Tuesday, February 18, 2014

First-Time Compulsory Voting

The idea of first-time compulsory voting is discussed on Democratic Audit. (It's an idea that I'd previously proposed myself.) Unfortunately, the text doesn't have any links - I guess it may have been simply copied and pasted from the IPPR report, rather than being reformatted for blog publication. I'd be interested to see Andrew Adonis's thoughts on young people voting.

Sunday, February 02, 2014

How to Derive Ought from Is: SNP on Alcohol Pricing

The great Scottish philosopher David Hume famously remarked that one cannot derive an ought (that is, a normative conclusion about what one should do) from an is (that is, a mere statement of fact). It seems, however, that the SNP have cracked the problem. Alcohol is cheap, therefore minimum pricing is needed. Why didn't Hume, or one of the many philosophers who've considered his problem, think of that?