Ethics Headlines            


Volume 2, Number 6
                            Friday, February 10, 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
  •     Publishing those cartoons was a mistake. The Western news media is unlikely to heed the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and the European politicians who have condemned the provocative nature of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which have provoked rage in the Muslim world. But it does need to engage in serious debate about its preferred role in mediating between cultures. This should start with the admission that publishing and republishing the cartoons was a grave mistake.
    • Tolerance towards intolerance. Last week the publication I work for, the German newsweekly Die Zeit, printed one of the controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. It was the right thing to do.
    • The case for mocking religion. [T]here is a strong case for saying that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and those who have reprinted its efforts out of solidarity, are affirming the right to criticize not merely Islam but religion in general. And the Bush administration has no business at all expressing an opinion on that(Christopher Hitchens)
    • Free speech in Europe: mixed rules. The violence over cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad has highlighted often inconsistent rules in Europe governing free speech, tolerance, and the boundaries of public expression.
      Muslims in particular charge that hate-speech laws are implemented unfairly. Many countries, they say, do not abide anti-Semitic outbursts, but will tolerate cartoons that to many Muslims are deeply offensive.
  • Evangelicals miss the big picture. So what do evangelicals want from Hollywood anyway? Help converting the masses? If so, movies don't seem as if they're the most effective forum. Despite all the evangelistic hype for The Passion, a survey by The Barna Group showed that less than one-tenth of 1% of those who saw the movie accepted Jesus Christ as their savior as a result of seeing the film. Likewise, don't expect a jump in the size of the gay population because of Brokeback Mountain, however much it might foster the national conversation.
  • Northwestern University rips Holocaust denial. Northwestern University President Henry Bienen said Monday that a professor's recent comments denying that the Holocaust happened are "a contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people" and an embarrassment to the university.
  • Gifts from drugmakers damage doctors' integrity. For decades, pharmaceutical companies have showered physicians with meals, tickets to shows and sporting events, ski and beach vacations disguised as medical education seminars, and consulting "jobs" for which doctors do no work. The companies aren't being charitable. They expect a return on their investment, namely that doctors prescribe their newest expensive pills. That's why an army of 88,000 pharmaceutical representatives, many of them young and beautiful, provides freebies to doctors and their staffs.
  • In Bronx, a possible case of high school cheating, but not by students. [A]t least 16 students who took the January Regents exam had their English grades changed from failing to passing by the new assistant principal, with the principal's approval. The teachers said they did not learn of the changed scores from the administration; they learned from the students, who said that their grades had suddenly been switched to passing months after taking the test, and that now they would not have to retake the Regents exam.

Previous Headlines