Ethics news:
2 February 2005
Ethics News is regularly updated with links and introductions to ethics-related news stories gathered from all over the web.
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How much should you give?
The massive amount of cash contributed by ordinary people to the tsunami appeal is unprecedented. Does this herald a new era of altruism? And how much should one give? The tales of stubborn goodwill are overshadowed only by the pitiful stories of those on the receiving end of this generosity. The elderly Welsh woman who withdrew her £120 weekly pension, before giving £100 to the disaster appeal; the prisoners in Kent who gave up smoking for the New Year if their governor would make a donation; the American donor who called up to offer the money he had been saving towards a new hearing aid. At the other end of the scale, the rich and famous have been reaching for their chequebooks too. Actress Sandra Bullock has given $1m while Michael Schumacher has multiplied that sum by 10 ...
BBC News - 6 January 2005
Give, and you shall receive great publicity
Publicity-hungry opportunists are banking on the tsunami relief appeal to boost their own image, and making a mockery of the spirit of charity. What would Jesus have to say? Jesus Christ may have been the Son of God and the Messiah, but he had a pretty feeble grasp of commercial reality and the mechanics of marketing. If Jesus had his way, we would go about doing good anonymously, trusting that God would know what we are up to and would reward us in His own good time and in due course. I think we can assume that an Order of Australia here and now beats getting your name in the Lamb's Book of Life any day. Jesus had a couple of specific things to say about charity. The first, reported in Mark's biography of Jesus, is that our Lord calculated the worth of a charitable donation not by its size alone but by the degree of sacrifice involved in making it ...
The Age - 30 January 2005
How we deal with disasters
From 'Acts of God' to 'Acts of Nature' and 'Acts of Man' - humanity's reading of catastrophes has changed through the ages. After the Asian tsunami, how can we make sense of such senseless events? A brief look at history suggests that our answer will depend on the prevailing beliefs of the time. Major catastrophes and disasters often serve as historical markers. The phrase 'after this event nothing will ever be the same again' has been repeated after many major disasters. Frederick Francis Cook, chronicler of the 1871 fire that destroyed a large part of Chicago, wrote that 'in the minds of Chicagoans the city's past is demarcated from the present by the great fire of 1871'. After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, it became commonplace to hear politicians and commentators announce that 'the world changed forever on 9/11' ...
Spiked-Online - 6 January 2005
Scare tactics will do far more harm than good
Travel warnings are delaying the economic recovery of countries hit by the tsunami. The World Tourism Organisation is to hold an emergency session over the next two days in an attempt to revive Indian Ocean tourism and destroy some of the myths that have stopped people from travelling since the tsunami. Thailand's Phuket has been chosen for the crisis summit because the holiday island has been widely reported as being "devastated" by the big waves and, according to some government travel warnings, is still unsafe to visit. The WTO aims to undo the damage wrought by false media reports and is asking governments to avoid using scare tactics when issuing travel advice ...
The Age - 30 January 2005
A disastrous way to oppose war
Anti-war activists are demanding an equality of pity between Iraqis and the victims of the Asian tsunami. Terry Jones, filmmaker, actor and 'Python', says he was 'bewildered' by the world reaction to the tsunami. Not because he thinks it odd that many in the West should express sympathy and solidarity with the thousands devastated by the tidal wave in south Asia. No, 'it's the inconsistency that has me foxed', says Jones. He wants to know why 'nobody is making this sort of fuss about all the people killed in Iraq, [even though] that is a human catastrophe of comparable dimensions'. 'Are deaths caused by bombs and gunfire less worthy of our pity than deaths caused by a giant wave?' asked the 'truly baffled' Python in the UK Guardian ...
Spike-Online - 14 January 2005
Why didn't the Allies bomb Auschwitz
Should the Allies have heeded calls to bomb Auschwitz when they learnt the full horror of the Nazi Holocaust? It is one of the enduring controversies of World War II. By the summer of 1944, detailed information about the true nature of the death camps had reached the West, but it was not until months later that Auschwitz was finally liberated by the advancing Red Army. During that time, thousands more had perished in the gas chambers. Whether a precision strike was militarily possible or would have been effective in halting the killings is still hotly contested. But many - including survivors of the camp - say the Allies should have acted whatever the mission's chances of success ...
BBC News - 23 January 2005
Race to preserve Holocaust legacy
"Popocatepetl," Trude Levi repeated dreamily as if chanting it could transport her back to her childhood. In a narrow and paper-cluttered computer room in her north London home, Mrs Levi was browsing for the first time a new internet database listing the names and life stories of half of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. She had keyed in her father's name, Dezso Mosonyi, and noticed another entry under the same name. Dezso Mosonyi was also the name of her father's cousin. "I never met him," she said. "But I always remember the postcard he sent me from Mexico when I was a child." "It was a photograph of Popocatepetl," she said. "At the time, I thought it was a most funny word" ...
BBC News - 24 December 2004
Forging a future after Auschwitz
It is only recently that Germany has learned to celebrate what it is without losing sight of what it was. As a string of deeply symbolic 60th anniversaries approaches - from the liberation of Auschwitz to the end of World War II itself - the country is in an uncharacteristically self-confident mood. Taboos have been falling away. "It's never too late to be a Jew!" - is the motto of a couple at the centre of a new Jewish comedy set in Berlin, whose lives, in the words of one critic, "are about as kosher as a pork chop". The film, Alles auf Zucker! (Everything lands on Zucker) follows a hard-up non-practising Jew, Jaeckie Zucker, as he attempts to convince his Orthodox brother that he is, in fact, kosher - and thus eligible for an inheritance from his mother ...
BBC News - 24 January 2005
Swastika's changing symbolism
The swastika is far older than Hitler's Germany and means much more. We passed through the exit formalities at Kathmandu airport, and an official of the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal stamped our exit cards. I glanced down at mine. Staring back at me, in fresh black ink, was a swastika. We had, in fact, encountered the swastika in many places in our travels. When we visited the personal quarters of the Dalai Lama in Mussoorie, India, we had to step over a large inlaid swastika to enter. The device figures on countless temples. In the West, the swastika remains to this day an irredeemable symbol of the evil of Nazism. However, much of the East has merely shrugged off the Nazi association. After all, the word "swastika" is derived from a Sanskrit term meaning "being good" or "wellbeing" ...
The Age - 27 January 2005
Are we forgetting the unforgettable?
It happened 60 years ago and for those who grew up in the post-war aftermath of the Holocaust, the horrors are ingrained on their memories. But what of today's teenagers? How much, if anything, do they know about this nadir in human history? When Eva Clarke was born at Mauthausen concentration camp in April 1945 her mother, Anna, weighed just five stones. Eva herself weighed 3lbs. She did not move and she did not cry as she was wrapped in newspaper to protect her from the cold. Unknown to Anna, her husband, Bernd Mathau, had been killed by the Nazis "for no reason" at Auschwitz months earlier ...
BBC News - 27 January 2005
What's wrong with the world's oldest mum?
It might be selfish and unnatural - but a woman in her 60s should have the choice to have a child. 'First baby for the world's oldest mother (and she's single).' In this Daily Mail headline, the parentheses say it all. If it wasn't bad enough that a 66-year-old Romanian woman has given birth to a daughter as a result of fertility treatment, Adriana Iliescu seems to be no Earth Mother figure prevented by tragic circumstances from having the family she deserved. She is single; a retired university professor who claims to have been too busy pursuing her career to get around to having babies earlier in life. Ms Iliescu's newfound status as World's Oldest Mum has attracted consternation across the UK press ...
Spiked-Online - 18 January 2005
A painful birth
Today the people of Iraq vote in historic elections that will see power spread across the country for the first time. Peter Beaumont in Basra reports on the slow and sometimes violent emergence of politics from the shadow of oppression. Mohammed Nasser is a dapper little man. A little overweight, with sharp, saturnine features, he suffers from diabetes and hypertension. He sips from a little glass of Iraq's ubiquitous sweet tea as he talks. And like every Iraqi, the director of Basra Children's and Maternity hospital wants to talk of politics. Of today's first free Iraqi elections in a generation - elections that will finally bring about an end to the long suppression of Iraq's Shia Islamic majority, and the advent of their political power ...
The Observer - 30 January 2005
Are Iraqi elections a panacea?
President Bush, in his second inaugural address, used soaring idealistic rhetoric to tell us that he was going to democratize the Middle East. After the recent Iraqi elections, he declared a triumphant moment in that effort. Yet those elections-with their predictable results-may not mean much for the future of Iraq and might, when combined with other US policies in the Islamic world, reinforce world perceptions of US foreign policy as hypocritical. Iraqis should be commended for risking their lives to vote. Sadly, it may ultimately be in vain. The heavy turnout in Shi'ite localities and the light turnout in Sunni areas were predictable ...
Iviews - 1 February 2005
Acts of bravery
You'd have to be pretty hardhearted not to be moved by the courage of the millions of Iraqis who insisted on turning out to vote yesterday despite the very real threat that they would be walking into mayhem and violent death at the polls. At polling stations across the country there were women in veils holding the hands of children, and men on crutches, and people who had been maimed during the terrible years of Saddam, and old people. Among those lined up to vote in Baghdad was Samir Hassan, a 32-year-old man who lost a leg in the blast of a car bomb last year. He told a reporter, "I would have crawled here if I had to." In a war with very few feel-good moments, yesterday's election would qualify as one ...
The New York Times - 31 January 2005
Iraqis fight a very lonely battle for democracy
Whatever your view of the war, you should embrace today's election. The election in Iraq is without precedent. Never, not even in the dying days of Weimar Germany, when Nazis and Communists brawled in the streets, has there been such a concerted attempt to destroy an election through violence - with candidates unable to appear in public, election workers driven into hiding, foreign monitors forced to 'observe' from a nearby country, actual voting a gamble with death, and the only people voting safely the fortunate expatriates and exiles abroad. Just as depressing as the violence in Iraq is the indifference to it abroad. Americans and Europeans who have never lifted a finger to defend their own right to vote seem not to care that Iraqis are dying for the right to choose their own leaders ...
The Observer - 30 January 2005
The devastating power to die
Suicide bombers are driven by despair and defiance. It is their last sovereignty. While insurgents have been blowing themselves apart in Israel and Iraq, a silence has prevailed about what suicide bombing actually involves. Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death. They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice. It is possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could have avoided it ...
The Age - 28 January 2005
Sinners all, for a despicable act
The invasion of Iraq was a monstrous crime for which everyone shares the blame. The White House's acknowledgement last month that the US has formally ended its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq brought to a close the most calamitous international deception of modern times. This decision was taken a month after a contentious presidential election in which the issue of those weapons and the war in Iraq played a central role. George Bush was unwavering in his conviction that Iraq had such weapons. When one looks at the situation in Iraq today, the only way it would be possible to justify the current state of affairs is if the invasion of Iraq was for a cause worthy of the price. With no weapons of mass destruction there is no justification for the war ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 29 January 2005
Confounding patriotism and bigotry in post 9/11 America
A patriot is "one who loves, supports, and defends one's country." A bigot, on the other hand, is "one who is strongly partial to one's own group religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ," says the American Heritage dictionary. The difference between the two is obvious and enormous: Patriotism is borne out of love and generosity towards the country to which a person belongs, while bigotry is borne out of hate and a mean-spirited attitude towards those who are different. The clear difference can be easily obscured when defending one's country includes fighting an enemy whose identity is broadly and loosely delineated, and when that identity is defined in religious and racial terms ...
Iviews - 29 January 2005
An Australian whose values we should cherish
We must not lose the good stories of Australians like Weary Dunlop. Slaughterhouse 5 is a great American novel whose origins lie in the fact that in 1945 its author, a fourth-generation German-American named Kurt Vonnegut jnr, witnessed the firebombing of the German city of Dresden as an American prisoner of war. One day, this ornate beautiful city was there. The next it wasn't and 135,000 of its citizens had been incinerated - more than the number of dead at Hiroshima. Deceptively slim (about 140 pages), the novel took its author 20-odd years to write. After all, how do you describe hell? The solution he devised was utterly original - a comic novel of unflinching moral gravity that is as insightful today as when it was when written ...
The Age - 26 January 2005
Hold the apology: freedom is not proof of Habib's innocence
US concern for its intelligence sources is likely to be behind its reluctance to prosecute in open court. Three years after his arrest in Pakistan, Mamdouh Habib was released from detention at Guantanamo Bay. Habib's supporters are loudly declaring that his discharge constitutes conclusive proof of his innocence and are demanding an apology, and compensation into the bargain. Yet not only are Australian and American officials unrepentant about Habib's incarceration, they clearly harbour continuing suspicions about his allegiance to al-Qaeda. So why did the US Government decline to prosecute Habib, despite the obvious belief in his terrorist connections? ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 1 February 2005
Nation's guardian of liberty turns his back
The Attorney-General is determinedly ignoring his duty to the law. As the Commonwealth Attorney-General is the first law officer of the Commonwealth, one of his traditional duties is to resist abuse of liberties bestowed by law. It is difficult indeed to see a single decision made by the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, that would suggest he has much interest in resisting abuses of liberty either here or overseas. In the creation of Australian statutes he constantly attempts to confer the maximum investigative and coercive powers upon anonymous agents of secret government organisations, and to put those powers beyond reach of any judicial interference. In the process of this repressive legislation, the Government takes from every member of the community a right ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 31 January 2005
Less than picture perfect
Mobile phone cameras are not only intrusive, they can be harmful. Recently I had to upgrade my mobile phone. "Are there any without the camera?" I asked. The salesman gave me the look that says, "Only a fool would want the product without all the bells and whistles." Maybe I am a fool consumer. But I am no Luddite. It's just I think of mobile phones as a tool. But what we are sold these days is a toy. An adult toy that kids can have, and that makes kids of all of us. Mobile phone cameras are marketed as the great 21st-century plaything. They are a product hyped as fun in spunky capital letters. Think of the TV ads, where beautiful people hold their phonecams in the air, and laugh the laugh of the fortunate as they send cheeky glitterati snaps of themselves to some imaginary person not invited to the party ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 25 January 2005