Ethics news:
1 June 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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What's in it for me?
As befits the me-me-me age we live in, those who volunteer can get as much out of giving their time as those they are helping. For volunteering can be good for the CV, the waistline - even the love life. Fitter. Happier. More productive. Better work/life balance. Credit at (moral) bank. With apologies to Radiohead, giving time to good causes is essentially a selfish business. Rare is the charity that asks for volunteers simply by appealing to people's altruistic nature. Some work with businesses so time given can be counted towards an employee's work hours ...
BBC News - 30 May 2005
How status anxiety is taking over our lives
Our obsessions about success and failure are making losers of us all. The current debate about IVF funding has overlooked some extreme anxiety underpinning the issue. This goes far beyond the real distress of women and men desperately seeking parenthood. There's a much broader, if not disconnected, disaffection abroad in contemporary Australia. It's what British writer Alain de Botton terms "status anxiety" and it stems from dissatisfaction at where we stand, or may fall, in the social and economic pecking order ...
The Age - 30 May 2005
Students hear the word and hand in their CDs
What would Jesus do? That's the question students at Sutherland Shire Christian School were asking themselves after a Bible-reading session last week. It's unlikely the son of God envisaged the scourge of modern-day music and film piracy. But the students decided their messiah would have considered copyright violation a breach of one of the all-important Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus: thou shalt not steal. By yesterday afternoon, a year 12 group had risen to the cause and handed into the school 2000 of their own illegally burnt CDs and DVDs ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 26 May 2005
A day at the brain spa
At a Dana Foundation conference on neuroethics last week at the Library of Congress, University of Pennsylvania neurologist Anjan Chatterjee declared that we are already well advanced in the enhancement era of neuropharmacology. As evidence, Chatterjee offered a scenario in which a high level executive who works 80 to 100 hours a week comes to clinical neurologist for help. His wife has just divorced him because he was never home, and he's feeling down, which is affecting his work ...
Reason Online - 18 May 2005
Treaty: the big idea whose time is overdue
Everyone would benefit from a treaty between old and new Australians. Australians can be suspicious of big ideas but interested in practical solutions. In 2000 the big idea was put forward that Australia should advance reconciliation by a treaty between government and indigenous people. The idea received a mixed reception, as it had before. It deserves fresh attention for the way it could deal with practical and symbolic issues at the same time ...
The Age - 26 May 2005
Why we need a new policy on refugees
It's time for compassion and accountability in handling asylum seekers. For many years I have been concerned about difficulties experienced by some refugees and asylum seekers, which result from policies implemented at a time of widespread anxiety that we might be engulfed by a flood of bogus asylum seekers. That fear has not been realised. It's time to review the policy framework established under different circumstances and adopt a more compassionate, transparent and accountable approach ...
The Age - 26 May 2005
Be mad if you will, but at Australia
Anger over Schapelle Corby is misplaced. Like many, I feel sorry for Schapelle Corby. I don't think she was smuggling drugs and I can't imagine the trauma she is enduring as she faces her 20-year sentence. I am also extremely angry about this incident, but not at Indonesia. The reaction since the verdict has been directed overwhelmingly at the Indonesian judicial system. But I get the impression there is an even more insidious, sinister sentiment being directed at the Indonesian people ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 30 May 2005
We'll go for whom the tears flow
The media could not get enough of her. She was young, attractive and accused of a terrible crime. She steadfastly maintained her innocence. Everyone had an opinion on whether she did it or not. But publicly, she never cried. The national verdict: lock her up. That is what happened to Lindy Chamberlain 25 years ago, when her daughter, Azaria, disappeared and she was accused of murder. And, though the Schapelle Corby case may never enter the realm of folklore as the dingo-baby mystery has done, the author who wrote the definitive account of that saga finds echoes of media overkill and public obsession in the drama unfolding in Bali ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 27 May 2005
Fact and fiction in the Corby case
Australians' support for a high-profile defendant is based on damaging double standards. What would otherwise be a relatively unremarkable drugs trial in a foreign country has now become the major national story in Australia. The Australian defendant has rapidly become a martyr figure. Popular reaction to the trial - supporting Schapelle Corby and demonising Indonesia, for the most part - has become so extreme that it is now a national political issue ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 27 May 2005
Why we need free speech online
In their crusade against 'hate speech', regulators want to subject all internet users to a system of parental controls. The rush to find new legislation outlawing 'hate speech' on the internet has become a Europe-wide project. The 'Brussels Declaration' issued by the Organisation for Security and co-operation in Europe (OSCE) - which came out of the proceedings of its Conference on Tolerance and the Fight against Racism, Xenophobia and Discrimination commits OSCE member states to 'combat hate crimes, which can be fuelled by racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic propaganda in the media and on the internet' ...
Spiked-Online - 26 May 2005
A freedom to oppress
Far from eradicating illiberalism, anti-blasphemy laws actually encourage it. Anyone who has seen the films of Michael Moore or read the vaguely leftish books which pour out of America might imagine that they don't need to be told the background to the Workplace Religious Freedom Act currently before the US Congress. After the loud campaigns to allow prayers and creationism into US schools, a working assumption would be that Republicans were once again playing on the ineradicable paranoia of the religious by claiming that Christians were being persecuted by employers ...
The Observer - 29 May 2005
The ethical case for animal research
At the launch of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics report, 'The Ethics of Research Involving Animals', TV personality Nick Ross isolated what to me is the report's main asset - 'it is a marvellous reference guide'. There are chapters full of useful information about what animal research has contributed to biological and medical science. As Professor Martin Raff, cell biologist and member of the working party, said: 'most of what we know about physiology - including the endocrine systems - is based on invasive physiological studies of animals' ...
Spiked-Online - 25 May 2005
Why gambling is good for you
The current discussion on the pros and cons of gambling has concentrated on what are often the tragic results of poor judgement and lack of self-control. These dangers are real enough, yet by focusing exclusively on them we misunderstand the ritual symbolism that underlies gaming. Even the citizens of ancient Rome played dice once a year, at the festival of Saturnalia, in honour of the god of plenty (though the wagers were only nuts, not money). Far from being evil, or even simply neutral, gambling is often described in traditional mythology as an embodiment of the workings of the universe itself ...
The Guardian - 28 May 2005
Torture is not the answer
Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke, two researchers from Deakin University, opened up a furious debate the other day when they published an article defending the use of torture. Peter Faris QC, a former chairman of the National Crime Authority, was almost a lone voice supporting them, in a rising tide of human rights rhetoric. But so far most of the fundamental questions about torture and its effects have barely been raised ...
The Australian - 28 May 2005
Both Palestinians and Israelis will benefit from a boycott
The racist and colonial policies echo apartheid, and call for a similar response. Last October, 13-year-old Iman al-Hams was shot and wounded by an Israeli army unit in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, despite being identified as a little girl, and wearing a school uniform. Iman was machine-gunned by the unit's commander. She had 17 bullets in her body, and three in her head, a Palestinian doctor told the Guardian. Iman is one of 654 Palestinian children to have been killed in the occupied territories since September 2000 ...
The Guardian - 25 May 2005
The ultimate postmodern spectacle
Michael Jackson and his trial hold a mirror to modern western civilisation and its blurring of fact and fiction. Celebrity trials, like those of OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson, are sometimes loosely called postmodern, meaning that they are media spectaculars thronged with characters who are only doubtfully real. But they are also postmodern in a more interesting sense. Courtrooms, like novels, blur the distinction between fact and fiction ...
The Guardian - 25 May 2005
The role of recklessness in rape
Rape is not confined to the battleground that sees evident resistance overborne by brute force. It also embraces far more nuanced scenarios where shades of belief by a perpetrator can be prompted by subtle responses from the victim or, indeed, no response at all. A little treatise on rape is probably best left well alone, but recent events have opened up further questions, if not uncertainties that at this moment are being judicially juggled ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 27 May 2005
We are not instruments of US power
Claims that NGOs are agents of destabilisation are irresponsible. In the game of claim and blame that has followed political changes in the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, there have been some silly and even dangerous assertions. The changes have been lauded by Bush supporters as unambiguously democratic, and as direct consequences of the president's determination to spread freedom round the world. Governments that have lost power, those who fear they may do so, and their allies, such as Russia, plus a few critics in the west, see no freedom, merely the installation of pro-western regimes ...
The Guardian - 28 May 2005
Uzbekistan is missing on Bush's democracy watch
The US is indulging a brutal regime to keep its foothold in Central Asia. Uzbekistan is the latest example of the United States' failure to act on its cherished principle of bringing democracy to the Muslim world. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Uzbekistan was one of the 15 republics to be welcomed in the international fold as a sovereign state. These states were expected to make a rapid transition to democracy. The conventional view was that democracy had won over tyranny. Francis Fukuyama even called it the End of History ...
The Age - 25 May 2005
Complex legacy of Chairman Mao
He may have been a despot, but the leader of the largest country in the world unintentionally did his people good. It is less than 30 years ago that the 20th-century's bloodiest dictator was approaching death, his country still dirt poor, his vision in ruins, with tens of millions of his fellow citizens dead at his hands. Today, that same country has enjoyed three decades of the most unparalleled economic growth. Mao's death has proved the trigger for an extraordinary economic renaissance ...
The Observer - 29 May 2005