The Dallas Morning News reported in a City Hall Blog story Sunday that the Dallas City Council may attend this week’s Ethics, Trust & Transparency conference en masse.
Category: Uncategorized
Next weeks Ethics, Trust & Transparency conference on the SMU campus just got easier to attend with the announcement that the entire event will be streamed on the web. Every minute of the conference, beginning at 8:20 am, Wednesday, November 2, 2011 will be video streamed free-of-charge on the main page of the Maguire Center’s […]
Have you ever stolen someone else’s idea? Does it matter if the idea has monetary value or not? According to the Wall Street Journal, “Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for the influential social-networking site. Three judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals questioned lawyers about whether to toss out a 2008 settlement […]
Categories
RI Governor: First Order is Ethics
Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chaffee makes ethics oversight his first executive order. Do people need to be monitored to do the right thing?
Every 2 years, New York state employees will be required to go to Ethics School. Do we need frequent reminders of what is or isn’t acceptable public behavior?
See why 300 leading academics have called upon the American Economic Association to establish a code of ethics.
Categories
Kidney Donations–Some New Ideas
Tom Mayo and I have already posted some thoughts about organ donation in the US and elsewhere on this blog. I’ve just read two interesting recent articles about the problem with regard to kidney transplants in the US. Currently some 80,000 people are on a waiting list for kidneys, and they generally receive dialysis while […]
Categories
Explaining Morality Religiously
The Op-Ed page of the New York Times again has a challenging discussion of morality. The well-known atheist Sam Harris expresses some reservations about President Obama’s nomination of Francis Collins as Director of the National Institutes of Health. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/opinion/27harris.html?ref=opinion Harris recognizes Collins’ important scientific accomplishments. But he quotes some statements by Collins about religion and […]
Categories
Peter Singer on the Value of Life
Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine had an article by the eminent utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer with the provocative title, “Why We Must Ration Health Care”: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?ref=magazine It is partly a defense of the idea of a national health insurance program, but it also discusses the idea of ‘rationing’ health care. Singer is brave enough to […]
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times columnist who writes the most about issues of global poverty and disease, has a discussion today of some of the recent work by psychologists and philosophers about empathy and its limits. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/opinion/09kristof.html Kristof has done his homework, and he cites some of the most important thinkers in these fields. […]