Ethics Headlines
#68         

Volume 2, Number 16
                            Friday, April 14, 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.

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This week's headlines--select the headline to read the article
  • Young voters beat a path toward a politics of morals. The majority of college students view key political issues through a moral lens, according to a poll released Tuesday by Harvard University's Institute of Politics. That lens extends far beyond the three traditional hot-button issues: abortion, gay marriage, and stem-cell research. It includes the federal government's response to hurricane Katrina, education policy, and the Iraq war.
  • A distinguished philosopher asks if killing innocents is ever justifiable.
    But the question remains: Was the indiscriminate bombing of civilians -- in Hamburg, in Dresden, in Tokyo, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki -- justifiable militarily, or was it "in whole or in part morally wrong"? This is the question addressed in Among the Dead Cities by Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London and one of Britain's more prominent and outspoken public intellectuals.
  • Seattle school district fires three girls basketball coaches. The Seattle School District plans to get rid of three Chief Sealth High School girls basketball coaches after concluding they improperly recruited girls to build their nationally ranked, state-championship team — a scheme that ranks as the biggest prep-sports recruiting scandal in state history.
  • Textbooks may have to tell gay role. The California state Senate will consider a bill that would require schools to teach students about the contributions gays and lesbians have made to society, an effort supporters say is an attempt to battle discrimination and opponents say is designed to use the classroom to get children to embrace homosexuality.
  • The state is looking after you. On some of the biggest decisions in their lives, people succumb to inertia, ignorance or irresolution. Their private failings—obesity, smoking, boozing, profligacy—are now big political questions. And the [new policy] wonks think they have an ingenious new answer—a guiding but not illiberal state. What they propose is “soft paternalism”. Thanks to years of patient observation of people's behaviour, they have come to understand your weaknesses and blindspots better than you might know them yourself. Now they hope to turn them to your advantage.
  • 'Dateline' pedophile sting: one more point. The NBC newsmagazine "Dateline" agreed to pay a civilian watchdog group more than $100,000 to create a pedophile sting operation that the network plans to feature in a series of programs next month..."Dateline's" orchestration of the sting crossed ethical boundaries and could place the network in an awkward legal position, [news media observers] said.
  • Judges set hurdles for lethal injection. Judges in several states have started to put up potentially insurmountable roadblocks to the use of lethal injections to execute condemned inmates. Their decisions are based on new evidence suggesting that prisoners have endured agonizing executions. In response, judges are insisting that doctors take an active role in supervising executions, even though the American Medical Association's code of ethics prohibits that.