Month: May 2010

Photo Ethics: Kagan at the Bat

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The Wall Street Journal is being assailed by some gay and lesbian advocates for running an old photo of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, bat raised, waiting for a pitch in a softball game. “It clearly is an allusion to her being gay. It’s just too easy a punch line,” said Cathy Renna, a former spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who is now a consultant. “The question from a journalistic perspective is whether it’s a descriptive representation of who she might be as a judge.”

What???? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Ken Griffey, Jr.

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The reports are that Hall of Fame-bound Seattle outfielder Ken Griffey, Jr. was passed over as a pinch-hitter in a recent Mariners game because he was asleep in the clubhouse. Other Mariner players leaked this embarrassment to the press; Griffey won’t discuss it, except to say that the reports are “not entirely accurate.” Others have noted that the outfielder is a serial napper, and has slept during games in the past. In other words, no big deal.

It is a big deal. Griffey gets paid $2,350,000 in 2010 to play baseball or be available to play baseball for approximately three hours a day for six months. If he’s napping during that three hours, he hasn’t fulfilled his obligation to be fully fit, awake and ready to play.

“But the baseball season is a grind!”

$2,350,000.

“It’s boring just sitting on the bench!”

$2,350,000.

“You don’t know what it’s like playing a professional sport!”

$2,350,000!

When a police officer, a fireman, a lawyer or another professional is unable to do his or her job because he is taking a nap, the response is usually a warning, or even dismissal. Homer Simpson sleeps on the job in his position at the nuclear energy plant, but 1) he’s a cartoon character and 2) he isn’t making $2,350,000.

There is a minimum level of diligence, loyalty and commitment employers are entitled to from those they employ, no matter what their salaries are. Sleeping on the job when one is making millions, however, adds significant theft to the mix. If Griffey wasn’t ill or hadn’t hadn’t had a recent run-in with a tsetse fly, he not only owes the Mariners an apology; he owes them about $14,000.

Ethics for Bureacracies—On An Index Card

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ethicist Bob Stone has proposed a useful and perceptive solution to the perplexing problem of lax ethics in government bureaucracies. Calling on them to adopt “a strong sense of mission and a culture of trust, with authority and responsibility shifted from the few at the top to the many front-line workers,” Stone declares that too often “what passes for ethics is merely another set of rules to comply with, and ethics training usually consists of badgering workers about bribery, conflict of interest and favoritism.”

As a solution, Bob proposes a statement of ethical principles, so brief that it would easily fit on an index card:

I will:

  • Do my best at work
  • Avoid conflict of interest
  • Speak truth to power
  • Be a good citizen
  • Shun any private gain from my employment
  • Act impartially
  • Treat others the way I would like to be treated
  • Report waste, fraud, and corruption

When in doubt, my test is can I explain my actions to my mother or to my child.

Stone recommends that leaders and managers customize this to their own organizations, print it, distribute it, and then–and this is the most important part—regularly use events and decisions to discuss ethical lessons and principles with the staff, using the Statement of Principles as the starting point.

You can read his entire essay here. I recommend it. Bob has a long and distinguished background in that Mother of All Bureaucracies, the Pentagon. He knows what he’s talking about.

The School, the Flag, and Cinco de Mayo

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It has been almost a week since Cinco de Mayo, and I’m still not sure how to assess the conduct in this story.

A group of five students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California were told by a school administrator that their American flag bandannas were “disrespectful” to the Hispanic students at the school celebrating Cinco de Mayo, and that they either had to remove them or leave. After their parents were called in to discuss the matter, the boys decided to leave.  As you might imagine, this was an instant politically-charged custom-made for Fox News. The school district issued a statement saying that it didn’t agree with the administrator’s handling of the situation.  The boys issued a statement affirming their support for American patriotism, and asserting that they felt  discriminated against and robbed of  their First Amendment rights. Then, the next day, about 85 mostly Hispanic students staged a noon protest march through Morgan Hill to express their support for the administrators.

Were the students wrong to wear American flags on a day that Mexican-American students were celebrating Cinco de Mayo? Was the school wrong to send students home for wearing apparel that featured the American flag? Is it ever fair to treat the American flag as inappropriately provocative in the United States? Continue reading →

Next: Paramilitary “Jolly Rancher” Raids?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“No tolerance policy” is clearly a misnomer: what it appears to mean in practice is “self-designed trap to expose the incompetence and lack of basic fairness of school personnel. According to that definition, “no tolerance” polices are working extremely well.

For example, an Orchard, Texas third-grader at Brazos Elementary was given a week’s detention for first-degree possession a Jolly Rancher. The school’s principal and superintendent said they were simply complying with a state law that limits junk food in schools. The miscreant, Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch  when a teacher saw the candy and confiscated it. Her punishment is that she must be separated from other students during lunch and recess for the rest of the week. Continue reading →

Being Fair to Elena Kagan

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The long knives are already out for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now the latest Supreme Court nominee. Once, before the late Ted Kennedy shamelessly accused Robert Bork of being a racist, a sexist and a monster to boot, U.S. Presidents were accorded the respect by both parties in the Senate have confirmed whoever they chose for the High Court, unless the choice was so cynical or politically tainted as to demand defeat. No more. Now each nominee has to thoroughly debase herself or himself by denying the political philosophies that produced his or her nomination in the first place. The first casualty of the nomination process is integrity.

Is it too late to go back? Is it too late to be fair? Continue reading →

The Ethics of Silencing Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Good and just people are not just bothered by the bad things people do, but also by the bad things they may be thinking while they do it.  This is reasonable, on its face, because a lot of  the time (though far from always), misconduct arises from ideas, emotions, motives and intentions that are not very admirable and sometimes despicable. The indisputable connection between what we think and what we do increasingly is fueling the idea that we can and should try to control people’s thoughts—not by encouraging good ones through education, culture, philosophy, role models and positive reinforcement, but by preventing bad thoughts through punishment, enforced conformity, censorship, and linguistic controls.

The civil rights movement, once dedicated to wiping out discrimination, which is a kind of conduct, now focuses on eliminating bigotry and bias, a form of thought. Hate crime legislation extends penalties for criminal acts beyond the act itself to what the criminal was thinking while he committed it.  The term “hate speech” is frequently used to describe any intense negative opinion as a way of both suppressing and de-legitimizing political opinion. The label effectively argues that an opinion, even a reasonable opinion by itself, should be shunned and even suppressed based on the “illegitimacy” of the thought process used to arrive at it.

As many predicted, this device or tendency (which you call it depends in part on how cynical you are) has intensified with the election of our first African American president, allowing the kind of intense opposition rhetoric, satire, condemnation, hyperbole and ridicule that has been directed at virtually every president before him to now be characterized as hate speech, or proof of racial prejudice. People, of course, have a right to engage in this tactic, but it is wrong.

Over on Facebook, over a million people have joined a fan page called “DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN”, inspired by a joke that is a lot older than Barack Obama, and probably older than Millard Fillmore. Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” and Helping Illegal Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Randy Cohen’s first response in this week’s installment of “The Ethicist” (in the Sunday New York Times Magazine) isn’t exactly unethical, but it isn’t exactly ethical, either, if little things like obeying laws still matter to you. The real value of Cohen’s column this time is to remind those who blithely condemn Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement statute as “cruel,” “racist” or “un-American” the extent to which the Federal Government’s failure to control our boarders and enforce the immigration laws has corrupted and confused us all.

Stuart Gold, from Brooklyn (and I respect Stuart for making his name public) queries Randy about how he should deal with knowledge that a local supermarket is exploiting some illegal immigrants working there by not meeting the legal requirements for minimum wages and working conditions. Stuart is friendly with the workers and wants to help them, but he doesn’t want to get them fired or deported. Cohen tells him to advise them of their rights if they don’t know them, but to leave any proactive steps to them.

This is reasonable advice, but look at what we have: Continue reading →

CBS: Nostalgia Spoilsport

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

For many years, I’ve been trying to track down a recording of the theme song from the wonderful 1963-64 TV anthology “The Great Adventure.” A critically praised, largely forgotten dramatic series that portrayed stories from American history, “The Great Adventure” began with a spirited march written by composer Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.

Now I can play the show’s intro on my computer any time I feel like being inspired, thanks to a wonderful web resource, televisiontunes.com. The site has collected over 15,000 songs and instrumental pieces from the entire expanse of television history, and it is a magic doorway to instant nostalgia, not to mention some fun and excellent music, like the Rodgers composition, that is difficult to find anywhere else. Want to hear, for example, “Interjections!”, the cleverest and catchiest of all ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” creations? It’s there…or rather, here.

But if you want to listen to the “Twilight Zone” theme, or the iconic intro to “Perry Mason,” or, most tragically of all, the opening strains of “Hawaii Five-O,” perhaps the best TV theme ever, you are out of luck. You are out of luck because CBS, alone among the networks, has had its lawyers start pulling off the best-known themes from the CBS shows, as is CBS’s right as the owners of them. Continue reading →

Drug War Ethics: THIS Is Excessive Force…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Radley Balko, a senior editor at Reason Magazine, has been following the law enforcement tactic of paramilitary raids on American homes, some of which go horrible wrong, and many of which raise questions of propriety and proportion. One of the worst of these, a February raid on a family’s home in Missouri that featured the invading authorities shooting the family dog in front of a young child, is immortalized on this frightening video. The father was charged with marijuana possession and child endangerment, presumably because he used drugs in the presence of his.

Balko, who, like everyone at Reason, is a libertarian, uses the incident to press his opposition to the illegal status of recreational drugs. “This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years,” he writes… Continue reading →