Ethics Headlines
#75

Volume 2, Number 21                                                  Friday, June 2, 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--select the headline to read the article
  • 'Ex-gays' seek a say in schools. In response to campus programs supporting homosexuality, critics call for offering an alternative view: that people can go straight.
  • Judging whether a killer is sane enough to die. Scott Panetti, a death row inmate in Texas, understands that the state says it intends to execute him for the murder of his wife's parents. But Mr. Panetti, 48, who represented himself in court despite a long and colorful history of mental illness, says he believes that the state's real reason is a different one. He says the state, in league with Satan, wants to kill him to keep him from preaching the Gospel.
  • Ethics start at the top. The US army in Iraq is being offered lessons in ethics in the wake of Haditha massacre. But shouldn't the ethical education start at a more elevated level?
    • Bush and Rumsfeld as ethics teachers? This Bush Administration just keeps on topping itself when it comes to outrages. Now, after the press exposed a couple of cases of civilian massacres by U.S. forces--massacres the military tried to cover up--they’re calling for "ethics training" for the troops in Iraq.
  • A survival challenges Mount Everest ethics. It has been a deadly climbing season on Mount Everest, with at least 10 deaths recorded so far.No incident seems quite so strange as that of Lincoln Hall, a 50-year-old Australian climber who was the 16th victim - but only for one night. Sharp's death revived a passionate debate over the ethics of high-altitude climbing, particularly in what is called the death zone, where conditions, temperatures and the lack of oxygen combine in such a way that would-be rescuers may forfeit their own lives while trying to save a sick or incapacitated fellow climber.
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