

A couple of years ago there were shock-horror stories in the British press because Prince Harry revealed that he had undertaken missions as a pilot that involved killing Taliban fighters. But what the hell do we pay military pilots for, if not to kill the enemy?!

Now we have a similar reaction to the news that David Cameron authorised drone strikes that killed UK citizens fighting for Daesh in Syria. To my mind, if a British citizen joins a terrorist organisation and goes abroad to fight on its behalf, the British Government has a responsibility to take all possible steps to prevent that citizen from doing harm.

How is the British Government to achieve that? They could send in a team of highly trained soldiers to capture the renegade citizen and drag him home to face trial. But the risk of failure and consequent injury or death of team members would be high. A drone strike, based on good intelligence, is low-risk and much more likely to succeed.

Admittedly a drone strike carries the risk of civilian casualties. But a civilian living in an area that is under Daesh control, or under Daesh attack, is already in extreme danger of death, injury, kidnap, rape, enslavement or dispossession. And who knows how many innocent lives may be saved by the death of a single terrorist?

Drawing the threads of these three stories together, it seems to me that there are times when the opprobrium usually directed toward the act of killing is undeserved.