Ethics news
Keep up with ethics-related stories appearing in the news.
Below are stories collected from news sources around the web relating to ethics. Click on the links provided to read the stories in full.
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Australia bans death penalty and appeals to Indonesia to spare Bali nine
11 March 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
A Liberal senator has used the permanent abolition of the death penalty in Australia to call for Indonesia to spare the lives of members of the Bali nine, saying the use of capital punishment is not reflective of a civilised society.
The Federal Parliament today passed laws that ensure the death penalty can never be reintroduced by any state or territory in Australia.
Both sides...
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Iraqis vote
8 March 2010 - The New York Times
Final results from Iraq’s parliamentary election may not be available for days, but this much we can already say for sure: Iraq’s citizens once again showed tremendous courage and determination, defying bombs and a flawed pre-election process to cast their ballots.
We hope that Iraq’s political leaders will show at least as much courage in coming weeks as they...
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Will Israel Join the March of Folly?
10 March 2010 - The New York Times
Barbara Tuchman, in her classic book “March of Folly,” examined four cases in history when governments acted contrary to their own best interests: the Trojans who let the Greeks bring the fatal horse into their midst; the papacy, which allowed and even brought about the Protestant secession; the British who lost America, and America, which lost the war in Vietnam.
When I...
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Only a carbon tax and nuclear power can save us
11 March 2010 - The Australian
Australia will suffer if fossil fuel use continues unabated. Climate extremes will increase. Poleward expansion of the subtropics will make Australia often hotter and drier, with stronger droughts and hotter fires, as the jet stream retreats southward.
But when ocean temperature patterns bring rain, the warmer air will dump much more water, causing damaging floods. Storms will become...
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Stereotypes do our peoples an injustice
11 March 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
I was taken aback when I learnt that in a recent Lowy Institute survey, 54 per cent of Australian respondents doubted that Indonesia would act responsibly in its international relations. Indeed, the most persistent problem in our relations is the persistence of age-old stereotypes - misleading, simplistic mental caricatures that depict the other side in a bad light. Even in the age of the...
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Imagine if Australian women were flogged for drinking a beer
1 March 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
If my women friends lived in Malaysia, and we happened to be Muslim, we'd – with a few exceptions – be badly battered and bruised. Our bodies would be red raw from constant thrashing. I wonder if we'd wear those lashing marks with pride. Or would the pain and humiliation of official caning eventually break our spirit, and reduce us to a pitiful submission?
The humiliation...
Turn up the heat on solariums
26 February 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
After the very public death of 26-year-old solarium customer Clare Oliver from melanoma in September 2007, health authorities introduced mandatory rules for solariums.
Health authorities, journalists and the public had been jolted out of complacency. Solariums were not like spray tan studios, catering to fashion victims. They were cancer incubators. The days of voluntary codes were...
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It is time for Israel's friends to condemn its acts of terrorism
1 March 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
By and large a one-dimensional approach has characterised our approach to understanding the phenomenon of terrorism. However, the recent killing of a Hamas figure, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai should make us cast our net wider to focus also on state terrorism.
The Dubai police have claimed with almost undisputed evidence that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, was behind the...
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Survivors know best: Torture is always wrong
3 February 2010 - Christian Science Monitor
It’s immoral and it doesn’t make anyone more secure. Just ask those who’ve been tortured.
They live invisibly among us, 41,000 in the Washington area, half a million in the United States. They are survivors of horrific political torture. Unless they open their shirts, you detect few visible scars. “The mark of torture is more inside than out,” says “...
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Toyota and trust: Was the Akio Toyoda apology lost in translation?
25 February 2010 - Christian Science Monitor
Stung by Toyota recalls, Toyoda had to convey sincerity – and bridge the gulf in communication styles between Japan and America.
Toyota president Akio Toyoda’s testimony before a US congressional committee Wednesday may have been the most public nonmilitary confrontation between the two radically different cultures since American Commodore Matthew C. Perry first “...
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The politics of repression in China
18 February 2010 - The Economist
What are they afraid of? The economy is booming and politics stable. Yet China’s leaders seem edgy.
“The forces pulling China toward integration and openness are more powerful today than ever before,” said President Bill Clinton in 1999. China then, though battered by the Asian financial crisis, was busy dismantling state-owned enterprises and pushing for...
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Facing up to China
4 February 2010 - The Economist
Making room for a new superpower should not be confused with giving way to it.
For six decades now, Taiwan has been where the simmering distrust between China and America most risks boiling over. In 1986 Deng Xiaoping called it the “one obstacle in Sino-US relations”. So there was something almost ritualistic about the Chinese government’s protestations this week that...
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Toyota: Accelerating into trouble
11 February 2010 - The Economist
The company’s problems sharply illustrate the failings of Japanese corporate governance.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Toyota in Japan’s business psyche. The company has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Japanese innovation, manufacturing quality and industrial strength—particularly since it overtook General Motors in 2008 to become the world’s...
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Let’s make this an age of abundance, not austerity
19 February 2010 - Spiked Online
Prosperity’s critics are demonising material desires and calling for governments to elevate happiness over growth. It’s time to fight back.
If someone was transported from 1900 to the present day, their first reaction would almost certainly be amazement at what humanity has achieved. Then they would probably do a double take. After getting to know our world better they would...
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The warning that we ignored
27 February 2010 - The Age
The latest headache for NSW prison authorities is how to safely house the five terrorists convicted this month of plotting bomb attacks in Sydney. With sentences ranging up to 28 years, the challenge will be how to prevent these unrepentant Islamist extremists from radicalising other inmates in Goulburn's supermax high security prison.
This week the Premier, Kristina Keneally, told...
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No R-rating for games does not compute
27 February 2010 - The Age
It's confession time. I have picked up a prostitute in a stolen vehicle and sped the wrong way down a busy highway to escape police. I have accompanied a terrorist group in an airport shooting spree. I have garrotted guards, slaughtered soldiers, decapitated dudes and shotgunned sheilas.
But never have I felt the remotest desire to do any of this for real. They were computer games....
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Toyota, Computers and the Human Factor
24 February 2010 - New York Times
Over the past decades, Toyota has built a strong presence in the United States by serving its consumers well and doing what the US government has wanted. Now, it has stumbled badly largely because its greatest strength — the Toyota Way of “accumulation of small improvements,” or “kaizen” philosophy — has turned out to be a weakness in the age of complex...
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Talking-Cure Diplomacy
25 February 2010 - New York Times
last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton caused a stir with remarks that at first glance seemed a restatement of the obvious — namely, that the 1967 borders between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, along with some land swaps, should be the focus of peace negotiations. In fact, since 1993, when the Oslo agreements were signed, the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...
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Sex, sleaze and a traumatised boy sacrificed for ratings
24 February 2010 - The Brisbane Times
At age 15, you can't vote, you can't die for your country, and you can't even take a legal drink. But it seems you're fair game if your parents lost their lives in the most pored over local sex scandal of the decade.
If you don't like it, well, turn off the telly.
Nine Network's telemovie about Maria Korp, the woman strangled by her husband's mistress and left for dead in the...
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Stop perverting Anne Frank’s diary
3 February 2010 - Spiked Online
Banning the diary from schools because she wrote about sex is bizarre. But so are the attempts to turn it into a guide to life.
‘I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having...
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Australia's 'racist' tag is myth heavily hyped
2 February 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
There are two pragmatic tests to ascertain the real level of racism in a country. Namely, the level of ethnic-motivated crime and the amount of inter-marriage between ethnic groups. Australia has a low level of ethnic crime and a high level of inter-marriages between all races, including indigenous people.
There is racism in every country. But Australia is not a racist nation. Certainly...
Luxury makes us selfish
3 February 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others, according to a Harvard Business School study.
Researchers Roy Y J Chua, of Harvard, and Xi Zou, an assistant professor at London Business School, examined the psychological consequences that luxury goods can have on people in their...
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The worst place in the world is deeply thought-provoking
8 February 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
Visiting Auschwitz is horrendous, unsettling, and deeply thought-provoking. Photo: AP
"Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death."
So wrote Tadeusz Borowski, survivor - and victim - of Auschwitz.
The Nazi concentration camp seems an unlikely tourist attraction. Stranded on the grey plains of southern...
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Hidden danger in tampering with the veil
1 February 2010 - The Australian
Like the Americans waging war in Afghanistan, the French demanding their government ban the burka would do well to look back in history at the experience of others who pursued a similar path.
In 1935, the shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, embarked on a sweeping program of modernisation. He built railways, factories and a university and prohibited the photographing of camels, which he believed...
Too many losers in the merit race
1 February 2010 - The Australian
There is probably no more powerful motivator of human action than a lofty and sincerely felt philosophy of universal justice, combined with a determined and even desperate regard for the personal fortunes of our offspring. When the ennoblement of society and the career-success of our kids march hand in hand, we are willing to overlook any inconvenient statistic, to countenance any petty...
Why has Hollywood forsaken conservatives?
29 January 2010 - Christian Science Monitor
Hollywood’s liberal bias is offensive – and bad business. It’s time conservatives changed this.
I don’t know what my butcher’s political beliefs are, and I don’t want to know. I pay him for his services and we are both happy. I want the same arrangement with my entertainers.
If my butcher constantly mocked my values, I’d soon take my...
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More airport security won’t do much to stop terrorists. Leaving the Middle East would.
28 January 2010 - Christian Science Monitor
Ending US interference, including military support for Israel, could significantly reduce the rationale for terrorist acts.
Earlier this week, Osama bin Laden praised the Christmas Day attack in which a Nigerian-born man living in London attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane by igniting explosives in his underwear.
Mr bin Laden’s endorsement, along with recent...
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The ex-gay files: The bizarre world of gay-to-straight conversion
1 February 2010 - The Independent
In Britain today therapists are trying to convert gay men and women to heterosexuality. I know this, because for several months I infiltrated this network of therapists and put myself – a happy, "out" gay man – through treatment.
According to a report by Professor Michael King of University College London, one in six UK psychiatrists and psychotherapists have...
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Virginity is one hell of a gift
1 February 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
Virginity is not a ''gift''. To suggest it is, as Tony Abbott has, is absurdly childish. It's also ridiculously romantic. None of which would matter if the discussion stopped there. But it doesn't.
Instead, the Leader of the Opposition has raised the very ugly spectre of female virtue as a tradable, marketable, sellable commodity. By telling his daughters their virginity is ''the...
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Always being positive can become a negative
29 January 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
I don't know about you but I'm over being positive. I'm over looking for the silver lining when there isn't one, over moving forward rather than reflecting on past mistakes, and over saying I'm having a nice day when basically I'm having a pretty crap one.
It's difficult being a nay-sayer in a time when unrealistic optimism is so pervasive. But now author Barbara Ehrenreich has removed...
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You can't make meaningful laws for assisted suicide
28 January 2010 - The Guardian
We need compassion and common sense to deal effectively with such a distressing but important issue.
Common sense. Decency. Humanity. These were the words used by Lord Justice Bean in praise of the jury that cleared Kay Gilderdale of the attempted murder of her suicidal, ME-plagued daughter, Lynn. Good words. By contrast, the words of the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer,...
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In search of Frenchness
28 January 2010 - The Guardian
The Sarkozy government's debates on national identity peddle the same old story about the enemy within – French Muslims.
The nationwide debate on national identity launched in November by Eric Besson, the minister of immigration, national identity, integration, and co-development, has now been raging for several weeks. I'm actually not that surprised by all of this – we have...
The Taliban would applaud
26 January 2010 - International Herald Tribune
It is easy to see that a woman’s human rights are violated when a government requires her to wrap her body and face in an all-concealing veil, as the Taliban used to do when it ran Afghanistan. It should be just as easy to see the violation when a French parliamentary panel recommends, as it did this week, barring women who wear such veils — the burqa and the niqab — from...
Not being racist, but burka is wrong
28 January 2010 - The Australian
I confess that I once fell over on the job. In 2001, I was sent near the Pakistan border to interview fleeing Afghans and the local imam asked me to wear an extra-large faded blue burka in the refugee camp. I was taken to interview a woman who had lost five of her six children before managing to walk with her baby across the mountains to safety.
As she described the pain of losing four...
Guidelines prompt artists to take cover
29 January 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
After her exhibition was closed and her house raided by police, the Archibald Prize-winning artist Cherry Hood made a pivotal decision. She would no longer depict nude children but would concentrate on portraits instead.
About a decade on, she has never returned to the subject that provoked the police action.
''I was just getting so much flak and distraction that it just wasn't...
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The right to know where your charity dollar goes
21 January 2010 - The Australian
At times of crisis, such as right now in Haiti, it may not matter too much which charity raises funds for those poor souls whose lives are devastated by the earthquake. As long as it gets there quickly. Beyond the short-term emergency, however, it is essential that donors are aware how charity moneys are distributed.
Over the Christmas/New Year break, major charities - The Smith Family...
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Children are best left with their families
21 January 2010 - The Age
The horrific situation for Haitian children in the aftermath of the earthquake raises the difficult question of what can be done to make sure they are safe and secure.
Often the easiest solution can be the least appropriate. Even in the hectic environment of emergency response, aid agencies need to ensure that their actions concentrate on the long-term wellbeing of children, rather than...
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Haiti's poor are part of solution
21 January 2010 - The Australian
The Haiti earthquake has caused immeasurable suffering in what was already the western hemisphere's poorest nation. The challenges of rebuilding Haiti should not be underestimated - especially when it comes to protecting this nation's poorest and most vulnerable citizens.
All too often people who are poor miss out on the thousands of tonnes of aid delivered during massive...
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A bonny prince, but we deserve to be a republic
21 January 2010 - The Australian
The media frenzy and swooning women that have characterised Prince William's visit to Australia mask an awkward reality.
This 27-year-old man, a stranger to our shores, is pre-ordained to be our head of state. There will be no election, no contest and no vote. No correspondence will be entered into.
And as sensible as he appears now, the prince will still assume the mantle if he...
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Russian ice dancers should rethink their routine
21 January 2010 - The Age
I've always believed that if you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all. So I'll start by saying that the interest in Aboriginal culture by the two talented Russian figure skaters, Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, is both welcome and flattering.
And while I'm still saying nice things, I commend Fairfax media and the National Times for drawing people's...
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Poverty is not passe, and development is not a dirty word
21 January 2010 - The Australian
Colonialism, the independence of nations and the development decades are words rarely heard nowadays.
They were commonplace around the middle of the 20th century, when the springtime of freedom for developing countries was the focus of world attention.
Future historians will describe the second half of the 20th century as the period when the majority of the world's population...
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Earthquakes don’t have to be this devastating
18 January 2010 - Spiked Online
Underdevelopment and lack of economic growth made the Haitian earthquake far worse than it might have been.
The dreadful events in Haiti are the product of an unavoidable natural event. Earthquakes are not something that can be prevented. But what is preventable is the huge impact they can have on the people affected by them.
The earthquake in Haiti had a magnitude of 7 on the...
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How did their tragedy become All About Us?
18 January 2010 - Spiked Online
There’s a danger that giving to Haiti has become a way of advertising our decency rather than helping the desperate.
How did giving aid to Haiti become All About Us? Emergency aid should be a politics-free, urgent provision of the essentials of life – food, water and shelter – to people affected by a disaster. Yet following the Haiti quake, it has been turned into the...
To rescue Haitians, we need to take risks
18 January 2010 - Spiked Online
Since the beginning of time, catastrophes have represented a major challenge to our humanity. And history suggests that, most of the time, disasters bring out the best in us. People tend to come together and demonstrate kindness and solidarity to their fellow man.
During the past week, following the terrible earthquake in Haiti, there has been an outpouring of altruistic sentiment...
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It's simple: India doesn't want to see its citizens harmed
15 January 2010 - The Sydney Morning Herald
Picture the scene of a car accident. An injured person lies on the ground needing help while the two drivers squabble over who caused the crash. That's about how intelligent the debate over attacks on Indian students has been.
It is embarrassing to watch politicians, police and the media in Australia and India engage in a dialogue that has so far been fatuous and, quite frankly,...
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