From the You Find Ethical Controversies in the Strangest Places Dept., this post from “About the Occult”:
“There are many people (about 0.5%) who use PSI [psychic abilities, to you non-X Files fans] to do evil. Are there laws concerning that? Using ESP AT ALL should be ILLEGAL!!! It is UNETHICAL!!!”
The ethical analysis is certainly sound, even if the assumptions are flawed.
In an earlier post this month, I related the story of Ethan Haines, an unemployed, newly-graduated lawyer who was staging a hunger strike, he said, to protest the fact that law schools misled their recruits about the employment prospects of their graduates. I was not sympathetic, and concluded:
“Law degrees still are valuable credentials, as is a good legal education, and if Haines got a good legal education, he received everything a law school is obligated to provide. Turning the degree into a career is his responsibility, and it is wrong for him to claim that anyone but himself is accountable for his present unemployed state.”
His stunt was more than an avoidance of responsibility and accountability, however it was a lie. Continue reading
Sometimes conduct is just wrong, and a culture should be able to reject and condemn it confidently without engaging in navel-gazing over cultural tolerance and diversity. The position, unfortunately popular, that all cultural determinations of right and wrong are equally valid is both lazy and insidious, though it has wormed its way into the minds of some who would cal themselves “progressive,” but who are more appropriately called “confused.”
In this category is a New Jersey Court judge, who refused to find a Muslim defendant guilty of sexual assault despite undisputed evidence that he raped his wife multiple times, (immediately prior to their divorce), saying at one point,
“You are my wife, I can do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do.” Continue reading
The Department of Agriculture, in a desperate effort at damage control (and to make amends for its unprofessional and unfair treatment of her), offered Shirley Sherrod another job. She has turned it down, saying, “I know [DOA Secretary Tom Vilsack] apologized, and I accept that. And a new process is in place, and I hope that it works. I don’t want to be the one that tests it.”
Excellent. Brava! Continue reading
A British website has posted its list of the “10 Most Unethical Ways to Make Money.” Like all such lists, there are some eyebrow-raising choices, both in what is included and what is not, usually attributable to the political and ideological biases of the list-makers. For example, until we have figured out a way to run civilization without oil, it is more than a bit unreasonable to declare the entire oil industry unethical, climate change or no climate change. Oil is on the list, though, while child porn, drug dealing and gambling are not. The list could be the result of a collaboration among Greenpeace and Ron Paul.
Still, most of the inclusions on the list, like blood diamonds, ivory, and sweat shops are neither surprising nor controversial. Placing one of the businesses on the list, however, qualifies as a public service. Most people have no idea what the industry is, or what is unethical about it.
That business is the viatical settlement industry, which preys on human impulsiveness and irresponsibility to make large profits. Unfortunately, the list’s brief explanation of the industry misses its most unquestionable and sinister incarnation: buying structured settlements. Continue reading
It is an old ethical problem: what is “fair”? If you help someone, are you obligated to help everyone? Does charity have to be consistent to be fair? Does a potential beneficiary of generosity have a right to demand it? It is obviously good for those who are fortunate and successful to share the benefits of their success with the unfortunate and less successful, but is it unethical if they choose not to?
These are some of the ethics issues being raised in a controversy launched by the major league baseball veterans, now retired, who played between 1947-1979. In those days, when free agency was just beginning and top players made six-figure salaries rather than seven or eight as they do now, a player needed four full years of time on a big league roster to qualify for medical benefits and an annuity. In 1980, however, new rules put in place by the Major League Baseball Players Association granted health insurance benefits to those with just one day of service, and a pension after merely six weeks. The new benefits were not retroactive. Continue reading
Kim Lehman, who is one of Iowa’s two national Republican Committee members, responded to Politico’s report last week about the large and, oddly, increasing number of Americans who believe that President Obama is a Muslim, with this tweet:
“@politico You’re funny. They must pay you a lot to protect Obama. BTW, he personally told the muslims that he is a muslim. Read his lips.”
When Lehman was asked by the Des Moines Register what speech she was referring to, she cited an Obama speech in Cairo last summer in which he reached out to Muslims “to seek a new beginning.” In that speech, Obama made no comment about being Muslim. In fact, he said he was a a Christian, saying,
“…Now part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I’m a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith. As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam.”
Never mind that, Lehman said; the speech still “just had the appearance that he was aligning himself with the Muslims.” Continue reading
“I don’t think it’s a hate crime, it’s just a recession out there.”
—A Staten Island neighbor of 17-year-old Yashua Plair, who has been arrested and charged with a hate crime for shouting anti-Latino epithets while attacking a 15-year-old Mexican boy to take his i-Pod.
Oh. Well, I guess it’s OK then. Continue reading
[TV is full of reruns these days, and sometimes I am grateful for them, for it gives me a chance to see episodes of favorite shows I had missed for some reason or another. Back in early March, I posted the following essay about the origins of America’s current crisis of trust in our government, and how it might be cured by our elected leaders. Since then, the crisis has deepened, and as I was doing some routine site maintenance, I reread the post. It is still very timely (unfortunately), and since far fewer people were visiting Ethics Alarms in March, I decided to re-post it today, with just a few minor edits. I promise not to make this a habit. Still, trust is the reason why ethics is so important in America: if there is a single post of the more than 700 I have written here since October 2009 that I would like people to read, this is it.] Continue reading
On Aug. 6 in Washington, D.C., a violent brawl broke out among 70 people, most of them teenaged or close to it, at the Gallery Place Metro Station. There were arrests, and several people landed in the hospital. Pitched battle in the usually staid D.C. subways are not daily occurrences, yet the Washington Post apparently found itself short-handed, faint of heart, or both: its initial and follow-up stories on the event had little information. What started the fight? What happened? Who were the combatants? How long did it last? Continue reading
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