Month: June 2010

Asking For a Favor And Turned Down Flat

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Has this ever happened to you?

There is someone who has needed a lot of help from me recently—rides, errands, a shoulder to cry on, and mostly time.  I try to help out people when I can, especially if I am asked, because, obviously, it’s the right thing to do.

After a day in which my assistance to this individual was especially inconvenient and aggravating, essentially blowing a day that I could not afford to have blown, I learned about a personal situation facing me the next day that was going to be a problem, and realized that the person I had been assisting would be able to make my life a lot easier by granting a favor, and not a very difficult one.  So I asked her. Continue reading →

When An Ethical Parent Must Veto a Child’s Dream

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It looked grim for a while yesterday, when the media was reporting that the sailboat carryingAbby Sunderland, the 16-year old seeking to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo by sea, had been lost. Now it looks like she may be safe after all, as a rescue of her crippled craft is underway in the Indian Ocean.  That a tragedy may have been averted, however, doesn’t mitigate that unethical abdication of responsible parenting and trust by Abby’s parents that set the stage for a calamity.

Had the ill-conceived adventure ended fatally, it is certain that we would have heard her heart-broken parents eulogize their daughter as intrepid,  courageous and mature beyond her appearance, who lived a full life in her sixteen years, and perished “living her dream.”  All true, but those aren’t the facts that matter.  What matters is that she is a dependent, trusting, sixteen-year old child who desperately needed her older and supposedly wiser parents to say “No. Being the youngest woman to sail around the world is good, living long enough to go to college, have a family, have a career and experience the joys of life over many decades is better. Sorry. It’s too dangerous. When you understand a little bit more about life, you may be capable of deciding when to risk it.”

They failed her, and the fact that she isn’t dead as a result is only luck. Continue reading →

“Welcome to AshleyMadison Stadium!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In an inspired bit of P.R. wizardry, the adultery-facilitating website AshleyMadison.com has made a serious bid for “naming rights” for New Meadowlands Stadium, the just-completed new home of the N.F.L.’s Jets and Giants. The site’s founder, Noel Biderman, has sent a letter to the CEO of New Meadowlands stating that they “are prepared to make a preliminary offer … of $25,000,000 for the Naming Rights for a five-year term” and would match any higher offer by other parties.

The N.F.L. isn’t going to let one of its stadiums be named after an adultery website, as Biderman well knows. But maybe Biderman has done the N.F.L. a favor by slapping it across the face and giving it a chance to avoid the venal, values-abandoning path that Major League Baseball adopted more than a decade ago when it allowed teams to sell naming rights of its new parks and stadiums to the highest corporate bidder, turning venues for classic sporting contest into billboard for banks, fly-by-night dotcoms and worse. Continue reading →

“Glee” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Now that I know I’m not the only one to be a bit troubled by the gleefully unethical practices of the absurdly talented high school students in the performance choir chronicled in the Fox TV series “Glee,” I will conquer my fear of rampaging “Gleeks” and say so.

In addition to the annoyance of the teens being played by 30-year-olds, their absurdly accomplished performing skills, and most of all, the speed with which they arrange, choreograph and master complex musicals numbers that a no professional performing group could equal in less than a week of twelve-hour days, there is this: the students regularly violate the copyright laws by using music, lyrics and exact copies of video choreography in their numbers.

Yes, the producers of  “Glee” are really paying the artists involved; that’s not the point. The problem is that the show’s conceit contributes to an attitude among younger Americans (and a lot of old ones, like “The Ethicist,” Randy Cohen) that stealing intellectual property from artists is OK, everybody does it, and it is standard procedure. This encourages an unethical and illegal practice by glamorizing it, and also misinforms viewers who may not know that what the “Glee” kids do could involve big fines and serious legal problems in the real world. Continue reading →

When a Crime Is More Unethical Than Illegal

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“It’s just a dog folks!!! Why not go after people that brutally slaughter cows, chicken and pork. Oh wait, you eat those animals so that justifies killing them. This country’s priority is screwed up. He got what he deserved, fine, buy the couple another dog and perform community service. Now leave him alone.”

This was the reaction of a Washington Post reader to the widespread out rage over the cruel act of David M. Beers, a Marine Corps veteran who expressed his anger with a Maryland couple by taking their 4-pound pet Chihuahua and hurling her off a bridge to her death. A judge has sentenced him to four months in jail, and ordered him to pay a $1,000 fine, perform 300 hours of community service, and pay $318 restitution to Caisha and Timothy Wantz, who had just had a heated dispute with Beers before he took their pet.

The sentence is appropriately stiff, and yet inadequate too. Continue reading →

The Ethical Significance of Pete Rose’s Corked Bat

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

To cut to the chase: there is now irrefutable evidence that Pete Rose, Major League Baseball’s all-time hit leader who is currently banned from the game for betting on baseball, used a corked bat. How often he used it, how many other bats were similarly doctored, and what results he got from the illegal bat (s) are all unknown, and probably unknowable. The long, interesting and well-researched article about Rose’s bat on the website “Deadspin” points out that:

  • Corked bats (which have been doctored with a hollow chamber that is filled with cork, on the theory that it lightens the bat without sacrificing power) are forbidden by the rules of baseball, and their use constitutes cheating.
  • Their use is almost impossible to detect; only a handful of players have ever been caught using one, but it is believed that the cheaters are many and notable. Amos Otis, a star for the Kansas City Royals, admitted after he retired that his bats were corked for the majority of his career. Norm Cash, who won a shocking batting championship in 1961 with an average far above any he posted before or after, attributed his career year to a corked bat.
  • It is quite possible that corked bats don’t have any positive effect at all, and might even be worse than regular bats.

The last point cuts no ice with me. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”

— Job posting for a “qualified engineer”at an anonymous electronics company in Angleton, Texas, placed on The People Place, a  recruiting website for the telecommunications, aerospace/defense and engineering industries.

A Huffington Post article by Laura Bassett properly condemns this hiring requirement as offensive, irresponsible, cruel and unfair during a recession, when there is widespread unemployment. The practice would also be offensive, irresponsible, cruel and unfair during an economic boom or an eclipse of the sun. Bassett interviewed a human resources representative for Benchmark industries, which follows the same hiring policies, and its rational was this: Continue reading →

Abuse of Power in the Schools, Part 2: “Beat the Jew”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Seven seniors at a high school at a La Quinta, California high school have been suspended for three to five days, causing some of them to miss graduation, because they participated in a role-playing game, organized on Facebook, after school during their own personal time. The school administrators found the game objectionable, which you will be able to understand. But nobody was hurt, and no laws were broken.

That is all we really need to know. That the seniors were disciplined by the school for an activity completely unrelated to school is a pure abuse of power. This is an outrageous extension of school and government authority into the private lives of the students involved. It should not matter what the game was…not to the school. The governments of La Quinta, California and the United States couldn’t outlaw the game, nor could they forbid citizens to play it, not could they punish citizens that did.

Now, because you may be  curious, here’s a description of the game. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: This Guy at a Mets Game

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In this video, a grown man reaches over and intercepts a tossed baseball obviously intended to reach a specific little boy with a glove in an inning-ending gesture by New York Mets third baseman David Wright. The fan snags the ball just as it was about to land in the shocked kid’s glove, and then hands it to his own child.

There are rumors, unconfirmed, that after being berated by surrounding fans, he returned the ball. It doesn’t matter if he did or not: doing the right thing after you have been caught, shamed and threatened is not an ethical act, just a pragmatic one. The deficiency of values displayed by the act of taking a baseball from the child, and the stunning lack of kindness, empathy and fairness it shows, would be sufficient to dissuade me from hiring such an individual for a job, allowing him to marry my daughter, or associating with him socially. I think he should have been thrown out of the park.

Many ethical decisions require thought and reflection. Deciding that it’s wrong for an adult to take a gift from a child is not one of them.

Abuse of Power in the Schools, Part 1: Pimping the Kids

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Blogger-mom Laura Wellington is making the talk show rounds after a post last month on her blog aroused interest and commentary from various newspapers. In the post, she indignantly described a fundraising drive by her child’s school that understandably raised her ire:

“…the letter [my daughter] handed me stated my daughter was to accomplish chores around the house with the goal of being paid by me for those chores the sum of $20.  She would then have to hand the full $20 over to the school to make up for the shortfall in their overall budget which, ultimately, disallowed the kids to go on yet another class trip.  Participation was mandatory according to what my daughter told me and the letter seemingly conveyed (however, on a later phone call, my daughter’s teacher altered the word “mandatory” to be “suggested” despite all evidence to the contrary)…”

Wellington’s complaint is that schools need to exercise fiscal responsibility, and she is joining a rising chorus of protest among parents across the country who feel that their tax dollars should not have to be supplemented with constant arm-twisting from schools urging them  to buy and sell over-priced cookies or provide additional contributions. This is a fiscal policy issue; the ethical issue should be less controversial. When did schools get the authority to dictate what children do outside school? How do they justify requiring unpaid labor for the school’s benefit? Continue reading →