Practical Ethics

Refusing Cochlear Implants: Is It Child Neglect?

Australian Graeme Clark developed the cochlear implant, or bionic ear, in the 1970s. It does not amplify sound but directly stimulates any functioning auditory nerves in the inner ear. The Australian Government has promised a screening program of all babies for deafness from 2011. At present, only 70 percent children who might benefit are picked up early. The earlier deafness is detected, the more effective treatment can be.

Lobby group Deaf Australia says the implant "implies that deaf people are ill or incomplete individuals, are lonely and unhappy, cannot communicate effectively with others and are all desperately searching for a cure for their condition. [This] demeans deaf people, belittles their culture and language and makes no acknowledgment of the diversity of lives deaf people lead, or their many achievements."
Some deaf parents have denied their children cochlear implants. Is this right?

Who defines a Jew?

by David Edmonds

 

Here are some of the relevant facts about a landmark legal ruling last week – involving a dispute that illustrates an irresolvable tension within multi-culturalism. 

 

JFS is a Jewish ‘faith school’ in North London.  It achieves impressive academic results.  Faith schools’ are perfectly legal – indeed, they seem to have been encouraged by this government.  If oversubscribed, as the JFS usually is, faith schools are allowed to favour members of their faith.  There are many Christian and Islamic faith schools.

 

The legal case involved a boy, ‘M’.  JFS refused M a place because his mother, who was not born Jewish, converted to Judaism in a Progressive synagogue.  This conversion process is not recognized by the Office of the Chief Rabbi (OCR).  The family of the boy regularly attended Progressive synagogue.  

The Court of Appeal has just ruled that the JFS’s admissions policy contravened the Race Relations Act because of the requirement that for a pupil to qualify for admission “his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or by conversion’.  This, the court said, was a “test of ethnicity”.

Here are a few minor comments about this case.

 

Jackson, Enhancement and the American Dream

What can we learn from Michael Jackson's tragic premature death? The autopsy will be performed later today which may reveal the immediate cause of death. But whatever the immediate medical cause of death, the ultimate cause is clear: death by social malfunctioning.

Sometimes justice wears a mask: blogging, anonymity and the open society

After the Times exposed the identity of the police blogger "Night Jack" he has been disciplined by the police force. The blog (now deleted) had won the Orwell Price for political writing and often expressed critical views related to the police and the justice system. In a court ruling Mr Justice Eady claimed that blogging was "essentially a public rather than a private activity" and that it was in the public interest to know who originated opinions and arguments. Do we have a right to anonymity on the net? And is it truly in the public interest to know who every blogger is?

Nice People Take Drugs (Too)

The drug and human rights charity *Release* recently launched an advertising campaign in which the slogan ‘Nice People Take Drugs’ was displayed on the sides of London buses. Their aim was to encourage society to face up to the reality that a huge proportion of the population does at least experiment with drugs and to combat the popular assumption, which underlies a good deal of political rhetoric and media coverage, that since drugs are simply ‘evil’ there is no point in seriously debating drug policy. Those ads are now being withdrawn by the company that booked the space, after advice from the Committee of Advertising Practice: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/09/nice-people-drugs-ads-pulled

Apparently, Release has been told that their strap-line would be more acceptable if it included the word ‘too’. This suggests that the CAP may have felt that the public would read the original claim as equivalent to ‘All those who take drugs are nice people’. But even adding the word ‘too’ may not be enough. For the new sentence might be read as: ‘All nice people take drugs, along with other things (such as holidays when they can, advice when they need it, offence when people are rude to them, etc.).’ Of course, no one would have understood either the new or the old sentence in these ways. But in fact, though it should be up to Release how they word their strap-line (the censorship charge they have made doesn’t seem far-fetched), adding ‘too’ does bring out more clearly what they want to say: that we should stop demonizing drug-takers and have an open, impartial, and well-informed debate.

Coercion, compulsion and immunisation

The former head of the British Medical Association, Sir Sandy Macara, has called for the Measles Mumps and Rubella immunisation (MMR) to be a compulsory requirement prior to school entry. The UK has seen a surge in cases of measles over the last couple of years because of a fall in the immunisation rate. Many parents have chosen not to immunise their children as a result of the supposed (and now completely discredited) link between MMR and autism. Immunisation rates have fallen to 70% in some parts of the country. Is compulsory immunisation the answer, and if so, what degree of compulsion should we adopt?

Decimating Democracy?

Labour MP Shahid Malik has resigned as justice minister after claims about his expenses were published in the Daily Telegraph: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8051091.stm
Shortly before standing down, he claimed that the extensive media coverage of the expenses issue is in danger of ‘decimating democracy’.

There’s room for debate about whether Mr Malik is using the verb ‘to decimate’ properly. The word comes from the practice in ancient Rome of killing one in ten of a group of soldiers as a punishment for mutiny – not nine out of ten. But of course Mr Malik’s usage is now so common that it probably has to be accepted as part of standard English.

How much should we care about MPs' expense claims?

Few people in the UK could have missed the furious storm about MPs’ expense claims that has dominated the news headlines for the past several weeks.  A steady flow of stories has revealed not only which MPs bent the rules on expenses, but also that many of the rules are themselves objectionable and arguably facilitate a misuse of taxpayers’ money.

Of course, few of us enjoy paying tax, but most of us grudgingly accept that it is necessary if we want certain social goods like decent healthcare and a fair justice system.  None of us likes to think of our money instead being directed towards those who already enjoy a higher income and better job perks than we do.  What is most striking about the current focus on MPs’ expense claims, however, is the fact that we are in the middle of a serious recession.  And the amount of taxpayers’ money used to finance MPs' bogus mortgage payments, luxury goods, and furniture is but a drop in the ocean compared to the financial losses suffered by homeowners due to falling property prices, by the half-million workers who have lost their jobs in the past nine months, and by those still employed whose tax payments must help support the newly jobless.  Given that the impact of a recession on ordinary people is at least partly the result of government decision-making, why does the recession consistently take second place in the headlines to the relatively trivial matter of MPs’ expense claims?

Yad Vashem and the Pope

Today I just want to put a question. 

Pope Benedict is in Israel.  When a visiting VIP is in Israel – and they don’t get more VI than the Pope - he or she is invariably taken to the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.  Walking around Yad Vashem is an overwhelming experience.  As a museum it’s more raw, less professional, more gut-wrenching, than the vast and stunning Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Pandemic ethics: all pigs are equal

In the last few days the influenza pandemic has led to over 800 deaths, with another 240,000 expected in coming months. There has been rioting over the government response to the pandemic leading to 8 protesters and 7 police being injured.

Hang on. Are we talking about the same pandemic?