Ethics news:
16 February 2005
Ethics News is regularly updated with links and introductions to ethics-related news stories gathered from all over the web. Discuss the ethical issues raised by these stories in our Ethics Forum by clicking on the 'discuss' links.
Note that you may need to register for free with sites to read some of these news articles.
Inequality begins in the home
The national debate over how to balance work and family in 21st-century Australia has become the new barbecue stopper. This national conversation is long overdue. It's about that quarter of all Australian men who work more than 50 hours a week and don't know what to say when told they need to be mentors to their sons and daughters. It's about teenage children with nobody home, or mothers anxiously sitting on the bus worried about getting to the childcare centre before it shuts, or picking a sick child up from school before they vomit again. It's about husbands and wives angrily confronting each other over who does what -- or not confronting each other and walking out ...
The Australian - 11 February 2005
Dangerous liaisons
Open marriages and strict monogamy are equally unrealistic goals, writes Stuart Jeffries. "Coupledom is a performance art," wrote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. "But how does one learn what to do together? How to be, once again, two bodies in public, consistently together, guardians of each others' shame, looking the part? Where do the steps come from?" Phillips was not writing about the unconventional marriage of Hollywood stars Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith when he wrote these words in his book Monogamy, but they are nonetheless prescient ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 11 February 2005
Vera and her ilk may be gone but many of the problems still exist
Recalling abortion in the "bad old days" highlights hypocritical attitudes of today. Mike Leigh's film Vera Drake evokes 1950s Britain in its every period detail, down to the last tin of Vim. But what starts in a warm glow of nostalgia for less materialist times is brutally punctured by what lies just beneath the surface - a suppression and punishment of sex that led to untold suffering. Ask any woman or gay man from those pre-'60s liberation times and they all have stories to tell about sex and terror for themselves or friends. Vera Drake, friend to all neighbours in distress, props up the sick, the lonely and the darkly depressed ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 15 February 2005
The cost of defying our biological clocks
Science can now create 67-year-old mothers. That doesn't mean it should. The practice of reproductive medicine has come to represent a conquering of what was once understood as the limits of the human condition. Its latest trophy is Adriana Iliescu, a 67-year-old Romanian academic, who has just become the world's oldest mother. Should the technological imperative continue to demand that what can be done, should - with no looking at the cost? Ms Iliescu began fertility treatment at the age of 57 to reverse menopause. In 1999 she miscarried. Another pregnancy in 2000 was going well, said her doctor, but "when she reached the fourth month, the embryo stopped its development and we had to terminate the pregnancy" ...
The Age - 13 February 2005
Attack of the clones
Dolly's creators say their new licence to clone human embryos could lead to a cure for motor neurone disease. But pro-life groups insist it's an unethical bid to cash in. For three years, Diane Pretty's husband could only watch as she disintegrated in front of his eyes through the devastating effects of motor neurone disease (MND). In her final months, with her muscles wasting but her intellect unaffected, the once vivacious mother-of-two could only communicate with the aid of an electronic keyboard, unable to move or chew her food. The fear that her final moments would be spent in a panic, fighting in vain against asphyxiation, led her to launch a high-profile legal case to allow her husband Brian to help her take her own life ...
Sunday Herald - 13 February 2005
The loneliness of the gene enhanced runner
I am not a sports fan. I barely know that baseball is the game that's played with a stick. (Or do they call it a "bat?" Never mind.) I was the tallest kid in my high school, but when the basketball coaches asked me to come out for the team, I turned them down. I was too busy with the debate team. So I have no dog in the coming fight over “gene-doping” in sports (or the fight over steroids for that matter either, but that's a slightly different topic). What is “gene-doping” anyway? ...
Reason Online - 2 February 2005
Nasty case of apologitis traced back to Rau
The apology storm brewing over the treatment of Cornelia Rau is nauseating. It's clear the poor woman found herself trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare involving four different federal and state jurisdictions. Plainly, Ms Rau with her assorted and, apparently, convincing stories presented a difficult case. But if we're going to start blaming the mentally ill for their own maltreatment, it's time to apply for a visa to volunteer for street patrol in Baghdad. John Howard triggered the outbreak of apologitis with his ridiculously legalistic stonewalling in which the PM rabbited on about the dangers of confessing anything in "the litigious society in which we live" ...
The Australian - 15 February 2005
Exposed: the darkest corners of our lives
The Cornelia Rau tragedy should, indeed must, change Australia. Occasionally, just occasionally, there is a story that is so powerful and illuminating that it shines a light into the darkest corners of our lives. It is as if the finest detail of one life, one series of events, throws such a powerful beam on to the shadowy parts of our society that for the first time we are forced to confront what we cannot normally see - or what we choose not to see. The story of Cornelia Rau is surely such a story. It is in its extraordinary detail that we discover what is happening, what is being done in our names. Cornelia Rau, Australian resident, German born, former Qantas flight attendant, attractive, intelligent ...
The Age - 14 February 2005
Accounting for community spirit
By promoting volunteering as good for your health, self-esteem or bank balance, the government sells it short. 2005 is the Year of the Volunteer - and if you listen to the UK government, altruism has never been so good for you. Feeling a little low after the return to work? Still haven't got around to joining the gym? Need to lose a bit of weight, or gain a few pounds of self-esteem? Then volunteering is for you. It may seem a little odd to sell good deeds on the basis of individual self-interest. It is a sign that the government has little faith in our ability to manage our own behaviour or relations with each other, never mind engage with the 'big issues' of the wider world ...
Spiked-Online - 10 February 2005
Aid groups have to be neutral
There is no place for activism in tsunami-devastated Aceh. The Prime Minister, John Howard, and his Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, have done a remarkable job in improving Australia's bilateral relationship with Indonesia, arguably our most important neighbour, from its nadir just after Australia's intervention in East Timor. This process has been aided greatly by the election of Indonesia's new President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who seems to have developed a good working relationship with Howard. Relations with Indonesia have been strengthened further by the Howard Government's prompt and generous humanitarian response to the Boxing Day tsunami ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 10 February 2005
Like it or not, we are all shareholders now
In 20 years, privatisation has caused an unprecedented surge in stock values. Feeling comfortable? After a sequence of record highs by the market indices in the first six weeks of the new year, the total value of the stocks listed on the Australian market broke through the $1 trillion threshold. One thousand billion dollars. It's a mountain of wealth, a big benchmark, a new financial stratosphere. It's more than the nation's entire annual gross domestic product. Yet the threshold has gone unnoticed. According to the Australian Stock Exchange, the market's value was equivalent to 102 per cent of gross domestic product on December 31. The market has moved onwards and upwards since then, enough to place Australia in the top 10 of global stock markets, even though Australia ranks only 42nd among nations by population ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 14 February 2005
Badness is ready to come good
At around 10am on Tuesday, Christopher Dean Binse blinked in the sunlight as he emerged from a 13-year sentence in Goulburn's forbidding "super max" prison. As he tackled an iced coffee topped with a mound of fresh cream, the armed robber nicknamed "Badness" grinned with the excited glee of a small child. At 37, Binse - highly intelligent and hyperactive - has spent nearly half his life in juvenile institutions or jail, escaping seven times and earning the fury of detectives and prison guards in two states as he taunted them with letters and newspaper ad ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 10 February 2005
Taking the pain out of humane
Another day and another writer is commended for being 'humane'. Andrea Levy's Whitbread-winning novel, Small Island, was lauded by the panel of judges led by the ITV news presenter Trevor Macdonald for being 'wonderfully observed, moving and humane'. But what do people mean by 'humane'? Do they even know? It's a word that has sneaked into mainstream vocabulary, and that one hears as often as the vacuous sign-off 'lots of love', or 'lol', to give it its SMS format. When we call a work of art humane, we mean it as a term of endearment, endorsing something we vaguely sense about the work but can't quite put our finger on ...
Spiked-Online - 10 February 2005
Why artists get our vote
Politicians are always unconvincing when they talk of art but artists often understand politics. You might think assisted suicide lacks entertainment value. The listings magazines say otherwise. Euthanasia is the latest box-office draw, and, like cinema popcorn, it does not come in frugal helpings. Kim Cattrall, formerly of Sex and the City, is playing a paralysed sculptor who wants to die in Whose Life Is It Anyway? on the West End stage. Hilary Swank's performance as a doomed boxer in Million Dollar Baby has won her an Oscar nomination and the anger of pro-lifers now picketing American cinemas after belatedly catching up on the punchline the critics didn't want to give away ...
The Observer - 6 February 2005
Global warming: while scientists quibble, species vanish
Scientists met in Britain recently to discuss what level of greenhouse gas concentrations constitutes "dangerous interference" with the global climate. Instead we should be focusing on what are safe levels. Without such guidance, global climate efforts are tantamount to walking blindfolded toward the edge of a cliff. The global instrument for dealing with climate change, the International Convention on Climate Change, is designed to avoid dangerous interference in agriculture, economies and ecosystems. Since the convention came into existence in 1992, it has become increasingly apparent that ecosystems are the most sensitive of the three ...
International Herald Tribune - 15 February 2005
Cool heads required
As long as the climate change debate is fuelled by politics, the science will remain up in the air. At a recent global warming conference in Exeter called by UK prime minister Tony Blair, all the usual fears were aired. Yet real debate about climate change seems to be strictly prohibited. The week before, another conference organised by the Scientific Alliance at London's Royal Institution raised critical questions about the global warming thesis. This time the Royal Society's president Sir Bob May received frontpage coverage for arguing that the event would be biased and dangerous ...
Spiked-Online - 11 February 2005
Buying the fourth estate
The recent "cash for comment" scandal reveals a deep malaise afflicting the US media. It was revealed in Washington recently that a conservative syndicated columnist and regular pundit on a number of cable TV current affairs shows had been secretly contracted for the sum of $US241,000 ($A307,000) by the Bush Administration to promote the President's education policies in his columns and TV appearances. One naturally thought of John Laws and Alan Jones. In Australia, we have been there and done that, though neither Laws nor Jones took cash from the Government to promote government policies. Instead they did deals with the banks and with Telstra among others, for amounts that even the Bush Administration would probably baulk at paying ...
The Age - 15 February 2005
Brave new world for a couch potato
After decades of illegally taping TV programs and CDs we are about to be made honest by the Government. We are TV viewers, iPod owners, computer users - and most of us are criminals. Any Australian who has recorded Law & Order on Channel Ten while watching Desperate Housewives on Seven has broken the law. It is also illegal to tape a CD for the car stereo, copy songs onto an iPod or make a back-up copy of a computer program - although most of us ignore such laws and no one has ever been prosecuted in these circumstances. Our creaky 35-year-old copyright laws are being further exposed by a wave of new consumer electronic products such as DVRs, or digital video recorders, that can be programmed weeks in advance at the touch of a button to record hundreds of hours of TV programs and films ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 15 February 2005
Are the Dutch becoming xenophobic?
What is happening to Holland that once stood as the shining light of tolerance and religious freedom? A country that the entire world admired for its courageous protection of Jews and other persecuted people during World War II? It would appear that Holland has forgotten its own history. In a series of attempts to discourage immigration from Third World countries, the Dutch have introduced a legislative proposal that would require some potential immigrants to take an examination to prove that they have an understanding of the Dutch language and culture. This applies to individuals who marry a Dutch citizen or who have family members already living in Holland. It does not apply to people from the European Union, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan or the United States ...
Iviews - 14 February 2005
The people of Iraq speak
The birth pangs of Iraqi democracy should not blind us to the fact that Middle Eastern politics will never be the same again. As the results of the country's first ever free election were announced yesterday, there was a genuine air of excitement. The predicted victors, the Shia United Iraqi Alliance, fell short of their expected overall majority; the incumbent prime minister, Iyad Allawi, had to be content with less than 14 per cent of the vote. Both accepted results that were, in different ways, disappointing. This readiness to abide by the verdict of the electorate is a novelty for a nation that, until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, had been ruled by one party, the Ba'ath Socialists, for nearly half a century ...
The Telegraph - 14 February 2005
Casualties of total war
Sixty years on, the bombing of Dresden still evokes horror and regret: horror at the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians; regret that the British and American planes which attacked it on February 13 1945 destroyed so much of the lovely city known as the "Florence of the Elbe". But such emotions have to be seen in the context of the times: the final, cruel months of a world war launched by an aggressive, racist, totalitarian state. The vast majority of today's Germans recognise that truth, even if they are now more able than before to say openly that they too were victims of "die Hitlerzeit". Thus the recent success of books such as Gunther Grass's novel Crabwalk, which features the sinking of a ship with thousands of refugees fleeing the Red Army ...
The Guardian - 12 February 2005
Practising journalism or double standards?
When thousands of innocent Indian Muslims and Dalits (low-caste Hindus) are mercilessly butchered, hundreds of them gang-raped, stripped and marched through the streets, or several Muslims are sent to jails without any charge, it makes no headlines or news in Indian newspapers. Neither does it stir the conscience of human rights activists in India. But when an Indian is executed in Saudi Arabia according to the law of the land, it flares up as a gross human rights violation, and makes into front pages of all newspapers ...
Arab News - 10 February 2005