Not if you're a member of Congress, they won't!

No surprise there - politicians haven't been highly regarded for their honesty and ethics by John Q. Public for decades, but the 7% ratings in this recent poll by Gallup is a new low.

The most honest professions? Nurses and pharmacists topped the poll.

Link - via AQFL

Raul made about $10,000 total by donating a couple of times a week for a year and a half, at $70 a sample. He didn’t dwell on the outcome—the possible children, the various mothers. He went on with his plans for a legal career, his artistic pursuits, and his own family life. Last year, he mentioned to colleagues that he’d been a sperm donor during his time off. “Have you ever Googled your donor number?” one of the other lawyers asked.

Raul had not. But that morning at work he typed his donor number into the search engine. The first hit was a blog called Django Djournal, a mother’s chronicle of the baby, Django, she had conceived with Raul’s sperm. At the top of the page was a photo of a chubby 2-year-old in striped shorts, smiling halfheartedly—Raul himself as a toddler. “It was out of context,” he explained. “So it took me a minute to realize why it was familiar.” During the period he was donating, he’d sold the photograph to the bank for an extra $200, to give a sense of what a baby of his might look like.

The next photo on the page was of 6-month-old Django, and the resemblance was indeed striking—the dark hair and eyes, the open face. Raul and his wife had two children of their own by this time, and Django resembled them, too. What made the blog entry even more transfixing, though, were the photographs of two other babies also conceived with Raul’s sperm. Their mothers had tracked down the blog, and the result was an impromptu online community of mothers who’d used Raul’s sperm.

Should there be a limit to how many times one man fathers a child by donation? Depending on the clinic, maybe twenty to over a hundred children could be produced by one man. An article in The Atlantic raises the question of whether sperm, particularly sperm like Raul’s that is in demand by multiple families, should be considered a product for sale or something more. In the internet age, there are also issues of privacy, obligations, and genetics. But there are no easy answers -especially for children who were conceived in the age of secrecy and grew up to confront the openness of the internet -and all their parents. Link

Link

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. As mentioned above, an attorney can’t withdraw in the middle of litigation without the judge’s permission, and it’s indisputably unethical for an advocate to directly inform the judge that his client is a liar. What usually happens in these cases is that the lawyer approaches the bench and asks to beg off the case for vague “ethical reasons.” The judge, knowing exactly what’s going on, typically denies the request, because the jury would smell a rat if the lawyer were to disappear right before the defendant took the stand. The judge, continuing the Kabuki-style exchange, informs the advocate that he has satisfied his ethical obligations and must continue. In some courts, the lawyer can protect his sense of ethics by simply putting the client on the stand and instructing him to “tell the jury his story,” rather than specifically prompting the lies.

Slate looks at various reasons why a lawyer can and should quit a case -or not. Link

London based designer Rohan Chhabra’s hunting jacket transforms into a 100% animal cruelty free ram’s head trophy you can mount on your wall when you’re not wearing it. It reminds me of the Transformer toys my sons played with back in the day.

The thought-provoking design is part of Embodying Ethics, a series of stand-alone pieces that question the materials, origin, and manufacturing of a product while turning the idea of consumption on its head. The project aims to explore Design with a capital D’s ability to not only provide answers, but also ask its own socially fueled questions about ethics and value.The jacket itself isn’t your typical wearable-turned-animal-head, either. Equipped with many pockets and zippered compartments, the wearable streetware can transform into several different “modes” of jacket, including a lined coat, a lighter-weight quilted jacket, and a fitted city windbreaker.

Link – Via ecouterre

That’s the provocative title of an article in this month’s Archaeology magazine exploring the scientific, legal, and ethical considerations involved. Extensive information about the Neanderthal genetic code is available, and the technologic problems can apparently be overcome. Questions remain about how the process might best be accomplished, and whether it should be done at all.

The Neanderthals broke away from the lineage of modern humans around 450,000 years ago… As different as Neanderthals were, they may not have been different enough to be considered a separate species.  “There are humans today who are more different from each other in phenotype [physical characteristics],” says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin… Many of the differences between a Neanderthal clone and a modern human would be due to genetic changes our species has undergone since Neanderthals became extinct… Clones created from a genome that is more than 30,000 years old will not have immunity to a wide variety of diseases, some of which would likely be fatal. They will be lactose intolerant, have difficulty metabolizing alcohol, be prone to developing Alzheimer’s disease, and maybe most importantly, will have brains different from modern people’s…

“I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties,” says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The law does not define what a human being is, but legal scholars are debating questions of human rights in cases involving genetic engineering…

Hawks believes the barriers to Neanderthal cloning will come down. “We are going to bring back the mammoth… the impetus against doing Neanderthal because it is too weird is going to go away.” He doesn’t think creating a Neanderthal clone is ethical science, but points out that there are always people who are willing to overlook the ethics. “In the end,” Hawks says, “we are going to have a cloned Neanderthal, I’m just sure of it.”

Much more at the link.  The image is a computer-assisted reconstruction of a Neanderthal child by a research team at the University of Zurich.

Previously on Neatorama: Misconceptions About Neanderthals, and Cavemen Did Have Compassion: They Cared for Disabled Children.

In Sherman and Clore’s version of the Stroop, volunteers read not the names of colors but words with strong moral overtones: greed and honesty, for example. Some of the words were printed in black and some in white, and they flashed rapidly on a screen. As with the original Stroop, a fast reaction time was taken as evidence that a connection was mentally automatic and natural; hesitation was taken as a sign that a connection did not ring true. The researchers wanted to see if the volunteers automatically linked immorality with blackness, as in black ink, and virtue with whiteness.

And they did, so quickly that the connections could not possibly be deliberate. When moral words were printed in white and immoral words in black, reaction time was significantly faster than when words of virtue were black and sin were white. Just as we unthinkingly—almost unconsciously—“know” a lemon is yellow, we instantly know that sin and crime are black and that grace and virtue are white.

The researchers conducted further tests and determined that this color-moral association may stem from concepts of physical cleanliness:

This result offers pretty convincing evidence in itself that the connection between black and bad is not just a metaphor we all have learned over the years, but rather it is deeply associated with our ancient fear of filth and contagion. But Sherman and Clore wanted to look at the question yet another way. If the association between sin and blackness really does reflect a concern about dirt and impurity, then this association should be stronger for people who are preoccupied with purity and pollution. Such fastidiousness often manifests as personal cleanliness, and a proxy for personal cleansing might be the desire for cleaning products. The researchers tested this string of psychological connections in a final study, again ending with the Stroop test.

Link | Image: Republic Pictures

This chart shows the moral alignments of nine pop culture characters using the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system. Rorschach as Chaotic Good? I think that Chaotic Neutral is more likely. And Neutral Good for John Locke at best.

Top row, left to right: John Locke of Lost, Dwight from Sin City, Rorschach of Watchmen.
Middle row: Indiana Jones, Niko Bellic of Grand Theft Auto 4, Tyler Durden of Fight Club.
Bottom row: Darth Vader, Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men, and the Joker.

I’m not sure who’s responsible for this chart — it’s been floating around the net. I’ll edit with a photocredit when someone claims responsibility.

via Popped Culture | Explanation of Alignment System

Zach Gage says that he created the free video game Lose/Lose to make people question their ethical assumptions. The game is similar to Space Invaders, but every time you kill an alien, the game deletes a randomly-selected file from your hard drive:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted. Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land? Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

Clicking on the link below will not download the game onto your computer and begin deleting your files. But it will give you the option to do so.

Link via Geekologie

In 2006, researchers found six Pakistani children who felt no pain due to an inactivated gene, and who constantly had bruises and cuts. One fell into the habit of putting knives through his hand and walking barefoot on coals, before his untimely death.

Still, scientists already know that humans can intellectually dissociate the sensation of pain from how much it bothers them. Lab experiments with mice have also suggested a way to disconnect that pain sensation without totally leaving animals vulnerable to a world of hurt.

Due the concern among some meat-eaters that the animals that provide their food suffer physical pain while being raised and slaughtered, Hsu wonders if geneticists may be able to create animals that cannot feel pain. Would it be ethical to do so? What do you think?

Link

Image: Mitch Romanowski Design

A human-robot co-existence society could emerge by 2030, says Chen in his paper. Already iRobot’s Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and Scooba floor cleaner are a part of more than 3 million American households. The next generation robots will be more sophisticated and are expected to provide services such as nursing, security, housework and education.

These machines will have the ability to make independent decisions and work reasonably unsupervised. That’s why, says Chen, it may be time to decide who regulates robots.

If it was up to you, what laws would you program into robots?

Link

*a total of 30 percent overall — admitted stealing from a store within the past year.

*More than two of five (42 percent) said that they sometimes lie to save money.

*A substantial majority (64 percent) cheated on a test during the past year

*More than one in four (26 percent) confessed they lied on at least one or two questions on the survey.

*A whopping 93 percent said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character

The report released yesterday covered honesty and integrity. A later report will have survey results on drug use and violence. Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!