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

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

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”…

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…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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An Offensive Medal of Freedom

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yecchh.

Not the worst desperate mid-term election tactic President Trump has improvised this year, and definitely not the last, Trump suddenly announced during a Republican National Committee (RNC) campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas this week that he would be awarding former pitcher Roger Clemens the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Clemens was stunned. It is likely that Trump dreamed up the stunt on the spot. Trump may have been rewarding “The Rocket” for his effusive introduction, when he said,

“What a privilege it is for me to intro our great President. A man that loves our country, that puts all of us first, and puts America first. This is what I love. He’s made us better, he’s made us stronger, and more important, because of the border and everything here, he’s made us safer. And don’t forget, this is really important, this man put his life on the line for us. Don’t ever forget that.”

I’m checking: is Clemens, who evolved into a bigger and bigger asshole as his impressive career went on and who is current deemed unworthy of the Hall of Fame because of substantial evidence that his late career resurgence was fueled by banned PEDs (Performance Enhancing Drugs) the worst Medal of Freedom recipient ever? Looking over the list…

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Stop Hanging On!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Guest Post By James Rogers

Why are we hanging onto a relationship for which we should be actively separating ourselves?

Is it ethical to cling to something you know is more than dead, when it is demonstrably existentially dangerous?

What is this relationship that is so toxic? The intact 50 states comprising the United States. My proposition is: We must separate from states, leaders and groups actively attempting to destroy the U.S. Constitution and American culture before there is no Constitution left to protect us and a culture seeking to exterminate us.

The states themselves are rather obvious: California, New Mexico, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Washington, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and distinct portions of other states like western Oregon, northern and eastern Virginia, eastern Pennsylvania, southern lower Michigan, southeastern Wisconsin, plus the District of Columbia.

The leaders can be broadly described as Democratic Socialists, so-called democracy advocates, cultural cancers such as the “gender affirming care” and abortion-on-demand advocates. The names on this list are long, but they all subscribe to the Obama-imagined fundamental transformation of the US against those clinging to the Constitution, God and guns.

They have proven via political violence, poisonous policies, and social canceling that we are their targets. COVID policies experimentally divided the country into individualists and collectivists. Obedience was the metric / the crux of COVID policy. Even now, after proof being provided of the malicious nature of government policies during the period, the true believers call out individualists as deniers. Similarly issues like DEI, puberty blockers, climate change, court packing, electoral college elimination, unfettered immigration, no voter ID, history rewrites, endless lawfare, judicial overreach and trans activism are alive and very well among the places and people described above. Nearly everything they believe is intentionally malicious, not real, or so grossly exaggerated it is ludicrous.

The United States is not united. To expect us to somehow become united again is a fantasy. And yet our traditional notion of America of 50 United States persists…as we fervently hope this will go away once people come to their senses. These people and policies are not rational, nor will they ever be. Stop the delusion.

The more we cling to the self-deception the more opportunity those seeking to unravel the culture have to do terrible things, endangering everything we believe to be right, valuable, and sustainable as a society.

In the original colonies the sentiment was join or die. Now we must separate ourselves to survive and begin to thrive again in a society worth keeping.

Life Ethics, Professional Ethics, Family Ethics, Baseball Ethics: Paternity Leave During A Crisis

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This issue, which I feel strongly about and have so written, more than once, reared its ugly metaphorical head again this week.

The San Diego Padres were added to the National League in 1969. The team has been in two World Series, losing both quickly; the last time was in 1996. They have only made the National League Championship Series three times. The team closed the season hot, and faced the best team in baseball, at least based on their record, the Milwaukee Brewers, with high hopes. Among the team’s many stars (more, in fact, then Milwaukee) is Mason Miller, by consensus the best 9th inning relief pitcher (aka “closer”) in the game.

The Padres lost the first game of the five game series due to a fluke, as described here. They lost Game #2 as well, and faced elimination in Game #3. It was “all hands on deck,” the Alamo, Custer’s Last Stand. Nevertheless, before the game, Mason Miller chose to take paternity leave, a privilege the players won in a contract battle with owners in 2011.

My ethics analysis of this conduct begins with “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” The entire season, 162 games, many millions of dollars, millions of fans, a city’s economy and community, players’ careers and income, managers’ and coaches’ jobs, team sponsors and more ride on which teams win in the post-season. My position is that Miller’s decision was selfish, irresponsible and a breach of duty. His team not only needed him, but depended on him. His wife’s pregnancy had had hit no crisis (I checked); she also had other support available. If I were a team mate or the management, I would conclude that Mason Miller could not be trusted. An employee who flees in a crisis is not a desirable employee, especially when the employee is paid $4 million dollars for eight months of service.

Moral Luck Alert! The Padres won the game without Miller, then lost the next one, ending their World Series quest.

Ethics Alarms hosted an intense debate on this exact topic in 2021. I wrote in part,

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Stunningly, a Fair and Perceptive Essay On The Cornell Gang Rape Ethics Train Wreck…In Slate! [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Knock me over with a feather. I once subscribed to Slate when it was an innovative commentary e-magazine genuinely striving to be independent and non-partisan. Then it went full woke and Trump Deranged, and managed to get on the EA blacklist. Frankly, I didn’t know it was still being published. But Hanna Stotland an independent educational consultant specializing in crisis management authoring her second Slate piece after seven years, delivered a superb analysis.

UPDATE: You can read the whole paywalled article at the archive link provided in the comments below by James Flood. [Thanks, James.] I was tempted to paste the whole thing into this post, but that would be unethical….

Some notable passages from the publicly available version deserve emphasis and should whet your curiosity:

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The Case of the Bondage-Promoting Congressional Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Christoper Gallant, 37, is an openly gay military pilot, former air traffic controller and volunteer firefighter who is running against Rep. Nick LaLota, who represents New York’s First District, covering eastern Suffolk County. Photos “surfaced,” as they like to say, showing Gallant in an explicit ad campaign modeling leather bondage gear. In some of the photos he appears to be doing…stuff…with another man.

The photos originally appeared on the site of a bondage apparel company called Mr. S Leather about 15 or 16 years ago. In response to the photos entering the campaign conversation, Gallant’s lawyer said that the photographs “were taken during a private, consensual photo session involving Chris and his then-partner, with whom he was in a committed four-year relationship. Chris was also friends with the owner of Mr. S Leather, and the shoot was intended to be fun and personal, with the understanding that Mr. S could use select images in connection with certain products” and that Gallant “remains fully committed to his campaign and to earning the trust of the people he seeks to represent.”

Right. About that trust thingy—oh! I forgot to mention that Gallant is the Democratic Congressional candidate in the race! Did I have to?

“This is the Democratic congressional candidate for CD1,” the local GOP wrote on Facebook above the smaller photo above. “Is this who you want to represent us in Washington DC?” That’s certainly a fair question. I hold that there is an equivalent of EA’s recently revisited Naked Teacher Principle in play here, though I’m not sure what I would call it. A candidate who has allowed himself to be photographed like that gets no sympathy from me if that choice eventually costs him a job teaching in a public school, and the standards of character and role model fitness for a member of Congress should be a higher bar than the one required of teachers. Sadly, considering the current Congress, that is obviously not the case.

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Update on the Tragic, Trump Derangement-Fueled Deterioration of the Once Ethical and Perceptive Ken White

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Why don’t “the guys” take personal responsibility????

Unethical Quote Of The Month: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s October 7th Message

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.

The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.

To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”

New York’s anti-Semitic, Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in his official statement on the anniversary of the unprovoked and ambush Palestinian terrorist attack on Israel that included the murder of unarmed civilians, rapes, infanticide, and the taking of over 200 hostages, mist of whom died.

I could have had a much longer headline, and had to restrain myself to avoid posting one. Anyone who agrees with this vile man is an Ethics Dunce, as is anyone who voted for him or would argue that such votes can be justified. Mandani qualifies for an EA “Incompetent Elected Official” designation, because condemning the victims of terrorism while supposedly memorializing those victims is incompetent and irresponsible, unless one is an Ethics Villain, which Mayor Mamdani certainly is.

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