Martin Cohen's 101 Ethical Dilemmas
101 Ethical Dilemmas
‘101 Ethical Dilemmas is witty, clever, imaginative, pithy, and sweeping in scope. It explores many different questions concerning philosophy, ethics, religion and politics, and leaves a great deal of room for further debate and discussion.’ David Resnik, East
Carolina University, USA
From overcrowded lifeboats to the censor’s pen, Martin Cohen’s stimulating and amusing dilemmas reveal the subtleties, complexities and downright contradictions that make up the rich tapestry of ethics.
Travelling from DIY babies and breeding experiments by way of ethically dubious chemical factories and the ‘School of Terror’, before finally ending up in the ‘Twinkies courtroom drama’ and Newgate Prison, there is a dilemma for …show more content…
Yet that was a little decision,
Forward!
with no clear ‘right or wrong’ about it. (Every day he loaded things into planes!) Too often ethics misses the real questions completely.
Let’s pause a moment and look at that great issue again. Perhaps the greatest single decision ever taken – whether to drop the atom bomb – or not? Whether to drop it on a city of men, women and children? On big children, middling children and little ones too?
Old people and handicapped people and sick people? The lot? Or not.
In the Spring of 1945 the US Air Force had almost a free run at all the Japanese cities, sprinkling incendiary bombs of napalm in their thousands into seas of fire that sweep through the wooden houses of Tokyo and a score of lesser cities. The Japanese were a cruel and merciless foe, and had shown no concern or pity for their many victims – civilian more often than military – whom they treated, mark this, as animals. As Minoru
Matsui’s film Japanese Devils (2002) records, using the voices of Japanese soldiers themselves, the troops massacred men, women, children, and, yes, babies. But now
‘101 Ethical Dilemmas is witty, clever, imaginative, pithy, and sweeping in scope. It explores many different questions concerning philosophy, ethics, religion and politics, and leaves a great deal of room for further debate and discussion.’ David Resnik, East
Carolina University, USA
From overcrowded lifeboats to the censor’s pen, Martin Cohen’s stimulating and amusing dilemmas reveal the subtleties, complexities and downright contradictions that make up the rich tapestry of ethics.
Travelling from DIY babies and breeding experiments by way of ethically dubious chemical factories and the ‘School of Terror’, before finally ending up in the ‘Twinkies courtroom drama’ and Newgate Prison, there is a dilemma for …show more content…
Yet that was a little decision,
Forward!
with no clear ‘right or wrong’ about it. (Every day he loaded things into planes!) Too often ethics misses the real questions completely.
Let’s pause a moment and look at that great issue again. Perhaps the greatest single decision ever taken – whether to drop the atom bomb – or not? Whether to drop it on a city of men, women and children? On big children, middling children and little ones too?
Old people and handicapped people and sick people? The lot? Or not.
In the Spring of 1945 the US Air Force had almost a free run at all the Japanese cities, sprinkling incendiary bombs of napalm in their thousands into seas of fire that sweep through the wooden houses of Tokyo and a score of lesser cities. The Japanese were a cruel and merciless foe, and had shown no concern or pity for their many victims – civilian more often than military – whom they treated, mark this, as animals. As Minoru
Matsui’s film Japanese Devils (2002) records, using the voices of Japanese soldiers themselves, the troops massacred men, women, children, and, yes, babies. But now