Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro, North Carolina needs money, so it decided to sell the one thing that it knew parents and students would pay for.
Grades. I’m not kidding. Continue reading
Month: November 2009
Ethics Quote of the Week
“”Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Kanye,” they sang. “Let them pick guitars and drive them old trucks, ’cause cowboys have manners,they don’t interrupt..”
Country Music Award show hosts Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood, in a parody of the song, “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” giving a much-deserved shot to rapper Kanye West for disrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV awards. Swift also was a big winner at the CMA’s, but West was nowhere to be seen.
Government Lawyer No-No’s
Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, two Environmental Protection Agency attorneys based in California, posted a YouTube video criticizing the Obama administration’s climate change policy, citing a Washington Post op-ed piece. When the EPA told them to either take down the video or edit out references to their work with the EPA, some organizations cried “censorship.” Continue reading
Rep. Cao: Profile in Something or Other
Wow. One lone House Republican voting for the reviled Democrat healthcare bill. Talk about conscience! Talk about courage!
Well, maybe. The vote by Louisiana Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao could have been a truly ethical act, or a completely cynical one. The fact that it is almost impossible to tell which explains a lot about the funhouse mirror version of “ethics” in use of Capitol Hill. Continue reading
Ben Franklin’s Ethics Alarms
Why do good people do bad things? Usually it’s because they aren’t thinking about good and bad at all. They are thinking about more immediate issues, like getting through the day, keeping a job, making a child happy, paying the bills, enduring a crisis. When good people—most of us, I believe–actually focus on doing the right thing, doing good, they tend to do it. The trick is focusing, when emotions and basic human needs are so powerful. Continue reading
The Death Penalty At Its Best
Virginia executed the D.C. Sniper tonight, and I am not sorry. Apparently not very many others are either: in stark contrast to past executions, like that of Gary Gilmore, anti-death penalty protests regarding the execution of John Muhammad have been minimal.
A responsible society is obligated to have a death penalty to set an appropriate upper limit for state imposed punishment. Without such a ceiling, the punishment for every other crime must be ratcheted down, and this tends to lower the penalty for capital crimes as well. The Lockerbie Bomber would never have been released after a short prison term in the U.S., as he was by Scotland; in all likelihood, he would have been executed. As with Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh, and Muhammad, it would have been a case of the punishment fitting the crime. Continue reading
Finally, a Backlash Against Lip-syncing
Audiences at Britney Spears’ “Circus” concert are complaining that the singer is lip-syncing all of her songs, and not dancing energetically or well enough to justify it.
Good!
NEVER the Sinner?
The AP reports that there is a computer virus that causes one’s computer to independently visit child pornography sites and download material. This has caused innocent people to be prosecuted, fired from their jobs, humiliated and ruined.
I would like the conduct of a person who would create and release such a virus explained to me. I would like the explainers to be those who will describe any bad act , no matter how heinous, as “one mistake,” and who resolutely maintain that engaging in wrongful conduct, no matter how destructive and cruel, doesn’t mean an individual is personally rotten to the core. “Hate the sin, never the sinner,” Clarence Darrow said. Darrow was one of the most persuasive and articulate people who ever lived. I wonder if he could have reconciled this with his convictions.
Now I’m going to check my computer.
And my faith in human nature.
Showdown at Brookstone: An Ethics Train Wreck
Thanks to the enterprising employees at Brookstone, that odd chain that sells expensive gadgets for tasks that aren’t that important anyway, Ethics Alarms now encounters what has all the signs of a genuine Ethics Train Wreck. Ethics Train Wrecks are situations where one unethical act sets off a chain reaction of bad judgment and rash behavior, and by the time all the carnage is over, anyone who was near the event, and those who tried to make sense out of it or clean it up, end up looking bad and arguing with each other. Recent Ethics Train Wrecks include the Valerie Plame affair and the Prof. Gates arrest. President Obama won’t get involved in this one (I hope!), but it has it all: gender, religion, workplace relations, law, Fox News. Continue reading
The Card-counting Conundrum
There is a terrific thread going on over at the Volohk Conspiracy, consistently one of the most erudite and thought-provoking blogs there is. Noting that a Indiana court has declared that the state’s casinos are prohibited from throwing blackjack players who count cards out of their establishment, Prof. Volokh, who has a libertarian streak, opined that casinos should be able to toss out the card counters, and that the case was wrong. Well, all hell broke out after that, and as usual for that blog (and, some golden day, for this one), there has been a flood of comments from every kind of authority from legal experts to card counters themselves. They show what an odd and ethically topsy-turvy matter the controversy over card-counting is. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 