Free Republic

NEW YORK--Answering a question from a reader as to whether a teacher should post a cartoon on his door that disparages President Obama as a socialist, New York Times columnist Randy Cohen writes: [W]hile this teacher does not transgress ethically, he does seem to fall short intellectually, offering not deft political analysis but slogans and clichés... Incidentally...how does it defame a person to call him a “socialist” (outside of nutty far-right circles) — a set of ideas many advanced Western democracies find congenial, what with the accessible health-care, affordable higher education and good public transportation? Cohen, who writes the Times'...

Caterpillar, the heavy equipment manufacturer, is moving to lay off more than 20,000 workers. These days such mass layoffs are sadly unsurprising, but are they ethical? If Caterpillar is to relegate legions of employees to the care of the public, it may not simply echo Ebenezer Scrooge: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Is there no COBRA?” Instead, it must use its considerable political clout to ensure that those programs are robustly funded, hardly a priority either for Caterpillar or its confreres among the Fortune 500. That is, if Caterpillar is to deprive thousands of people of a...

Faced with painful choices about who will suffer most from looming budget cuts, Alexandria officials have taken the unusual step of paying a professional ethicist to help them grapple with the moral issues involved. Just a few of the vexing decisions his advice helped Alexandria policymakers confront in recent weeks: They took apartments being built for the mentally ill and temporarily turned them into housing for the disabled. They cut a parenting counselor for jailed minors with kids but preserved aid for belligerent preschoolers. They scaled back drug prevention but kept the methadone pills available to ease the cravings of...

Professor Robert P. George is pacing around a Princeton auditorium before 200-plus undergraduates, preparing to wage an intellectual shock-and-awe campaign against illogical thinking. “Some politicians say that they’re ‘personally opposed’ to abortion, yet ‘pro-choice,’” says the 48-year-old professor of constitutional law and moral philosophy. “But we must ask: Is this a position that can survive the test of logical coherence? After all, if abortion is wrong, surely it is wrong because it is the unjust taking of the life of a developing human being.” He pauses to let that sink in and then launches another question: “And if one believes...