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.
What would you have done?
Sixty years on, it's all too easy to condemn the bombing of Hiroshima. The 60th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb falls a week today. The occasion will be marked by a torrent of prose from those who regard the destruction of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki three days later as "war crimes", forever attaching shame to those who ordered them. By contrast, there will be a plethora of dismissive comment from pundits who believe the nuclear assault saved a million allied casualties ...
The Guardian - 30 July 2005
My grandad the Nazi
Dan Tetsell grew up with an uncomfortable family secret - his grandfather was an SS officer. The more he's got to know about him, the more Dan realises his grandad was, in many ways, just an ordinary guy. And that's what's worried him. Lots of people find their grandparents embarrassing. Maybe they pretend to be hard of hearing, maybe they have a weird fondness for boiled sweets. Or maybe, like my grandfather, they were a Nazi ...
BBC News - 1 August 2005
Speaking out of turn is not free speech
Ideologues shouldn't make comments in their employer's name. The concept of academic freedom is in the news again. And again, civil libertarians are stepping forward to say academics should be entitled to say absolutely anything they want to say - irrespective of how inflammatory, offensive or false their comments may be. Meet Andrew (call me "Drew") Fraser who, until recently, was a long-standing but little-noticed academic at Macquarie University ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 2 August 2005
Certainty isn't a sure thing
To acknowledge our partiality and confusion is more realistic than rigid adherence to a particular point of view. As a young nun in the 1960s I was not allowed to have any opinions. During our first week in the convent our mistress told us that many ideas and practices of the order would seem incomprehensible - even perverse at first - because we were spiritually immature and still tainted by secular values ...
The Guardian - 27 July 2005
Dialogue is the only way to end this cycle of violence
The west and Islam must acknowledge the truths in both their stories. The London bombings pose a dilemma. It is hard to believe that the right response to terrorism is to make concessions. But the terrorism also seems part of a cycle of violence in which we too are involved, a cycle of potential war between Islam and the west that threatens to spin out of control. Should we do nothing, leaving the violence to accelerate? Or should we make concessions that may encourage terrorism? ...
The Guardian - 27 July 2005
Europe: where's the spirit of liberty now?
EU elites are using the cover of recent terror attacks to take away our freedoms. The idea of freedom has captivated the European imagination for centuries. New York's Statue of Liberty, which became a world symbol for the search for a better life, was presented to America by the French. The engineer was Gustave Eiffel, creator of the Paris tower landmark, and his statue was entitled 'Liberty enlightening the world' ...
Spiked-Online - 22 July 2005
Don't let terrorism win
Immediately after the first London bombings, Tony Blair and John Howard told us that only if we went about our business as normal would we deny terrorists their victory. A day or so later, they announced that they were contemplating (perhaps radical) changes to laws that govern us. In the same week, speaking in New York to the America Australia Association, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said he was examining his obligations under article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ...
The Age - 2 August 2005
Bombers come from cults of personality
There have been dozens of attacks on US abortion clinics by religious extremists - ultra-Catholics with guns and born agains with bombs - that most of their co-religionists would abhor. Just as the overwhelming majority of Northern Irish wanting the Brits out of Ireland totally opposed Irish Republican Army atrocities. Do you damn the Seventh Day Adventists because of David Koresh? ...
The Australian - 26 July 2005
Truth struggling
In all the coverage of the bombing of London, a truth has struggled to be heard. With honorable exceptions, it has been said guardedly, apologetically. Occasionally, a member of the public has broken the silence, as an East Londoner did when he walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude. "Iraq!" he said. "We invaded Iraq and what did we expect? Go on say it" ...
Iviews - 30 July 2005
A misguided assault on multiculturalism
It is terrorism that is dangerous, not tolerance. For some, multiculturalism has always been a scapegoat for a variety of real and perceived social ills. What causes ethnic enclaves? Multiculturalism. Why don't we have a crystal clear national identity? Multiculturalism. Violent youth gangs? Multiculturalism. The list goes on. The evidence for these assertions was always flimsy and political ...
The Age - 26 July 2005
Relax, migrants have the best of both worlds
Doubts about our multicultural success following the London bombings are unfounded. Even as a young child, I was well aware of the benefits of living as a manifestation of multicultural Australia. For one, it meant presents at both Tet (Vietnamese New Year) and Christmas. Moreover, it meant I could spend nights with my parents talking about their childhood experiences in Vietnam, while spending idyllic schoolyard afternoons with my mates ...
The Age - 31 July 2005
A matter of identity
The killing of an innocent man in London raises serious questions. The man shot dead at point-blank range on the Stockwell tube in London last Saturday was Jean Charles de Menezes. He was a Brazilian electrician with no links whatever to terrorism. London Metropolitan Police admitted this on Saturday night and said they were very sorry. So, no doubt, are his family and anyone who witnessed this public execution ...
The Age - 26 July 2005
The textual analysis of terrorism
The apology by the Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Ian Blair to the family of the young Brazilian shot dead on the London underground highlights the appalling dilemma the police are currently facing, as well as the fear among Britain's multi-ethnic communities that anyone who does not look European can be mistaken for a suicide bomber. As the 17th-century Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Retz, wrote: "Of all the passions, fear weakens judgement most" ...
The Guardian - 30 July 2005
After Stockwell: the threat of fear and defeatism
The response to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes suggests that we are losing the ability to have a rational debate about terrorism. Since the London bombings on 7 July, Metropolitan Police chiefs have repeatedly called for people to remain calm. The shooting of a 27-year-old Brazilian man at Stockwell Underground station suggested that, if anybody was panicking, it was the police more than the public ...
Spiked-Online - 26 July 2005
Blair's two faces of terrorism
Spot the difference: the Prime Minister declares war on al-Qaeda while making peace with IRA murderers. Ever since he became Prime Minister and began cutting a deal with the IRA, but still more since the 11 September attacks nearly four years ago, Tony Blair has tried to answer a conundrum: how can terrorism be utterly and unforgivably wrong in one case, but tolerable and negotiable in another? ...
The Guardian - 31 July 2005
Now IRA stands for I Renounce Arms
After a three-year logjam in the Northern Ireland peace process, the IRA has announced that it is finally abandoning its armed struggle for a united Ireland—ordering its fighters to dump their arms and pledging henceforth to seek its goal by peaceful means. It is an historic day in a conflict whose origins go back more than five centuries. But those who want the province to stay British will take some convincing ...
The Economist - 28 July 2005
Maria Korp: the difficult moral questions
There are no easy answers in cases as morally complex as this. The decision by Public Advocate Julian Gardner to authorise a halt to the artificial feeding of Maria Korp raises a number of difficult moral issues. In particular, the meanings of the terms "burdensome" and "futile" that the advocate used at his press conference on Tuesday to describe the use of the feeding tube in this case are not easy to pin down ...
The Age - 28 July 2005
Singer on 'speciesism': a specious argument
In his new book In Defense of Animals, Peter Singer reduces the value of human life to a tick-list of capabilities. Peter Singer is recognised as the driving force behind the modern animal rights movement, and is widely credited with making 'speciesism' an international issue - speciesism being the idea that a human-centered morality is as abhorrent as racism or sexism ...
Spiked-Online - 29 July 2005
'Millionaires factory' defends $10m salaries
Macquarie Bank has challenged criticism of the $10 million-plus pay packets handed to its top executives, saying it can't base remuneration policy on society's perceptions of what is right or wrong. The Australian investment bank, dubbed The Millionaire's Factory, says it has no choice but to base its pay levels on its global rivals or else risk losing its top people to overseas firms ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 28 July 2005
AIDS: too much morality, too little sense
Politicians must suspend moral judgements if AIDS is to be defeated. THE world is not winning the war against AIDS. By the end of this year, 3m poor people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are supposed to be receiving the treatment they need. So far, though, barely 1m are. At present, about 40m people are living with HIV, some 5m are infected with it each year and over 3m die from it. The human and economic cost is huge ...
The Economist - 28 July 2005
Congo's child victims of superstition
Poverty, civil war and a widely held belief in witchcraft means children in the Democratic Republic of Congo can be extremely vulnerable. Angus Crawford hears the stories of some of the young victims in the capital, Kinshasa. When Maria starts to cry, she does not make a sound. She sits rigid and silent, staring straight ahead. She allows just a trickle of tears from each eye. She does not even blink ...
BBC News - 30 July 2005
How to find forgiveness for the costliest of mistakes
Most families long to hear 'I'm sorry.' Part of being human is making mistakes. But what we say and do after the mistake makes a tremendous difference. When a mistake involves serious injury or even death, the stakes are high. A highly publicized 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine, "To Err Is Human," estimates that nearly 100,000 hospital deaths each year may be caused by preventable errors ...
Christian Science Monitor - 2 August 2005
Trouble in store
Our rampant consumer culture is nurturing dissatisfaction and cynicism in Britain's poorest children. If the holiday is booked and the suitcases almost packed, chances are that if you are taking the kids, they're the ones who have been the key decision makers as to where you are going. And once you're on holiday, where you eat and what you do will probably be largely decided by your children ...
The Guardian - 1 August 2005
Small planet seeking saviour
Ecologists need a figurehead to stir us from selfish slumber, to help translate nebulous dread into action. When I left school in 1989, we were all given the books of our choice. Mine was The Green Guide, a worthy tome devoted to saving the planet, turning heaters off and using crystal deodorant. Soon afterwards, I moved to Sheffield and spent the winter eating Pot Noodles in front of a leaky gas fire, but back then, at least, my ecological intentions were good ...
The Guardian - 27 July 2005
Do mobile phones invade our privacy?
On 20 July 2005, spiked organised a seminar in central London entitled 'Mobile society: Do mobile phones invade our privacy?'. The seminar was sponsored by the mobile service provider O2 and hosted by IBM, and accompanied the current spiked/O2 online debate on the same theme. The seminar was chaired by spiked's commissioning editor Jennie Bristow. Five speakers gave introductions outlining their thoughts on the subject ...
Spiked-Online - 22 July 2005
Red light for auto erotica
In Australia, there is no R-rating for computer games. So when a game was revealed to have interactive sex scenes, it was banned. When Carl "CJ" Johnson needs money he beats up the nearest drug dealer. CJ will keep punching until his victim falls and then begins stomping. The more CJ stomps, the more money he will get. The pool of blood around his victim will grow with each blow. When it comes to the (many) ladies in his life, CJ is a bit more subtle ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 1 August 2005
Downloading 'myths' challenged
People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests. Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans. Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives, the report said ...
BBC News - 27 July 2005