Ethics Roundup – 7/7/2011

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

 

Chuck Gallagher comments on a Medicare fraud case.  Mr. Gallagher is always a good read! He is a noted lecturer in the field of business ethics.

The Safety At Work Blog has some comments on an expulsion.  This is an Australian web site. They have a strong reputation in the area of worker compensation.

Bioethics Commission Will Follow Human Subjects Work With Examinations of Sequencing and Imaging is the subject of a post by  Pasco Pronesis.  The privacy issues surrounding our DNA makeup are staggering in their complexity and implications.

A student discusses her student loan burden and what is the best decision to be made about paying it down. The long term pain of student loans is an ethical issue.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (82): Children as Involuntary Suicide Bombers. This is from P.A.P. – Blog, Human Rights etc. I very much enjoy the writing and the outrage on this blog. JP

 

 

16 Reasons To Feel Really Depressed About The Direction That The Economy Is Headed (via Organic News Net)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I agree with virtually everything here. I believe the economy is in serious trouble and it is not getting better soon. I firmly believe that the deficit reduction talks will result in an agreement that will damage the nation severely in the short term, savagely in the long term and serve as the final nail in the coffin of the middle class.

The prosperity and well being of individual Americans making less than a quarter of a million dollars a year no longer registers in any form whatever in the concerns of the governing class.

James Pilant

16 Reasons To Feel Really Depressed About The Direction That The Economy Is Headed The American Dream July 7, 2011 If you do not want to feel really depressed, you might not want to read this article.  The U.S. economy is coming apart at the seams, and there are a whole lot of indications that things are about to get even worse. After a time of relative stability, the pace of job cuts is starting to pick up again, inflation is rising but paychecks are not, the U.S. housing crisis shows no signs of ending, millions of American f … Read More

via Organic News Net

Teaching difficult texts (via jay.blog)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I talk about this a lot myself. My primary gripes are that teachers often teach unimportant things because they are easy to grade. Sometimes, I see meaningless questions asked because they lend themselves well to an easily gradable format. Here’s a disguised version of one I saw –

The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in ….
A. 1935
B. 1936
C. 1937
or D. 1928.

If your career and life depend on knowing the year that social security passed in the format of a Jeopardy question, that would be a good question. In every other way it is useless.

How should the questions be phrased? Like this –

The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in …
A. The first few years of the Roosevelt Administration.
B. The last years of the Hoover Administration.
C. As one of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-sixties.
or D. With the founding of the Constitution.

This places the Social Security Act in historical perspective, and it allows reasoning to be used. You can use what you learned in a variety of venues to determine if the act would have been something that the founding fathers or Herbert Hoover would have done.

I believe in teaching difficult subjects. I believe my students can handle difficult material. And I believe that teaching is an art whose highest practitioners can rise to meet the challenges of complexity and ambiguity.

James Pilant

Just a short post that got me thinking about this. In our Inquiry Education class, we read Wintergirls, a novel about a young girl, Lia, who has anorexia. It takes place in the days, weeks and months after her "best friend," Cassie, who had bulimia, died. It's an intense book with a lot of touchy and sometimes controversial events. In a nutshell, it's the book you want kids to open up and read but you don't want to teach it because of the subject … Read More

via jay.blog

they tell us what they want (via getting lost in skylines; trying to forget)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I think this level of anger entirely appropriate. I was appalled by the “newspaper’s” conduct in hacking the voice mails of crime victims and their families.

James Pilant

they tell us what they want I just want to express my disgust and disbelief at what has been uncovered about the News of the World and their phone hacking. It's absolutely obscene. I also want to applaud the Guardian for their efforts in revealing it. This is one of the first times in history that one newspaper has investigated another (acc to tonight's This Week on BBC1), and given the results, you can see why that is. It's no surprise that they're the ones to have done it … Read More

via getting lost in skylines; trying to forget

Turns of events (via Sujato’s Blog)

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Religions other than Christian struggle with equality for women and other societal changes.

Read these two paragraphs from the larger article below –

What exactly is going on here? The governing principles of Wat Pa Pong remain as they have ever been: discrimination against women and submission to the authority of the Ajahns. Since the majority of devotees reject these principles, they have been kept secret as far as possible; however this is no longer possible. The only way to ensure survival is to gain absolute power over the considerable wealth and property invested in the monasteries.

We shouldn’t be surprised. The Ajahns have been telling us these things for years. Equality, democracy, rights: according to the clear, often repeated, and explicit teachings of senior Wat Pa Pong Ajahns, these things are alien, ‘Western’ values irrelevant to the Dhamma and of no value for liberation. What we are now seeing is simply these principles put into practice.

(I’m letting the article speak for itself. The religious issues here are of major importance and my knowledge is not deep enough to do careful analysis.) JP

It’s now a year and a half since Ajahn Brahm and Bodhinyana monastery were excommunicated from their monastic circle, Wat Pa Pong, for disobeying orders by ordaining women in accordance with the Buddha’s teachings. Has anything got better? Short answer: not so you’d notice. Long answer: Ajahn Brahm has been in discussions with some of the WPP Ajahns overseas, trying to arrange a forgiveness ceremony, to let go and move ahead. He is clear that nei … Read More

via Sujato’s Blog

How Kansas City Honors Lincoln!

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Abraham Lincoln and his son, Tad

The sculpture was the result of a community-wide effort lead by Orville W. Anderson, a retired insurance salesman, civic volunteer, and political activist, who raised almost $140,000 to commission the sculpture. The Orville W. Anderson Committee for a Lincoln Memorial solicited funds from trusts, foundations, corporations, and individuals. Included in the erection of the memorial was an endowment for maintenance. IAS files include articles from the Kansas City Times, May 27, 1985 and Sept. 16, 1983, the Kansas City Star, Feb. 10, 1986; and a resolution dated July 28, 1983 by the Kansas City City Council to authorize installation of the monument. (from the Smithsonian Web Site) 

I don’t know about you but I think this is beautiful.

James Pilant

William Buckley on Ayn Rand & Atlas Shrugged (via MetrozalElectricity)

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Here are Buckley’s thoughts on Ayn Rand. I am not a fan of either but I found his impressions to be interesting.

James Pilant

Ayn Rand & GOP vs. Jesus (via American Values Net)

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I am a critic of Objectivism, and this video details one of my objections. I believe in a vigorous religious morality based on Christian principles. She doesn’t.

James Pilant

Beijing consensus fails even in China (via Charles Rowley’s Blog)

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Is the Beijing model something Americans should emulate?

No. China develops because the government allows its citizens more freedom and less top down control. It slows down when the government limits freedom by top down economic  control. When I speak of control I mean decisions about what resources are to be allocated, what industries encouraged and what should be made. These severely limit the power of a market economy.

James Pilant

My favorite paragraph –

More recently, China has reverted to the Beijing Consensus, with its leaders picking trade fights, for example by restricting the exports of rare earth minerals. It has back-tracked on banking reforms, forcing banks to engage in state-directed lending during the global crisis. It has crawled all over such elements of the rule of law as had emerged under Deng, cracking down on dissent, and jailing dissidents without any pretense of due process of law. Not coincidentally, this period of illiberalism has been accompanied by slowing growth rates and rampant inflation, traits that have fueled social instability and that now threaten a Chinese spring that is the worst fear of the central autocracy that cowers in the nation’s capital.

“In his speech last Friday marking the Chinese Communist Party’s 90th anniversary, Hu Jintao made one point clear above all: ‘Success in China hinges on the party.’  That view is to be expected from the party secretary.  Perhaps more surprising is the extent to which outside observers have come to believe it too.  These foreigners – academics and journalists prominent among them – look to the ‘Beijing model’ or the ‘Beijing consensus’ as a desira … Read More

via Charles Rowley’s Blog

Democracy is the Solution (via Out of the Black)

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This blog post is an analysis of Dr. Aswany’s words and the state of the nation of Egypt. In the United States, there is an assumption that foreigners are always moving toward an American style democracy. I do not believe the current American government is a shining light on a hill to virtually any foreign nation or its people. The adoption of torture demonstrate to many that the United States has given up on moral absolutes and operates only along the lines of what action is most profitable at the time. The best we can hope for is the development of democratic reform. A nation with the kind of rich educational and philosophical history of Egypt is quite capable of developing its own democratic institutions.

James Pilant

This is my favorite paragraph –

Ultimately, I think Dr Aswany’s answer is that the revolution was the cry of wounded human dignity. Firstly, many of his stories involve Egyptians being sent to several different hospitals and being refused treatment at each, like a scene from The Death of Mr Lazerescu, or being asked for a bribe. Secondly, Egyptians regard Gulf States seeking domestic servants in their country as an affront, especially as the idea of Pan-Arabism is a deep political instinct. Thirdly, attitudes to women and sexuality play a highly significant part in Dr Aswany’s rejection of the cult of power and formulaic Islam. Despite, or rather, because of the introduction of the hijab and the niqab, sexual harassment has risen exponentially, leading us to conclude that societies which seek to place the blame on victims merely encourage the urges of the perpetrators.

On the State of Egypt; What Caused the Revolution by Alaa Al Aswany (2011) Addressing distinguished guests at the Mansion House last month, William Hague called the Arab Spring ‘perhaps the main event of the twenty-first century so far.’ More significant than the rise of al-Qaeda, which changed the course of Western foreign policy in the region, or the global economic crisis, which has accelerated the relative decline of the West vis-à-vis China … Read More

via Out of the Black