Is taxation theft?

This is a really clearly written article looking at the various reasons we might think that taxation is the taking of something that is fundamentally yours.

However, after carefully and clearly setting out and analysing the reasons, it concludes:

It’s hard to shake the feeling that the gross income figure on your payslip represents your money, and that the difference from your take-home pay represents how much the state has taken from you. In fact, there is no coherent way of justifying this conviction. Even if the most radical forms of Right-wing libertarianism are true, it remains the case that you have no special moral claim on your gross income.

Introduction to ethics

The TV series Ethics Matters is a really good basic introduction to some of the key issues in Ethics.  I highly recommend it.

It  is currently a series of 12 12-minute videos, each of which introduces a different topic/issue in ethics, such as the environment, nationalism, justice, rights, religion, freedom, etc.

I've decided to start using these videos with my critical thinking / philosophy students (young teens).  We watch the videos together, stopping and starting them and discussing it along the way.  So far it is working well.

Enid Blyton, moral guide

My blog post title is simply following the title of this very interesting article on Enid Blyton.  I highly recommend it.

We have got many dozens of Enid Blyton books here at home.  I loved them as a child.  Mulan and Miya love them.  Blyton's books are among our first chapter books for new readers, and they continue to be loved well into the tween years (or even teen years!).  Whenever we get a new pile of books from a book fair, it is always the Enid Blyton books that get read first.

In other words, there is something about Blyton's books (like Harry Potter, or Roald Dahl) that just seem to appeal.  Her storytelling is simply very, very enjoyable.

But yep, Blyton's morality is sometimes question-raising, and we need to acknowledge those dubious aspects of her moral teaching.  (When I read aloud books to Mulan and Miya, we sometimes discuss together the questionable aspects.)

But nonetheless, the article does a nice job of picking out the morally admirable aspects of Blyton's books -- the bits that make Blyton's books, on the whole, pretty good moral guides for young children.

(There are a few of Blyton's books that I have chosen not to keep, such as the Amelia Jane stories.  Blyton's characters can sometimes be vindictively nasty, but these stories seem to be based entirely around vindictively nasty oneupmanship, and I can't see anything worth keeping in them.)