Ethics news:
11 may 2005
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Against his will, tranfusion that saved a boy
It was night-time. The Supreme Court building had emptied hours before, except for the duty judge hearing an urgent application. The Children's Hospital at Westmead was seeking the court's approval for a life-saving blood transfusion for one of its patients. The 16-year-old cancer patient and his parents were Jehovah's Witnesses. They opposed the transfusion because it violated their religious beliefs, even as they grappled with the doctors' pleas that the teenager had a 50-50 chance of dying overnight if he did not receive a transfusion. The teenager, known only as Joseph, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in March, and was attending the hospital's oncology unit ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 4 May 2005
Finding a place for religious dissenters
The case of a gravely ill 16-year-old refusing a blood transfusion poses questions with no easy answers. The decision of Justice Ian Gzell to order a blood transfusion for a competent 16-year-old - Joseph - is the latest controversial entry in the emerging encyclopedia of Australian medical law. Joseph - like his parents, a Jehovah's Witness - was diagnosed in March with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a particularly aggressive form of blood cell cancer. He had deteriorated in only six weeks and was very likely to die of heart failure or have a fatal brain hemorrhage without a blood transfusion ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 5 May 2005
A Catholic culture of death
Pope John Paul II was known for his unwavering belief in the "culture of life", his conviction that euthanasia and abortion infringed the sanctity of human life. Yet the late pontiff allowed a culture of death - and it seems likely his successor, Benedict XVI, will do the same - in relation to the AIDS pandemic raging through the developing world. It is widely assumed that Benedict, the former doctrinal enforcer, will maintain John Paul II's ban on contraception, which included the use of condoms to combat AIDS ...
The Australian - 9 May 2005
There is something rotten in Australia
An undercurrent of intolerance permeates our society. I recently engaged one of Melbourne's biggest real estate companies to find a tenant for an apartment I own. In the course of our phone conversation, the agent made a statement that left me dumbfounded. "I won't send any Asians your way," she said, with a bright and breezy tone. "Why not?" I asked, incredulous. "Because they don't know how to look after property properly," she replied. When I asked her to elaborate, she said: "They never put the rubbish out and they don't keep the place clean" ...
The Age - 5 May 2005
Closer to a Hitler truth
It was 60 years ago that Adolf Hitler did the world a favour by firing a bullet into his insane brain in the Fuhrerbunker. Pity that he hadn't pulled the trigger decades earlier. Apart from saving 6 million Jews from the Holocaust and millions of Slavs from his death camps, Hitler's death would have prevented the slaughter of another 50 million: Poles, Czechs, Russians, Americans, British, French, Australians and, yes, Germans. The fascination with Hitler is as intense as ever. The biographies continue to pile up, as do accounts of the final days of his Third Reich ...
The Australian - 3 May 2005
Downfall of humanity?
The response to a film about Hitler's final days suggests that some believe we're all to blame for the Holocaust. Before it opened in cinemas, Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall was already stirring rumours of controversy for an allegedly 'humanised' portrayal of Hitler, and its depiction of ordinary Germans as victims of the Nazis. Once the movie had opened, the debate shifted in tone. If by 'humanising' Hitler the critics had meant portraying Hitler sympathetically, then there was little to debate ...
Spiked-Online - 6 May 2005
An ethical blank cheque
British and US mythology about the second world war ignores our own crimes and legitimises Anglo-American warmaking. In 1945, as at the end of all wars, the victor powers spun the conflict's history to serve the interests of their elites. Wartime propaganda thus achieved an extraordinary afterlife. As Vladimir Putin showed yesterday, the Great Patriotic War remains a key political resource in Russia. In Britain and the US, too, a certain idea of the second world war is enthusiastically kept alive and less flattering memories suppressed ...
The Guardian - 10 May 2005
Muslims react to two equal but opposite acts
Islam faces big questions about its future in the West, as one day of controversy showed. March 18 was an eventful day for Muslims in the West. In New York, Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, became one of the few Muslim women to lead a Friday congregational prayer. Meanwhile, in Sydney, Sheik Faiz Mohamad made comments linking rape and women's dress that have become infamous over the past few weeks. The contrast could not be starker ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 6 May 2005
Sex and the teacher: was justice done?
Try substituting a male for a female teacher and test your reaction. Did unconscious sexism lead to a miscarriage of justice in the case of Karen Ellis? On Thursday, the Victorian Court of Appeal threw out the 22-month suspended sentence handed down in November by the County Court and resentenced the 37-year-old school teacher to nearly three years, six months of which she must serve in jail. The ruling found the initial sentence had violated the principle of equality, including "equality of concern for male and female victims and equality in the sentencing of male and female offenders" ...
The Age - 7 May 2005
You can be for truth or with the terrorist
Journalism may be the first draft of history, but it is often a very rough draft indeed. The perspective offered by history frequently requires a total rewrite. This especially applies to war. And it must be especially remembered in the wake of the terrible news that an Australian, Douglas Wood, has been taken hostage by Iraqi insurgents. Wood has become the latest propaganda tool in their battle with Coalition forces, with the Iraqi people and with Iraq's new democracy ...
The Australian - 4 May 2005
Beating around the Bush
The US military went into Iraq with no clear idea of the rules of engagement. During a nationally televised press conference 11 days ago, George Bush was asked about the CIA's "rendition" policy, through which people suspected of being involved in terrorist organisations are flown for interrogation to countries known to regularly torture detainees. Not even the most enthusiastic supporters of rendition deny that the most horrific forms of torture are commonplace in some of these places ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 9 May 2005
Rescuing environmentalism
Market forces could prove the environment's best friend - if only greens could learn to love them. “The environmental movement's foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest.” Those damning words come not from any industry lobby or right-wing think-tank. They are drawn from “The Death of Environmentalism”, an influential essay published recently by two greens with impeccable credentials ...
The Economist - 21 April 2005
Junk science
David Bellamy's inaccurate and selective figures on glacier shrinkage are a boon to climate change deniers. For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world's glaciers, he claimed, "are not shrinking but in fact are growing ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980". His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right? ...
The Guardian - 10 May 2005
Postponing the end of poverty
Economist Jeffrey Sachs' new book has an upbeat title, but the message inside is that underdevelopment is here to stay. It is rare for economists to be household names, but Jeffrey Sachs has made it into Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people - and an extract from The End of Poverty became a Time cover story. Sachs is at the forefront of contemporary economic thinking. He advises the United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan on development issues, and is an inspiration behind campaigns such as Make Poverty History and Jubilee 2000 ...
Spiked-Online - 6 May 2005
The youth of today: relaxed, comfortable and blissfully unaware
There is no room for shades of grey in today's black and white world. As director of revue for the Sydney Theatre Company and one of the creators of its latest incarnation, Concert for Tax Relief, I approached the review in the Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit with some trepidation. The traditional responses from official organs of the voice of youth run along the lines of "bourgeois, middle-class, lacks bite, too old, theatre is dead, etc", although thankfully these are not necessarily opinions shared by the ticket-buying public ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 10 May 2005
Unwrapping the 'cotton wool' kids
It would take more than school lessons in risk-taking to challenge the culture that is stifling our children. British children need to be taught how to embrace risk, says the head of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). How is that supposed to work, then? Speaking at the annual conference of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) on 2 May, Sir Digby Jones bemoaned the growth of a 'rights culture' in the UK that turns people into victims seeking compensation ...
Spiked-Online - 5 May 2005
Cannabis: time for a rethink?
Tony Blair's hint that the downgrading of cannabis may be reversed means drugs is firmly back on the political agenda at the start of the new term. In his new book, Griffith Edwards, founder of the National Addiction Centre, offers some radical solutions. Cannabis, the drug of choice for students and regarded by millions of otherwise law-abiding people as a harmless high, is the subject of renewed debate about its effect. It was downgraded last year to Class C, the same as steroids. This made most cases of cannabis possession a non-arrestable offence ...
BBC News - 9 May 2005
Spain grants amnesty to 700,000 migrants
Queues in scramble to meet deadline for acquiring official status. Spain declared an amnesty yesterday for about 700,000 illegal immigrants, bucking a Europe-wide trend of cracking down on economic migrants, while striking at exploitation of those working secretly and fearfully in the black economy. The Socialist government claimed that a three-month qualification period which ended at the weekend - during which illegal workers and their employers could apply for residency and work permits - had attracted most of the country's illegal workers ...
The Guardian - 9 May 2005
I do, I don't, I'm not sure: modern wedding jitters
Faking abduction is an extreme way to cope. But the urge to make a mad dash for the exit besets many a modern bride. When Rachel Safier heard the news that Georgia bride-to-be Jennifer Wilbanks had run away, she wept. She could relate to feeling paralyzed with doubt before a wedding. Her sense of unease about marriage - even to a man she thought was wonderful - caused all kinds of problems in the run-up to her nuptials in 2001. She lost weight, suggested they live together instead, and even told him she didn't think she could go through with it ...
Christian Science Monitor - 5 May 2005