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Category: Ethics

Hunter Biden and the corrupt culture of influence-peddling that has long been deemed socially acceptable

Hunter Biden and the corrupt culture of influence-peddling that has long been deemed socially acceptable

Sarah Chayes writes: How did this get to be standard practice? The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S….

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Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement

Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement

Eric Beinhocker writes: Human-induced climate change is a moral wrong. It involves one group of humans harming others. People of this generation harming those in future generations. People in the developed world harming those in the developing world. Each of us is emitting carbon that is harming those caught in climate-driven superstorms, floods, droughts and conflicts. And there’s the greatest moral wrong of all – the mass extinction event we have triggered that harms all life on Earth. Yet until…

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Vegans are right about ethics and the environment

Vegans are right about ethics and the environment

Farhad Manjoo writes: Many of us, myself included, engage in painless, performative environmentalism. We’ll give up plastic straws and tweet passionately that someone should do something about the Amazon, yet few of us make space in our worldview to acknowledge the carcass in the room: the irrefutable evidence that our addiction to meat is killing the planet right before our eyes. After all, it takes only a few minutes of investigation to learn that there is one overwhelming reason the…

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Jeffrey Epstein hoped to seed the human race with his own DNA

Jeffrey Epstein hoped to seed the human race with his own DNA

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The New York Times reports: Jeffrey E. Epstein, the wealthy financier who is accused of sex trafficking, had an unusual dream: He hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch. Mr. Epstein over the years confided to scientists and others about his scheme, according to four people familiar with his thinking, although there is no evidence that it ever came to fruition. Mr. Epstein’s vision reflected his longstanding fascination with…

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The Bible says to welcome refugees

The Bible says to welcome refugees

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A new Trump ruling will prohibit virtually all Central American migrants from seeking asylum in the United States. AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell By Mathew Schmalz, College of the Holy Cross The Trump administration will stop accepting asylum applications from migrants who could have claimed asylum in a different country before entering the U.S., it announced on July 15. The new interim immigration rule upends a 60-year-old policy that protects refugees from war, political persecution and targeted violence. Central Americans – hundreds…

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White evangelicals, ignoring the Bible, are least likely to say U.S. should accept refugees

White evangelicals, ignoring the Bible, are least likely to say U.S. should accept refugees

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Stephen Johnson writes: It might seem like non-religious people would be most likely to say the U.S. doesn’t have a responsibility to accept refugees. After all, nonbelievers don’t follow a unified doctrine that explicitly tells followers to offer love, shelter and compassion to foreigners — you know, like Christians do. For example, the Bible states: Leviticus 19:34 — “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the foreigner as yourself,…

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Trump’s concentration camps

Trump’s concentration camps

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Charles M Blow writes: I have often wondered why good people of good conscience don’t respond to things like slavery or the Holocaust or human rights abuse. Maybe they simply became numb to the horrific way we now rarely think about or discuss the men still being held at Guantánamo Bay without charge or trial, and who may as well die there. Maybe people grow weary of wrestling with their anger and helplessness, and shunt the thought to the back…

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Most people seem to value integrity more than money

Most people seem to value integrity more than money

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The Guardian reports: Here’s a moral dilemma: if you find a wallet stuffed with bank notes, do you pocket the cash or track down the owner to return it? We can each speak for ourselves, but now a team of economists have put the unsuspecting public to the test in a mass social experiment involving 17,000 “lost” wallets in 40 countries. They found that a majority of people returned the wallets and – contrary to classic economic logic – they…

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GOP lawmakers are quietly turning against the death penalty

GOP lawmakers are quietly turning against the death penalty

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Madeleine Carlisle writes: David Welch’s wife died on Christmas Day 2016. He doesn’t remember much of what happened that next year. But in the grips of grief, he came to a fundamental realization, he told me: The death penalty is “just morally wrong.” Welch has served as a Republican in the New Hampshire state House for more than three decades. For most of that time, he had consistently voted to uphold the death penalty. But after his wife’s death, he…

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Lending practices like those behind 2008 financial crash devastated a generation of taxi drivers

Lending practices like those behind 2008 financial crash devastated a generation of taxi drivers

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The New York Times reports: The phone call that ruined Mohammed Hoque’s life came in April 2014 as he began another long day driving a New York City taxi, a job he had held since emigrating from Bangladesh nine years earlier. The call came from a prominent businessman who was selling a medallion, the coveted city permit that allows a driver to own a yellow cab instead of working for someone else. If Mr. Hoque gave him $50,000 that day,…

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Face it: A farmed animal is someone; not something

Face it: A farmed animal is someone; not something

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Lori Marino writes: We’ve all heard them and used them – the common references to farmed animals that appeal to the worst part of human nature: ‘pearls before swine’, ‘what a pig’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, ‘bird brain’. These phrases represent our species’ view of farmed animals as not particularly bright, uncaring about their treatment or fate, and generally bland and monolithic in their identities. My team of researchers asked: ‘What is there to really know about them?’ Our…

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Martin Buber’s vision of Zionism as a cultural rather than political movement

Martin Buber’s vision of Zionism as a cultural rather than political movement

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Adam Kirsch writes: In 1917, when the Zionists were celebrating Britain’s endorsement of their aims in the Balfour Declaration, Buber objected that he did not envision the redemption of the Jews as something that could be achieved through political victories. Later, after Buber moved to Jerusalem, in 1938, he opposed a Jewish declaration of statehood, arguing that Palestine should become a binational state shared by Arabs and Jews. And, after the State of Israel came into being, in 1948, Buber…

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Is a more generous society possible?

Is a more generous society possible?

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By Leah Shaffer In January 2016, Cathryn Townsend set out to live among “the loveless people.” So named by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the Ik are a tribe of some 11,600 hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers living in an arid and harsh mountainous region of Uganda. Turnbull studied the Ik in the 1960s and famously characterized them as “inhospitable and generally mean” in his book The Mountain People. He documented how young children were abandoned to starve and how people would snatch…

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What science can tell us about how other creatures experience the world

What science can tell us about how other creatures experience the world

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Ross Andersen writes: Amid the human crush of Old Delhi, on the edge of a medieval bazaar, a red structure with cages on its roof rises three stories above the labyrinth of neon-lit stalls and narrow alleyways, its top floor emblazoned with two words: birds hospital. On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late 20s was processing patients. An older woman…

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How Trump’s wall would harm immigrants and refugees

How Trump’s wall would harm immigrants and refugees

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Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin writes: Is the border wall ethical? President Trump has suggested the wall is moral and those who oppose it immoral. His critics claim the opposite. To answer this, we have to consider its effect on humans. What harm could a border wall cause to immigrants and refugees, all of whom are equal to us in the eyes of God? Some people who cross the border are in desperate search of work to support their families. A…

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