Understand Afghanistan: News Roundup

A selection of the latest news from Afghanistan.

Understanding Afghanistan: Reading Material

Once a week or so, we’ll be rounding up recent reading material on Afghanistan. After the jump, the inaugural list.

Announcing a Public Ethics column

Here’s something to keep you busy between PER episodes. Christian and I are going to start writing a regular column in the online magazine Policy Innovations. It’ll be called the Public Ethicist–or something like that. We’re still working out the details.

Our pilot article is up there now. We take a look at pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline’s decision to cut some prices in developing countries. Check it out and let us know what you think.

“The Right to Be Present”

The Washington Post published an article on Thursday, which explained that Guantanamo prisoners were only allowed to attend the first full habeas corpus hearing via audio link. And a nonfunctional link at that. Sensing absurdity, I wrote a letter to the editor, which the Post graciously printed.

Tables Turned: PER Interviewed

Christian and I were interviewed the other day by Tyson Chaney over at the Politics 2000 blog. Read all about it here. Thanks, Tyson!

Schedule Change

Due to some technical problems, we’re making a small change to the schedule of upcoming episodes. We’re swapping Leif Wenar and Jessica Wolfendale. This means that the Wolfendale episode on torture lite is coming out tomorrow, 9/15, and Wenar’s on 10/6. Sorry to all you Leif Wenar fans out there, but I promise you won’t be disappointed once you’ve heard the good Dr. Wolfendale.

The Health Impact Fund as Philosophy

What does a practical political idea like the Health Impact Fund have to do with academic philosophy? Or, as the question is often posed, why is the Health Impact Fund being run by Thomas Pogge, a philosopher? I’m a (marginal) member of the HIF project, and I find myself confronted by this question on a regular basis. As a follow-up to our episode with Pogge, I’ll try to sketch out some answers.

Episode 1 Transcript

We had a couple of requests for a transcript of Episode 1. Here it is. Download (PDF, 132 kb)

Upcoming Episodes

To whet your appetite, here’s the release schedule for our next few episodes.

• 9/15: Leif Wenar (Kings College London) on the Resource Curse
• 10/6: Jessica Wolfendale (University of Melbourne) on Torture Lite
• 10/27: Larry Temkin (Rutgers) on Extending Human Lifespans

We’ve got lots more in the works, and we’ll let you know about those as they materialize. In the gaps between shows, I’ll be posting here with discussions of our past episodes, previews of future ones, and lots more.

Welcome to our show!

Hello, everybody.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of this brand-new podcast. The idea behind the show is to get careful thinking about political problems out into the world in a new way. Many of our discussions will be with people who call themselves philosophers, but we hope to be both intellectually rigorous and engaging for nonphilosophers at the same time. It’s a tough balancing act, and we hope you’ll let us know when it works and when it doesn’t.

And with all that said, we should introduce ourselves. The man writing these posts (and most of the future ones) is Matt Peterson, and the show’s host is Christian Barry. We both work at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics—Christian in Canberra at the Australian National University, and me at the University of Melbourne. If you do a little digging, you’ll see that our backgrounds are in print editing (we used to edit a journal together called Ethics & International Affairs). Audio is new for us, but we love it already.

We’ve had some great assistance in putting the show together, both from CAPPE, whose staff has enthusiastically supported this project, and from our sponsors, who we’ve linked to in the right-hand column. The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs has agreed to add Public Ethics Radio to its own podcast stream. And the superb German record label Kompakt has generously agreed to let us use their music in our show. The producer Steve Rennicks has also composed some original music that appears in the show, and we thank him as well.

We’ve got a lot of great material to give you. We’re delighted to have as our inaugural guest a philosopher we know well and respect deeply, Thomas Pogge. We’ll tell you a little bit more about him in the next post. We’ve got plenty more more in the pipeline: Leif Wenar on the resource curse, Jessica Wolfendale on Torture, and Larry Temkin on extending human lifespans.

We hope you enjoy the show. If you do (or don’t!), we’d love to hear what you think: send us an email at contact@publicethicsradio.org.