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	▪ American History ▪ Art ▪ Biographies ▪ Business ▪ Case Studies ▪ Communication & Media ▪ Computer Technologies ▪ Controversial Topics Abortion Advertising Ethics Affirmative Action Animal Rights Anti-Semitism Assisted Suicide Bias Crime Biotechnology Capital Punishment Contradictions Corporate Corruption Creationism Drug Testing Drugs Legalization Ebonics Environment Ethics Extinction Foreign Aid Free Speech Gay Bashing Home Schooling Homelessness Homosexual Parenting Homosexuality Movie Censorship Patriot Act Social Responsibility ▪ Culture ▪ Economics ▪ Education ▪ Environmental Issues ▪ Finance		▪ Geography ▪ Health ▪ History ▪ Internet ▪ Management ▪ Media ▪ Philosophy ▪ Politics ▪ Religion ▪ Roman History ▪ Science and Technology ▪ Sociology ▪ World Literature


	The History of HIV/AIDS

	Imagine a disease that was usually fatal and could spread each and every time two people have sex. Now imagine that that disease progressed so slowly that it took an average of ten years from the time of infection until the infected person's death, sometimes as much as twenty years. Let's also imagine that the disease was caused by a virus so small, a mere 130 millionth of a millimeter in diameter, that if it was magnified several times, it still could not be seen with the naked eye. And what if the disease affected mostly people in the prime of their lives, rather than at the end of their years? And what if the disease produced hideous symptoms like purplish blotches on the skin, extreme fatigue, and severe weight loss? And imagine that disease was new and spreading around the world at an alarming rate, infecting tens of millions of people.


	▪	Alternative Schooling
	▪	Freedom of Speech: Hustler Magazine v. Falwell
	▪	Homosexuality: Biology and/or Culture?
	▪	Fossil Fuels: Coal, Gas, and Petroleum
	▪	Generating and Transmitting Electricity
	▪	Rise of the Steel Industry
	▪	The Development of the Automobile
	▪	Extinction of Species
	▪	Legalization of Drugs
	▪	Corporate Social Responsibility
	▪	The U.S.A. Patriot Act
	▪	Death Penalty Contradictions
	▪	The Right to Die
	▪	Affirmative Action: Pursuing Fairness
	▪	The Abortion Reform Movement
	▪	Puritanism in America
	▪	Early Christian Art
	▪	Theodore Roosevelt
	▪	Labor Rights
	▪	Medieval Chivalry
	▪	Understanding Marijuana
	▪	Medicine in the Classical World
	▪	Health Care Policy in the US
	▪	Psychedelic Drugs Abuse
	▪	Ethics of Doctor-Patient Relationships
	▪	Religion of Rome and Early Italy
	▪	Standardized Testing
	▪	Economics of Alfred Marshall
	▪	Confucian Moral Self Cultivation
	▪	Genocide in Rwanda
	▪	Andy Warhol
	▪	Accounting Ethics
	▪	Benito Mussolini
	▪	Anthony Comstock
	▪	Henry Ford
	▪	Bram Stoker
	▪	The Television Industries: Broadcast, Cable, and Satellite
	▪	Online Gambling
	▪	New Spain
	▪	Homeopathy
	▪	International Financial Flows
	▪	Experiencing Culture Shock
	▪	Computer-Mediated Communication
	▪	Political Advertising
	▪	International Human Rights
	▪	The Iran-Contra Affairs

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Controversial Topics Custom Essays samples

▪

Abortion


	The Abortion Reform Movement

	It is hard to say precisely what set the abortion reform movement in motion. State abortion laws had remained essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century, but by 1960 pressure for liberalization was building. As the population of the world increased and natural resources were used up, many people thought that it was imperative to limit population growth. Restrictions on birth control and an absolute ban on all abortions seemed to embody unreasonable governmental policies.

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▪	Advertising Ethics


	Ethics of Advertising

	Advertising has been universally praised and condemned. It has been cheered by those who view it as emblematic of the American Dream - the notion that anyone with money and moxie can promote a product to masses of consumers, along with the promise, cherished by immigrants, that an escape from brutal poverty can be found through purchase of products and services not available in more oppressive economies. Advertising has been roundly condemned by those who despise its attack on our senses, its appropriation of language for use in a misty world located somewhere between truth and falsehood, and its relentless, shameless exploitation of cultural icons and values to sell goods and services (Cross, 1996, p. 2; Schudson, 1986).

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▪	Affirmative Action


	Affirmative Action: Pursuing Fairness

	Affirmative action and equal opportunity practices are followed by most businesses, universities, and public agencies. In 1989 critic Abigail Thernstrom admitted that affirmative action had become �so institutionalized� that court decisions would have little effect. That certainly was the case on most campuses after the Michigan cases. Just weeks after the decision, representatives of almost 50 public and private universities met and discussed ways �to shield raceconscious admissions policies against future legal challenges.� Affirmative action in some form has become part of the American way of life and in that sense is fulfilling Martin Luther King's Dream.

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▪	Animal Rights


	Animal Rights and Moral Status

	Thus Western culture has changed, becoming more receptive to the idea of animal rights and more serious in exploring associated issues regarding animals' moral status and mental lives. We are no longer surprised to see animal activists on the news. Many people today are grappling with questions concerning the proper treatment of animals. They want to improve their understanding and appreciation of the issues associated with animal rights.

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▪	Anti-Semitism


	History of Anti-Semitism

	Despite its nineteenth-century context and its often inappropriate racial implications, the term anti-Semitism has become so deeply entrenched that resistance to its use is probably futile. The impropriety of the term, however, makes it all the more important to clarify as fully as possible the range of meanings that can legitimately be assigned to it. Essentially, anti-Semitism means either of the following: (1) hostility toward Jews as a group which results from no legitimate cause or greatly exceeds any reasonable, ethical response to genuine provocation; or (2) a pejorative perception of Jewish physical or moral traits which is either utterly groundless or a result of irrational generalization and exaggeration.

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▪	Assisted Suicide


	The Right to Die

	For many, the inevitability of dying is too painful to contemplate. Our society is marked by a consummate denial of death; most of us prefer to pretend it doesn't exist. We shy away from making our wills and leaving instructions about the kind of end-of-life care we want. We fight the forces of nature to stay youthful, healthy, and, to the greatest degree possible, immortal. Our crusaders, the physicians, arm themselves with shiny modern machinery and powerful drugs to repel the enemy for as long as possible. Meanwhile, we remove the dying from the flow of everyday life and confine them to institutions. As recently as 50 years ago, the majority of people died at home. Today, 80 percent end their lives in hospitals and clinical care settings. And according to an important 1997 study on death and dying led by Dr. Joanne Lynn, director of the Center to Improve Care of the Dying at George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., (published in Annals of Internal Medicine, January 1997), most of those people end their days in pain, breathlessness, depression, and confusion. Many patients are subjected to at least one form of "heroic" treatment before they die--cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or attachment to a respirator or a feeding tube--even though fully 59 percent of the patients in the study said they wanted comfort care rather than aggressive treatment in their final days of life.

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▪	Bias Crime


	Hate Crimes

	It is widely believed that since the mid- 1980s the United States has been experiencing a hate crime epidemic. This belief has been expressed over and over again by politicians, journalists, scholars, and spokespersons for racial, religious, gay and lesbian, and other advocacy groups. Leo McCarthy, lieutenant governor of California, declared that "there is an epidemic of hate crimes and hate violence rising in California"; 1 Mississippi State Senator Bill Minor warned, "this is the type of crime that easily spreads like an epidemic." 2 The District Attorney for St. Paul, Minnesota claimed that state and local governments faced a "massive increase in hate crimes." 3 A journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that "hate-motivated violence is spreading across the United States in 'epidemic' proportions." 4 Dr. Arthur Caliandro, cochair of the religious group, Partnership of Faith, termed hate crimes "a virus that has turned into a disease that has grown into an epidemic." 5 A New York Times journalist characterized the incidence of hate crime as "raining down hard and heavy," and as "a recent explosion." 6 The Boston Globe claimed that "incidents of racial and religious harassment or intimidation have skyrocketed." 7 An article in the National Law Journal characterized the 1990s as "the decade of hate--or at least, of hate crime." 8

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▪	Biotechnology


	The Ethical Challenge of Biotechnology

	There can be no doubt that biotechnology represents a major breakthrough in scientific research and a triumph of human ingenuity. It will be the most powerful ally in our fight against diseases and disabilities, hunger and poverty on a world scale. It will help us cope better with the devastation of nature brought about by the earlier industrial revolution and over-population in the wake of what has been described as 'the demographic explosion' ( Paul Kennedy). However, the downside of biotechnology has largely to do with this unprecedented power, its use and its control. The implications and social impact of biotechnology have been compared to those of the splitting of the atom and the technological exploitation of nuclear power. As with nuclear technology, biotechnology has put enormous power in our hands. Yet, power is essentially ambiguous, it can be used for good and evil purposes. And there is growing concern that this new technology may redefine our relationship to nature by irreversibly and detrimentally changing nature's course. In altering natural evolution through human tampering with the gene pool, biotechnology would cause incalculable risks for human integrity, well-being and freedom.

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▪	Capital Punishment Contradictions


	Death Penalty Contradictions

	The major objective of death penalty supporters in the 1990s was to cut down the delay between death sentences and execution. The story of this crusade is an important chapter in American constitutional history. The 200 death sentences a year are an impossibly tiny fraction of the multitude of felony convictions recorded each year in the United States, and the 3700 prisoners on death row in 2002 are less than one-tenth of 1 percent of sentenced felony offenders. But death penalty cases are unique in American criminal justice and have provoked a sustained attack on judicial principles and processes over the last twenty years that carries important consequences throughout the criminal justice system.

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▪	Corporate Corruption


	Corporate Corruption: Foreign Bribery

	Many individuals in the American corporate world ardently defend foreign bribery. They argue that if it is customary in foreign countries to give bribes, then it is also necessary for U.S. corporations to give bribes when an essential contract is at stake. As they see it, bribes translate into greater business, higher profits, and more jobs for American workers. They maintain that fortunes of big corporations and hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts depend on the strong desire of foreign officials to skim off some of the money that passes through their hands. Some people in corporate businesses also maintain that the prohibition of bribery has led to a decrease in U.S. exports, as their hands are tied when they have to compete with countries that have no anti-bribery laws. . .

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▪	Creationism


	Creationism/Evolution Controversy

	. . .Garry Wills begins his 1990 book, Under God: Religion and American Politics, as follows: "The learned have their superstitions, prominent among them a belief that superstition is evaporating. Since science has explained the world in secular terms, there is no more need for religion, which will wither away. Granted, it has been slow to die in America." If there is a recurring lesson in each episode of the creation/evolution controversy, it is that neither creationism nor evolutionism ever dies in America. This controversy does not go away�no matter how convinced one side is that truth has won out and the other side, that error has prevailed. Wills could have been speaking of the creationists when he reminds his readers that "in a time of reviving fundamentalisms [around the world], some Americans have rediscovered our native fundamentalists (a recurring, rather than cumulative experience for the learned). It seems careless for scholars to keep misplacing such a large body of people." . . .

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▪	Drug Testing


	History of Drug Testing

	Throughout history, in every society, people have used drugs, not only to cure illness and alleviate pain, but also to alter mood, thought, and feeling and to improve physical and mental performance. Furthermore, there have always been individuals and groups whose use of drugs has deviated from the medical and social conventions of the time. Societies express their disapproval of such aberrant behavior by calling it "drug abuse." Because the definition of drug abuse is culturally determined, the behaviors and drugs so labeled vary considerably from culture to culture and within the same culture from time to time. In contemporary society, such deviant behavior may range from self-experimentation or the occasional use of alcohol or marijuana to compulsive drug taking, in which individuals behave as though they cannot function optimally without certain drugs. Self-experimentation, arising from natural curiosity or a need to conform to one's peer group, is better tolerated. On the other hand, compulsive drug use is seen as harmful to both the individual and to society, and legal constraints have been established to protect both. . .

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▪	Drugs Legalization


	Legalization of Drugs

	During these early years of drug policy formation, there seemed to be few critics of the emerging control efforts. A conspicuous exception in this regard was Alfred R. Lindesmith, who during the 1930s was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and in subsequent years a member of the sociology faculty at Indiana University. Lindesmith's first exposure to the drug field was through criminal addicts, but the majority of his thinking was influenced by his research with patients at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky. There the addict population was comprised of individuals addicted to either morphine or paragoric, and their drugs had been obtained from physicians through either legal or quasi-legal means. They were members of neither the criminal underworld nor the street subcultures. As "patients" under treatment for some illness, Lindesmith argued that criminal penalties were inappropriate for those suffering from the chronic and relapsing disease of addiction. Although a direct call for the legalization of drugs was not apparent in Lindesmith's early work, it was clearly implied. His arguments for policy changes were criticized at the federal level --and then essentially ignored. . .

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Ebonics


	African American English

	Labels pertaining to American slave descendants have undergone considerable change over the decades since our forebears were freed. W. E. B. Du Bois observed that racial classifications can be misleading, particularly if those classifications are detested. In 1928 DuBois spoke of these matters in response to Roland Barth, and Barth's advocacy of the change from "Negro" to "colored." Do not at the outset of your career make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not alter matters by changing its name. If men despise Negroes, they will not despise them less if Negroes are called "colored" or "AfroAmerican." ( Du Bois 1928:96-97) Du Bois's sage advice holds true for the Ebonics controversy as well. If the vernacular speech of urban or rural slave descendants is devalued, modified nomenclature will not increase its worth in the eyes of those who hold black speech--or African Americans--in low regard. Many who criticized Ebonics did not do so merely because they objected to the term; they scoffed at Ebonics as an attempt to legitimize "bad English" in the name of politically correct linguistic enlightenment. Detractors often claimed to be offended, resentful, or worse.

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▪	Environment Ethics


	Environmental Ethics

	The field of environmental ethics has developed its own approaches for dealing with problems that the natural environment poses for ethical thinking. Sometimes called the greening of philosophy, this field is attempting to provide alternatives to the anthropocentrism that undergirds traditional approaches, approaches that view the environment as something separate or external to humans, its having merely instrumental value, and as reinforced by and in turn reinforcing the dualism and individualism characteristic of the Modern World View. In opposition to this, environmental ethics has developed philosophical frameworks which extend moral consideration to nature; this endeavor has taken two very different paths: first, moral extensionism and eligibility; second, biocentrism and deep ecology.

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▪	Extinction


	Extinction of Species

	Extinction can be a natural process. Indeed, the vast majority of species that ever existed are now extinct. In light of this, some people have justified the growing global impoverishment of species by arguing that because extinction is a natural process, the extinction of modern species is simply a continuation of a normal phenomenon. Yet historically, typical, or background extinction rates usually have been lower than the rate at which new species evolved (except during extinction spasms). But because modern extinction rates are roughly 1,000 times higher than background extinction rates (Myers 1988; Soule 1996), today only a handful of people deny that the planet is in, or rapidly approaching, an extinction spasm.

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▪	Foreign Aid


	The Flows of Foreign Aid