Ethics news:
16 November 2005
To discuss any issues raised by these or other ethics-related news stories visit our ethics forum. To view other issues of ethics in the newsclick here.
Note that you may need to register for free with sites to read some of these news articles.
The price of fear
The radical views of some Australian Muslims are not a threat - political intolerance is. Historically, fear has proven to be one of the most successful political means of controlling the masses. Not for the first time, our political masters are employing the tradition of using exaggerated fear to further their objectives. This time around the aim is to gain public acceptance for anti-terror legislation that is clearly draconian ...
The Age - 8 November 2005
Exploiting our nuclear fears
It's alleged that three Australian terror suspects were thinking about targeting a nuclear reactor. Where could they have got an idea like that? This morning's news wires are buzzing with the revelation that some of those terror suspects arrested in Australia last week were toying with the idea of targeting a nuclear reactor. According to a police document released this morning, three of the 18 men arrested had been stopped near Lucas Heights ...
Spiked-Online - 14 November 2005
Sedition clamp is no joke
Proposed new laws will threaten our artists' freedom of expression. As anyone who bothers with serious mainstream media knows, our federal and state governments are proposing harsh criminal penalties for urging any assistance of the enemy, including peaceful and non-violent assistance - and, more incredibly, for urging disaffection against the Government of the Commonwealth ...
The Age - 12 November 2005
Putting the muzzle on the media
The Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005, now pending in the Senate, further entrenches severe risks for the operation of a free press in this country. We cannot preserve our democracy if we destroy institutions that serve it. The nation's leading publishers - Fairfax, News, West Australian Newspapers and AAP - and the Press Council have joined to express strong opposition to the bill ...
The Age - 15 November 2005
A test case for free speech
Should the Racial Volunteer Force be free to urge readers to 'roast a rabbi'? Those of us who defend free speech argue that no words or images, however vile, should be banned. The case of Mark Atkinson and his racist friends pushes that principle to near-breaking point. If there is a limit to free speech, everybody seems to agree that they crossed it ...
Spiked-Online - 9 November 2005
How design supporters insult God's intelligence
The idea of a supreme being who leaves creation to chance does not sit well with some Christians. Intelligent design has become the latest hot topic in the increasingly blurred distinction between secular and sacred in Australian society. It has received qualified support from the federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, and is being promoted within some Christian schools as an acceptable "scientific" alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 15 November 2005
Our faith in science
Science has always fascinated me. As a child in Tibet, I was keenly curious about how things worked. When I got a toy I would play with it a bit, then take it apart to see how it was put together. As I became older, I applied the same scrutiny to a movie projector and an antique automobile. At one point I became particularly intrigued by an old telescope, with which I would study the heavens ...
International Herald Tribune - 13 November 2005
Unethical committees
A burgeoning ethical infrastructure can mean that scientists take less care of their research subject. Heinz Lehman went to Canada as a refugee psychiatrist in 1937 and worked at a large psychiatric hospital in Montreal with over 1600 psychiatric patients. Lehman was convinced that the major psychiatric disorders were biologically based and, in the absence of any proven effective treatments, he was willing to try anything ...
Spiked-Online - 10 November 2005
France and the Muslim myth
The French riots have been a godsend for those who oppose integration and progress. Analysts and commentators often seek to find evidence to support their well-established ideas in any given event. So while critics of the 'French social model' have gleefully seen evidence of its failure in the recent violence in France, its supporters have seen evidence of the damage done by right-wing policies ...
The Guardian - 13 November 2005
France: no wisdom on migrants
The social ills in France do not prove multiculturalism fails - they don't have such a thing. Beware a Frenchman bearing advice on social order. On 60 Minutes last Sunday, Peter Overton interviewed Dominique Moisi about the civil disorder that began in north-east Paris more than two weeks ago and which has spread to other cities, including Lyons and Marseilles ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 15 November 2005
Letter from a burning banlieue
As the dust settles over Aulnay-sous-Bois, an American student asks the rioters what all that was about. Before I came to fisticuffs with the young rioters I was interviewing, before they relieved me of my camera, we spoke. It was nightfall; we were solidly on their turf, their project in the Aulnay neighbourhood of Rose des Vents. The Franco-Algerian adolescent who gave me his name as Kabir The Gun, one of my two subsequent boxing partners ...
Spiked-Online - 14 November 2005
Riots are a class act - and often they're the only alternative
France now accepts the need for social justice. No petition, peaceful march or letter to an MP could have achieved this. 'If there is no struggle, there is no progress," said the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning ...
The Guardian - 14 November 2005
Evil yes, mad no
Bruce Lawrence's collection of writings by cave-dweller Osama bin Laden, Messages to the World, reveals him to be a formidable figure. There he (probably) squats, the most wanted man in the world. His world is a cave in the Hindu Kush or the badlands of Baluchistan; his life is constant flight. Maybe, because we've heard nothing from him for nearly a year now, he is wounded, cornered or dead ...
The Guardian - 13 November 2005
How to lose friends and alienate people
The Bush administration's approach to torture beggars belief. There are many difficult trade-offs for any president when it comes to diplomacy and the fight against terrorism. Should you, for instance, support an ugly foreign regime because it is the enemy of a still uglier one? Should a superpower submit to the United Nations when it is not in its interests to do so? ...
Spiked-Online - 8 November 2005
10 lessons from the medieval knights
Police are putting unruly youngsters through their paces on an eight-week "knight school", to teach them some of the ways of medieval knights. The Lincolnshire scheme has been hailed a success in improving behaviour, so what kind of lessons could knights teach youngsters today? Knights of old were either virtuous and honest men who lived according to a code of chivalry, or a bunch of marauding looters who were lucky to get a good write up in the history books ...
BBC News - 28 October 2005
God save Nguyen, the Queen won't do it
The Queen's feeble response to a plea from Nguyen's mother, Kim, to intervene in support of her son's bid for clemency raises serious constitutional issues. Commentators and legal advocates continue to protest against the death penalty in the case of Nguyen Tuong Van, an Australian citizen due to be hanged in Singapore. Nguyen is to be put to death for a drug offence for which he would be jailed for perhaps six years in Australia ...
The Age - 16 November 2005
Let's talk about sex - frankly and frequently
Sex education is a hit and miss affair. Isn't it time to set a formal curriculum? When it comes to sex education, we are strangely bashful. Intermittent debate about abortion rates, or the rising prevalence of sexually transmissible infections among the young, fails to spur meaningful discussion about sex education at school. Who, for example, is teaching it and is it adequate? ...
The Age - 13 November 2005
Tired of globalisation?
But trade liberalisation and other forms of openness are needed more than ever. Frederic Bastiat, who was that rarest of creatures, a French free-market economist, wrote to this newspaper in 1846 to express a noble and romantic hope: “May all the nations soon throw down the barriers which separate them.” Those words were echoed 125 years later by the call of John Lennon, who was not an economist but a rather successful global capitalist, to “imagine there's no countries” ...
The Economist - 3 November 2005