Ethics news:
3 August 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.
Note that you may need to register for free with sites to read some of these news articles.
Mixed signals on the virtue of courage
When Londoners climbed back on buses July 8, just one day after bombs ripped through the city's transportation system, reports hailed the display of a virtue much esteemed in an age of terror: courage. But cultivating courage - a willingness to take personal risk for the sake of a larger purpose - promises to be an uphill battle in the 21st century, ethicists say, whether the enemy is terrorism, local bullies, or moral decay ...
Christian Science Monitor - 20 July 2005
Defend free speech now more than ever
Laws against 'incitement to religious hatred' and 'indirect incitement' to terrorism can only make matters worse. We have been told many times since the London bombs that we need to stand together to defend freedom and 'our way of life' against the terrorist threat. However, it has also become clear that the freedoms we are being asked to defend do not include freedom of speech ...
Spiked-Online - 19 July 2005
Expose the haters
I wasn't surprised to read that British police officers in white protective suits and blue gloves were combing through the Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Leeds for clues to the 7/7 London bombings. Some of the 7/7 bombers hung out at the bookstore. And I won't be surprised if Thursday's bombers also sampled the literature there. ... Guess what: Words matter. Bookstores matter. Video games matter ...
The International Herald Tribune - 23 July 2005
Free speech or fighting words - it's a fine line
Silencing those who incite violence will be easier said than done. OK, so how would it work? How would Australia silence the mullahs and ban their repugnant books? How would we crack down on hate speech? What would we do about the internet? What would we do about the one medium that lies beyond anyone's control, talkback radio? Calls have been coming in thick and fast since the London atrocities for laws to protect society not just from bombs but from the hatred and intolerance of radical Islam ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 27 July 2005
Fundamentally speaking
Muslims who preach hate are to be deported and subject to new restrictions, Charles Clarke announced in the Commons on Wednesday. So what would the home secretary have to say about stuff like this: "Blessed is he who takes your little children and smashes their heads against the rocks"? Or this: "O God, break the teeth in their mouths ... The righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked." No, this is not Islam, it is the Bible ...
The Guardian - 23 July 2005
I wouldn't even ban the footy show
When anything is denied me, something dark in my person reaches for it. When the world is spinning beyond the poles of reason and when parties in each cultural hemisphere seem impelled only by a magnet of numbest hate, public reaction takes two distinct routes. There are those, like myself, who watch aghast as scattered, televised terror unfolds east and west. We're felled by the complexity of this post-modern sorrow ...
The Age - 23 July 2005
The marriage of spirituality and the machine is a recipe for disaster
Science and religion are best left to travel on parallel paths. If you believe religion and technology are at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, the young men who don plastic explosives and recite "God is great" as they bomb their way to heaven should give you pause. Fortunately, this gruesome take on the modern partnership between religion and technology is never likely to be popular with true believers in the West ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 22 July 2005
In the name of God
Blair has appeased and prevaricated. Now, as the death cult strikes again, he must oust religion from public life. Two weeks on, London is stricken once more. The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God. Whatever they intended, the message was loud and clear: they can and will do this whenever they want ...
The Guardian - 22 July 2005
Tradtional culture fights back
The war of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington unfortunately phrased it, takes place in time rather than space. The bombers in London and the insurgents in Iraq may think that they are avenging themselves on Western civilization. Some in Washington, London and Tel Aviv may think that they are blocking the ambition of radical Muslims to create some marvelous new caliphate to rule the world. Both are wrong. The civilizations at war are modernity on the one hand and the traditional world on the other ...
The International Herald Tribune - 21 July 2005
Muslim rage burns in our backyard
Western liberals must rethink their attitudes towards the causes of religious tension. At Lennox Head Public School on the North Coast, children have for decades recited a prayer at assembly. The prayer begins "O God Our Heavenly Father" and asks that the school be blessed "so that one day we may do great work for you, Australia and all mankind". Sentiments to be proud of. Only now the prayer has been dropped, pending a review, after complaints from a parent or two ...
The Age - 21 July 2005
Creating the enemy
How a risk-averse West has inflamed the terrorism it fears. In March 2004, following the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 civilians, I wrote an essay for spiked in which I argued that contemporary nihilistic terrorism has its origins in moral and political crises within the West, not in the hotheaded fanaticism of faraway lands. I argued that, if you strip away all the talk about a 'clash of civilisations', the real problem of terrorism ... begins at home ...
Spiked-Online - 18 July 2005
Why the bombers are so angry at us
Most suicide bombers are driven by resistance to occupation, not Islam. This month's London terrorist attacks are part of al-Qaeda's strategic logic, which has been pursued with increasing vigour in the past three years. Since 2002, al-Qaeda has carried out 17 suicide and other terrorist bombings that have killed nearly 700 people - more attacks and victims than in all the years before 9/11 combined ...
The Age - 23 July 2005
A matter of respect
As Australians, we tell ourselves many stories that stimulate our sense of self-righteousness and moral superiority; most societies do this sort of thing fairly regularly. Our myth-making is powerful - and very comforting - in a world of violence and destabilisation. Recent reveries on the meaning of the London bombings for Australia's so-called multiculturalism abound in such spinning of indignation: the "Other" has emerged from its lair and its name is Islam. Well no, not really ...
The Age - 22 July 2005
There are apologists amongst us
The 'We told you so' lot have been bleating on about Iraq ever since the atrocities of 7/7 - it is time to fight back. Within hours of the bombs going off two weeks ago, the voices that one could have predicted began to make themselves heard with their root-causes explanations for the murder and maiming of a random group of tube and bus passengers in London. It was due to Blair, Iraq, illegal war and the rest of it ...
The Guardian - 21 July 2005
A point of view: impact of the London bombings
Before the Holocaust and before the Nazis had taken a single British life, I heard my father tell a neighbour that the Nazis terrified him. I was shocked. He didn't make any mention of Nazi aggression, cruelty, or intolerance. He said something like: "The more I read about them, the more they chill my blood. I can't understand why they hate us. Why do they think like they do? I can't work the Nazis out. They terrify me. I think they're inhuman" ...
BBC News - 25 July 2005
Nothing normal in murderous beliefs
How often have you heard or read about the London suicide bombers being normal? A teacher who helped disabled children. One a popular member of the local cricket team. Neighbours in the northern England city of Leeds couldn't believe such normal fellows were behind the commuter atrocities. Of all the horrible stories and images to emerge from London, this is the most terrifying ...
The Australian - 16 July 2005
Who's in denial about the London bombs?
Whether they point the finger at Islamic clerics or Iraq, everyone seems to be looking for a foreign factor. On 7 July, four British citizens from Leeds and Huddersfield blew up themselves and at least 56 others in the British capital. Yet the post-bombing debate has focused on everything except the question of why young men born and raised in the British 'way of life' would do such a thing. Instead, the finger is pointed at madrassa schools in Pakistan ...
Spiked-Onine - 19 July 2005
The police marksman's dilemma
Scotland Yard's admission that an innocent man, Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot dead on Friday by plain-clothed police searching for the 21 July London bombers has focused attention on the record of British firearms officers. Jean Charles de Menezes was not the first person to die by mistake at the hands of UK armed police. His death ... is the latest in a long line of controversies involving firearms officers ...
BBC News - 24 July 2005
It's not political correctness to hold soldiers to account
The prosecution of British troops helps to protect their own lives in Iraq. The press pack in full cry is a terrifying vision. There should be special provision in the international criminal court to protect their quarry from inhumane and unnatural persecution. Except that this week it is the ICC itself that has been the target of their concerted outrage, because of the effrontery of the army in charging some of its soldiers with war crimes ...
The Guardian - 22 July 2005
The women of Guantanamo
There are countless reasons to be outraged about the abuses of detainees at American military prisons. But there is one abuse about which there can surely be no debate, even among the die-hard supporters of President George W Bush: the exploitation and debasement of women serving in the US military. Surely no one can approve turning an American soldier into a pseudo-lap-dancer or having another smear fake menstrual blood on an Arab man ...
The International Herald Tribune - 21 July 2005
Page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 girl
Thanks to pop culture, my 12-year-old son's life revolves around porn. Zoo magazine offered an unusual prize this month - "Win Your Girlfriend a £4,000 Boob Job!" - explaining how its young readers could "bag a new set of rib-lamps" for their "lady". Shortly afterwards the Big Brother women enacted a porn scene in the spa bath for the boys. The once-concealed symbols and attitudes of hardcore porn are now flooding mainstream culture ...
The Guardian - 22 July 2005
The art of failure
No one enjoys failure. Even the most stereotypical plucky Brit, the type of person who revels in national sporting disasters, will enjoy a secret smile of satisfaction that they are at least making a success of their failure. And yet everyone fails. From your first driving test to your first job interview to your first girlfriend to your first marriage. Sometimes you will go through periods when nothing ever seems to go right ...
BBC News - 25 July 2005
My abortion would have spared my mother
Remember the agony of mothers who give birth to the afflicted. The recent debate over the late-term abortion of a woman with a foetus suffering from dwarfism raises issues that go to the heart of values held dear by our society. While ethicists from both sides have been arguing their cases, no one, as far as I am aware, has asked the opinion of those who have suffered as a consequence of coming into the world handicapped: that is, those who were not aborted ...
The Age - 25 July 2005
Killer's fate hanging on his IQ
The life of a convicted murderer is hanging in the balance while a US jury considers whether his intelligence has increased enough to allow him to be put to death. Daryl Atkins was named in a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2002 that said it was unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded. But the intellectual stimulation the killer got by constant contact with lawyers in the case is thought to have raised his IQ above the threshold of 70, which puts him in line for the death penalty in Virginia ...
BBC News - 25 July 2005
Morals crusaders get under director's skin
The American filmmaker Gregg Araki is used to discussing childhood sexual abuse. His latest movie, Mysterious Skin, has encouraged audiences to talk about the traumatic effects of being abused. At the Seattle International Film Festival a visibly shaken woman approached him and said: "Thank you for telling the truth." What Araki is not used to discussing is whether Mysterious Skin should be banned ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 20 July 2005
Judge him, yes - but pillory him, no
Steve Vizard is going to pay a price for the rest of his life, but just how much will tell us a lot about ourselves and what sort of society we live in. What we do know, by his own admission, is that Vizard took advantage of confidential information to secure a financial advantage. We also know he initially denied it, but was properly pursued by corporate regulators and made to confront the evidence. For that, he is rightly condemned throughout the entire community ...
The Age - 22 July 2005
Something rotten in immigration
The Palmer report unravels a story as frightening as a plot from Kafka about Cornelia Rau's 10-month journey through jail, although she had committed no crime, and immigration detention, despite being an Australian resident. But it does more than that. The ramifications of its findings about government abuse of power are profound and long-lasting ...
The Australian - 21 July 2005