Ethics Headlines is an
ethics-in-the-news clipping file published each Friday by Polytechnic
School teacher Greg
Feldmeth. It contains news items from the media in the
past week that deal with some area of ethical inquiry.
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You can receive the file via email every Friday afternoon with
links to the original articles. Just email your address
here and put
Ethics
Headlines in the subject line. If you know of others
who
would be
interested, please forward the page to them.
This
week's headlines--select the headline to read the article
- MIT admissions dean resigns. Marilee Jones, a prominent crusader against the pressure on students to build their resumes for elite colleges, resigned Thursday as dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after acknowledging she had misrepresented her own academic credentials.
- Fight over baby's life divides ethicists. When Emilio Gonzales lies in his mother's arms, sometimes he'll make a facial expression that his mother says is a smile. But the nurse who's standing right next to her thinks he's grimacing in pain. Which one it is -- an expression of happiness or of suffering -- is a crucial point in an ethical debate that has pitted the mother of a dying child against a children's hospital, and medical ethicists against each other.
- Guantánamo detainee Omar Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghan Al Qaeda compound after allegedly murdering a US serviceman. A US military tribunal is scheduled to convene next month to try – on murder charges – a Canadian man who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base for almost five years, since he was captured at the age of 15. Human right groups are protesting the move, saying the man should be tried as a civilian.
- Capital punishment: here is thy sting. HOURS after being sentenced to death by a sharia court in Somalia last May, Omar Hussein was publicly executed. He was hooded, tied to a stake and stabbed to death by the 16-year-old son of the man he had admitted stabbing to death three months earlier. In Kuwait, a Sri Lankan was executed last year by hanging, or so the authorities thought. After the body was taken to the morgue, medical staff saw he was still moving. He was finally pronounced dead only five hours after the execution had begun. In Iran, a man and a woman were stoned to death for extra-marital sex.
- When a student's in trouble, should parents know? US privacy laws prevent counselors from informing parents of danger signs. But many say they should know if their young adult children – or their roommates – need help.