Ethics Headlines
#80

Volume 2, Number 26                                                Friday, July 7, 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
  • Stem cells without moral corruption. For the past few years many of the world's leading scientists have promoted so-called therapeutic cloning as the most promising way to produce clinically useful, genetically tailored, biologically versatile stem cells. That is why claims by a team of South Korean researchers -- one in 2004 that the first cloned human embryo had been produced, then another in 2005 that the process of producing embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos could be done routinely and efficiently -- were hailed as a watershed...But then the world discovered that it was all a scandalous fraud.
    • False dilemma on stem cells. The issue of stem cell research -- which is back before the Senate -- is often described as a moral dilemma, but it simply is not. Or at least it is not the moral dilemma often used in media shorthand: the rights of the unborn vs. the needs of people suffering from diseases that embryonic stem cells might cure.
  • A Taliban past and a cloudy Yale future. A student at Yale University who was once a roving ambassador for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has been denied admission to a degree-granting program at Yale, one of the student's financial supporters said yesterday.
  • A failing grade for a broken system. Regardless of whether observers favor or oppose the death penalty, most agree with the conclusion of Columbia Law School's James Liebman , a leading capital punishment scholar, who has labeled the way we enforce death penalty laws a ``broken system." Execution commonly occurs more than a decade after the crime that gave rise to it, long after the death has meaning for anyone outside the immediate circle of the case. Amazingly, it costs from $2 million to $5 million to take a convicted killer from trial to the death chamber.
  • How low will advertisers go? The next time you bite into a juicy Wendy's hamburger, just remember this: The corporate folks at Wendy's apparently are content to advertise their burgers on TV shows that treat spousal rape as just another entertaining plot twist.

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