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Recently, the British Journal of Medical Ethics published a paper which quickly achieved notoriety (via the Catholic Herald), but most commentators have misunderstood what the paper is proposing.

It is not a new argument for infanticide. The argument for infanticide to relieve a child’s suffering has already been made, notably by Peter Singer in 1985. Indeed, infanticide is already practiced regularly in the Netherlands under the Groningen protocol.

The authors argue that infanticide is justified to relieve parents or society of the burden of caring for a child, even in situations where the child’s suffering is not a consideration.

Obviously many people were unaware that infanticide is practiced in a supposedly civilised society. A visceral reaction to the thought of infanticide is not surprising. Killing a newborn child ought to be something that horrifies us.

But in one sense the reasoning in the paper, and by earlier ethicists like Singer, is quite correct: it makes no real difference whether a child is killed a few days before birth or after birth. In fact, there is no obvious point at which a child becomes a “person” worthy of protection from killing. Abortion and infanticide are morally equivalent acts — there is no difference between a person who aborts an unborn child and a person who kills their infant.

This point has been picked up by some journalists in Britain, such as Will Heaven, who points out that if you find the idea of infanticide horrifying (as of course you ought to), then “The only totally logical response I can think of… is to be altogether anti-abortion.”

The authors are simply proposing a new, additional basis for infanticide. Up until now, the argument for infanticide has generally been to preserve the child from a life filled with suffering. But abortion is available on a different basis: the convenience of the mother. As the authors point out, this is inconsistent.

They propose removing the inconsistency. In their view, infanticide should be permitted not just for the benefit of the child, but for the convenience of the parents or society (society, after all, might bear the economic cost of caring for a disabled child).

Here’s my question: most people, I think, find the idea of killing an infant repugnant. Certainly society tends to react with shock when a mother kills their own child after the child is born.

And killing an infant simply for the sake of convenience is truly appalling.

But if you find the idea of killing an inconvenient child repugnant — as any right-thinking person does — on what basis is it right to kill a slightly younger child, still in the womb?

Facebook, Twitter, and news websites can be a dreadful drag on productivity. The temptation is always there to see if someone has posted something somewhere. Checking websites kills productivity because you interrupt what you are doing, and requires you to try and remember if the site has changed since you last looked five minutes ago. Most of the time there’s nothing new, but it can still easily take a minute or two to check a few sites.

One solution is to decide to be disciplined and not check. I find that impossible, and besides, I actually really enjoy Twitter and so forth — it seems overkill to completely give up something enjoyable that in theory only requires a few minutes a day of attention. What is more, I can’t actually concentrate on one task for several hours at a time. I need regular breaks in my work. The real problem is making the breaks (& distractions) regular and widely spaced enough that they help my productivity, instead of destroying it.

The great thing is that computers are really good at checking websites and seeing if they have changed. There’s no reason for me to do it. Even better, you can tell computer software to only check occasionally. That way, you never miss anything, and at the same time you can schedule your interruptions to fit your pattern of working.

To do that, I use four apps. One important feature is that most of them live in the menu bar, meaning the the windows visible in Spaces are all work-related:

1. Fantastical — I no longer have to keep iCal open to see my upcoming schedule, and I can easily add and edit new appointments. As a bonus, adding new appointments can be done by just typing in a description of the appointment in (fairly) normal English. As I get more into using Siri, the adding of appointments is less necessary, but it’s still great when I’m reading an email to add an appointment without leaving the email app.
2. Sparrow — this is my main email client. It has a very small main window that looks more like a Twitter client than a conventional email program. It also lives mostly in the menu bar, lighting up (and giving me a Growl notification) when new mail arrives. It also has simple & quick archive support: even though I don’t use GMail, I like the model of an empty inbox, with incoming mail either being dealt with or archived. Full-text search means that there’s no need to use folders any more (I have over 10,000 archived messages, and it’s easier to find messages with search than it used to be with a huge folder hierarchy; I tried using tags/labels but found it too tedious trying to manage them, and ended up searching most of the time anyway).
3. Reeder — this is what I use for RSS feeds, so that I never need to check news websites. I used to just have only those websites I often read full articles from in my RSS feed reader. But recently I have added the high-volume news websites like BBC News into Reeder, because it stops me checking the BBC website. I keep high-volume general news in a separate folder, so that I can quickly skim through the headlines, only occasionally reading an article. I have found that I read fewer articles this way, and the BBC web site was the last one I used to regularly check during the day. Reeder has a built-in option to clip an article to Evernote, which I use to save and search interesting articles. The only downside with Reeder is that you can’t hide its window/make it live in the menu bar.
4. Socialite — this is how I follow Twitter and Facebook. In theory, I could use this for RSS feeds too, but it’s not as good a feed reader as Reeder. In fact, it’s not a brilliant client for either Twitter or Facebook, but it does the job for both of them. I get notifications for both Twitter and Facebook on my phone, so I only need Socialite for new posts.