On Wednesday I asked if it was ethical to force-feed prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who, by their own volition, refused to take any nourishment. The question was featured in a Room for Debate forum on The New York Times website. I was looking for responses based solely on the ethics of such an action. I pointed out that both the American...

At a White House news conference last month, President Obama said, “It’s not sustainable. The notion that we’re going to keep 100 individuals in no man’s land in perpetuity. All of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this? Why are we doing this?” Obama was talking about the on-going imprisonment of, as of August, 164 individuals at...

Every couple of years, The Gallup organization takes a poll on the honesty and ethics of professions. It’s not surprising that nurses typically come out on top. In the latest poll, from 2012, nurses were given an 85 percent rating of high or very high. I met First Lieutenant (ret.) Jean Mitchell-Baldwin when she and her husband, John, paid a visit...

CSI is a CBS-TV crime drama that follows “Crime Scene Investigators” – like William Peterson, Ted Danson, Elizabeth Shue and others – as they solve murders using science and analytical skills. ESI is my own ethical-sense investigative process used in researching and examining stories like the three-part series, Conspiracy Theory. (Think of me as Ted Danson… with darker hair.) The purpose of...

All focus is on President Obama and Congress as to whether the U.S. will enter into a “limited” attack on Syria as a response to their use of chemical weapons. This is a difficult issue and there are no easy answers. As The New York Times (Sept. 5), recently made clear, the rebels opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have demonstrated their own...

Once again, friend and colleague Colman McCarthy hits the nail on the head in his commentary regarding sexual assaults in the military. A former Washington Post columnist, McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington and teaches courses on nonviolence at four universities and two high schools. It was Groucho Marx, and it usually was, who had it right:...

David Krieger is a friend and president of The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation His most recent book is “ZERO: The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition.” I recently visited Hiroshima to give a speech.  It is a city that I have visited many times in the past, and I am always amazed by its resilience. The city represents for me the...

The recent controversy over scenes of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, a film dramatizing the hunt for terrorist Osama bin Laden, caused me to revisit a student paper from Steve Ambra’sContemporary Ethical Issues class. The student, a former U.S. soldier deployed to Iraq, reminded me of just some of the many ethical issues faced by our military in combat situations. “I joined the military at...

Every year the Gallup organization asks a cross-section of Americans to rate “the perceived honesty and ethical standards” of various professions. As expected, nurses, pharmacists and medical doctors have topped the list at 85%, 75% and 70% respectively in 2012. “Six medical professional categories were included in this year’s update,” Gallup writes. “Nurses’ high rating this is not unexpected; they...

The fall of a leader is always tragic, and in David Petraeus’ case, much unexpected. In the immediacy of the moment, there is an understandable shock, and, within the ranks, it is not uncommon for those closest to him to feel a sense of betrayal. I was in the process of writing-up General Petraeus’ 12 Rules of Leadership when it was announced...