An interesting interview about the morality of using torture as a tactic. What’s great about this is that it’s not just an essay but an interview with Moral Philosophy professor, Jeff McMahan.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/can-torture-ever-be-moral/
“The next day, the police released images of the attacker and asked the public for help identifying him. The New York Daily News ran the story in their typically sensationalist way. They described the man as a “brute” and a “thug” and described the incident in lurid detail and begged for readers to help ID the coward who attacked the woman and “ran away smiling.”
The problem? The man turned out to be an off-duty NYPD police officer and the New York Daily News, like almost every other media outlet in the country — liberal or conservative — has a completely different set of rules for covering police officers accused of committing a crime. By the next day, the story had been cleaned up.”
The US uses pain and force against terror prisoners, and argues it is all perfectly legal. Mark Tran explains
“When their relationship turns sour, a couple undergoes a procedure to have each other erased from their memories. But it is only through the process of loss that they discover what they had to begin with.”
“On April 18, 2011 Maddow and her network had no difficulty showing and discussing the “Piss Christ” photo by Andres Serrano after it was destroyed in a museum in France by protestors upset with the image of a crucifix submerged in urine.”
http://cnsnews.com/blog/eric-scheiner/msnbcs-maddow-shows-piss-christ-not-latest-charlie-hebdo
“When Obama approved the release of dangerous, top-value Guantanamo prisoners in exchange for an American soldier captured under mysterious circumstances, he negotiated a tangle of competing moral principles. If it were possible to wrestle with these issues in a nonpartisan way, the country might gain from this difficult experience.
The Bergdahl-Taliban trade will be discussed in ethics classes for years to come.”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/04/opinion/ghitis-bergdahl-swap/index.html
“We also believe that with free speech comes great responsibility not to gratuitously offend. But that responsibility belongs to the individual, not the government, and the consequences for breaching it should be social, not governmental. Yet we see an ominous trend toward government restrictions on speech in the very places speech freedoms were born.”
“France, it will be said in the next days, has failed, in a profound way, when it comes to making sense of its own diversity. What will be strongly debated is the nature of that failure, and what its opposite might look like. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, will, inevitably, offer one set of answers, with her characteristic, glossy coat on her much uglier injunctions that often add up to the same thing. Who in France, and in other countries, whose policies and commitment to a free press were, again, targeted in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, is going to come forward with other, better answers? This is a dangerous moment for France, both in the frighteningly immediate sense—there are armed terrorists loose in the capital—and because the decisions that a nation makes at a time of terror are not always the best ones, for anybody.”
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/attack-charlie-hebdo
Photograph that has attracted controversy for more than two decades attracts protests outside New York exhibition
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/sep/28/andres-serrano-piss-christ-new-york
Click on the image below to watch an episode from the popular Ethics course taught by Michael Sandel and Harvard University. Much of the discussion we had in class was taken from the episode linked below.
TOK Topics 