Ethics Headlines
#76

Volume 2, Number 22                                                  Friday, June 9, 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
  • High-tech cheating in Asia's high-stakes exams. Passing notes in the exam room? It's so passé. Try this instead: sew a tiny microphone and speaker inside a shirt cuff, activate on a concealed cellphone, and get your buddy outside to scan the textbook for answers. It worked this year for two first-year medical students in Lucknow, India - until a supervisor spotted them in action.
  • Ethical questions complicate the recruitment of egg donors. Recruiting women to donate eggs for stem cell research brings scientists into new ethical territory where the standards are still being worked out, ethicists say. Women who donate eggs have to take drugs and undergo minor surgery. This puts them at risk for side effects, yet there is no immediate benefit to them or anyone else -- an uneasy and probably unprecedented combination.
  • Bullied by the eunuchs. India has somewhere between half a million and a million eunuchs. The estimates are very approximate, because the hijras live in a secretive, shadowy world they've created for themselves away from the abuse and persecution of general society.
  • Can you teach a person ethics? DePaul University professor Laura Hartman begins her business ethics class by talking about a train on a path to hit five people. By pushing a button, the train would veer off track and hit a different person instead, but only one. "Do you hit the button?" she asks the undergraduates.
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