Help! My Ethics Conflict…

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

I would write “The Ethicist,” but I’m a better ethicist than he is, so I’m asking you.

I have a friend, a neighbor, who has been very kind and caring since my wife died in 2024. She’s about 20 years younger than I am, divorced, and desperately lonely. She’s also brilliant, politically obsessed, and furious at the world. Spuds likes her two dogs, and we all go to the nearby dog park together whenever our schedules mesh. She checks on me when she hasn’t heard from me for a while (which is annoying but still considerate). She sends me food; she invited me to have Christmas dinner with her and her then-boyfriend last year.

She is also as Trump Deranged as anyone I know, which is saying a lot. Her progressive mania is extreme: on Facebook and other social media she goes from one stream of furious posts on the latest leftist cause to another. Currently she is determined to have the seven men accused of sexual assault in the Cornell mess tried, convicted, and if possible, castrated.

My friend, like so many people I know infected with woke hysteria and Trump Hate, confidently rants to me about her obsessions because she assumes that nobody she likes and views as intelligent could possibly have any opinions different from hers. I’ve written about this phenomenon before. I just let her do it, because she needs to talk, and eventually I get her to move on to another subject, make her laugh, or try to get a word in edgewise that has nothing to do with politics.

For me, this is a pure Julie Principle situation: she’s a good and generous person, she’s intelligent, she needs a friend, she’s a great Scrabble player, and as long as she doesn’t try to run my life (which she is always on the verge of attempting), I’ll accept her quirks and obsessions and concentrate on what’s admirable about her, which is a lot.

However, she excises anyone from her life who doesn’t conform to her political beliefs. She is estranged from her family and both of her children. She recently told me that she made a list and that I am one of just 17 people she feels comfortable talking to. Somehow, she has concluded that I have the same political beliefs she does, which means, among other things, that she has never googled me or done any research online. I have a rather large cyber-footprint, including Ethics Alarms, of course. I know, with near certainty, that she would be crushed if she learned about my positions on many of the issues she feels passionate about, including the Cornell 7. When a dinner date recently told her he had voted for Donald Trump, she got up and walked out of the restaurant.

I feel like I am deceiving my freind, and yet I also don’t believe political views are relevant to personal relationships unless they are the basis of those relationships. I have many more than 17 friends, and the idea of ending a relationship because someone doesn’t agree with me about, well, anything is alien to my being.

Heck, I even have friends who are Yankee fans.

Is the most ethical course to continue to allow her to think I meet her self-harming extreme standards she demands of friends, or to be transparent, let her know more about me and guarantee that she will be angry, disillusioned, and cancel me as she has so many others?

This is a true ethics conflict, with valid ethical justifications on both sides of the question. Kindness or honesty? Inflicting pain in the cause of transparency for its own sake? My friend is incapable of embracing the Julie Principle.

Now what?

Speaking of Cheating Democrats…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The New York Times revealed yesterday that a group called Frontier Media has paid TikTok “influencers” to post pro-James Talarico content on social media. Talarico is the Democratic challenger for an open Texas U.S. Senate seat deemed crucial to his party’s chanced of taking the Senate in November. But Talarico’s campaign told the Times regarding the discovery,

.

…so I guess they are as innocent as little lambs. You will recall paying for celebrity endorsements was part of Kamala’s “we go high” campaign strategy. Just for the record since I’m sure you don’t need to be told, this is lying. Such conduct falsely represents to the public that a trusted individual has independently concluded that a candidate deserves to be elected, while the payers do not reveal their influence and the payees don’t reveal their incentives.

This latest cheating to elect Talarico has surfaced nearly a month after an employee for a pro-Talarico PAC was caught on video explaining that the group was “paying people for their votes” through a “paid relational program.” The undercover video resulted in the employee’s firing (for getting caught).

Two related notes:

  • Lest you be overly impressed that the Times reported this story (“SEE?” I can imagine banned commenter and loyal Times bias-denier “A Friend” bellowing in his bunker), the paper buried the lead as best it could. The headline was “On Texas TikTok, it’s all about Talarico,” and there was no mention of the pay-offs until 18 screens into the article.
  • The Times piece also revealed that despite TikTok’s emergence as a social media power (and that young voters increasingly use it as a primary source of news), Republicans lag absurdly behind Democrats in using the videos as a marketing tool. Morons. Being slow to embrace technological and web innovations is how the party managed to lose the 2012 Presidential election. For these mid-terms Democrats have handed them so much ammunition that the GOP should be lapping them in the polls. “The Stupid Party” sobriquet remains as accurate as ever.

Seriously, What’s Going On Here?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

And why should I have to ask?

The handling of Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico’s oddly-timed absence from the campaign trail in a close race is inherently suspicious. If an extreme left-biased Democrat propaganda machine like “The Daily Beast” is concerned, there is certainly enough “smoke” to make anyone with a memory ponder. The excuse for the candidate being AWOL without clear evidence of where has been that he has the flu and doesn’t want anyone to catch it. That’s thoughtful. It does seem a strange decision if Democrats really believe that flipping the Senate is crucial to “saving democracy,” which in Democrat-speak means knee-capping the Trump Presidency with more fake impeachments, packing the Supreme Court with Ketanji Brown Jackson clones, opening the borders, defunding police, letting trans-women crush the natural kind in sports, spreading anti-Semitism, further embedding “good discrimination” in the workplace and letting Iran continue with plans to nuke Israel as soon as possible.

Past extended unexplained absences do not make me sanguine that this one is as benign as the Axis narrative would have us believe:

  • Mitch McConnell vanished after a fall until we finally learned that he is too feeble to participate meaningfully in the Senate.
  • GOP Congressman Tom Kean’s hospitalization for depression this year was kept secret for 117 days. He finally disclosed the truth upon his return to the House floor.
  • Biden’s DEI Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized for three days without even telling the White House. He should have been fired, but, you know, Biden was President. Austin said he was sorry.
  • The all-time champ, not counting Woodrow Wilson, was South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford going AWOL for six days, failing to answer calls from his staff, family, or the state’s security detail while his office lied that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail to “decompress.” He had actually secretly flown to Argentina to visit his soul mate mistress.

Of course, Biden’s brain was mostly absent for months (years?) while his staff and the Axis said he was “sharp as a tack.”

Here’s the New York Times story updating the mystery. Conservative outlets claim there is evidence that Talarico was undergoing treatment for some kind of mental or emotional issue. Best line: “The Eagleton has landed!” My Democrat friends, flush with similar confirmation bias, are certain there is “nothing to see here.”

Maybe they are right, but it sure seems like something is off. Where’s the transparency? And remember: Democrats cheat.

Ethics Quiz: The Kitty Boo-Boo

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Cynthia ​Morgan, a school bus driver for Harford County Public Schools in Maryland for more than a decade, was alerted by an alarmed 10-year-old boy on board that there was an injured kitten by the side of the road. Yielding to the young student’s entreaties, Morgan stopped the bus on lightly-trafficked Heaps School Road in Pylesville and allowed the student to retrieve the kitten. The boy held the kitty in his lap until he was dropped off at school, whereupon the bus driver volunteered her lap for kitten-sitting for the rest of the route.

The incident got her fired. Morgan confirmed her dismissal to CBS News Baltimore and said she was devastated by the decision. The mother of the kitten rescuer says that her son would have been “devastated” if the cat has been left to fend for itself. “The fact that she was let go because of an act of kindness does really weigh on him,” she added. “That is unforgivable and cruel.”

Is it? Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was it ethical—responsible, fair, competent and reasonable—to fire the bus driver for permitting the emergency woulded kitten intervention?

The community, not to mention the influential feline population, is rallying behind Morgan. A petition on Change.org calls for the bus driver to be reinstated. “Over the years, Cynthia has become more than just a bus driver to our children; she is someone they look forward to seeing every morning and afternoon,” one parent wrote. “Her kind and warm nature makes the pupils feel safe and comfortable.This is not just my personal sentiment – countless parents and students share the same view.”

Another told reporters, “Every year at the beginning of the school year she buys every child on the bus school supplies. She buys them gifts for Christmas, every holiday, birthdays; she gives them birthday cards, all out of her own pocket.”

In a meeting with district officials, Morgan defended her actions and insisted that she had not put the student or those remaining in her bus in any jeopardy. For its part, the school system is staying the course. “Certification and decertification are not always based on a single factor but often involve consideration of multiple circumstances and requirements,” the school district said in a statement. “Student safety remains our top priority, and all certification decisions are made with that responsibility in mind.”

That sounds like lawyer-dictated CYA to me. Of course the district would default to an “it was the final straw” stance. Still, maybe it was. A letter from district Transportation Director Danielle Bedsaul cited “multiple incidents” involving Morgan, some including “concerns regarding inappropriate interactions with students.” Was buying students gifts and supplies among those “inappropriate actions”?

And “The Great Stupid” Crawls On: White Female Executive Fired Because Her Hairstyle Was Too Black

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I can’t believe I even wrote that.

That’s Kelly Carnes above, the recently-hired executive director of the apparently insane Baltimore Rock Opera Society. After the blonde, white female returned from Burning Man with newly braided cornrows (above), her organization began receiving complaints from the staff regarding her choice of hair style. Cultural appropriation, you know. Can’t have that.

Carnes, who apparently has a habit of exploring daring hair displays…

…was fired, being told only that she and her new job were “not a good fit.” She had adopted the cornrows, she says, to deal with the desert where Burning Man is held annually. I wouldn’t regard a white woman’s cornrows as especially daring almost 50 years after “10” —Hello, Bo!

but The Great Stupid is full of nasty surprises.

The society’s board was especially stupid, publicly acknowledging “concerns” over their organization’s new executive director’s cornrows and that it was “taking the matter seriously.” It also said it planned to revise its anti-discrimination policy and require anti-racism leadership training, which apparently means that whites are racist when they adopt styles, behavior or dress that emulate our African American brothers and sisters. The board advised her not to attend a town hall that was called to discuss the controversy. That’s always a bad sign: they said that to Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers” when the town was meeting to fire him as the high school basketball coach for trying to teach the kids team play. Then the town’s star player got up and said he would only play if they let Gene keep coaching…wait, where was I?

Oh, right: the cornrows.

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The Legal Profession’s Self-Policing Myth

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

If you watch any legal-themed TV shows, sooner or later a lawyer will say, “I can’t do that. I would be disbarred.” That is a scriptwriters fantasy. Probably they think it’s true; almost everyone does. In the vast majority of cases, violating the Rules of Professional Conduct, the so-called “Law of Lawyering,” will not result in disbarment, or a long suspension, a short suspension, or any bar discipline at all. this is true even for serious and repeated violations.

I have been dealing with the issue for more than a year, and will soon go public, meaning public beyond Ethics Alarms, which is, as I am constantly told, an obscure, little-read, typo-prone dinosaur mostly frequented by irrelevant Boomers like myself. The lawyers are permitted by the courts to be self-regulating on the heart-warming theory that it is a profession, and thus worthy of public trust. Many years ago the legendary and wise Judge Richard Posner, the legal scholar who was until his retirement a star United States circuit judge who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, observed that bar associations were unacceptably conflicted as the supposed enforcers of legal ethics standards. Like all associations, he said, their main concern is the welfare of their members, not the public. I have discovered that he was more right than I, or anyone who would admit it, ever suspected.

Maybe Judge Posner didn’t know how much of a sham the legal discipline system is. Now I do.

Bar associations are grievously under-funded and understaffed to perform the job of policing the profession with even minimal proficiency. They also don’t try very hard. The bar association websites are usually badly designed, and the pages devoted to the disciplinary system are so confusing and verbose I suspect the intention is to make filing a complaint so burdensome for members of the public that they will just give up. Lawyers have contempt for client complaints, and so do bar association officials. The public doesn’t understand legal ethics, and confuses malpractice with ethics violations. Client complaints tend to be badly written, rambling and over-long, and arrive with the presumption of incompetence. Phone calls for guidance will never reach a live person, just infuriating phone trees now made more annoying with “AI agents.” You leave a number and are promised a call back, which may never come.

Lawyer complaints, which the rules (Rule 8.3) say bar members must file when they have substantial reason to believe that another lawyer has committed acts that “call into question the lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness to practice in other respects,” are a tiny percentage of the number of complaints reality should demand. That rule is derisively called “the Snitch Rule,” and lawyers seldom report colleagues, firm members or friends. They do report adversaries, and thus the state bars take those complaints with many grains of metaphorical salt, just as they do complaints from clients

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On the Upcoming Public Execution of Nidal Malik Hasan

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Last week the President signed off on the firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim terrorist who killed 13 people on an Army post in Texas in 2009. Funny, I assumed he had been executed already: why I thought that, I do not know. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that Hasan’s killing would be public. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. I think pretty much everyone is aware that there are serious consequences for murdering a lot of human beings, unless the killer is a mother and the victims are her own children, but I digress.

The Pentagon confirmed the plan to make the execution public, with the event streamed live. Predictably, many Americans are horrified at the prospect, including the usual suspects, progressives, capital punishment opponents and the Trump Deranged. The issue was lightly debated on yesterday’s EA Open Forum, with opinions varying. AM Golden wrote, “I guess I don’t want to watch someone die. Even if he deserves it. It’s not sport. It’s not entertainment.” Remy Boudreau said, “It really is a terrible idea.” Steve Witherspoon wrote in part that it “will give this terrorist the martyrdom that he wanted. Across the globe, those that support the actions of this terrorist will hail this terrorist as a martyr and use the execution video to actively promote their ideology.” JutGory: “I do not believe public executions, which were historically routine, is edifying to the average person. Quite the contrary, they feed baser instincts. I still don’t intend to tune in.” Michael West wrote, “Had Nidal Hasan been dealt with appropriately – within the year of his conviction for what he was quite obviously guilty of – a private execution would have been sufficient. I’m not a fan of the spectacle, but I’m open to being convinced that the spectacle has some ethical claim because of how long it has taken for justice to be enacted.”

Over on the all anti-Trump, all-pro-Democrat propaganda network MS NOW, host Stephanie Ruhle and correspondent Jonathan Lemire made those counter-arguments and more.

“We will see it here in the United States,” Lemire said, “but so will people around the globe, including our adversaries, including terror groups that would probably make good use of this kind of footage of America killing someone who accused of doing these things. It raises the terror threat, it raises security risks; but more than that, it degrades who we are as a country.”

The latter point is the reflex and empty lament I keep seeing on Facebook: “Is this who we are?”—whatever that means. It is a versatile, lazy default argument that fits anything the speaker thinks is repugnant. “Is this who we are—encouraging children to mutilate themselves and calling it “gender affirming care”? “Is this who we are—encouraging anti-Semitism and the destruction of Israel while supporting brutal terrorists?” “Is this who we are, a nation that kills over 1,230,000 unborn children each year and calls it “choice”?

As Jimmy Durante would say, I got a million of ’em! And as Tonto said in a memorable joke, “What do you mean we, white man?”

Ruhle even had the gall to send a plea to Trump to block the public execution. Why should a a President that Ruhle and her colleagues denigrate, lie about and refuse to extend even minimal respect to all day, every day care what she wants?

My assessment of the public execution is as follows:

1. It is not cruel and unusual punishment, contrary to what I heard one ignorant critic exclaim today. The shooting has been judicially approved as a valid execution method, and the public part of it isn’t a tangible aspect of the punishment anyway. The man is going to be killed: we’re worried that he might be embarrassed too? The 8th Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual” punishment: at worst, a public execution by ordinary means is just “unusual.”

2. Hassan has been a paraplegic since he was shot when being apprehended after his killing spree. Another critic found it especially cruel to execute Hasan because he is disabled (due to his own criminal conduct!) Wow. That ranks a Kauffmann.

3. If anyone doesn’t want to see it, nothing will force them to tune in. Anyone who does tune in just to complain afterwards has no credibility. The act itself is, at worst, “ick” rather than unethical. Hasan won’t die any more painfully or slowly in a public execution than in a private one. He’ll be just as dead whether the shooting is on TV or held at the bottom of a mine.

4. I do believe that the decision to hold a public execution is unethical because it’s incompetent and irresponsible. From a utilitarian perspective, its negative results, expected and unanticipated, far, far outweigh anything positive that can come from the spectacle. It is undeniable that terrorists, Muslims and anyone looking for another excuse to attack the Trump Administration will exploit the event to their advantage. The President is addicted to handing his adversaries huge metaphorical sticks to beat him with. This is another one, and to do it before mid-terms is just perverse. And stupid.

5. Trump still hasn’t learned the Cognitive Dissonance Scale principle. Firing squads are associated with dictators in the public mind. Good guys don’t kill bad guys that way, it’s the other way around. The most popular and viewed U.S. movies featuring firing squads all side with the executed: “The Firing Squad” (2024), “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Valkyrie” (2008), and “Jojo Rabbit” (2019). Trump already has been branded as the equivalent of Hitler; this won’t help. Of course, most of those outraged would be similarly inclined no matter what the Trump Administration decided to do with Hasan. One of the two vocal critics I encountered with Spuds at the dog park today was wearing a “RESIST” shirt and the other a shirt reading “KAMALA.”

6. I can see one ethical argument for the public execution, though it is not sufficient to carry the day. For a capital punishment advocate, watching an execution is, if not mandatory, a demonstration of good faith. It’s easy to advocate the State killing someone in the abstract, but the State represents all of us, and we share responsibility for what our government does. Giving citizens the opportunity to see and understand exactly what they say they want bolsters seriousness and integrity.

The results of this public execution may not be what its adherents expect.

ADDED: I also want to note that this is another relatively minor source of outrage, like the vast majority of what Trump’s critics bellow about. On the consequential list, I’d put it above the reflecting pool uproar but well short of Trump’s aborted deal with the IRS for a family slush fund.

A Lawyer Whom ABC Gives a National Platform on an Alleged News Program Said This, And You Wonder Why The Public Is Ignorant About The Law?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Yes, it was on “The View,” but no, the lawyer spewing idiocy wasn’t Sunny Hostin.

For a change.

Yesterday, “The View’s” collection of opinionated female Democrats were discussing the botched execution of Christa Pike. Whoopi Goldberg began by saying, among other things, that what needs to happen now is that Pike’s original victim’s mother should decide what happens to the condemned murderer . “Me personally, I think you should ask the mother what should happen now. I think they should ask her because, you know, they tortured her daughter and there’s a reason she was where she was, but I think it’s, it’s not a question that the state should answer,” Goldberg said, being semi-incoherent because she never made it through high school. You should ask her? They should ask her? They tortured her? Whoopi also has civic literacy of a guppy. Then Ana Navarro (above), who has a law degree and a license to practice, piped up.

“I’m with you. I think the victim’s family needs to lead.”

And how would that work, exactly? Oh, details, details! It just feels right, so “do it.” What does “needs to lead” mean? Can the family be handed the authority to decide how Pike is executed this time? How would that be done? Does any law permit a judge to delegate law enforcement to citizens? Well, no, but the family “has a right” to take over because the state has failed. Is that Ana and Whoopi’s theory? I believe that is called “vigilantism,” which is specifically illegal, but remember this whole program represents the lowest common denominator of not only of civic comprehension, but of attachment to the whole concept of that “Rule of Law” thingy. Process? Nah. Precedent—what’s that?

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“Indefensible Awards Day” on Ethics Alarms Continues With The Nobel Peace Prize

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Norwegian Nobel Committee today named Navi Pillay, as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. She is a pro-Palestinian (hence pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism) South African human rights lawyer and international judge who led a U.N. commission last year that held that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Pillay’s native South Africa has also a prominently accused Israel of genocide in the international court system, which neither the U.S. nor Israel recognize.

Peace. Anyone who can’t figure out that vilifying Israel encourages terrorism and violence against Jews worldwide as well as forcing Israel to aggressively defend itself and its ally the U.S. to engage militarily as well is either brain-damaged or 12. This would be a more serious ethics outrage if the Nobel Committee hadn’t already destroyed the Peace Prize’s prestige and credibility by such throbbingly political stunts as handing Barack Obama one for just being Barack Obama and giving Al Gore a Peace Prize for spreading panic and misinformation about climate change. The award has no integrity and is another institutional victim of “ideological capture.”

Was I dreaming to recall how the Peace Prize was respected and admired across the dieolgical spectrum when I was growing up? When did it jump the ethics shark? It was before the Obama debacle. Frankly, at this point it isn’t worth my time to research the answer now; the Nobel Peace Prize has rotted to the point of irrelevance. What it needs next is a recipient rejecting an award with a rousing speech declaring the prize worthless, and the committee fatally hypocritical.

“The Ethicist” Answers a Question So Easy That Having to Ask It Is “Signature Significance”…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

…meaning, signature significance because only an ethics-challenged fool who shouldn’t be trusted to keep sharp objects away from children would be unable to answer it correctly in a nanosecond.

Once again, I wonder what criteria Kwame Anthony Appiah uses to pick which questions to answer. With this one, for example, does he assume NYT readers are so dense and ethics-free that many of them need this guidance?

Hmmm. Considering the comments on the Axis’s favorite paper’s usual propaganda, he may be right.

The question from “Name Withheld” is, in sum: “My grandmother is 94 and has dementia. Her short-term memory is very limited, though some recent events, like the death of a cousin, have stayed with her and still upset her….her daughter [ the writer’s mother] has died. The news could cause her real anguish and possibly affect her physical health [or] she might forget and then have to learn, and grieve, the loss repeatedly. At the same time, despite their estrangement, it feels as if she has a right to know.”

Gee, tough one! What to do? Let the poor woman fade away in peace and in a blissful state of ignorance regarding a loss that can’t possibly make her feel anything but worse (the inquirer even says that there isn’t going to be a memorial service or a funeral), or, in the alternative, risk traumatizing her when she is in a vulnerable state because of an imaginary “right” that doesn’t apply to such extreme circumstances. Wow, we need a real professional to solve this one!

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