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Month: October 2017

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Fast Fashion and the Ethics Behind Your T-shirt

A Photo of fashion design mannequins in an empty warehouse.

Can ethics and economics ever work together? This question captures the essence of the sweatshop issue that dominated the majority of media in 2013, especially highlighting Bangladesh. In 2013, according to the Guardian, a garment factory located from the fourth floor to the seventh floor of Rana Plaza collapsed, killing 1,135 people.This was not a natural disaster in any way, but rather was purely man-made. The workers apparently noticed a crack on Tuesday and reported to their manager, which resulted in a supposed Wednesday off for inspection. However, for some reason the building was declared safe to work in later on, and hesitant yet voiceless workers were called back to work, as CNN explains. Unfortunately, the Rana Plaza incident was not the first incident related to garment factories that occurred in Bangladesh. Previously in 2005, reports indicate that there were 70-plus deaths in a garment factory in the same area. Additionally, in 2012 another garment factory fire has already killed more than a hundred people in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

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Regulating Consumption and Canada’s Trans Fat Ban

A close-up photo of onion rings.

On September 15, Canadian Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor announced the prohibition of artificial trans fats from all foods sold in Canada starting on September 15, 2018. In the United States, a similar order from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will prohibit trans fats starting on June 16, 2018. While some have hailed the regulations as significant milestones in public health policy, others have objected to the restrictions on the food industry.

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Assessing the 2017 DePauw Dialogue: Was it Effective?

A photo of the Depauw boulder.

DePauw’s annual Day of Dialogue is a day where classes are cancelled and students congregate in spaces across campus to discuss prevalent racially and socially charged topics that DePauw students encounter. Or at least that’s the goal of Day of Day of Dialogue. In the wake of DePauw’s Day of Dialogue this past week, one question seems to loom over campus like a shadow: was this year’s Day of Dialogue effective? Did students leave the spaces where they had conversations about race as better people? Or at least did they leave more aware? Continue reading “Assessing the 2017 DePauw Dialogue: Was it Effective?”

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The Transplant Scenario in Fiction and Film

A photo of an operating room during surgery

Ethicists make many uses of the story of the transplant surgeon—the surgeon who uses one healthy patient as an organ bank and saves five lives.  Surely this must be a villain, not a hero, but why? Most of us think it would be right, not wrong, to flip a switch so a train didn’t head toward five people lashed to a track but instead toward one. The scenario helps raise questions about killing and letting die, doing and allowing, and also poses a problem for act utilitarianism, which assesses actions in terms of outcomes.  

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Should Hugh Hefner be Buried Next to Marilyn Monroe?

An old snapshot of Hugh Hefner smoking a pipe.

Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, died on September 27 at the age of 91. A leader in the sexual revolution of the second half of the twentieth century, Hefner has been a controversial figure throughout his life. Playboy magazine launched in 1953 and hurled his empire into mainstream success that spanned media, later including multiple television shows, clubs, restaurants, and the notoriously excessive Playboy Mansion.

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Can There Be a Democratic Socialism?

A photo of Salvador Allende waving to a crowd.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro recently said that he is willing to become a dictator in order to ensure “economic peace” in his country. This is very strange, as commentators have widely argued that Maduro has already been a dictator for quite some time. Latin American countries had long endured dictatorships, but for the most part, dictators acknowledged their condition. They rarely pretended to be democratic. The only exception was Cuba. There, a leftist dictator pretended to be democratic, ala the German Democratic Republic, which everyone knew was democratic only in its name.

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