Ethics news:
18 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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Do-gooders gone wrong
Truly responsible companies are improving shareholder value rather than trying to win corporate beauty contests. Recently, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald published four-page coverage of the Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI), a product of their alliance with the St James Ethics Centre and Ernst & Young. Extensive media coverage of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in recent years has prompted companies to spin nice yarns about CSR activities in their annual reports. Many struggle to resist pressures to increase CSR activities and participate in surveys that claim to measure corporate social responsibility ...
BRW - 5 May 2005
The Alvarez case: a warning to us all
The deported Australian is the symptom of a culture of official racism. If Australia had not welcomed my mother into this country, I would not be here today. The woman who gave birth to me was born in southern China, on a date no one is exactly sure of. Her childhood was spent with a family who searched for a stable and safe place to live, and that place was found when she was 14 years old and arrived here. After their persecution in China, persecution as ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and the subsequent migration here, she completed high school in a language she barely knew on her arrival ...
The Age - 14 May 2005
Our cruelty to detainees must stop
It's time to end the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and give an amnesty to all detainees. When Iranian asylum seeker Ardeshir Gholipour stepped out of Baxter detention centre last Friday week after five years of incarceration, his first thoughts were of how so many years of life could have been taken away from him and his fellow detainees. Gholipour had not committed a crime. Indeed, he had fled in fear for his life after years as a pro-democracy activist in Iran. This included 27 months in a tiny cell in Tehran's Evin prison for distributing pamphlets on behalf of the Iranian Freedom movement ...
The Age - 13 May 2005
Schoolgirl punished for Muslim dress
When Yasamin Alttahir started wearing her mantoo to school more than two years ago, fellow Muslims congratulated her on the strength of her faith. But the body-length religious tunic has since landed the high achiever in trouble with her principal at Auburn Girls High, Sharon Ford. After disobeying Ms Ford's orders to stop wearing the mantoo in March, the 17-year-old Shiite Muslim from Smithfield was this week put on detention. Yasamin, who is in year 11, had drawn up a petition of more than 100 signatures from students, parents and members of her community supporting her case ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 14 May 2005
Chastity ring funding attacked
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the US government over its funding of a nationwide sexual abstinence programme. The ACLU says the Silver Ring Thing programme violates the principle that the state budget cannot be used to promote religion. The programme, which targets teenagers, is an offshoot of a Christian ministry. Since 2003, it has received more than $1m from the Department of Health and Human Services. The funding is part of a government initiative to expand abstinence-only sex education ...
BBC News - 17 May 2005
How can we halt the march of unreason?
In his new book The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism, Dick Taverne - who has had careers in politics, law, economics and industry, and who now sits as a Liberal Democrat in the UK House of Lords - presents a formidable case against what he terms 'dogmatic environmentalists'. Yet he was not always critical of their 'dodgy science'. He admits to being one of many who 'fell under the spell of Rachel Carson' when reading her book, The Silent Spring, in 1962 ...
Spiked-Online - 9 May 2005
Michael Jackson trial: nobody's innocent
Outside the Californian court, we're witnessing a show trial of the most sordid aspects of contemporary culture. There are two trials of Michael Jackson. One is going on in a court in Santa Maria, California, where a jury must decide beyond reasonable doubt whether or not Jackson is guilty of abusing young boys, plying them with alcohol, and conspiring to hold a boy and his family captive. Then there is the trial going on in the media. This deals not in the currency of evidence, guilt and innocence, but in a somewhat baser coinage ...
Spiked-Online - 13 May 2005
Torture is illegal, inhman and futile
The Deakin academics' case for torture fails morally and practically. Despite the ban on torture in international law and the domestic laws of almost every country, the "war on terror" has tempted many people to argue that it as an effective and justified method of combating terrorism. In a paper to be published by the University of San Francisco Law Review, Professor Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke of Deakin University make unfounded assumptions about the usefulness of torture and fail to consider how damaging its legitimisation would be to society ...
The Age - 18 May 2005
The true purpose of torture
Guantánamo is there to terrorise - both inmates and the wider world. I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an event honouring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is the world's most famous victim of "rendition", the process by which US officials outsource torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching planes in New York when US interrogators detained him and "rendered" him to Syria, where he was held for 10 months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out periodically for beatings ...
The Guardian - 14 May 2005
Honour and martyrdom
Suicide bombing isn't as new or alien as westerners imagine. One of the most chilling aspects of the Iraqi conflict is that suicide bombings have now become a matter of everyday routine. During April there were 67, a new record. On Wednesday there were no less than five separate suicide attacks across Iraq, killing 71 people and injuring scores of people. The rate of suicide bombings - the seemingly endless supply of people prepared to blow themselves up - leaves a western audience utterly bewildered. What kind of psychology motivates people to such violent extremes? ...
The Guardian - 14 May 2005
Sex trade's reliance on forced labour
Working late at night in the streets around Sofia's most luxurious hotels, Mitko takes pride in his ability to quickly deliver what his customers want. "Ten min utes and I can get you a girl - any girl - blond, brown, black or white," he declares. Mitko's operation is part of a sex industry that, according to the International Labour organisations (ILO), "has become highly diversified and global in recent years".Globally, forced labour - which includes sexual exploitation - generates $31bn (£16.5bn) ...
BBC News - 12 May 2005
Sexual assault victims deserve confidentiality
Counsellors' notes should be protected from disclosure. Churches, sexual assault and criminal justice form a troubling combination. This week, the Supreme Court was asked to resolve an unusual dispute. In late 2002 two clergymen from the Church of Christ spoke to two women congregants following a disturbance outside their church. They made notes of their conversation, apparently to obtain advice in the church hierarchy. The following week the women made police statements after which sexual assault charges were laid ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 13 May 2005
Waking up to the morning after pill
It's five years since emergency contraception became available over the counter in the UK. Geraldine Bedell reveals why, despite its obvious benefits, the morning-after pill is still considered the method of choice for the morally lax. What is good sex, exactly? In Britain, it appears to be sex that's been scheduled, logged in the diary and planned for. The sort of sex that happens suddenly and spontaneously, hotly and passionately, isn't at all what we want, because it's far too irresponsible ...
The Observer - 15 May 2005
Too much tsunami cash - return to sender
The international medical relief agency Médecins sans Frontières is tracking down hundreds of thousands of donors worldwide to its Asian tsunami appeal and offering them their money back. Hundreds of Australians have asked for $93,000 of refunds after the charity told them it had four times the €20 million it needed to fund its response to the Boxing Day disaster. They refused the charity's offer to redirect their donations to lower profile crises such as in Sudan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One of the Australian donations handed back was for $50,000 ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 11 May 2005
Expletives repeated
Overuse has blunted swearwords, but they shock in children's shows. At a time when worries have been expressed about the hood-hidden faces of the young, my own concern has been about what comes out of their mouths. My working week involved seeing the musical Billy Elliot, in which one of the jokes is children swearing, and interviewing the American writer Judy Blume about her novels for teenagers, which have been banned and burned by conservatives in the US because they depict young people speaking realistically about sex ...
The Guardian - 14 May 2005
Beauty myth: 68% of girls think they're not pretty enough
Australia's girls are suffering a crisis of self-esteem, with many admitting they would change every aspect of their appearance if they could. Barbie girls and pre-teens may be driving a booming new market for beauty salons, but a recent survey found 94 per cent of girls aged 18 and under wished they were more beautiful. The survey, by marketing company The Heat Group, questioned 1356 Australian women of all ages and found 68 per cent of teenagers believed they were less beautiful than the average girl ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 15 May 2005
Dead gorgeous jewellery
Looking for a memento of your own mortality? Meg Mundell meets a jewellery designer who mixes death, diamonds and ethics. Every species has its reputation. Foxes? They're a sly bunch. Kittens? Innocent little scamps. Dogs are loyal; pigeons are dirty; sharks bloodthirsty; and cows quite delicious when fried and stuffed in a sesame seed bun. Taxidermists, as a species, are harder to pin down, but certain images come to mind: tweed waistcoats, sombre expressions, a whiff of formaldehyde and a pair of specs perched precariously on an elderly male nose ...
The Age - 10 May 2005
Tut-tut. Leave the mummy's boy alone
Hold the scans, it's time we left what's left of Tutankhamen in peace. Can't a man get some sleep? Even after 3300 years Tutankhamen isn't able to rest. He's been mapped and measured, scanned and sculpted. Now scientists have come up with 3D models of what the boy king would have looked like. Frankly, I was less impressed by his oddly shaped head than the realisation that Andre Agassi's haircut was big in Egypt all those years ago. It's guesswork anyway. Don't be fooled by anthropological mumbo jumbo ...
The Age - 14 May 2005
Penetrating rather than elicidating
As a film, 9 Songs is an abject failure. But by successfully tackling the taboo on screen sex, director Michael Winterbottom makes an important breakthrough. David and Margaret both like the film 9 Songs, David giving it three stars and Margaret going over the top with four. I predicted that Margaret would give 9 Songs six stars out of five but I thought that David would wrinkle his nose and lament that "it is so ugly". Because it is, indeed, an ugly little film. Which presumably is why the censors took a second look at it and decided that adults could safely watch it without being corrupted ...
The Age - 15 May 2005