Catherine McDonald is a Melbourne VIC based Philosopher and teacher. Included are publications, articles, podcasts, and resources for teachers and students.
MILLER-2019-3 …. The scholarship rejecting arguments justifying torture on the basis of the ticking bomb thought experiment has increased significantly in both sophistication and size. In addition, the issue of the problematic nature of ‘intuition pumps’ has now become a field of study in its own right and some of it has even been applied to the field of torture arguments….
While the intimate nature of the graves of Weeroona suggest a very personal relationship with death, the environment itself offers a kind of serenity. Serenity is not possible with this little memorial. One encounters this memento mori, face to face. The visceral nature of the distress is unavoidable, breathtaking even. Domestic items, socks, footy jumper, fairy lights, the childish messages on the nearby wall, all … Continue reading Memorials in the West: 5. Roadside Death – 15 Year Old Driving an Unregistered Car
When Mitchell gazed out over the land from Mount Macedon, he was not gazing out over vacant space. It was not terra nullius but a land fully occupied by a culture, the absence of which in the national narrative, is now acutely obvious. While we build monuments of European glorification, there are no moments to warriors of the frontier wars. Our national amnesia extends to … Continue reading Memorials in the West: 4. Weeroona Aboriginal Cemetery
Contrasted against the dry Western plains, Mount Macedon is wonderfully damp, all misty forests, moss covered trees and panoramic views. The panorama from Major Mitchell’s lookout (after surveyor general Major Thomas Mitchell) is spectacular, a glorious sweep of the plains below, the remains of volcanic caldera dotting the horizon and yes, in the distance Port Phillip Bay. Mitchell must have been reading the classics at … Continue reading Memorials in the West: 3. The Great Cross
If the West Gate Bridge memorial seems to suffer from a desire to downplay the significance of industrial deaths, the “Vietnamese War” memorial in Sunshine is testament to an Orwellian desire to re-write history completely. It is difficult to know where to begin. Trends in memorials to war dead have altered significantly over the decades. Increasingly, war memorials have moved away from triumphalism; glorifying statues … Continue reading Memorials in the West: 2. Walking in Sunshine
I am old enough to remember the day the West Gate fell. Unlike the saccharine sorrow of today’s celebrity culture extracting tears for every trivial demise or faux grief for the anonymous victims of salacious crimes, the deaths of the thirty-five who died when the span fell were genuine tragedies. They went to work and were killed by the hubris of men who thought they … Continue reading Memorials in the West: 1. The Day the West Gate Fell
Existentialism and Kantian ethics. Drawing parallels or distinctions between Kant and Sartre is nothing new. Lots of theorists have done this and anyone familiar with the work of Kant would find much that is familiar in the work of Sartre. Likewise anyone familiar with the work of Sartre will be aware of his criticisms of Kant. While I don’t want to suggest that there is … Continue reading Kant and Existentialism
This is a section of a larger paper discussing problems in health care distribution. The World Health Organisation [1] defines health as “…a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.” [2] In doing so it incorporates total well-being under the concept of health. This definition is not a relational claim between the various parameters of … Continue reading Problems with the WHO Definition of ‘Health’
This paper was delivered at a Post-graduate seminar, Latrobe University, Melbourne 2003. Footnotes are missing. All fictions dealing with genetic “engineering” raise issues of identity and genetic essentialism/determinism. This film is often favoured as a representation of ‘real’ as opposed to ‘fictional’ problems in this regard because it extrapolates on the basis of known science and because it avoids the cruder, less plausible forms of … Continue reading Introduction to a Bioethical Analysis of the Film Gattaca
AAP Conference, Adelaide. 2003. Introduction: Defining the concept of ‘health’ is a central problem in the field of Bioethics. It sits at the crossroads of multiple levels of theory, having implications for both metaphysics and normative ethics. Among the plethora of potential theories, the work of Christopher Boorse continues to be widely influential. Boorse argues that it is possible to give an objective, value-neutral account … Continue reading Problems with the Biomedical Model of Health