Ethics news:
15 June 2005
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Landscapes of the spirit
The ur-question - what does it all mean? - is the defining query of our existence and as such has always preoccupied philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described that sensibility of acute anxiety that tells us that we are mortal, that our lives are mean and small and that we must die. As the medieval poet William Dunbar put it: "Timor mortis conturbat me" - the fear of death disquiets me. Not so much death, perhaps, as the meaningless it encompasses. In a postmodern context where little seems to make sense, where we experience ceaseless change and fragmentation, where can we look for meaning or fulfilment? ...
The Guardian -11 June 2005
Dubious good intentions
There is plenty of rhetoric, but the push to help Africa has not been thought through. If good intentions could change the world then the campaign for Bob Geldof's Make Poverty History would be sweeping all before it. And in one sense it is. Make Poverty History is the new Not in My Name. The millions with their white wristbands are alive with the energy and commitment that Britain's political parties so conspicuously lacked a few months ago.Against St Bob, the predictable journalistic anti-Geldof backlash of the past few days is powerless, a misanthropic spit into the wind ...
The Age - 9 June 2005
Daddy, what did you do to end world poverty?
Bob Geldof has his critics, but at least he is doing something. Bob Geldof's mobilisation of the world to fight African poverty points to a new way of seeing philanthropy. The series of world rock concerts planned for July 2 is not about raising money but raising international consciousness. In a recent interview on Parkinson, Geldof asked: "Do we have to turn on our television screen and see African poverty forever?" It was a telling question. My family and I discussed what Geldof had said ...
The Age - 14 June 2005
Lifting the load of debt off Africa
Something is going right in the world as richer countries help the poorer ones. I have never understood the mentality of people who feel instinctive hatred towards those trying to make the world a better place. It is particularly hard to understand on an issue as fundamentally humanitarian as tackling poverty in Africa. Bob Geldof has brought the haters out of their closets by organising his all-star Live 8 charity concerts on July 2. What a terrible thing for a guy to do! ...
The Age - 14 June 2005
The frontier continent
The tendency to see Africa as exceptional underestimates our increasingly common experience of corporate globalisation. Tony Blair's Commission for Africa has left me bewildered. As an anthropologist interested in "traditional" medicine, I was delighted to see its report's attempt to take an Africa-centred point of view. Reading a sentence stating that "history shows African cultures to have been tremendously adaptive, absorbing a wide range of outside influences" is a relief to those of us who have tried for years to make this point ...
The Guardian - 13 June 2005
Lightening the load of child miners
Sudha in Nepal helps boost her family's small earnings from farming by working as a stone crusher, providing material to build roads near her home - a job she began when she was 12. Her job helps lift her family's income to a combined 1,400 rupees, or $20 a week. She'd prefer to be at school, but now believes it is too late to start her education. When asked why she continues to do the dangerous work, she says simply: "There is no alternative." Sudha is one of an estimated one million children who work in small-scale mining and quarrying across the globe ...
BBC News - 12 June 2005
Tackling the AIDS epidemic
Everless, from Malawi, knew she was not well. 'I kept wondering what is wrong with me?' she said. Then she met someone from one of Oxfam's home-based care groups who persuaded her to go to hospital. 'I was asked if I wanted a blood test and if so did I want to know the results. Did I want to know if I was HIV positive? I said, yes I want to know. The test was positive.' Everless is not alone. More than 14 per cent of the adult population, 810,000 people, in Malawi have HIV or Aids. The disease has swept across the continent ...
The Observer - 12 June 2005
It'll be all white on the night
Supermodels, rock stars and some of the world's most powerful leaders want to save Africa. But others think this can happen only when Africa cleans up its act. The paparazzi clustered in a pack near the doors of the Westminster Conference Centre. Inside, various aid activists prepared to walk out to meet them. Had the 30 or 40 photographers come for the Global Coalition Against Poverty, or fair trade, or Africa? No, they had come for Claudia ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 11 June 2005
Preying on minority communities
An isolated case of 'exorcist' child abuse has brought out all the old assumptions about African backwardness. What should be the response when a woman is found guilty of cutting her young niece with a knife, beating her with a belt, and rubbing chilli peppers into her eyes? Perhaps an expression of horror, and satisfaction at the successful conviction. But in a recent case in the UK, the defendant was from Angola, and committed the abuse because she thought that the girl was a witch. The case quickly became a careering bandwagon, on to which police, social services and the media leapt ...
Spiked-Online - 10 June 2005
Corby stirs Australia's 'dark side '
Australia is beginning to assess the fall-out from the extraordinary public anger at the jailing last month of 27-year-old Schapelle Corby. The former beauty therapy student was sentenced to 20 years in jail by an Indonesian court for drug trafficking. The verdict unleashed what the Herald Sun newspaper in Melbourne described as "a tide of vitriol, racism and tribal prejudice" and there are now concerns that Australia's reputation, and its relationship with Jakarta, has suffered ...
BBC News - 9 June 2005
Australians see Dr Death in every overseas trained doctor
Many doctors are now being judged by their skin colour and accent. The unfair situation facing many overseas-trained doctors who provide a vital service in this country has been aptly described by the president of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Mukesh Haikerwal: "Doctors who looked different or spoke differently are being targeted for racial slurs or abuse." He said in The Age last Saturday that patients were also demanding to see doctors' credentials, refusing to accept appointments and abusing foreign-trained doctors ...
The Age - 14 June 2005
Trapping Cambodia's sex tourists
Cambodia is one of the world's poorest countries and notorious for child sex trafficking, making it a big destination for paedophiles and other sex tourists. Geoff is sitting on a small, hard bed in a Cambodian brothel, his heart thumping fast. He is 49 years old, a retired Australian diplomat with a wife and two grown-up children. After a long, tense wait, a grinning teenaged boy opens the door and pushes in two young girls. One says she is seven years old. The other is nine ...
BBC News - 11 June 2005
Fat and fiction
The consensus about obesity goes something like this: People are getting fatter because they exercise less and eat more than in the past, and this has led to a rise in lifestyle diseases and early deaths. Yet is this consensus the product of scientific research, or a modern morality tale dressed up as health advice? That is the question asked by The Obesity Epidemic, a refreshingly sceptical new book by Michael Gard and Jan Wright, two Australian physical education academics. They were inspired to write the book after discovering that the science of obesity is far less certain than we have been led to believe ...
Spiked-Online - 10 June 2005
Why I hate vegetarians
People should not be bullied into giving up meat by humourless, judgemental souls using spurious arguments. Eating in a meat-free restaurant the other day made me realise why I hate vegetarians. The food, unlike the tasteless, bland rubbish often served up in such places, was delicious. Unusually for meatless cuisine, it had flavour and texture, and had even been seasoned. What was unpalatable were the customers and waiting staff, all of whom seemed to believe that what they were eating made them superior ...
The Guardian - 13 June 2005
Jackson's trial: our error
Amid claim and counterclaim, we are losing sight of what the singer is being tried for. Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. For, without doing anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning. So begins The Trial, whose lonely protagonist stumbles into a judicial nightmare orchestrated by a malign society. On US campuses, thousands of freshmen read Kafka's novel every year. In Santa Maria, California, the plot is being played for real. In place of Joseph K, read Michael Jackson. Or so his supporters believe ...
The Observer - 12 June 2005
The nuclear power option: expensive, ineffectual and unnecessary
There are more than two choices in the debate on how to meet future energy needs. When climate change becomes a hot topic, as it has lately, the argument emerges from the nuclear industry and other sources that nuclear power can save the day. In 1988 the threat of global warming was gaining traction, due in part to public response to an exceptionally hot summer in north-eastern America. To me, there were two events that marked that period. One was ... organised by an environmental non-government organisation to respond to the question "Can nuclear power save us from climate change?" ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 13 June 2005
Fake or not, compliments work wonders
We live in an economy of goodwill, trading comments across the commercial playing field. 'I love your boots," says the shop assistant as I browse for jeans. "Where did you get them?" My face lights up; it's always gratifying to have my taste validated. But equally, the shop assistant might be trying to win me over so that I'll buy something. I don't care. I've always been big on compliments. When someone's appearance, personality or talent impresses me, I tell them so. And in return, I accept and enjoy compliments when they're offered to me ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 14 June 2005
Big Brother beauty contest
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but a new website has taken networking to Darwinian extremes by banning ugly people. Beautifulpeople.net is an online club which admits only the most beautiful people - through a vicious selection process. Applicants enter a profile and picture, which sit on the site for 72 hours. Fully signed up members - opposite sex only - are then invited to vote on the applicants' attractiveness. Most people don't make it any further ...
BBC News - 9 June 2005
True justice knows no boundaries
Amnesty leader Irene Khan replies to last week's attack on Amnesty's direction on human rights. I agree with Nick Cohen when he wrote last week: 'The choice between human and economic rights isn't either/or. It's both or neither.' But that is where my agreement ends. Cohen is wrong when he suggests that Amnesty International is forsaking its role as champion of the oppressed in pursuit of an economic development agenda ...
The Observer - 12 June 2005
No subsance to Vinnies' alarmism
Last week, the St Vincent de Paul Society released a report warning that Australia is set on "a headlong dash into the chasm of inequality". Unless the Government does something to reverse this trend (presumably by raising taxes on higher earners and increasing welfare payments for those lower down), the report warned of impending catastrophe. "Our society," it predicts, "will face severe dislocation." It warns of "sharpening divisions, discord, increased crime and urban degeneration". It even foresees "a return to the dismal social injustices ...
The Australian - 10 June 2005