Ethics news:
6 April 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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The first world leader
The greatest political actor of our time leaves us the challenge of moral globalisation. The world lived this death. It was a global Calvary. People from every corner of the earth gathered in St Peter's Square, peering up at those two windows of the papal apartment, illuminated against the night sky. Across five continents, Christians, Jews and Muslims joined them through television. Marcello, from Rio de Janeiro, emailed CNN: "We are watching the agony of the greatest man of our time." Mohamed, from Birmingham, emailed the BBC: "He will be missed by Catholics and non-Catholics alike." What does this tell us? ...
The Guardian - 4 April 2005
World pays tribute to a pope who reached out to the world
Pope John Paul II's death brought to the fore one of his most heartfelt goals Sunday, connecting members of faiths around the globe as they mourned his passing and commemorated his unprecedented attempts at reconciliation with historically rival religions. "We ... certainly feel sorrow for the passing away of the pope because he has dedicated himself all his life to humanitarian and peace efforts,' said Hasyim Muzadi, a Muslim leader in the world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia. "The pope ... bravely put an end to historic injustice by officially rejecting prejudices and accusations against Jews,' said Israeli President Moshe Katsav ...
Christian Science Monitor - 4 April 2005
The Pope they loved but could not obey
Catholics everywhere revered John Paul II, but his death may lay bare underlying schisms within communities and across continents. John Paul was a Pope who Catholics loved but disagreed with. His long spell in office represents the deferral of a debate about the fundamentals of the faith. Most of the cardinals who will elect the successor to John Paul II were appointed by him. It might be too simple to regard them all as placemen who will serve their master's agenda. In among them there may be a few men (no women, of course) of patience and imagination who have clear ideas of a future different from the one that John Paul imagined ...
The Observer - 3 April 2005
The best and worst of times
So Pope John Paul II's reign is over. It was magnificent - but was it really Christianity? The death of Pope John Paul II will end a papal reign that really does live up to Charles Dickens's famous oxymoron: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." People will rush to praise or condemn the man before he is cold in his coffin, but the historians' verdict may well be that both sides are right. It was indeed one of the best and one of the worst papacies in history. The ambivalence even many in the Catholic church felt about Pope John Paul II is illustrated by a story circulating in Rome some years ago ...
The Guardian - 2 April 2005
Let us pray for a man of courage
The new pope will have to make a leap of faith or the church will be left behind, writes Morris West. For 2000 years Christians have relied upon the promise of Christ: "I shall be with you always even to the end of the world." This is the hope by which the community of believers endures in faith. It provides also a specious absolution for the follies and delinquencies committed by the same community and its leaders down the centuries. This is the paradox of history, the constant jeopardy in which the institutional church survives ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 4 April 2005
Searching for wisdom in difficult times
The death of Paul Hester is depressing news for an uncertain generation. I never met Paul Hester, but artists I respect in the music world, people of generosity as well as talent, held him in serious regard. A special tremor passes through a community when someone who is loved and respected takes their life, particularly when it seems that the person has much still to do. Hester was 46. The years approaching 50 are solemn ones for a man. No doubt they are for a woman too, but women have the huge biological clock of menopause driving their mid-life direction. For men it's more cerebral or, rather, less obviously physical ...
The Age - 2 April 2005
Schiavo: playing God and politics
The furore over one woman's fate exposes the double standards of American society. While the US media gave Americans blanket coverage of every breath taken by Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who has become the centre of a battlefield in the country's bitter culture wars, a new exhibition opened quietly at Washington's Arlington National Cemetery. For Christian conservatives and their allies in Congress - and George Bush for that matter - Schiavo is being murdered. In their view, her death will be evidence of what happens when a godless, materialistic, valueless liberal elite ... captures the courts, the media, Hollywood, popular music, popular culture ...
The Age - 31 March 2005
No release from death
The death of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman kept alive for the last 15 years, should have been a deeply private affair. Seeing your child die must rank as the worst tragedy a parent can endure. But both the parents and possibly also the husband of the 41-year-old woman jettisoned their true roles on that final day - such was the bitterness of their feud, the teams of "advisers" that had grown like lichen around them, and the howling storm of controversy outside. The parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, invited a stream of politicians in, they allowed a conservative direct-marketing firm to sell the lists of donors to their cause, and they stoked the media-frenzy by vilifying her husband, Michael Schiavo, as a murderer ...
The Guardian - 2 April 2005
Sadly, some dying people are more equal than others
The big problem with living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is that you've got to die really grossly before you rate a mention in the international press. Particularly if you're competing against a single comatose American. A couple of weeks ago, The Sydney Morning Herald ran a tiny news brief in its foreign pages: "Militiamen grilled bodies on a spit and boiled two girls alive as their mother watched, United Nations peacekeepers have charged, adding cannibalism to a list of atrocities allegedly carried out by one of the tribal groups fighting in northeast Congo, the Patriotic Resistant Front of Ituri." That was it ...
The Australian - 30 March 2005
Disasters sound wake-up call on poverty
More die from poverty every four days than perished in the tsunami, writes Tim Costello. The quake that has devastated Indonesia's Nias Island and the carnage of the Boxing Day tsunami have profoundly demonstrated the vulnerability of poor communities to cataclysmic natural disasters. In contrast to developed countries, poor nations hit by disasters experience greater suffering, higher death tolls and a much slower, problematic relief and rebuilding effort. Poor infrastructure such as roads and airports, shoddy buildings, a lack of adequate health facilities, the failings of "early warning systems" are just some of the factors that exacerbate the plight of poor nations ...
The Age - 1 April 2005
Only the ethical need apply
In the heavily automated workplace of the future, a keen sense of right and wrong will become a highly valued job skill. The "great global brain drain" is how futurist Richard Samson describes it. As the century progresses, he predicts, more and more jobs will be sucked up by technology and sophisticated computers, forcing humans to hone skills machines can't duplicate - at least not yet. Qualities such as ethical judgement, compassion, intuition, responsibility, and creativity will be what stand out in an automated world. With ethics issues spiking into the news almost weekly, the idea of a work world in which individual ethical acumen is viewed as an essential job skill is far from outlandish. The signs are already here ...
Christian Science Monitor - 30 March 2005
Taking care of business
One of Australia's big banks has taken the world by storm in the most comprehensive annual benchmarking surveys. In the social awareness stakes, Westpac has trumped them all. Australia's fourth biggest bank has topped lists of businesses in Australia and Britain that identify companies with the greatest level of social responsibility and awareness. Australia's second annual Corporate Responsibility Index, published today in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, places Westpac ahead of all others in the voluntary survey with a near-perfect score of 99.53 per cent ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 4 April 2005
*The Corporate Responsibility Index is a project of St James Ethics Centre. Click here to visit the Index website, where you can view the results in full and learn more ...
Investing in ethical firms pays off: study
Investing in ethically responsible companies can reap better returns over the longer-term, a new study shows. The study by funds manager AMP Capital Investors addresses the perception that investing in ethical funds might make you feel better, but not make attractive returns. AMP Capital Investors decided to test whether there was a fundamental advantage in investing in the sorts of companies preferred by ethical funds. The study took 300 listed companies and designated whether they had a high or low corporate and social responsibility by looking at the company's occupational health and safety record, its impact on local communities, and the independence of the company's board ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 30 March 2005
Muslim girls unveil their fears
Although France has banned religious symbols from schools, some of the country's 1,200 veiled Muslim schoolgirls are still searching for a compromise. "French education", declares a trim man behind a big desk, "aims to allow each person, irrespective of their religion or their community, the chance to start on an equal footing and receive the same education." This impassioned defence of French secularism comes from Raymond Scieux, headmaster of Lycee Eugene Delacroix in Drancy, a suburb northeast of Paris ...
BBC News - 28 March 2005
Christian moderates drowned out
Christian liberals are not being heard in debate on the key moral issues. When scenes from Good Friday church services were broadcast on the evening news last week, some television channels led with pictures from Sydney's Hillsong Church. The north-western suburbs megachurch, which belongs to the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, claims attendances of up to 17,500 people each week. Like its denomination, a conservative body that has grown by 20 per cent in recent decades, it has experienced a meteoric rise. But let's keep things in perspective. In all of Australia, the Assemblies of God claims just 160,000 constituents ...
The Age - 30 March 2005
Trail of fear left behind by moral crusaders
Like the first blowfly of summer, the video Left Behind II: Tribulation Force popped up on the shelves of the local video library. Only one copy, but it seems significant that the DVD is marked "Made in Australia". There is a big enough demand for Left Behind entertainments in the Wide Brown Land to justify local manufacture. You may not be familiar with the Left Behind publishing and filmmaking phenomenon, so here's the low-down. The reverend doctor Tim LaHaye, together with his co-author Jerry B. Jenkins, have created a publishing sensation in the United States with these books. The 12 books in the Left Behind series have sold more than 40 million copies, so they are hard to ignore ...
The Age - 3 April 2005
Respect mothers and babies will follow
Failure to treat parenting as a worthwhile job has caused the birthrate to fall.Recent studies which ascribe women's reluctance to reproduce to personal ambition, economic struggles and an imbalance in the division of housework paint only a small corner of a towering mural. There have always been crappy jobs that pay peanuts and leave you too exhausted to fight about whose turn it is to do the vacuuming, but they never stopped women having children before. For thousands of years, the raising of children was considered not just a social good, but a community responsibility. However, today's militantly childless have relegated it to the realm of a private hobby ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 29 March 2005
Conception deception
I'm loath to admit this but I doubt whether I would have felt the same level of disquiet if it had been Tony Abbott doing the cuckolding. A disconcerting thought when you've railed against double standards all your life. My upbringing/schooling/life experience might cause me to baulk at the thought of a woman not knowing who had fathered her child but the number of lovers Kathy Donnelly had is not the crucial issue her. Despite society's desperation not to appear moralistic, some acts are morally right and some are wrong, irrespective of spin or how many people indulge in them. But, thankfully, a bit on the side, a moment's indiscretion or a sleepover that goes too far is no longer a stoning offence ...
The Age - 27 March 2005
Marketing an unhealthy lifestyle
Our obesity problem is linked to the intense marketing of junk foods. A recent study has predicted that for the first time in the past thousand years, life expectancy is likely to decline - as a result of excess weight and obesity. We know that this has arisen because of reduced activity and increased energy consumption, yet we focus little on one of the key drivers behind these - the market. The market acts as the mediator and balance through which we not only buy and sell, but fundamentally interact with each other. It has become the backbone of our political and civil life, but it also happens to be a driving force behind many of the key determinants of excess weight and obesity ...
The Age - 28 March 2005
Their best defence
Israel has no choice but to withdraw from the West Bank - not to indulge the Palestinians but to save itself. When someone says that today the chances for Middle East peace have improved, it is worth asking two questions: can there be a sustainable truce, as long as Israel maintains a significant presence in the West Bank? And do the Israelis seem remotely interested in giving this up? If your answer to both is negative, then you share my view that we should not be deceived into optimism by a pitstop in mutual vilification between Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian Authority. The key challenge now, as ever, is to convince Israelis that their own security interests are best served by evacuating the Occupied Territories ...
The Guardian - 29 March 2005
Listen to the Supremes with care
The current file-sharing legal battle in the US could well shape consumer technologies used around the world for the next decade. It would be nice to think that the argument currently taking place in front of the US Supreme Court over whether the Grokster and Morpheus peer-to-peer (P2P) network services are unlawful was just another piece of legal theatre that did not really concern us over here in Europe. Sadly, history tells us we need to pay more attention to the outcome of the case than we might like to. The outcome could well shape the consumer technologies used around the world for the next decade ...
BBC News - 1 April 2005