Ethics news:
10 August 2005
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The world learned nothing from Hiroshima
Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The nuclear powers are commemorating it in their own special way: by seeking to ensure that the experiment is repeated. The British Government appears to have decided to replace Britain's Trident nuclear weapons, without consulting Parliament or informing the public - and the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston has been re-equipped to build a new generation of bombs ...
The Age - 5 August 2005
Hiroshima: the 'white man's bomb' revisited
Dropping the Bomb on Japan was the final act of a bitter race war in the Pacific. Ten years ago, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I wrote an essay for Living Marxism magazine arguing that the Americans dropped the Bomb on the Japanese rather than Nazi Germany as the final act of a bitter race war in the Pacific. To mark the sixtieth anniversary, we reprint a slightly edited version below ...
Spiked-Online - 2 August 2005
An inhuman disgrace
One can support the war against terror yet be disgusted by Guantanamo. Few people in America care about David Hicks. Nor do they care much about the more than 500 detainees held at the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the hundreds of alleged terrorists who have been picked up by CIA teams and flown to places such as Egypt and Jordan for interrogation. They don't care that an unknown number of alleged high-level terrorists, handed over to the US by Pakistan and other allies in the war on terror, are held in secret prisons ...
The Age - 8 August 2005
Good, bad or ugly, a fair trial is right
An alleged mass murderer is getting more justice than David Hicks. David Hicks may be bad, mad or blameless. But if he goes on trial before the US military commission in coming weeks, Australians will never know for sure which descriptor applies. The public can have no faith in the military commission's verdict on Hicks. If he is found guilty, many Australians simply will not believe it. Justice must be seen to be done ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 6 August 2005
No justice as Hicks thrown to the wolves
The Australian Government's support for US military justice has been exposed. There's nothing quite as powerful as insiders telling it like it is. For years now we've had well-intentioned outsiders saying that the Guantanamo Bay military commission is flawed and designed to produce fabricated results ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 5 August 2005
Freedom of speech takes a fall
The Andrew Fraser affair is not the first time an attempt has been made to stop discussion of race and IQ at Macquarie University. It also happened when I was a student there in 1977. The British psychologist Hans Eysenck was visiting Australia to talk about the subject, and had already had a lecture stopped by demonstrators at Sydney University. At Macquarie the university administration, to its credit, made sure the talk went ahead ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 6 August 2005
An important movie that should be seen
The attempt to ban Mysterious Skin was sadly misguided. The Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification's decision on Monday to reject an attempt by the Family Association to have Gregg Araki's powerful film Mysterious Skin banned from release in Australia is a welcome one. It is also a sorry indictment of the sweeping mood of misguided conservatism that would have this film's R rating questioned in the first place ...
The Age - 3 August 2005
Morale dilemma
Can we report threats without the risk of encouraging fears? It's an interesting trick to imagine how events here might be reported if they were taking place abroad. And, in AFP or World Service-speak, the line on recent Thursdays would be: "Thousands of police - many heavily-armed - took to the streets of London in an attempt by the government to restore calm after recent violence in the city." Our native media vocabulary would present a much less sinister picture ...
The Guardian - 6 August 2005
At risk with extreme views on TV
It might help the ratings but allowing fringe dwellers on talk shows is wrong. Twice in the past two weeks, I found myself disinvited from television shows when I objected to appearing with representatives of radical Islam or the far-left. In both cases, with CNN and MSNBC, I agreed to precede or follow these persons, but I refused to debate them, resulting in my exclusion. I have two reasons for not going on American television with people who hate the US ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 4 August 2005
The carnival of culture
Multiculturalism has to be a robust exchange of ideas, rather than of festivals and food. Recently, a friend sent me an article which he thought I'd find interesting as it was an attempt to sustain a non-violent version of Islam, one in which meddling clerics had no authority. Without the requirement of intermediaries, no one could come between you and God. The clerics were seen here as political figures, rather than the best interpreters of Islam ...
The Guardian - 4 August 2005
Dinky-di Aussie Muslims
What can we learn from the Muslims of Shepparton? Now that the London bombings have resurrected religious suspicion to its time-honoured place in the Australian mindset, then turned the blowtorch of blame on to multiculturalism, it is worth considering the experience of Shepparton. Listen to the outpourings from the hand-wringers here and in Britain and the recipe for inter-culture conflagration is simple: take an established, somewhat conservative community, pour in a large number of outsiders that look, act and think differently and whammo ...
The Age - 4 August 2005
Terrorism is not Islamic
Whether we are American, Nigerian, Indonesian, or British, we look like them, we dress like them, we speak like them and we pray like them. We cannot identify them before they strike. They hate us because we reject their ideology. They would kill us as "infidels." We are Muslims. So are they. But they are terrorists and we are not. That is the distinction. This is where we must make our stand ...
International Herald Tribune - 4 August 2005
Not bombed back to the dark ages by terror
There are limits to what freedoms we will give up in the war on terror. The results from this week's AgePoll of Australian attitudes towards terrorism show a nation prepared to sacrifice a range of civil liberties to decrease the likelihood of such attacks. But the picture is more sophisticated than one simply of public support for placing rights on the chopping block. To be clear at the outset, the overall message from the poll is far from surprising ...
The Age - 4 August 2005
Ladder of obligation
In an interview in The Age last Saturday, Lowitja O'Donoghue said that the ideas and policies dominating indigenous affairs are patronising and counterproductive - and that I am a principal architect of those policies. The most telling statement in the interview was O'Donoghue's reported comment on my suggestion that the most responsible members of an extended family be given some control over the welfare benefits paid to dysfunctional parents ...
The Age - 5 August 2005
How to call a crisis
Aid agencies must take responsibility for their failure to predict famines and face the fact that local people know better. I sold my first car in Maradi, Niger - epicentre of the current famine in the country. I was particularly proud of the car as it had just managed to cross the Sahara desert, but the price I got marked me out as a future aid worker rather than businessman. Fifteen years later, there is a crisis in Maradi, and I find myself reflecting over a career spent working in famine relief ...
The Guardian - 4 August 2005
Cry, the beloved, starving continent
Does the world need to see more Nigers before it acts on hunger, asks Desmond Tutu. The cameras are rolling on another African disaster: Niger and its desperate, starving children have thrust the continent back into the global spotlight. This tragedy has unfolded on the world's television screens even as leaders of the industrialised countries at the G8 summit pledged a historic amount of debt relief and humanitarian aid to African countries ...
The Age - 6 August 2005
Red Cross tsunami cocktails turn sour
Until last night, a wine and canapes event at the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Red Cross was to have been funded from money given to homeless tsunami victims. But the picture changed rapidly when questions were asked. The first in a series of catered parties for wealthy donors was no longer to be written off as an "administrative" cost of managing Australian's biggest humanitarian relief effort ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 4 August 2005
Globalisation is an anomaly and its time is running out
Cheap energy and relative peace helped create a false doctrine. The big yammer these days in the United States is to the effect that globalisation is here to stay: it's wonderful, get used to it. The chief cheerleader for this point of view is Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times and author of The World Is Flat. The seemingly unanimous embrace of this idea in the power circles of America is a marvellous illustration of the madness of crowds, for nothing could be further from the truth ...
The Guardian - 4 August 2005
All beings that feel pain deserve human rights
Equality of the species is the logical conclusion of post-Darwin morality. The word speciesism came to me while I was lying in a bath in Oxford some 35 years ago. It was like racism or sexism - a prejudice based upon morally irrelevant physical differences. Since Darwin we have known we are human animals related to all the other animals through evolution; how, then, can we justify our almost total oppression of all the other species? All animal species can suffer pain and distress ...
The Guardian - 6 August 2005
How did Srebrinica become a morality tale?
The West turned a bloody battle in a brutal civil war into a clash between good and evil. It is 10 years since the internationally brokered Dayton Agreement ended the civil war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the worst of the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia. In the West, the Yugoslav wars have became iconic symbols of both the transformed nature of war and conflict after the end of the Cold War, and of the moral imperative for new forms of Western intervention ...
Spiked-Online - 3 August 2005
Few want vote in booming Dubai
s part of a series about young people in the Middle East, the BBC News website reports on views about democratic reform in a city where change does not seem high on the agenda. "We live in the best democracy ever," says Samir Marzouqi, 19, who lives in a country where citizens never vote. As a national of the United Arab Emirates, he lives in what is now the only country in the Gulf which has no elected bodies. Political parties are banned ...
BBC News - 29 July 2005
'Bin Laden is seen as a hero'
The BBC talks to a youth worker who has worked in some of the poorest communities in the UK - and finds out why he thinks society doesn't realise what is happening. Ask Dawood Gustave what the average 'angry young Muslim man' thinks and he will say this: He probably doesn't support him, but the angry young Muslim man reckons Osama Bin Laden is a bit of a hero. He's a rebel, they tell him, giving the finger to the world's most powerful nations ...
BBC News - 4 August 2005
After 21/7: hiding behind the terrorists
By continuing to link the attacks in London with the war in Iraq, anti-war activists are conferring authority on the bombers. The alleged mutterings of an alleged failed suicide bomber have been cited as proof that the terror attacks in London on 7/7 and 21/7 were motivated by Iraq. Osman Hussain, also known as Hamdi Issac and currently cooped up in a Roman cell after fleeing London for Italy in the wake of the botched bombings of 21/7, has apparently said that he and his gang were driven by a 'political conviction', not a religious one ...
Spiked-Online - 2 August 2005
Infidelity is just not cricket, Shane
Warne's off-field performance is a turn-off to women cricket fans. I've been trying to work out when I lost interest in the cricket. Because ordinarily I'd be pretty keen on an Ashes series. It always reminds me of my first trips to the 'G when Lillee and Thompson worked end to end as a demolition machine. And I've loved its soundtrack in my life ever since. But I just can't muster the enthusiasm for the present Ashes series ...
The Age - 6 August 2005
It's a whole new way of seeing green
The land needs more people and animals, not less, to avoid environmental disaster. The Void Express leaves Central railway station at 7.10 each morning. Platform one. Officially, it is the XPT CountryLink express to the western plains. I caught this train on a recent Tuesday. At 10.42am, exactly on time, the train arrived at Bathurst, where I disembarked. I caught a taxi to the local airport. Waiting on the tarmac was the plane that would take me deeper into the void ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 8 August 2005
Our role in limiting nuclear proliferation?
We should not cash in on the world's growing appetite for uranium. Under pressure to limit greenhouse gas emissions, power utilities and governments in the United States and some European countries are reconsidering their moratoriums on constructing new nuclear reactors. Pro-nuclear scientists and lobby groups have already revived their arguments why nuclear power is better for world health than power derived from fossil fuels ...
The Age - 8 August 2005
How a minority in the BMA got their way on euthanasia
Eminent doctors used Stalinist tactics to engineer a change in the British Medical Association's policy on assisted dying. It was a Homer Simpson moment for the British Medical Association. At the end of its annual representative meeting on 30 June 2005, delegates voted to withdraw the organisation's firm and long-standing opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide. This leaves the world's most prestigious gathering of medical professionals in the absurd position of having no opinion on whether killing their patients is good or bad. Doh! ...
Spiked-Online - 9 August 2005