Ethics Headlines is an
ethics-in-the-news clipping file published each Friday by Greg
Feldmeth, a
high school teacher at Polytechnic
School
in Pasadena, California. It contains news items from the media in the
past week that deal with some area of ethical inquiry.
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Ethics
Headlines in the subject line. If you know of others
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This week's headlines--click on the headline to read the full article
- Writing
wrongs. It was supposed to be 'inspiration.' Turns out, they turned in
my work. College
admissions officers around
the country will be reading my application essays this month, essays in
which I describe personal aspirations, academic goals -- even, in one
case, a budding passion for the sitar. What they won't know is that I
actually graduated from college more than a year ago, and that the
names attached to these essays are those of my duplicitous clients.
- India's lost daughters: abortion toll in millions. As many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India over the last 20 years as families try to secure a male heir, according to a study published Monday in The Lancet, the British medical journal. In the two decades since ultrasound equipment, which allows prenatal determination of sex, became widely available, the number of girls born in India has declined steeply, despite a law banning doctors from disclosing the sex of a fetus to parents.
- India's 'girl deficit' deepest among educated. Selective-sex abortion claims 500,000 girls a year. The practice is common among all religious groups - Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Muslims, and Christians - but appears to be most common among educated women, a fact that befuddles public health officials and women's rights activists alike.
- Carroll student
expelled for ‘satire.' A Carroll High School (Indiana)
student defended a friend and classmate Monday who was expelled from
school this month for writing a book critical of the school
administration. Jeff Fraser, a 17-year-old senior and founder of the
Allen County Teenage Republicans, wrote a book titled “Carroll” that
was modeled after Jon Stewart’s book “America.” The book blasted the
administration for its lack of diversity, criticized teachers and their
methods and singled out a few students in what was meant to be a
satire, said Fraser’s friend, Sam Wysong, 17.
- A hero scorned. In 1968, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson flew into the thick of what he thought was a fierce battle in South Vietnam and discovered, instead, that a massacre was going on - of women, children and elderly men at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Horrified, he landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the civilians, ordered his crew to fire on any American who continued shooting, called for back-up and rescued victims, digging through corpses to scoop up one child.
- Iran to hold
conference on the Holocaust. Iran said Sunday it would
sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the
Holocaust, an apparent next step in hard-line President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's campaign against Israel and a move likely to deepen
Tehran's international isolation.
- Girls against boys. I went to Radcliffe, the women's wing of Harvard, at a time when the combined undergraduate student body was fixed at four male students for every female one. I don't remember anyone worrying about the boys' social lives, or whether they would find anyone to marry--even though nationally, too, boys were more likely to go to college and to graduate than girls...What a difference a few decades and a gender revolution make.
- 91,700 abortions in city. For every 100 babies born in New York City, women had 74 abortions in 2004, according to newly released figures that reaffirm the city as the abortion capital of the country.
- The ugly truth. When James Frey embellished his rap sheet in his best-selling memoir, did he cross the line into fiction? [I]t was surprising to see Frey sitting meek as a schoolboy last week, being grilled by Larry King about allegations he'd made up incidents in his best-selling drug-addiction memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." Frey admitted to 18 pages of "embellishments," which he rationalized as "less than 5 percent of the total book."
- 'Mini-brothels' allowed for prostitutes' safety. Two or three prostitutes will be allowed to work together in "mini-brothels" for their own safety in an attempt to force the vice trade off the streets. Tough action against kerb-crawlers will be combined with a drive to help prostitutes beat addiction to drugs and drink. But ministers have ruled out the creation of licensed "red-light districts", arguing they would not tackle crime or increase the safety of call girls.
- Study: men enjoy seeing bad people suffer. [A] new brain-scanning study suggests that when guys see a cheater get a mild electric shock, they don't feel his pain much at all. In fact, they rather enjoy it. In contrast, women's brains showed they do empathize with the cheater's pain and don't get a kick out it.
- 'Blonde is beautiful'
mystique. "Is it politically
correct for us
to see King Kong?" a friend joked when the latest version of the movie
classic opened. A movie clip that shows Kong staring mesmerized at the
fair Ann Darrow, played by Naomi Watts, caused me some uneasiness
because it's hard not to see the subliminal racism in a story about a
big black beast falling tragically in love with a pale blonde beauty.