Ethics news:
28 June 2005
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A day spent in the public gallery would shock the founding fathers
Parliament should be a place of debate, not a rubber stamp for the prime minister. When the legislation about research on human embryos passed Federal Parliament in 2002, several Government members expressed their gratitude to the Prime Minister who, in his kindness and wisdom, had allowed them a free, or conscience, vote. No one pointed out the bizarre implication of these statements for the system of government: the prime minister determines how the electors' representatives vote ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 21 June 2005
The monster within us all
Before accusing African leaders of being innately corrupt, Westerners should clean up their act. The one reliable prediction you can make about any group of human beings is that one or two will have a proclivity to cut corners, accept a bribe or be ready to pursue a dishonourable means to achieve their end. It comes with the territory of being human. Be sure there is always somebody ready to take the corrupt course of action. Certain financial reward today is, for some individuals, better than the uncertain reward of behaving properly and conforming to social norms ...
The Guardian -26 June 2005
Africans need DDT not 'blah ,blah, blah'
Africans have paid a heavy price for the West's misplaced demonising of the mosquito-killing pesticide. As Africa becomes big news - in the run-up to Live 8 on 2 July and the G8 summit in Edinburgh on 6 July, and with the start of an Africa season on BBC TV - there is one way we could help Africans that very few people are talking about: by lifting the restrictions on DDT, the pesticide that fights malaria by killing off the mosquitoes that carry it ...
Spiked-Online - 21 June 2005
What do pop stars know about the world?
Pop and rock stars are nowadays as influential in government circles as they are among their teenage fans. Is this necessarily a good thing? There has always been a little bit of politics - as Ben Elton might say - in pop and rock music. Ever since a wild-haired Bob Dylan sang The Times They Are A-Changin' in 1963 - in which he warned senators and congressmen that "There's a battle outside and it's raging" - popular singers have ventured, with varying degrees of success, into the world of political protest and dissent ...
BBC News - 28 June 2005
More to poverty trap than money
Applying the theories of the enlightenment may not be so enlightened. Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from conservatives, and I have mine. Mine include the differences between Jeffrey Sachs and George Bush. Sachs is a Columbia University economist who has done more to put poverty in Africa atop the global agenda than anybody else. He has hectored and lobbied the developed world to forgive debts, set goals and increase aid to ameliorate the suffering of the extremely poor ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 28 June 2005
Why vilification is such a blight
Fear and ignorance drive those opposing the vilification laws. While the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal decision yesterday on the Islamic Council of Victoria complaint against Catch the Fire provides us with welcome guidance on the practical application of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, the case itself has given rise to misguided opposition to laws that prevent the worse kind of vilifying behaviour. Much of this opposition stems from fears that the act attacks religious freedom and curbs our rights to free speech ...
The Age - 23 June 2005
Free speech under fire
Campaigners have fought a good defence against the government's bill to outlaw incitement to religious hatred. But we could go further still. The UK government's new bill to outlaw incitement to religious hatred scraped through the House of Commons on Tuesday night, but outside that hallowed hall the debate continues. Members of Parliament - led by the Lib Dem Evan Harris - have lined up alongside comedians, lawyers, writers and artists, as well as organisations such as the National Secular Society and Liberty, to attack this proposed law. This bill poses a serious threat to free speech ...
Spiked-Online - 23 June 2005
A hostage to public opinion at home
Douglas Wood survived his murderous terrorist kidnappers in Iraq so no doubt he will survive the sharks of public opinion in Australia. But the unrelenting nastiness to which he has been subjected reflects poorly on his country of birth. Ever since Wood opened his mouth and said he was in favour of George Bush and John Howard's policies in Iraq, praised the Iraqi Army, called his captors "arseholes" and said "God bless America", the knives have been out from all those who disagree with an opinion he is probably more entitled to hold than most ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 23 June 2005
Laying to rest ghosts of Deep South
An 80-year-old man has been jailed for his part in the deaths of three civil rights activists in Mississippi in 1964. It is the latest in a series of convictions stemming from an era when race hatred raged openly in the Deep South. When Feraris Golden was found hanging from a tree in the back garden of his Florida home in 2003 the black community cowered in fear, believing he had been the victim of a lynching ...
BBC News - 23 June 2005
Criminals nipped in the bud
What has a Minneapolis police chief described as "arguably the only effective crime-prevention device adopted in this nation since the late 1960s"? The answer, strange to relate, is legalised abortion. After the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision in 1973, abortion became legal and common in the United States. By the end of the decade, there was almost one abortion for every two live births. But some sorts of women had abortions more often than others, particularly those most likely to produce criminals ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 25 June 2005
Stem-cell science stirs debate in the Muslim world too
Egypt is joining the ranks of nations where scientists conduct stem-cell research. The private Egyptian IVF (in vitro fertilization) Center in Cairo is preparing to start such work in October, using stem cells from umbilical cord blood with the permission of newborns' parents. It won't delve immediately into the controversial realm of embryonic stem cells or therapeutic cloning - a way of deriving stem cells from cloned embryos ...
Christian Science Monitor - 22 June 2005
Fresh wrinkle on ethics
Remember Dennis Denuto, the inept suburban lawyer from the film The Castle? Dennis had to argue a case in the High Court but when he arrived he didn't have any evidence. Instead, relying on enthusiasm, he fell back on the vagueness of the vibe, the mood. Debate on the ethics of experimentation on human embryos, inspired by the forthcoming review of the legislation, is on this level. Last week's Inquirer column by science writer Leigh Dayton was full of the vibe ...
The Australian - 25 June 2005
The place where humanity's divisions meet
The United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco 60 years ago on Sunday, with a sense of excitement and romantic adventure. Yet today the organisations is in turmoil, struggling to cope with a string of allegations of fraud and misconduct by foot soldiers and senior officials that has produced demoralization throughout the UN system. The Charter begins with the grand words "We the peoples." The reality is that it functions as an organisations of, by and for member states ...
The International Herald Tribune - 25 June 2005
Life is about compromise
A cult of perfectionism is sweeping through the upper-middle class, writes Hugh Mackay. "Nothing's perfect" could have been the theme song of the Fab Four - Petro, Judi, Bruce and Russell - after their courageous confrontation with a Prime Minister famously reluctant to admit to errors of judgement. The fact that they secured any concessions, especially those involving the release of children from detention centres, is a cause for cautious celebration. We still have a long way to go ...
The Age - 27 June 2005
Migration is here to stay, so get used to it
By the end of 2004, there were 185 million migrants worldwide - approximately 3 percent of the world's population, or roughly one in every 35 persons, almost half of whom were women. Does this represent too much or not enough migration? Although certain to produce a lively debate, this is the wrong question. International migration is an established feature of contemporary economic, social and political life, driven by unstoppable forces of globalization and demography ...
The International Herald Tribune - 24 June 2005
Out tsunami aid work
Aid agencies are working slowly but surely to make sure they "get it right". Six months after the devastating Asian tsunami struck, villagers in one of the worst-hit areas of Banda Aceh are for the first time planting crops. It is a new salt-resistant crop of rice and peanuts and, as I write this, it is being sown on land that was feared would be never used again because it was contaminated by the tsunami. In Sri Lanka there is a school, set up in the first months after the disaster, which is now running night classes ...
The Age - 25 June 2005
Have you got no conscience?
By refusing to intervene, we surrender the public space to intimidation. Last year a 15-year-old boy from my daughter's school was waiting at a bus stop with 20 other pupils and a couple of adults, when a car with three or four young men in it drew up. One of them got out, punched him in the face and stomach several times, took his mobile, and drove off. "Didn't anyone do anything?" I asked. Like what, my daughter wanted to know. Like defending him? Shouting? Calling the police? Taking down the number plate? No ...
The Guardian - 25 June 2005
Giving 'puts business in good company'
It will soon be six months since the Boxing Day tsunami caused unprecedented human suffering while generating unprecedented human generosity around the globe. Six months on, parts of corporate Australia are still smarting from accusations that in contrast to the immediate outpouring of generosity from individual Australians, our corporate sector, with notable exceptions, was slow to respond to the Tsunami disaster ...
The Age - 21 June 2005
Reputation 'is more than marketing'
Corporations might be taking reputation management more seriously but they are getting nowhere because they are treating it as a marketing problem, says one of the world's leading reputational experts. Charles Fombrun, founder and executive director of the US-based Reputation Institute said putting corporate marketing and communications departments in charge of reputational issues was little more than window dressing ...
The Age - 23 June 2005
Jaw jaw on just war
A recent seminar in London drew together Christian just-war theorists from the United States and Britain to discuss the international scene in the light of Christian principles. It worked well because the participants shared a common intellectual framework and the view that, whatever moral judgements may be made about particular wars, the analysis provided by traditional just-war thinking was an indispensable intellectual tool. Nevertheless, there were strong differences of opinion ...
The Guardian - 25 June 2005
Amnesty's gulag idiocy
Amnesty International must not allow itself to lose credibility by using hyperbole in its criticisms. Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a long-time Amnesty International staff member. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time". "Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him ...
The Age - 27 June 2005
Nagging questions about the wisdom of zoos
The only elephants visible these days at the Lincoln Park Zoo's once-popular exhibit are the bronze mother and baby on a nearby drinking fountain. Even the signs by the empty enclosure have been removed. Wankie, the last of the three elephants, died last month after transport to Salt Lake City. Tatima and Peaches died in October and January. The deaths may be both natural and coincidental. Tatima, for instance, was 55 years old; Peaches contracted a rare respiratory disease ...
Christian Science Monitor - 9 June 2005
Missing teen case grips US media
The disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway on the Caribbean island of Aruba is a story that is dominating the US media. Since the teenager went missing after leaving a nightclub on 30 May her picture has stared out from newspapers, while TV bulletins have covered every movement in the story. It is not hard to imagine cynical reasons why. Tragic as her disappearance is, some have criticised the flood of coverage which is dominating the national news agenda ...
BBC News - 25 June 2005
Why are we so afraid of the N-word?
Australia should take the lead in formulating a sensible nuclear policy. The populism at the heart of Australia's political culture is starkly evident in the emerging debate about nuclear power generation. Eco-fundamentalism in the ranks of the Greens, policy timidity in the Labor Party (yet again), policy hubris in the Liberal Party and widespread confusion in the general public are combining to produce a dangerously blinkered approach to this vital issue. There are three related arguments that need to be addressed more intelligently in the nuclear power debate ...
The Age - 20 June 2005