Year: 2011

NOW Do You Get It, Bachmann Fans?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Bachmann finally jumped it, as we knew she would!

When I called Rep. Michele Bachmann unethical for her repeated uses of erroneous information in her speeches—announcing that the Battle of Concord occurred in New Hampshire, declaring the Founders spent their lives fighting slavery (and later justifying this whopper by saying that Founding Father’s Son John Quincy Adams qualified as a Founding Father himself), the Bachmanites were furious. “Anyone can make a mistake!” they argued.

Not these kinds of mistakes. As I wrote in July: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Month: Canadian Judge Joanne Veit”

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The Comment of the Day, by Eric Monkman, is one of many excellent comments on yesterday’s post on the words of a Canadian judge in allowing a woman who murdered her newborn infant to go free.

There are many threads in the discussion, and I am not caught up. I officially apologize to combatants Eric and tgt especially for not being able to respond in sufficient detail, or in some cases at all, to their thoughtful posts. This an example of the limitations of the blog comment format. I wish I could organize a conference call.

The discussion went into so many directions that the initial post’s point was distorted, in part by me. Here is how I would summarize it:

Judge Veit’s quote, the actual focus of the post, strikes me as ethically offensive because 1) the statement that “many believe” abortion is a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex suggests that abortion is acceptable as a primary method of birth control. The commenters object to my interpretation of the judge’s phrasing to mean that she personally believes the adverse of the statement, that abortion is an ideal solution to unprotected sex. (The ideal solution to unprotected sex is not to have unprotected sex.) OK. I see their point. I still read it differently, and my comments are based upon my reading. At best, it is a sloppy, imprecise statement. 2) The comparison, and equivalency, between grief for the child—who is dead, and who was killed by the person who was most responsible for her welfare—and grief for the murderous mother, who is alive, and who is avoiding legal sanctions for her crime, shows a warped set of ethical values. The implication is that the life of a child is no more important, nor has any more regard from the society, than the emotional comfort of the mother. I know that is the standard in Canada, and in much of the US. It is wrong.

The subsequent discussion about how acceptance of abortion leads to acceptance of infanticide was focused on the U.S., but mistakenly assumed that this was the order of events in Canada. It was not; I think that is affirmatively strange, as one would assume that a human life would not be less valued in a society as it became more viable. It doesn’t change my analysis regarding the U.S., however.

Eric asks some good questions which I will address at the end. Here is his Comment of the Day, on “Unethical Quote of the Month: Canadian Judge Joanne Veit”: Continue reading →

Unethical Business Practices: Online Reputation Services

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Consider this just a polite request to remove that accurate but ucomplimentary post about my client.

The web has created some new business niches, and one that fascinated me was the emergence of online reputation defenders, who purport to make sure that Google searches and web research about individuals and businesses do not turn up negative information that can harm business prospects, career advancement, or reputations generally.

While I can see the appeal and potential profitability of such services, manipulating online content is an ethical gray area. It is as wrong to artificially make someone look good  on the internet as to artificially make them look bad. In general, anyone who has been out and about very long will find both positive and negative information about themselves on the web, of varying accuracy. People who have experience with web research understand this, so the impressions they get from checking out a potential employee or business partner will usually, though not always, be tempered with skepticism.

They can and should apply common sense: What is the source of the negative information? How old is it? Was this one incident or complaint that doesn’t seem representative of the individual or company as a whole? I would rather have all the information available, and be able to make my own decisions, rather than have the most favorable material elevated in visibility and the least favorable made difficult to find or removed altogether. These services promise to “bury” the negative material. Continue reading →

Dear Laura Ingraham: Shut Up and Read Your Own Book

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Laura Ingraham misses the Jetsons. I don't care.

In her 2003 conservative book/rant, “Shut Up and Sing!” radio talk show host Laura Ingraham condemned know-nothing entertainers (among others) who use their popularity to push political views on their audiences and others. I certainly agree with her primary point, which is the expertise and notoriety in the entertainment field does not confer any special perceptiveness in matters of government and social policy, and many, if not most, of the opinions being vocally expressed by these singers, actors and comics are ignorant at best and infantile at worst.

Thus it is puzzling that Ingraham has increasingly been using her radio show, which is supposed to be about politics and current events, to hold forth on the relative value of children’s movies and TV fare in 2011 compared to the films and television programming of the past. To say that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about is being kind. She also is displaying such wretched aesthetic taste and factually mistaken analysis that her comments amount to pundit malpractice. Continue reading →

The Worst Humanitarian Award Winner of the Year

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Michael Brown---wife-beater, humanitarian.

Michael Brown founded Houston’s Brown Hand Center, which specializes in the treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome. He is now on trial for assault, after being arrested last year for attacking his his wife, twisting her arm behind her back and, among other things, hurling his 2010 Joanne King Herring Humanitarian Award at her.

I have often thought that those who give out humanitarian awards for specific instances of good conduct have an ethical obligation to make sure that recipients conform to the definition of “humanitarian” in their overall conduct. One of the definitions of humanitarian is “ethical.” Official pronouncements that an individual is ethical can be very effective false advertising for the character of someone who is anything but. Mr. Brown illustrates my concerns.

By 2010, when Brown received his award, he had already pleaded no-contest in 2002 to aggravated assault for beating then-pregnant wife, Darlina Brown, with a bed post. Call me a stickler, but I think there should be an automatic “Beating a pregnant woman with bedpost” disqualification provision for humanitarian awards. Then, in 2006, Dr. Brown’s medical license was revoked after he tested positive for cocaine use. So to summarize, at the time he was deemed worthy of the honor of being the 2010 humanitarian of the year, Brown was already an admitted wife-beater and an ex-doctor found unfit for the continued practice of medicine.

What a guy!

How about a rule that if you try to kill someone with your humanitarian award, it is automatically revoked?

Too strict?

 

Unethical Quote of the Month: Canadian Judge Joanne Veit

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

“…While many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support…Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother.”

—- Canadian Judge Joanne Viet, announcing that Katrina Effert, who strangled her newborn child and threw the body over a fence into the neighbor’s yard when she was 19, will serve a three-year suspended sentence with no jail time for the murder, reflecting a “fair compromise of all the interests involved.”

This is a cautionary ethics tale indeed for those who deny that a callous attitude toward human lives in the womb, giving them no standing against a mother’s desires and convenience, will gradually, inevitably, coarsen and warp a culture’s respect for life and its comprehension of wrong. [Addition: Many commenters have pointed out that Canada had designated infanticide as a relatively minor crime before fully legalizing abortion. That is a strange progression, though once infanticide had been declared “understandable,” abortions days were numbered. In the US, the gradual de-valuing of young life is moving in the more obvious way, from younger to older. The process, however, is the same.] Continue reading →

Another Inherently Misleading Statistic

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“Ok, I’ve put on some weight, but that hippo must weigh a ton!”

Ethics Alarms readers know that  certain statistics reporters and pundits like to cite are guaranteed to set my head spinning around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. One of them, that 50% of marriages end in divorce, is unethical because it’s imaginary. Another, the “women earn 75 cents for every dollar earned by men” line, is intentionally misleading as well as out of date. Lately, my head has been doing a 180 because of the popularity of citing Congress’s unpopularity, as measured by polls. In this case, the number is probably accurate and the implication of it is clear: the public doesn’t have much admiration for Congress. What is unethical is the misleading way it is typically used by journalists, to contrast with the President’s increasingly miserable poll numbers. Continue reading →

The Real Meaning of Manny Being Manny

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The only surprising aspect of the news yesterday that former baseball slugger-savant Manny Ramirez had been arrested for allegedly slugging his wife—the one alleging being said wife—is that any baseball fans were surprised. If anything was written in the Book of Fate, it was that this man, so completely lacking in respect for basic ethical values, was destined for trouble with the law.

While he was playing, of course, Manny’s uncivilized and cheerful contempt for basic rules and principles of right and wrong were tolerated by his employers, amused sportswriters and evoked cheers from fans. He was a great, great hitter, you see: who cares if he was habitually rude, unprofessional, slovenly, careless, disloyal, disrespectful and above all, selfish to his core? Look! He’s having fun! Isn’t that charming? Stop harping on little details, like hustling, sportsmanship, or being honest. Let Manny be Manny! Continue reading →

The Ten Commandments for Ethical Reviewers

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Film critic Roger Ebert’s autobiography is out, and I’m sure it’s terrific: Ebert is a lively writer, and he has many good stories to tell. One tale from the book that has been recounted in several  reviews, however, caused me to slap my forehead. Ebert says that he adopted longtime New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s approach to film reviewing, which she wrote was, “I go into the movie, I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me.”

Ah HA! That’s why Pauline Kael was such a destructive film reviewer, and the predominance of her attitude is why reviewers of stage and film do far more damage than good. Once upon a time, when critics had professional standards and cared about fairness, the accepted approach of someone who reviewed films or plays for public consumption wasn’t how a work made the critic feel, but rather how it was likely to make a typical audience member feel. It doesn’t take much insight to decide whether one likes a play or a movie; anyone can do that. Continue reading →

Perry, Insomnia, Leadership, and the Death Penalty

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

When should a leader lose sleep over a decision?

A lot of ink has been spilled over NBC’s Brian Williams’ question to Rick Perry regarding the death penalty, the Republican candidates debate audience’s strange reaction to it, and Perry’s response. Conservatives see Williams’ question—“Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?”—as a loaded query by a biased questioner who is pressing the progressive anti-death penalty agenda. Liberals see Perry’s answer as proof-positive that he is an unthinking, unfeeling, blood-thirsty monster. Continue reading →