Ethics news:
9 November 2005
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The loss of utopia
It is the lack of idealism and complacency of the west that is viewed with repugnance. Ever since Plato, western thinkers have dreamed of ideal societies, utopias that could perhaps never be fully realised, but which at least gave us something to aspire to - noble, beautiful visions of what society might one day be like. Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon and Karl Marx all painted pictures of a future in which there is a strong sense of community, in which work is fulfilling and leisure is used wisely and creatively ...
The Guardian - 27 October 2005
The return of the caliphate
There is no reason why the west should set its face against the vision of a reunited Islamic world. It came as news to many Muslims, and probably non-Muslims too, that one of the things "fundamental to our civilisation" is opposition to any recreation of the Islamic caliphate. That is according to the home secretary, Charles Clarke, speaking last month as an honoured guest of the neocon Heritage Foundation in the US ...
The Guardian - 1 November 2005
The cultural heritage of suicide bombers
The London bombers' pedigree owes more to Western culture than the Koran. Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto. The Roman playwright Terence observed that nothing human was foreign to him. According to this principle, the actions of suicide bombers in London, however terrible, are nonetheless explicable in terms of our common humanity. In the aftermath of the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005, many ascribed the actions of the perpetrators to an indecipherable alien culture ...
Spiked-Online - 8 November 2005
Who's fanning the flames?
It is not that assimilation has failed, but that France only pays lip service to assimilation. Nearly two weeks of nightly rioting in the suburbs of Paris has left hundreds of cars burnt out, and 800 people arrested. Despite talking tough, president Jacques Chirac's ministers have been left looking impotent and divided in the face of an incoherent rabble. Paris's banlieues, or suburbs, are sociologically the model that the rest of the world followed ...
Spiked-Online - 8 November 2005
Why do we believe these anti-human horror stories?
From Lozells to New Orleans, unsubstantiated rumours of rape, murder and depravity are now being spread as hard fact. Why do we seem so ready to believe the worst of others these days? The police have blamed the rioting in Lozells in Birmingham, England, on the spread of 'rumour, myth and speculation' about the alleged gang rape of a teenage black girl by Asian men in a local shop. ... Yet neither victim nor witnesses have emerged, and it now seems certain that no such attack occurred ...
Spiked-Online - 28 October 2005
When at war words can kill
The struggle against terrorism needs curbs on enemy propaganda. It was only rhetoric. No one ever accused William Joyce of harming a hair on a single person's head. He was nothing more than an English-language radio commentator who broadcast the Nazi version of reality from a radio studio in Berlin during World War II. But the fact that the British fascist known as "Lord Haw Haw" trafficked solely in ideology did not save him from the gallows ...
The Age - 1 November 2005
Leave medieval methods to those we seek to contain
Archaic sedition laws are not the way to counter the threat of terrorism. The crime of sedition is an arcane legal construct, a throwback to the pre-Enlightenment days when speaking ill of a king was a short cut to the gallows. Whatever the challenges of fighting terrorism, the Howard Government would have done better to let the sedition laws lie fallow in Australia, as they have done since the 1940s ...
The Age - 28 October 2005
Essential liberties are lost in imitation
Without a bill of rights, Australia lacks the safeguards that underpin Britain's stand on terrorism. After the London bombings in July, it comes as no surprise that Britain, like Australia, is in the midst of debate about new terrorism laws. These debates cover the same ground because the Australian law is based largely on British precedents. Indeed, John Howard has sought to justify our new law on the basis that it represents "best practice" from overseas ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 27 September 2005
You could be feeling safe in no time thanks to the anti-terrorism laws
How come the Government's not doing an expensive ad campaign for the anti-terrorism laws? There could be shots of happy Muslims being rounded up and herded into an ASIO holding cell. And close-ups of the attractive bracelets to be worn by those under house arrest. The voice-over could explain how everyone's rights will be "protected by law". Surely the director will include a shot of some bearded bloke merrily making his allotted phone call home ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 29 October 2005
Without answers, terror laws should be rejected
The Government has failed to justify the case for expanded powers. We can all agree that terrorist attacks need to be prevented. And we can all agree that civil liberties need to be protected. So beneath the legal and constitutional technicalities, debate over the Government's proposed terrorism legislation involves striking a balance between two opposing risks. One is the possibility that the proposed powers will be misused. The other is the danger that without extra powers the Government would not be able to stop a terrorist attack ...
The Age - 31 October 2005
New law could link our courts with torture
Allowing overseas video evidence in terror trials could prove dangerous. Forget the Federal Government's use of the Melbourne Cup as a smokescreen for the introduction of its Anti-Terrorism Bill into Parliament. Consider instead what other laws are passing under the radar courtesy of the debate over that bill itself. Because the spectre of torture has arrived in Australia and few seem to have noticed it ...
The Age - 2 November 2005
Time to retire the noose
There is no evidence that Singapore's death penalty is working in the fight against drugs. Time is running out for Nguyen Tuong Van, the Melbourne salesman on death row in Singapore's Changi prison. If the talk in Singapore legal circles is correct, at 6am on Friday week the 25-year-old will be escorted up a scaffold and hanged ...
The Age - 2 November 2005
Don't ask Singapore to make an exception
A 25-year-old man risks his life to help pay the debts of his drug-addicted twin brother. He is discovered, tried and sentenced to death. What is to be made of this outcome? He is a hero. ... A hero is what Nguyen Tuong Van would be today, except for one crucial, deadly detail: drugs. Nguyen is not a hero but a criminal who, notwithstanding that he was driven to desperation by concern for his brother, trafficked in the substance responsible for destroying the life of his brother ...
The Australian - 28 October 2005
Sold out for brownie points
If any one of the Bali nine is shot by an Indonesian firing squad, the Australian Federal Police will have blood on its hands. The AFP Commissioner, Mick Keelty, will resent this assertion mightily and he will deny it until he is blue in the face. But the appalling fact is that his officers gave up these nine young Australians to the police in Bali in the certain knowledge that death is the penalty for the crimes they are alleged to have committed ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 29 October 2005
The long history of a bus ride
Rosa Parks led an inspiring life. Unfortunately, we rarely hear about it. That may sound surprising at a time when Rosa Parks, whose body lay in state in the Capitol on Sunday and Monday, is probably mentioned in every American history textbook and is the subject of dozens of biographies. The problem is that her story is usually presented as a simplistic morality tale that goes like this ...
International Herald Tribune - 1 November 2005
Race isn't always so black and white
Ostensibly white people who always thought of themselves as 100 percent European find they have substantial African ancestry. People who regard themselves as black sometimes discover that the African ancestry is a minority portion of their DNA. These results are forcing people to re-examine the arbitrary calculations our culture uses to decide who is "white" and who is "black" ...
International Herald Tribune - 1 November 2005
When body counts kill
Our obsession with numbers of casualties in Iraq encourages the insurgents to make even more. Some commentators seem to have been waiting with bated breath for the two-thousandth American soldier in Iraq to die. No sooner had CNN announced that, by its reckoning, the death on Tuesday of Staff Sergeant George T Alexander from wounds he sustained in a bomb attack north of Baghdad had brought the American death toll to a grim 2,000, than anti-war websites and news outlets were making it into the big news of the month ...
Spiked-Online - 28 October 2005
A new era calls for a new model
In September, one of us was looking at the ravages of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the other was in China discussing the potential impact that the eruption of a new flu pandemic could have on dozens of other countries. Though these events are distinct in several aspects, they are also similar in their fabric as the new types of crises to be faced. As such, they embody a fundamental challenge: a qualitative jump from local to global risks ...
International Herald Tribune - 1 November 2005
Whose internet?
Some foreign governments are uncomfortable with the United States' controlling the nuts and bolts of the Internet. That is understandable. So much of the success of the global economy depends on its smooth functioning and the United States has not been a model of receptiveness to other nations' concerns in recent years. There may be a multilateral solution down the road, but right now it is in everyone's best interest to keep control of the Internet where it was founded, in America ...
International Herald Tribune - 1 November 2005
Music, music, music - with no copyright troubles
There's a popular gift that could have the recipient gone for a song. As Christmas approaches, this season's No.1 gift looks set to be Apple's iPod. But be warned: by buying someone an iPod you may be limiting their content choices and you may also be buying legal trouble. Apple's iPod has been greeted by the recording industry with almost a messianic fervour. Yet the iPod does not come with pre-loaded music ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 2 November 2005