Ethics news:
4 may 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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A furry little dilemma for meat eaters
A website about a bunny's possible death exposes a social hypocrisy. Toby is the cutest, fluffiest bunny you've ever seen. One look at his picture-book face is enough to send a gitchy-goo shiver through the toughest of hearts. But as Australia learnt last week through the ubiquitous office email chain, poor Toby is being held to a terrible ransom. As detailed on the www. savetoby.com site he will be murdered and then eaten by his anonymous owners unless we, the public, cough up a total of $US50,000 ($64,150) through donations or merchandise purchases. Yep, the bunny will get it, and the website even has recipes for the little guy's corpse ...
The Age - 27 April 2005
Dead funny?
New York columnist Matt Taibbi on why he wrote an infantile pisstake of a dying Pope. Have you heard the one about the dead Pope, the cocky New York columnist, and the former President's wife? It goes like this: On 8 March, as Pope John Paul II lay dying in the Vatican, Matt Taibbi, a columnist for the freesheet alt-newspaper New York Press and currently Rolling Stone magazine's Michael Jackson trial correspondent, penned a piece entitled 'The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope'. It was emblazoned across the front page of the New York Press ...
Spiked-Online - 25 April 2005
No God, but value in art of worship
Atheism doesn't have to be anti-religious or to see science as the only answer. There are many species of atheism, just as there are many species of religion. But while many religions still thrive, most of the atheisms that have ever existed are now extinct. The non-religious person today is rather like someone who wanders into a shop to buy breakfast cereal and finds only one variety is for sale. Moreover, this variety isn't very tasty, because the kind of atheism that flourishes today is old and tired ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 4 May 2005
Feminism's petty, shallow daughters
Let's hear it for the unvarnished appeal of the humourless feminist. Earlier this month, a woman named Andrea Dworkin died. For many, her death signified little more than a snag in sober newspaper obituaries. To others, her death was cause for keen reflection that extended beyond personal remembrance. For some of us, this death described more than a life. It described a fraught historical journey. Dworkin, not to put too fine a point on it, might be best remembered as the original Humourless Feminist. A relic of '70s naivety, her politics were straightforward and her fashion sense was utilitarian ...
The Age - 30 April 2005
Moral maze of genetic testing creates fertile territory for confusion
Science and the law are like the hare and the tortoise: as science streaks ahead, the law lumbers after. The unequal race is nowhere more apparent than in the emotionally charged world of fertility treatment and genetic testing. Last week the Law Lords gave judgement in the case of Zain Hashmi, a bright-eyed six-year-old who suffers from an inherited blood disorder. Zain's devoted parents have been trying for several years to have a baby whose donated stem cells might restore him to health ...
Scotland on Sunday - 1 May 2005
Going nuclear: it's the new green
Nuclear power is a cheap, clean and safe source of energy that we can't afford to ignore. More than 50 years ago, the Commonwealth of Australia was set to become the first nation south of the equator to build and operate a nuclear power plant for electricity generation. Sadly, this project and many other planned ventures connected with the technology and commercialisation of the global nuclear industry have not gone ahead. Federal Science Minister Brendan Nelson's recent timely comments advocating the use of nuclear energy in Australia for the production of electricity and fresh water show the signs of both informed realism and political courage ...
The Age - 28 April 2005
Nukes not the answer to the greenhouse threat
There are better and safer energy options to slow global warming, writes Peter Garrett. Any view of a capital city in Australia at dusk shows countless empty office blocks lit like Christmas trees, lights blazing. Yet massive chunks of the Antarctic ice shelf have broken free, parts of southern Australia spiral into drought, and there's no doubt that global warming is upon us. Now some sections of the media, politics and business are joining a chorus that nuclear power is the answer to the huge challenge of human-induced climate change ...
The Age - 28 April 2005
The new Iraq comes ethics free
he Iraqis have thrown the United States another curveball. Ahmad Chalabi - convicted embezzler in Jordan, suspected Iranian spy, double-crosser of America, purveyor of phony war-instigating intelligence - is the new acting Iraqi oil minister. Is that why we Americans went to war, to put the oily in charge of the oil, to set the swindler who would be Spartacus atop the ultimate gusher? Does anybody still think the path to war wasn't greased by oil? The neocons' con man had been paid millions by the United States to tell the Bushies what they wanted to hear on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ...
The International Herald Tribune - 3 May 2005
Down to the bottom dollar
As big companies look for ways to sell to developing countries, Wendy Frew asks if they're doing right by the poor. Neelamma, from the town of Kuppam in south-east India, is one of the US computer giant Hewlett-Packard's least lucrative customers. But she has become one of its most valuable customers in terms of public relations. The 27-year-old rents a digital camera and printer from the company at market rates, and makes a living charging about 90 cents to take pictures of fellow villagers. Although Neelamma is from one of the poorest regions in the world, she is presented as the future of Hewlett-Packard's revenue growth ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 27 April 2005
In bed with the killers
BP has a legal right to get a licence from Indonesia to extract gas in West Papua. Its moral case is less clearcut. It all seems a very long way away. But what is happening in an obscure island nation in the south Pacific has now become our business. A few weeks ago BP, the British company that has invested most in "corporate social responsibility", received final approval to start developing a gas field in West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea. There is nothing unusual about this: oil and gas companies are opening new fields all the time. What makes this operation interesting is the question of whether BP has any right to be there ...
The Guardian - 3 May 2005
This is our Guernica
Ruined, cordoned Falluja is emerging as the decade's monument to brutality. Robert Zoellick is the archetypal US government insider, a man with a brilliant technical mind but zero experience of any coalface or war front. Sliding effortlessly between ivy league academia, the US treasury and corporate boardrooms (including an advisory post with the scandalous Enron), his latest position is the number-two slot at the state department. Yet this ultimate "man of the suites" did something earlier this month that put the prime minister and the foreign secretary to shame ...
The Guardian - 27 April 2005
Muslims must speak out, or be condemned for their silence
A leader's controversial comments on rape do not reflect the view of the majority. Muslim websites in Sydney and Melbourne have been running hot in the wake of comments made some weeks ago by Sheik Faiz Mohamad, a graduate of Islamic law and lecturer at an Islamic centre in south-western Sydney. Faiz's comments, that women largely bear responsibility for rape if they make themselves an object of sexual desire, have upset many in a religious community that is still haunted by images and stories of Bosnian refugees being gang-raped during the recent war ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 28 April 2005
Oscar for the best use of propaganda goes to
The Pentagon does it, and now the UN is in on the act. The exploitation of films should worry us. Nicole Kidman's movie The Interpreter was the first to be shot inside the United Nations headquarters in New York. Many film directors have tried to gain entry but until now all have had to settle for manufacturing the appearance of multinational authority with Hollywood sets. The list includes the late, great Alfred Hitchcock, denied access to film his classic thriller of 1959, North by Northwest. An earlier Kidman film, The Peacemaker, was also rejected, in 1997 ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 2 May 2005
A culture of copy and paste
When US students see their degree as little more than a route to a job, is it any wonder that plagiarism is rife? The UK Plagiarism Advisory Service recently reported that one in four British students admits to copying and pasting material from the internet then presenting it as their own. Across the Atlantic in the USA, where I am a student, internet plagiarism is even more rampant. A national survey published in Education Week asserts that 54 percent of American students admitted to internet plagiarism ...
Spiked-Online - 28 April 2005
Infertility doesn't mean a right to endless IVF
Autonomy and choice are bywords of modern society. Behind the debate about IVF treatment for infertile couples is the expectation that governments keep economic policy out of people's emotions. But the debate is far wider, deeper and potentially more divisive than Health Minister Tony Abbott has made it by claiming that infertility treatments are elective and non-essential. Elective, possibly; but no one would choose IVF if there was another way. And to describe IVF as non-essential makes it appear that Abbott is spoiling for a fight with the infertile ...
The Australian - 29 April 2005
Abortion loses its majority
The longstanding consensus in support of abortion on demand is collapsing. First results of the most recent national opinion survey, begun in April, also confirm that there is substantial disquiet about late-term abortion. On the other politically sensitive issue, whether Medicare funding should be restricted, opinion is evenly divided. The polling was conducted by an independent research company, Market Facts, for the Australian Federation of Right to Life Associations. What follow are the first indications from the preliminary data survey ...
The Australian - 30 April 2005
Australian anger will condemn those in Bali
There's no doubting the popular passion surrounding the Indonesian actions against Schapelle Corby and the Bali Nine. Indonesian officials in Australia have been sent death threats. So, too, have Australian politicians. The Howard Government was even urged by one Aussie taxpayer to send in the SAS and extract Corby from the Bali jail in an Entebbe-style raid. (One example of the problematic policy of pre-emptive strike that John Howard will not be taking up.) Young Aussies held captive in "shocking" conditions in Indonesian jails facing the death penalty: it has the potential to touch a veritable harpischord of heart-strings ...
The Australian - 29 April 2005
There are people sleeping rough tonight. Why?
Neither state nor federal governments are doing enough for the homeless. About six months ago, Jacinta and her young daughter escaped a violent relationship, which meant leaving the home that Jacinta shared with her partner. Initially, she rented a small flat. But like many others in her situation, her performance at work deteriorated, she developed depression, and she lost her job in February. Since then, they have been homeless and either "couch-surfing" with friends or staying in crisis accommodation ...
The Age - 3 May 2005