Night Waves - Morality and the Law

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2013

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Anne McElvoy discusses ethics and the law after several politicians have complained recently about tax avoidance by big companies. To discuss are Geoffrey Robertson QC, Mark Littlewood and Angie Hobbs. Australian writer Andrew Upton talks about his sometimes controversial adaptations of classic Russian plays and explains to Anne why he inserted an egg fight into his recent production of Maxim Gorky's Children of the Sun. And writer Philip Hoare explores his fascination and fear of the sea when he talks to Anne about his new book; "The Sea Inside".

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds.
0:32.1	This is a download from the BBC. For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three.
0:40.9	Hello, and we're on a voyage on the programme tonight as a new book evokes the chills and thrills of the wild seas.
0:47.7	Writer Philip Haw will be talking to me about his maritime quest later on.
0:52.0	We journey back to the Russia of 1905 as Andrew Upton adapts one of
0:56.3	Gorky's early plays about an ominous early Russian revolution. But first, how do we chart our
1:01.7	way through the tangles of law and morality and which has precedence? You can hardly have missed
1:06.6	the outcry over the relatively modest amount of tax paid by some big international companies.
1:12.3	The firms insist they follow the letter of the law. Their critics insist that the spirit of
1:16.6	the law is being broken if big enterprises use cross-border variations in tax to keep the levies
1:22.6	they pay to a minimum. So is this just a standoff about the dismal economics of tax rates, or should there
1:28.8	be a moral compulsion to pay more? That argument evokes the ghosts of competing philosophies
1:34.0	across history about the place of law, from Aristotle to Hobbs, and more recently Ronald Dworkin.
1:40.4	Well, joining me to explore this legal and moral cat's cradle earlier with the barrister and writer Geoffrey Robertson, QC,
1:46.8	Mark Littlewood, Director-General of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Angie Hobbs,
1:51.5	who's Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at Sheffield University.
1:55.7	I started by asking Angie about the contribution she thinks tax makes to a truly ethical order.
2:02.0	Paying tax is only moral at all in a predominantly benign regime.
2:06.5	One could imagine a very corrupt or wicked regime,
2:09.6	which, for instance, only taxed a particular racial or religious group
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.