Ethics Headlines            


Volume 2, Number 5
                            Friday, February 3, 2006


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.

SUBSCRIBE. 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--click on the headline to read the full article
    •Can lying serve national interest? One of the inherent powers of the president, apparently, is the right to lie in the perceived national interest. In 1960, President Eisenhower had the State Department announce that a plane shot down over the Soviet Union was on a weather mission. He was left red-faced when the Russians produced the U-2 spy plane and its CIA pilot....[O]nce again we face the introduction to the nuclear waltz and the question of how far the administration will go in keeping Americans posted on the gathering storm. What we have heard so far leaves a lot to the imagination. At a news conference last February President Bush said, "The notion that the United States is getting readyto attack Iran is simply ridiculous." He paused, and then added, "and having said that, all options are on the table."
  • Ojai school is divided over a teacher's past. A bizarre murder in the Midwest a decade ago reverberated through the elite boarding schools of Ojai this week, sparking a debate in the small mountain town over whether offering a convicted man a second chance as a teacher necessarily compromises student safety. Shannon McCreery, 32, was hired this fall at Villanova Preparatory School. But the school's headmaster told teachers and parents only this week that the polite, soft-spoken man assigned to teach Virgil to teenagers was also a convicted murderer who had killed his father in an Illinois motel.
  • Schools grapple with policing students' online journals. This winter, teenagers at a Chicago high school used their Xanga websites to post obscene and threatening comments about a teacher, in one case suggesting her neck be "slit like a ... chicken." Last spring, a girl at a different Chicago high school outraged students when she posted derogatory comments about gay marriage and blacks on her Web log. The school district dealt differently with the two situations, defending the girl's freedom of speech in the latter while reportedly disciplining the three teens in the first. The incidents speak not only to the murky territory of free speech in schools but to the challenges of educating in a cyber age - particularly with the growing presence of Web logs or blogs, those online pages that millions of teens use for journals, photos, dating, or chats.
  • Grief, gratitude and baby Lee. Can I do this?' his mother agonized, knowing one of her newborns would not live. But for 43 hours, he was hers to cherish. She wanted to honor her son, to celebrate his life, however short. That's why she had refused an abortion, even after doctors told her that her little boy would be born without a brain.
  • High wages, low wages, and morality. Today Americans are mostly content to let market forces - that is, the law of supply and demand - determine the wage levels for the multiplicity of jobs, professions, and positions that make the economy work. It would be extremely difficult for a bureaucratic group to make detailed, comparative judgments as to the real value of various occupations and place a specific wage level on each. But at some point, the extremes in wages resulting from what is called "free enterprise" begin to violate people's sense of common justice.
  • Danes try to control Muslim rage. The Danish government stepped up efforts Tuesday to curb the damage caused by the publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper linking the Prophet Muhammad to terrorism. But the moves failed to allay Muslim anger as retailers boycotted Danish goods in the Middle East and protesters in Gaza set fire to photos of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The economic fallout continued, with the French supermarket chain Carrefour announcing it was pulling Danish goods from its shelves in Arab countries.
    • The Satanic sketches. A diplomatic and trade row is raging after several European newspapers—and a Jordanian tabloid—published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that were deemed insulting by many Muslims. In Britain, meanwhile, parliamentarians have defeated a government proposal to extend laws against incitement to religious hatred. Western democracies are again struggling to reconcile the right to free expression with respect for religious belief.
Previous Headlines