Ethics news:
24 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.
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Cotton wool kids
Fifty years ago, children were allowed to roam free; now, in the school holidays, the streets are empty. Are we doing kids any favours? 'And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.' Zechariah, 8:5. Many changes have taken place since Old Testament times, but if you glance at your street during the school summer holidays, the lack of children thereof is perhaps the most worrying. There is a new omnipotent force on the block - child safety ...
Spiked-Online - 19 August 2005
Beware the cry of stranger danger
There's fear, and loathing. In Banora Point, northern NSW, residents take to the streets armed with hammers and nails to advertise a popular crucifixion: eject the pedophile. In Hazelbrook in the Blue Mountains, the signs on the fences are ads not for beer or chips, but fear: watch your child. Across Sydney, notes from the principal clutter school bags: the streets are not safe ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 20 August 2005
Starving for the cameras
People dying from hunger like those in Niger should not have to wait for the TV crews to arrive. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, known as FEWS Net, monitors the threat of mass hunger in some of the poorest parts of the world. It is hardly surprising, then, that FEWS Net has published an inquiry into the world's failure to respond to food shortages in Niger and the rest of the Sahel. The report is subtitled simply: “What went wrong?” That is the right question to ask. But what is surprising, and disconcerting, is that the report was written in 1997, not 2005 ...
The Economist - 18 August 2005
Just who is the Big Brother?
Ban TV programs? Let our parents sort out right from wrong. I'm probably in agreement with Liberal MP Trish Draper on one point: "Television", as Clive James once wrote in his capacity as a critic for The Observer, "transmits values, whether real, false or confused", and the values transmitted by Big Brother can be pretty foul. Like films, novels and plays in earlier eras, television programs inevitably serve as a form of social instruction ...
The Age - 20 August 2005
Piano man: what's the score?
The mystery of Piano Man is solved, proclaim the papers. But is it really? And what does the whole saga say about us? So that's it? After four months of feverish speculation about the real identity of the man "washed up" on a Kent beach, we have the answer we didn't want. A collective sense of anticlimax, maybe even a sense of being cheated, prevails as the mystery unravels around the haunted-looking stranger who suddenly appeared in our midst ...
BBC News - 23 August 2005
Let's talk about how to close the identity gap
Two determining issues in the evolution of a European Union identity - immigration and Turkish accession - can be traced back to negative perceptions of Islam. Why is Islam seen as a problem? What do we mean when we talk about Islam-related problems? Many people in Europe see Islam as a problem of great concern. Others feel uncomfortable even linking the words "Islam" and "problem," because they fear stigmatizing a group already seen as vulnerable. But not articulating the problem means not solving the problem ...
The International Herald Tribune - 23 August 2005
Cultural assault on human rights
On Monday, Peter Costello said migrants should understand our core values. Such as equality for women. Yesterday, it was the Prime Minister's turn. He met Muslim leaders to sell the message that all Australians, whatever their race or culture or religious beliefs, must agree to a core set of values. Like an abhorrence of violence. Nice idea. But if we are having trouble selling that message - which, given the summit, apparently we are - we only have ourselves to blame ...
The Australian - 24 August 2005
The idolatry of holy books
The demand for a reformed Islam fails to take into account what the Christian Reformation really meant. Salman Rushdie has now joined those who insist that Islam needs a reformation. What better place to assess such a demand than in the new Musée International de la Réforme in Geneva? Here familiar portraits of Luther and Calvin magically appear in a mirror to lip-synch the glories of the 16th-century Reformation - a revolution against a corrupt Catholic church ...
The Guardian - 17 August 2005
The tyranny of reading
So Victoria Beckham has never read a book in her life. She doesn't have the time, apparently, and anyway she prefers listening to music. Noel Gallagher made a similar announcement a few weeks back when, interviewed by David Walliams, he revealed that he was making his first foray into the literary world, via Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. "I've never read a book!" Gallagher told the amazed Walliams ...
The Guardian - 17 August 2005
Today's virtual jugglers will be tomorrow's high achievers
Electronic games and the internet are not dumbing down a generation of users. Like jazz music, television and rave parties before them, there's not much electronic games and the internet haven't been blamed for when it comes to their impact on the young. They make children fat. They incite violence. They render users antisocial, depriving them of face-to-face engagement with the physical world ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 22 August 2005
Three cheers for the office bludger: the zero who became a hero
Bored by meaningless work, management jargon, memos and meetings, a new type of professional slacker has emerged - the actively disengaged. Rather than quitting and moving to the coast, this species avoids work where possible and puts up with corporate drudgery just to bank their pay. These time servers have a new hero in Corinne Maier, the French author of an angry manifesto against modern working life, Bonjour Paresse, to be published here next month as Hello Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 20 August 2005
The marks of human progress
So what if astronauts can glimpse signs of man's impact on Earth? Two cheers for NASA on the return of its space shuttle Discovery to Earth, mostly intact and with its crew alive and well. One cheer is deducted, partly because - as has been argued elsewhere on spiked - the mission was a glorified 'grocery-delivery trip to the International Space Station' and the narrow focus upon the mission's safety 'reflects a limited view of human potential' ...
Spiked-Online - 18 August 2005
Let's have a proper scientific debate
Intelligent design evokes strong responses. Time for cool investigation. Opponents of intelligent design theories fear the evolution debate has been hijacked by the fundamentalists. I fear they are right, but it's scientistic (blind faith in science) fundamentalists, not religious. Intelligent design theorists say evolution is largely demonstrable but is not the result of mere chance. The traditional account of a steady but gradual development, they say, is at odds with the incredible complexity of even the simplest cell ...
The Age - 18 August 2005
This was the most glaring scandal of all
UN sanctions destroyed Iraq but no one will be tried for the crime. The US Congress is incensed about a scandal. From 1996 to 2003 the UN's oil-for-food programme allegedly enabled Saddam Hussein to misappropriate hundreds of millions of dollars. Certain UN officials - particularly Benon Sevan, the man in charge of the programme - are alleged to have pocketed large kickbacks. It is also claimed that foreign politicians took similar advantage of the system ...
The Guardian - 19 August 2005
Gaza reality check
Ever since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced plans to remove nearly 9,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, the withdrawal has been certain to be an emotional scene. Images beaming from the desert this week are bearing that out. As Israel moved to leave land it has held for 38 years, soldiers carried crying and screaming residents out of their homes. Some Gaza settlers pinned orange stars to their chests in a reference to the Holocaust ...
The International Herald Tribune - 19 August 2005
Sex and empowerment can go hand in hand
There's no contradiction between being a feminist and a model. If Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and the 2005 cast of Big Brother had conservative tongues wagging about the effects of evil pop culture on helpless young women, the results of a recent British poll might just make them convulse. The survey of almost 1000 girls aged between 15 and 19, conducted by a mobile entertainment company, TheLab, found that many young women's favoured role models were men's magazine models ...
The Age - 19 August 2005
Prenuptual agreement; the need for safe sex
Engagement parties and white weddings are back in fashion among the young, even if these days the "young" are nudging 30. They like the old rituals. But there's a new ritual the young things could make their own: the wedding night ditch-the-condom ceremony. It could be beautiful. It could be more meaningful than the service in the church. Tossing the rubbers out for all time could be an emotional rite of passage, signifying a couple's commitment to sexual fidelity ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 20 August 2005
Why the all male High Court needs a woman's touch
Justice Michael McHugh sent out a call on Wednesday night for a woman to replace him on the High Court, when at midnight on October 31 he is constitutionally obliged to retire. He made a similar cry in a speech delivered on October 27 last year in Perth. The Chief Justice, Murray Gleeson, has given the impression he's not so sure about that. On March 24 this year on the ABC's PM program he was asked, "Wouldn't you prefer to see some women sitting alongside you?" His reply: "Instead of whom?" ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 19 August 2005
The CV detectives
It might seem like the only way to secure that dream job, but with one in four people lying on their CVs, employers are wising up, and have identified the typical fibs people tell. So, you founded your university debating society, did you? And what was your greatest challenge in that role? However unlikely, it's a job interview question some people would dread, if they are one of the many people to have faked parts of their curriculum vitae ...
BBC News -22 August 2005
Does it matter if you call it a civil war?
Iraq's constitution could be seen as a draft 'peace pact' for warring parties. Finding a way to head off civil war is at the heart of all the major initiatives - including the talks over a new constitution - in Iraq. But by most common political-science definitions of the term, "civil war" is already here. "It's not a threat. It's not a potential. Civil war is a fact of life there now,'' says Pavel Baev, head of the Center for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway ...
Christian Science Monitor - 22 August 2005
Mate: a workers' word nicked by the PM
John Howard and George Bush are not mates; they're accomplices, writes Michael Leunig. When Prime Minister Howard and President Bush announced that they were "mates", it was clear mateship had been boldly redefined. A historical tilting point had been achieved after which mateship was officially a dead parrot and "mate" had become our hottest new weasel word. Australian troops at Gallipoli, who were also meant to be great mates, never used the word "mate" in the Howard way ...
The Age - 22 August 2005
Student held over online mugging
Police in Japan have arrested a Chinese student over the use of a network of software "bots" to steal items in an online role playing game (RPG). Players were attacked in the game, Lineage II, and their items were then sold for cash on auction sites. The attacks were carried out using automated bots, which are difficult for human game players to defeat ...
BBC News - 20 August 2005
Korp morally responsible for wife's death
Joe Korp bore moral responsibility for the death of his wife, Maria, even if he had lived and been acquitted of her attempted murder, a judge said today. That was one of the main reasons that Justice Philip Mandie revoked Mrs Korp's will which had Mr Korp as the sole beneficiary and executor, it was revealed today ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 18 August 2005