@Jon Seymour: You’ve spotted an excellent point there: Clive Hamilton seems to want people to make responsible moral choices, but then wants their ability to make moral choices removed from them and instead put under government control. There’s a certain amount of hypocrisy there.

I always worry when someone believes their viewpoint is so right — or should that be “righteous”? — that everyone else should be forced to follow that viewpoint rather than be persuaded to make that choice.

@max: Execution? I think not. Clive Hamilton may be wrong, but he’s entitled to express his view.

“that we cannot be truly free unless we commit ourselves to a moral life.”

Here Clive Hamilton appears to be urging that we all take personal responsibility.

Yet in the mandatory filtering debate he wants to replace the inner moral core of each citizen with a Government-specified CISCO filter spec.

Or perhaps he just wants us to commit to that filter spec?

Hamilton’s debasement of logic is deplorable throughout his sad diatribe. The troops of flimsy strawmen, vain appeals to belief and authority amongst the litany of fallacies throughout indicate that reason has been hung, drawn and quartered on the altar of a spurious moral absolutism.