Month: February 2010

Unethical Website, the Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The Special Olympics, now in the business of censoring the English language, has applied technology to the task with a new website, http://www.rwordcounter.org. The site allows one to enter a URL and have the site immediately searched for the offending words “retard,” and “retarded,” sort of like little teeny versions of Big Brother’s thought-police rifling through your closets and under your mattresses for bootleg copies of The Bible or Paradise Lost. Then, once the website under surveillance passes the Special Olympics Appropriate Senstitivity and Inoffensive Expression Test, it can proudly display a banner that proclaims it Clean.

Too bad the website itself is unethical, for two reasons:

1. Its purpose violates the ethical values of autonomy, fairness, tolerance, equity, openness, process, respect, and American citizenship, and

2. It is incompetent and a fraud: the damn thing doesn’t work, or at least didn’t the two times I tried it on Ethics Alarms. Apparently I could make a terrible joke here about who must have designed the site, and it would still tell me that my site was “r-word free.” I am thinking the joke, however, and hope that when the folks at the Special Olympics devise a way to detect that, as I’m certain they would love to do, their R-Word Brain Purging Unit works just as well.

Ethics Quote by an Ethics Hero: Adm. Mike Mullen

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”

—U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen

Admiral Mullen made the statement testifying last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee, as he urged the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that permitted the military to discharge gay personnel once their sexual orientation became known, by whatever means.

[Special thanks to the Institute for Global Ethics for reminding me (via its weekly e-mail bulletin] that I had neglected to give Mullen credit last week for a much-needed endorsement of this policy change from a military leader of impeccable credibility.]

Beware of Ethicist Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On Ethics Alarms, as with its progenitor, The Ethics Scoreboard, commenters frequently accuse me of manipulating ethical arguments to endorse or support a political agenda. I often find such comments unfair, intellectually lazy and wrong, but please, keep making them. Avoiding a political or ideological slant is one of the most challenging tasks in rendering ethical analysis, and it is so easy (and tempting) to fall into the trap of letting bias rule reason that it helps to be regularly smacked upside the head.

Even with repeated smacks, true objectivity is nearly impossible in ethics, because of the central role played by ethical conflicts—not the ethical problem of conflicts of interest, but the philosophical problem of designating priorities among competing ethical values. Ethical conflicts require choosing which ethical value yields to another: a doctor knows a patient is dying and that nothing can be done. Is the ethical course to be honest, or to be kind? In public policy, ethical conflicts abound, and often involve deciding between two different versions of the same ethical value. Which version of “fair” is fairer, for example: allowing a talented, hard-working individual to keep the money she earns for her and her family, or for her to have to share some of that money with others, perhaps less talented and hard working, but also perhaps less fortunate, who do not have enough to survive? Ethical problems pit compassion against accountability, responsibility against forgiveness, autonomy against fairness, equity against justice. Continue reading →

“Everybody’s Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Please. Make them stop.

It seemed that every conservative talk show host today was getting yuks from the irony of the Obama  Commerce Department announcing the launch of a new government climate change service in the middle of unprecedented snowfall in Washington, D.C. Underlying the hilarity was the persistent implication, and sometimes outright assertion, that the snowfall itself actually undermined the prevailing scientific findings of climate change research. If Hannity, Limbaugh and others who did this (and have done it before) really believe that one snowstorm, or twenty, can have any probative value at all in determining the accuracy of climate change science, then they are too ignorant to participate in policy debates about the issue.  If, on the other hand, the talk show pundits are deliberately pandering to the many science-illiterates among their listeners—and I think that is exactly what they are doing—then they are being dishonest and unfair. Continue reading →

After the Tebow Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Super Bowl ad featuring Tim Tebow and his mother that caused so much angst and controversy before it aired turned out to be mild, understated and forgettable. Now we know why CBS felt it could use the spot to move away from its long-time ban on issue advertising during the NFL’s big game. We also know that the actual ad made the argument by abortion rights groups that the ad would be inappropriately “divisive” for an American sports ritual designed to bring us together seem even more ridiculous than it was—no mean trick.

In the ad, Quarterback Tebow and his mother never did tell the story of his birth after Pam Tebow had been counseled to terminate her pregnancy. You had to go to a website to read about it. Indeed, had the various advocacy groups that opposed the ad just kept their collective rage to themselves, few viewers would know about the pro-life aspects of the Tebow story. All of the ad’s work was done before it ran, thank to the pre-Super Bowl sputtering of NARAL, NOW, and their colleagues. Continue reading →

NPR Shows How Bad Opinions Get Made

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist at Duke University who struck gold with his Malcolm Gladwell-esque airplane book, Predictably Irrational. The book discussed his work in human behavior and how apparently irrelevant or minor factors affect our behaviors in significant and surprising  ways. I like the book, and I like Professor Ariely, but I now suspect him of using the American public as his guinea pigs for Best Seller #2,  and of rigging the experiments in the process. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Based on what we’ve seen so far, this shouldn’t have happened. Even when we’re asked to make an arrest, common sense should prevail, and discretion used in deciding whether an arrest or handcuffs are really necessary.”—-New York Police spokesman Paul Browne, admitting that it was a mistake it was a mistake to arrest a 12-year-old junior high school student and taking her out of school in handcuffs for doodling her name on her desk in erasable marker. Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling on her desk Monday while waiting for her teacher to pass out homework, and the teacher summoned the police to report a 657…a doodle in progress.  The Men in Blue led Alexa out of school in cuffs  to a police station across the street, where she was detained for several hours. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: England World Cup Team Coach Fabio Capello

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Just when I find myself staring disconsolately at the vast expanse of snow, thinking about how futile it is to try to sweep back the ethical apathy and self-serving tolerance for bad conduct that is burying our values as a blizzard buries a garden, along comes Fabio Capello, from the unlikely world of soccer, to give me hope.

Capello gets it. Mere days from his team’s embarking on the annual World Cup quest, he sacked his star Defender, John Terry, as team captain. Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Trio: CREW, Coercion and Condiments

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The C Street Horror…Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington appears to have jumped the rails in its hysterical protest of President Obama appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast, a venerable if odd event that dates from the Eisenhower administration. Some of CREW’s objections are that the event’s organizers, a group with the admittedly sinister-sounding name “The Family,” preaches “an unconventional brand of Christianity,” (As does Rev. Wright. So what?) lacks transparency (Just like the Obama administration of late. This is a matter worth investigating, exposing and reforming, but if the President has to boycott organizations based on a lack of transparency, he’ll be living on the streets), has been “linked” to unsavory causes (Translation: CREW doesn’t like the group’s politics), and that the C Street Christian home the group maintains in Washington has housed a lot of politicians with ethical problems, like Gov. Mark Sanford and Sen John Ensign. That’s a bizarre complaint, don’t you think? Continue reading →

Wising Up to The Cognitive Dissonance Game

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Wade Rathke, ACORN’s founder, is using his blog to attack James O’Keefe, whose bizarre pimp-and-prostitute charade exposed the culture of corruption in the organization he created. O’Keefe, who was arrested for trying another sting on a U.S. Senator, certainly deserves criticism. But it is safe to say that Rathke’s purpose is a little different than that of most pundits, for O’Keefe’s stunt hurt his baby. Rathke’s intent, other than  revenge, is to use the power of cognitive dissonance to make ACORN’s ethical failings seem less serious by making making O’Keefe look worse. Continue reading →