Ethics Shmethics

What to do? What to do? What would Jesus, the Buddha, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny do?
Everyone asks the question at some stage in their lives: do we stock the Harry Potter book or not? Do we go for profits or do we placate the noisy minority of St. Augustine wannabees and concede that Daniel Radcliffe is in fact the devil in disguise? I don't care, and neither should you. So I'd stock it in the interests of materialism, if nothing else. Oh yeah, and free speech, the right to information, the courtesy of giving people the opportunity to make their own minds up, and the fact that we shouldn't actually take fiction seriously unless it's a John Grisham thriller! Ooooh, this one's a "real page-turner." No, wait, now it's "unputdownable."

So which horsy do I back? The tried-and-tested, if a little quaint, Aristotelian virtue-based approach? "What on earth's a virtue?" I hear you say. Some ancient Greek thing? Or, the Kantian doctrine of the categorical imperative; a duty based theory? OR, the "whatever makes most people the happiest" approach of JS Mill and the Utilitarians? I've certainly considered Kant; in fact I spent the better part of this afternoon considering it, in between the hourly news broadcasts on the ABC. That Peta Collins... phwoaar!

Happy weekend readers.