The Ethics of Whistle-Blowing

Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly
Originally published February 14, 2014

Is Edward Snowden a hero for revealing government wrongdoing, or a traitor for leaking classified information? “I don’t think anybody acts and says to themselves, ‘What I’m doing is immoral, but I’m going to do it.’ People always rationalize,” according to former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow. Correspondent Lucky Severson reports on the debate over the morality of Snowden’s actions.



The entire story is here.

Embattled head of American Academy of Arts and Sciences to resign

By Todd Wallack |  GLOBE STAFF     JULY 26, 2013

Dogged by charges that she inflated her resume and abused her position, the embattled president of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences agreed to resign at the end of the month, the institution announced Thursday, ending weeks of controversy that had engulfed the organization and threatened to tarnish its reputation.

Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, who has overseen the Cambridge honorary society for the past 17 years, had been on paid leave from the academy for more than a month while an outside law firm investigated allegations, first reported by the Globe, that she falsely claimed to have a doctorate from New York University and misstated her work history in federal grant applications.

Berlowitz, 69, also came under fire for berating staffers and receiving an oversized pay package — more than $598,000 in fiscal 2012 alone for an organization with only three dozen staffers. The attorney general’s office also asked whether the academy fully reported all her executive perks, such as first-class travel.

The entire story is here.

The Role of Health Professionals in Detainee Interrogation

A teenager tortured at Guantanamo, and the stalled legislation to ensure clinicians "first, do no harm"

By Santiago Wills
The Atlantic
Originally published November 11, 2012

Here is one excerpt:

In the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ever since leaked reports and testimonies -- including that of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently on trial in Guantanamo -- were published in 2004, the issue has attracted the attention of the media, health organizations, and political activists. Psychologists and doctors have clashed with their peers and with the Department of Defense over the role that health professionals should play in interrogations, given their oath to "do no harm." The Senate Judiciary Committee and numerous military investigations have confirmed that physicians and clinicians played a significant role during so-called enhanced interrogations, either through reverse engineering of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, or through monitoring and assisting in CIA black sites and prisons like Bagram and Guantanamo.

Recently, that conflict reached politicians in Albany, New York. This year, State Senator Thomas Duane and Assembly Member Richard Gottfried sponsored a unique piece of legislation that establishes sanctions (including license removal) for state-licensed health professionals who participate in torture or improper treatment of prisoners.

"The bill presents an opportunity to fill a gap in state law on the regulation of health professionals that desperately needs to be filled," Leonard Rubenstein, the former president of Physicians for Human Rights -- an independent organization that fights human rights violations all around the world -- said in a public forum. "Almost everyone agrees that the idea that health professionals can participate in abuse of detainees and prisoners is indefensible. If that is the case, it is also indefensible to exclude such acts from state law on licensing and regulation of health professionals."

The entire story is here.

D'Souza Resigns From King's College

Inside Higher Ed
Originally published October 19, 2012

Dinesh D'Souza, president of the King's College, a Christian college in New York City, has resigned after reports that he shared a hotel room with a woman to whom he was not married before filing for divorce from his wife. In a statement posted on the college's website Thursday, the president of the Board of Trustees said that D'Souza had resigned, effective immediately, to "allow him to attend to his personal and family needs."

The entire story is here.

A Girl Not Named Sybil

By Debbie Nathan
The New York Times
Published October 14, 2011

Undated photo of
Shirley Mason

“What about Mama?” the psychiatrist asks her patient. “What’s Mama been doing to you, dear? . . . I know she gave you the enemas. And I know she filled your bladder up with cold water, and I know she used the flashlight on you, and I know she stuck the washcloth in your mouth, cotton in your nose so you couldn’t breathe. . . . What else did she do to you? It’s all right to talk about it now. . . . ”

“My mommy,” the patient says.

“Yes.”

“My mommy said that I was a bad little girl, and . . . she slapped me . . . with her knuckles. . . .”

“Mommy isn’t going to ever hurt you again,” the psychiatrist says at the close of the session. “Do you want to know something, Sweetie? I’m stronger than Mother.”

The transcript of this conversation is stored at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City, among the papers of Flora Schreiber, author of “Sybil,” the blockbuster book about a woman with 16 personalities. “Sybil” was published in 1973; within four years it had sold more than six million copies in the United States and hundreds of thousands abroad. A television adaptation broadcast in 1976 was seen by a fifth of all Americans. But Sybil’s story was not just gripping reading; it was instrumental in creating a new psychiatric diagnosis: multiple-personality disorder, or M.P.D., known today as dissociative-identity disorder.

Schreiber collaborated on the book with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist who asks, “What about Mama?” — and with Wilbur’s patient, whose name Schreiber changed to Sybil Dorsett. Schreiber worked from records of Sybil’s therapy, including thousands of pages of patient diaries and transcripts of tape-recorded therapy sessions. Before she died in the late 1980s, Schreiber stipulated that the material be archived at a library. For a decade after Schreiber’s death, Sybil’s identity remained unknown. To protect her privacy, librarians sealed her records. In 1998, two researchers discovered that her real name was Shirley Mason. In trying to track her down, they learned that she was dead, and the librarians at John Jay decided to unseal the Schreiber papers.

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One May afternoon in 1958, Mason walked into Wilbur’s office carrying a typed letter that ran to four pages. It began with Mason admitting that she was “none of the things I have pretended to be.

“I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong,” the letter continued. “But it is not what I have led you to believe. . . . I do not have any multiple personalities. . . . I do not even have a ‘double.’ . . . I am all of them. I have been essentially lying.”

Before coming to New York, she wrote, she never pretended to have multiple personalities. As for her tales about “fugue” trips to Philadelphia, they were lies, too. Mason knew she had a problem. She “very, very, very much” wanted Wilbur’s help. To identify her real trouble and deal with it honestly, Mason wrote, she and Wilbur needed to stop demonizing her mother. It was true that she had been anxious and overly protective. But the “extreme things” — the rapes with the flashlights and bottles — were as fictional as the soap operas that she and her mother listened to on the radio. Her descriptions of gothic tortures “just sort of rolled out from somewhere, and once I had started and found you were interested, I continued. . . . Under pentothal,” Mason added, “I am much more original.”

Mason was the most important patient in Wilbur’s professional career. She was preserving the tape-recorded narcosynthesis interviews she was doing with Mason and preparing to speak about the case at professional meetings. Wilbur told her patient that the recantation was “a major defensive maneuver,” merely the ego’s attempt to trick itself into thinking it didn’t need therapy. But Mason did need it, badly, Wilbur insisted. She was denying that she’d been tortured by her mother; this showed she really had been tortured.

Mason went home and composed a new letter. “One Friday,” she wrote Wilbur, “ ‘someone’ stalked into your office, imitated me [and] had a paper written about how she had now become well and was confessing . . . that it had all been put on. Well, you knew better.”

Wilbur instructed her secretary to schedule five sessions a week with Mason. She started the pentothal again.

Mason developed more and more personalities, ending up with a total of 16. Her “memories” of Mattie’s torture — of being sexually assaulted by her mother with kitchen implements; of seeing Mattie Mason conducting orgies in the woods with teenage girls; of being buried alive in a grain silo in her father’s workshop — were flowing.

Mason’s roommate, horrified by the treatment Mason was receiving, urged Mason to terminate her sessions with Wilbur. Instead, Mason left the apartment they shared on the West Side and found a tiny place on East 78th Street where she could live alone, just a few blocks from Wilbur’s home and office on Park Avenue. Wilbur paid the deposit on the new apartment and showered Mason with gifts: old rugs and drapes from her office, a fur-trimmed winter coat — even a cat.

The entire article can be found here.

Ethical dilemmas: A model to understand teacher practice

Ehrich, Lisa Catherine; Kimber, Megan; Millwater, Jan; Cranston, Neil

Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, Vol 17(2), Apr 2011, 173-185.

Over recent decades, the field of ethics has been the focus of increasing attention in teaching. This is not surprising given that teaching is a moral activity that is heavily values-laden. Because of this, teachers face ethical dilemmas in the course of their daily work. 


This paper presents an ethical decision-making model that helps to explain the decision-making processes that individuals or groups are likely to experience when confronted by an ethical dilemma. In order to make sense of the model, we put forward three short ethical dilemma scenarios facing teachers and apply the model to interpret them. Here we identify the critical incident, the forces at play that help to illuminate the incident, the choices confronting the individual and the implications of these choices for the individual, organisation and community. 


Based on our analysis and the wider literature we identify several strategies that may help to minimise the impact of ethical dilemmas. These include the importance of sharing dilemmas with trusted others; having institutional structures in schools that lessen the emergence of harmful actions occurring; the necessity for individual teachers to articulate their own personal and professional ethics; acknowledging that dilemmas have multiple forces at play; the need to educate colleagues about specific issues; and the necessity of appropriate preparation and support for teachers. Of these strategies, providing support for teachers via professional development is explored more fully.