New Ethical Challenges

New Ethical Challenges

D’aussi loin qu’elles remontent, les guerres ont toujours eu des conséquences dévastatrices pour l’environnement. Dès l'Antiquité en effet les armées n’ont pas hésité à détruire digues et barrages pour inonder des régions entières et acquérir ainsi l’avantage sur l’ennemi. Les Romains utilisaient déjà quant à eux la technique de la terre brûlée qui fut ensuite notamment reprise par l’armée russe durant la seconde guerre mondiale.

Il faudra cependant attendre le choc des défoliations intensives des Etats-Unis sur la forêt vietnamienne durant la guerre du Vietnam (1959-1975) pour que le Droit International Humanitaire (DIH) protège l’Environnement en lui-même. Ce n’est donc qu’après la...

Read more: L'Environnement en temps de guerre: Une victime oubliée

New Ethical Challenges

Today I visited Taiwan’s famous Losheng Sanitarium (樂生療養院), a leper colony built by the Japanese colonial government in Xinzhuang City, Taipei County. As in leper colonies throughout the world, Taiwanese victims of Hansen’s Disease were forcibly imprisoned in Losheng by the government, as they were in Japan by the government there. Although the leper imprisonment order was lifted in Taiwan in the 1950s , they have for the most part remained. With modern medicine the patients are no longer inmates, and no longer contagious, but nothing can de-cripple them or regrow their missing fingers and stumpy limbs. And they have nowhere to go, and no way to survive except by public welfare of some sort.

I had first heard of Losheng...

Read more: A visit to Losheng sanitarium in Taiwan

New Ethical Challenges

Day after day, medias and governments provide us with a grid through which we are supposed to understand the world: figures and statistics… “China’s growth rate last year has been of 11 percent, while in France it was only of 2 percent”… “The price index has been rising 1.2 percent during the last semester, and inflation is coming back”… “Stock market capitalization is down by 52 percent”… “The countries members of the G20 have agreed on a stimulus package of one trillion dollars”… Figures dance in our heads, they do not stay there for very long, but give us the feeling of a world on which we have no control at all. Figures and statistics are the masters whose power we are afraid of and to whom we pay...

Read more: Figures and Reality

New Ethical Challenges

Beyond economic reality, society suffers today from a deep disenchantment of the world that one could even call an identity crisis. Today, we put forward the individual and not the collective as if the material successes of each one could create happiness for all. Then consumption loses its first finality which is to meet our needs. We finally all consume because others consume. Paradoxically, the models of success conveyed by the media and publicity always put the exception and the performance ahead. It seems necessary to consume to be distinguished, to see its success and difference. A famous French adman has said recently that “if, at fifty, you do not own a Rolex, it means that you have failed your life”. Beyond the cynical...

Read more: Beyond our Needs and our Desires: Consumption

New Ethical Challenges

Read more: From Shanghai to Athens

New Ethical Challenges

Read more: 'Trash-Never-Touch' Program

New Ethical Challenges

We all have to leave this world eventually. Here, His Eminence Cardinal Paul Shan Kuo-Hsi talks of his final journey.

The Cardinal has two distinct memories that troubled him in his youth in Huabei, China. Firstly after the death of a neighbour’s uncle he wanted to become a doctor so he could save lives. Secondly, having seen numerous casualties and people left homeless in the Yellow river floods he wanted to become hydraulic engineer. He didn’t end up fulfilling either of these two dreams instead his eventual calling was to be a man of the clergy. However, as a Cardinal the principal remained the same, from the start he wanted to be of service to the people, for the happiness of the people.

The principal of life and death is...

Read more: Laughing through life’s final tour

New Ethical Challenges

The US healthcare reform bill that recently passed the House only did so after a controversial amendment was inserted banning any insurance plan which pays for abortion from accepting any federal subsidies, a clause that will probably eliminate abortion from most or all health plans if it goes into law. One reader at TPM had the following thought experiment:

"What would happen if a few female members of the House put in (or merely proposed) an amendment to the health care bill which stated that men would be barred BY LAW from purchasing health insurance which covered Viagra, all hair-growth medications or procedures or transplants, etc.? "
This thought experiment reminded me of the well known case of the birth control in Japan...

Read more: Pills for old men or young women?

New Ethical Challenges

On January 30, the Taipei Ricci Institute has signed an agreement with Taiwan National Library creating a "Matteo Ricci - Pacific Studies Reading Room" within the premises of the library. At the same time, with the support of the library, the Council for Aboriginal Affairs and individual scholars, the TRI is working towards the creation of a "Taiwan Society for Pacific Studies" that will become its main research outlet and focus.

New research into language evolution suggests most Pacific populations originated in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. The Austronesians arose in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Before entering the Philippines, they paused for around a thousand years, and then spread rapidly across the 7,000km from the Philippines...

Read more: Taipei Ricci Institute: shifting its focus

New Ethical Challenges

Each method of marketing represents a different way of offering particular products to targeted groups of customers. These methods recognize the peculiarities between customers and are the result of study and research, the outcome of experimentation and experience. Recently another type of marketing has gained popularity and is especially visible in the streets of Buenos Aires.[/dropcap]



Even though this type of marketing I am introducing is widely used, it doesn’t represent an evolution of the art; on the contrary, it assumes that customers are all the same, a mass that reacts uniformly. Therefore, it also supposes that the messages delivered will unquestionably persuade customers. This method represents, by nature, a naïf...

Read more: Dirty Marketing all over

New Ethical Challenges

Read more: Art&Culture in Taipei County

New Ethical Challenges

The Book of Revelation is the last one of the New Testament. Its style, its images and its dramatic aspect cannot but astonish its readers. Yet, it remains one of the most widely read of the Bible, especially in times of crisis.

It is difficult to understand its style and meaning if one does not know that it belongs to a literary genre: the “apocalyptic genre”, which developed in the Jewish world around two centuries before the birth of Jesus and will still last for one more century after his death.

Writers of “apocalyptic books” intend to reveal to their readers the project of God: the coming of His Day, when His Kingdom will be definitely established on earth. They first look at the past of Israel, reflect with their readers...

Read more: A Book Written for the Present