Tag: ethics

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Why We Love the Villanova Wildcats

Unselfish excellence & a commitment to always-active learning

The Historic 2016 Season

The Villanova University men’s basketball team not only won the 2016 NCAA National Championship; they did so with elegance, grace under pressure, and a deep commitment to quality ethical play. The easiest thing you can say about why the Villanova Wildcats are a fun team to watch is that they give you a riveting, energetic, and beautiful display of how the game is supposed to be played.

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Weathering: Climate Change & ‘Thick Time’

HYPATIA SYMPOSIUM Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality by ASTRIDA NEIMANIS, RACHEL LOEWEN WALKER ASTRIDA NEIMANIS—Researcher, Gender Studies, TEMA Institute, Linköping University, Sweden RACHEL LOEWEN WALKER—Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan, Canada The following is an EXCERPT Click here to read the full article Browse the entire special issue here Introduction: Toward a … Continue reading Weathering: Climate Change & ‘Thick Time’

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Semenya Case Shows Complex Ethics of Fairness in Sport

Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old track-and-field phenomenon from South Africa, is a woman whose hormonal chemistry is unusual for the average adult female. Test results are reported to show that her body naturally secretes three times the normal female levels of testosterone, the dominant “male” hormone, which some competitors say gives her an “unfair advantage”.

The issue has raised perhaps the most serious challenge to the notion of fairness in sport, and to conventional attitudes about gender. For instance, should Semenya be weaker than she is, if she were “fully” female? Is that idea in itself not demeaning to women? Is there even a specific provision in international sporting regulations that requires women to be notably weaker than or slower than men?

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Physicians for Human Rights says Doctors Aided in Torture

After reviewing the CIA inspector general’s (IG) report on prisoner abuse during and surrounding the Bush-era “war on terror”, the watchdog Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) says doctors not only attended and supervised prisoner abuse, but recorded information that “may amount to human experimentation”.

In a new 6-page white paper, “Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report”, PHR reports on physicians aiding in the abusive interrogation techniques some now say amount to illegal torture.

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Egypt Pig Cull Suggests Ethical Risks of DNA-based Public Policy

The Egyptian government has ordered a 100% blanket cull of its entire pig stock in response to the outbreak of “swine flu” in Mexico and the US. The problem is, the new strain of the virus, technically influenza A H1N1, has not been found in pigs. The H1N1 strain is a flu virus that affects the human population and is spread by person to person contact. It contains genetic material showing it is a hybrid flu containing genetic segments linking it to avian-borne, swine-borne and human-borne flu viruses.

It is believed the initial infection may have some link to a particular pig farm in rural Oaxaca state, in southern Mexico. But as yet, this has not been confirmed, nor has it been confirmed that any livestock were responsible for transmission of the virus to the first affected individual. Egypt’s culling of pigs has been declared unnecessary by the World Health Organization, and the nature of Egypt’s apparent severe overreaction to the theoretical threat of a flu pandemic is made more clear by the fact that no one in Egypt has contracted the H1N1 flu infection.

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