Clay Burell's Library tagged morality →  View Popular

Moreover, selective colleges have ulterior motives for relying on standardized admissions tests that have nothing to do with academic considerations and everything to do with their bottom lines. The more high-scoring students they admit, the higher their "selectivity" ratings in the college-ranking guides that help determine how many applicants knock on their doors each year.

And not only is sifting through applications based on test scores a lot cheaper than hiring enough people to consider each candidate carefully, but relying on such scores helps skew the process in favor of wealthier applicants, who will not need financial assistance and are likely to donate generously down the road.

If young people find that artificially inflating their test scores isn't enough to get them into a choice college, they always have the option of having someone bribe their way in with a big donation.

Selective colleges are so happy to have their palms greased in such a manner that some make little effort to hide how much they lower the bar for applicants connected to generous alumni and other contributors. To improve their odds of having favors done for them by people in positions of power, many selective higher-education institutions also admit mediocre applicants at the request of state and federal officials.

That being said, forcing treatment on a child who doesn't want it is its own kind of ethical dilemma. "There are some kids for whom it becomes in their mind a vicious assault every time they're treated," says Diekema. "At a certain age and height and weight, it starts to seem inappropriate to hold them down on a regular basis to do what needs to be done." Daniel Hauser has reportedly vowed to punch, kick or scratch anyone who attempts to treat him. Even if medical support staff members are successful at physically restraining Hauser so that they can administer the chemotherapy, the psychological toll may impede his progress. With longer-term treatments—fighting cancer can take years—it's harder to successfully apply aggressive therapies if the patient is unwilling, especially because a certain mental toughness is required.

At 13, Daniel is far from the age where he could be making his own medical decisions, though judges are likely to weigh the value of a child's input on a case-by-case basis, rather than using an arbitrary age cutoff. It's remarkable how quickly terminal cancer can mature a 12-year-old. (Legal adulthood is 18, and certain decision-making authority can be granted at 16, but the line is blurry when it comes to children's medical care.) 

To my chagrin, after a few months of daily annotation and study of Burton's writings, i realized that the version i'm using begotten online is actually the popular yet abridged version and there exists a unexpurgated version.

Here's a quote from The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition (1974-1997), on Sir Richard Burton:

He also published openly, but privately, an unexpurgated 16-volume
edition of the Arabian Nights (1885-88), the translation of which was
so exceptional for its fidelity, masculine vigour, and literary skill
that it has frightened away all competitors. Moreover, he larded these
volumes with ethnological footnotes and daring essays on pornography,
homosexuality, and the sexual education of women. He railed against
the “immodest modesty,” the cant, and hypocrisy of his era, displaying
psychological insights that anticipated both Havelock Ellis and
Sigmund Freud. His Nights were praised by some by for their robustness
and honesty but attacked by others as “garbage of the brothels,” “an
appalling collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice.”

The unexpurgated version is huge, in 16
volumes, and each volume includes a preface and a dedication, and with
several pages of annotations. To read them all and understand them all
is pretty much equivalent to a year of study of Middle East and
Islamic culture. Yours truely can't be making such undertaking. The
text you see on this site are the ones i read and annotated before
discovery of the full version. In the coming months, i will read and
add tales from the unexpurgated version, with inclusions of some if
not all Burton's original annotations. The outlook is that any content
involving sex or offensive to Christians or otherwise moral persons
will be absolutely included, while, some esoteric stuff related to
study of Islam and does not contribute to the story or of interest to
modern readers will be excluded.

The complete 16 volumes of unexpurgated version can be found at:
http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Vol_1/vol1.htm
.