Ethics news:
30 March 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.
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Desperately seeking Adolf
What's it like to play one of the most evil men in history? As new movie Downfall sets out to humanise the tyrant, six actors reveal all. Bruno Ganz: I had some doubts when I was first offered the part of Hitler in Downfall. I asked myself whether I really wanted to get involved in this ugly, terrible stuff. But it was also a temptation - the subject has a fascinating side - so I agreed. I did four months of research. The producers sent me a tape, secretly recorded in Finland in 1942, with Hitler's natural voice - not the screaming orator we are used to, but a soft, attractive voice, a calm baritone. I tried to capture that ...
The Guardian - 25 March 2005
The myth of dying
In the cacophony of debate about insignificant things, the torture of unassisted death goes on unremarked. Most religions have a day of the dead, and today is that day for Christians. In this most secular nation, polls show few now know what Good Friday is for, this day for sorrow, for contemplating death, loss and endings. But here the usefulness of faith ends, for it is mainly the power of the religious lobby that forces people to die in pain and indignity due to beliefs on the nature of life and death shared by very few. For 20 years now, every poll on the subject shows that 80% of people want the right to be helped to die at a time and in a way of their own choosing. But that kind of "choice" is not on the agenda ...
The Guardian - 25 March 2005
Private tragedy as political farce
Both sides of the sordid legal scrap over Terri Schiavo devalue the meaning of life. In a debate that began late last Sunday evening and ended shortly after midnight on Monday, the US House of Representatives voted 203 to 58 for an emergency bill. The Senate, with no objections, had approved the measure on Sunday afternoon by a voice vote with just a few senators on hand. US President George W Bush interrupted his vacation to fly in and sign the bill into law... What was the subject of this emergency legislation? To forbid the removal of a feeding tube from Terri Schiavo, a woman who has been in a persistent vegetative state for some 13 years ...
Spiked-Online - 23 March 2005
The living end
Letting Terri Schiavo live is as much about political expediency as it is about preserving a woman's life. The life and impending death of Terri Schiavo, a 41-year-old brain-damaged Florida woman who cannot know of the political and ethical storm swirling around her, has become a metaphor for the great and widening divide in American politics. That divide is increasingly bitter, starkly illustrated by the extraordinary session of Congress last Sunday. The result was a two-page bill that directed the US federal court to hear an appeal by Schiavo's parents against a Florida judge's decision last Friday to order the removal of the feeding tube that had kept her alive for 15 years ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 25 March 2005
A point of view
In his weekly opinion column, Brian Walden considers the gap between science and religion - and what this might mean for the future of humankind. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: "It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria" ...
BBC News - 28 March 2005
Therapeutic versus reproductive cloning
Two different forms of human cloning underpin the debate on liberalising the laws on human fertilisation. One is backed by law and allows scientists to create embryos and study them for up to 14 days. The aim is to create stem cells, the progenitors of all the body's different tissues including skin, heart, brain and liver cells. In understanding this process, researchers hope they will learn how to turn one type of cell into cells that make up a completely different type of organ or limb. Thus an individual's skin cells could be reprogrammed to become liver or heart cells and used to replace diseased tissue ...
The Guardian - 20 March 2005
Are you a man or a mouse?
Chimeric experimentation is producing animal-human hybrids. This time, science really has gone too far. What happens when you cross a human and a mouse? Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke but, in fact, it's a serious experiment recently carried out by a team headed by a distinguished molecular biologist, Irving Weissman, at Stanford University. Scientists injected human brain cells into mouse foetuses, creating a strain of mice that were approximately 1% human. Weissman is considering a follow-up that would produce mice whose brains are 100% human. What if the mice escaped the lab and began to proliferate? ...
The Guardian - 15 March 2005
UN moulds human ethics with clone ban
Self-preservation of society is at the heart of an international ban on human cloning. It passed largely unnoticed, but the UN General Assembly has banned all forms of human cloning, including research or therapeutic cloning. Australia voted to support the resolution, giving a moral victory to opponents of therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research. The resolution called on "member states to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life". The wording of the resolution goes to the heart of the reasons underpinning a ban on cloning: human dignity and protection of human life ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 24 March 2005
Banned: choosing a baby's sex
Couples will no longer be able to choose the sex of their baby in Sydney fertility clinics, after Australia's highest ethics authority ruled the procedure was not in the interests of resulting children. But critics say the clampdown - which in effect ends non-medical sex selection in Australia - reflects religious and other partisan interests and does not represent public attitudes towards the increasingly popular procedure. The medical director of IVF Australia, Michael Chapman, confirmed the group's member clinics would no longer accept new patients seeking the procedure, but said he believed the technique still had merit ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 25 March 2005
Mothers must tell the truth
It has been called sex, lies and DNA. That complex web snared Tony Abbott when, on Monday, he revealed that the son he was reunited with just a few months ago was not his son. Abbott's anguish, his shock and disappointment, as he faced cameras was only too real. Recall the beaming Abbott when just a month ago he talked about "my boy" Daniel O'Connor. It is impossible to imagine the even greater torment that O'Connor is now confronting. While the Abbott saga has mesmerised the nation, other cases slide under the radar. This is a web that entraps more men and children than we may care to believe. And when the tangled skein involves deliberate deceit, the devastation is often worse ...
The Australian - 23 March 2005
A time to return to the true path
Good Friday. A hint of autumn softening the trailing edge of summer. A bonus day, like a pause at the beginning of a long weekend. Time stretched out more lazily than usual. Time to catch up on some Christmas reading we never got around to, perhaps distracted by the seductions of the Australian coast, perhaps defeated by our own exhaustion. Time, at last, to start preparing the garden for winter, or to sort some photos or clear out a wardrobe or pantry that have been silently reproaching us for months. Time for family and friends, without the hectic prelude of Christmas gift-buying or the sense of obligation that pushes us into social events we'd rather avoid ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 25 March 2005
Get up, sleepy head, the day's a-wasting
Hands up if you're so busy you don't have time to watch television, save for the occasional dose of Lateline. If your exercise regime consists of running for the bus each morning and all your social life can manage is emailing friends to tell them you're too busy to have a social life. Hands up if it's irrelevant that it's a long weekend, because the last time you had a holiday was 1992. In fact, you're so busy, you have to specifically schedule in time to feed yourself. Hands up if you don't even have time to raise your hand ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 25 March 2005
Living in a wealthy, safe, stable city may be bad for your wellbeing
Economists are beginning to recognise that money really doesn't buy you happiness. It is tough trying to work out if life is good. It is usually only when something goes wrong that you realise it used to be great. For many of us, peer comparison is a useful way to judge how we are travelling. We check to see if our cars are in the same price bracket and if our children are on the same school waiting lists. If we have a similar quality of living to our mates, we reason, then we must be doing all right. We also like to be reassured on an international level ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 24 March 2005
Let's bring back Australia, the kinder country
Our self-image as a fair and generous people is at odds with the reality. Lately I have been not so proud to be an Australian. Sure, there are some really good things about Australia, like the Anzacs, AC/DC and the AFL, but it's the fact that we seem to ignore everything negative about our country that concerns me. We, as Australians, need to rethink our national identity. What do we think of when we think of Australians? Kind, unbiased, justice-motivated, multiculture-embracing, welcoming people, without racist and religious prejudices? This, I'm sorry to say, is all a lie ...
The Age - 25 March 2005
Small step in the right direction
Australia's system for detaining asylum seekers is neither moral nor efficient, and the latest changes to the detention regime improve things very little. Indeed, the announcement yesterday by the Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, is merely a limited acknowledgement of the ethical absurdity and practical difficulty of detaining people indefinitely. The changes will free only those long-term detainees who have failed to win refugee status yet - for whatever reason - cannot return home. Such detainees can now live in the community and enjoy Medicare and other government support. However, they must be prepared to leave Australia when the Government determines it is safe for them to return home ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 24 March 2005
Let's tap the rich talent of migrants
Migrants struggling for skills recognition are a resource being wasted. Who is Australia and what do we represent? This year, International Education Week connects Cultural Diversity Week and Harmony Day, appropriately, since we have been on a sharp learning curve in these past few years, determining the shape and colour of a great country aspiring to become a great nation. But as we know, education, one of life's most valuable commodities, does not stop in the classroom. We continue to learn from each other, so we might say that in a sense the quality of education is determined by the depth and breadth of us as citizens ...
The Age - 23 March 2005
Thanks for nothing
Billions of dollars have been promised and help has poured in from around the world. But the tsunami-devastated Acehnese can't live on kindness. It's time they saw the colour of our money. Faisal thought he had a reasonable chance of getting a typewriter. But the government official in charge of Punge Jurong village in Banda Aceh learnt that getting any of the billions of dollars of reconstruction aid promised after the Boxing Day tsunami was much harder than he thought. It was certainly harder than getting emergency help in the frantic days after the disaster ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 26 March 2005
Politics creeps back into tsunami aid
Although the world's response to the Asian tsunami was, as one experienced aid worker put it, "magnificent", the threat of politics as usual is beginning to creep back. As the provision of immediate aid gives way to long-term reconstruction, a lot of the old problems which follow disasters are resurfacing. In a sense, getting help to the victims quickly was the easy bit. It required effort but the unprecedented catastrophe was met by unprecedented generosity. The calamity even brought the sight of old rivals and former US presidents George Bush senior and Bill Clinton travelling together as American envoys ...
BBC News - 23 March 2005
Tsunami sufferers question faith
For the pilgrims descending upon Vailankanni, this Easter weekend is both a celebration of Christ's resurrection and a remembrance of the victims who died when last this seafront community came together to mark a Christian festival. The Vailankanni shrine was in one of the regions of southern India worst hit by the tsunami of 26 December. About 600 of the tsunami's victims were pilgrims who had journeyed to the "Lourdes of the East", a one-time hamlet on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, where, according to local legend, Mary and baby Jesus once appeared before local Hindu children ...
BBC News - 27 March 2005
Right and wrong of war lost in the Iraqi mire
Iraq's future is the issue, not further argument about the invasion. In Ian McEwan's extraordinary new novel, Saturday the protagonist, Henry Perowne, on his way to his Saturday game of squash, is watching the crowds gathering to protest against the forthcoming Iraq war. It is February 15, 2003. It is said to be the biggest protest march ever held in London; up to 2 million people, by some estimates. The scene "has an air of innocence and English dottiness". Perowne is struck by the "celebratory nature" of the crowds, people holding banners saying "Not in my name", secure in the knowledge of their own goodness. He later wonders why, among those 2 million idealists, there seemed to be "not one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam" ...
The Age - 25 March 2005
When the music stops
The internet world is focusing on Sydney this week as a landmark record industry case draws to a close. A shadow is following Kevin Bermeister. He can't see his pursuer, but he knows someone is there. Half-walking, half-running from the Queen Square court district towards Martin Place, Bermeister scans Phillip Street's reflection in shop windows. Sensing something, he stops and changes direction. Bermeister is used to the feeling. He has been tailed, photographed and filmed by private investigators for a year. The Sydney entrepreneur is No.1 with a bullet on the global music industry's hit list, and their investigators never let him out of their sight ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 23 March 2005