The latest issue of “Pole Spin,” the “international pole dance and lifestyle magazine,” features “the world’s youngest pole dancer” and a proud family with four pole-dancing teenagers.
Is this wrong? Child porn? Bad parenting? What the heck is it when something with sexual connotations is used by children in a non-sexual way? Continue reading
New research from Harvard University suggests that exemplary ethical conduct may increase an individual’s willpower and physical endurance. Research subjects who performed good deeds or who only imagined helping others excelled over others of similar physical strength in a subsequent task of physical endurance presented by behavioral scientists.
This is good news: the boost in self-esteem, certitude and commitment created by the decision to do something noble and good helps enable us to actually do it, if it is physically challenging. The bad news seems to be that the same holds for people who have made up their minds to do something particularly dastardly, according to the same data. Continue reading
Less than a week after taking office, attorney Scott Gessler, Colorado’s newly elected Secretary of State, announced that he plans to keep working part-time as an attorney for his law firm, the Hackstaff Law Group. In an interview with the Denver Business Journal, Gessler acknowledged that his plan to moonlight as a contract attorney raised ethical issues, but he needed the money.
Well that’s certainly an encouraging ethics orientation! Continue reading
In November, Ethics Alarms noted that Melanie Sloan, the head of the ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was involved in exactly the kind of Washington insider conflict of interest that the group typically slams politicians for engaging in:
“Melanie Sloan, long the leader and public face of CREW, announced that she is joining the new firm of lobbyist Lanny Davis, a long-time Democratic ally and famous for being Bill Clinton’s most ubiquitous apologist during the Monica Lewinsky scandal…Over the summer, CREW aligned itself with the for-profit schools industry. “Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (“HELP”), asking the committee to consider the financial motives of critics of the for-profit education industry,” a July CREW press release began. Later, Sloan again attacked the motives of for-profit school critics in a CREW blog post that linked to an op-ed piece Davis had written defending the for-profit industry. That industry then became a client of Davis’s lobbying firm.
“Got that? Sloan and CREW pushed the interests of Davis’s clients, then Sloan went to work for Davis, where she will, in part, be enriched by the very people whom she assisted in the name of ethics—by attacking the financial motives of for-profit school opponents! This is precisely the kind of D.C. two-step that CREW mercilessly exposes when elected officials do it, and now here is the very same CREW leader who once condemned such corrupt practices, doing it herself.”
Now, for reasons yet undisclosed. Sloan will not be leaving CREW after all.
Does that make everything all right, obliterating the conflict of interest exposed by her decision to take the lobbying job for a firm representing the same interests that CREW had defended? Is the stain of that apparent conflict now erased? Continue reading
I was just simultaneously reading an excellent, if not particularly revolutionary, article about blogging ethics and checking out the latest comments on the Immortal Tide (with Acti-lift!) Debate. Suddenly I found myself wishing that the author, whose essay concentrated on editing blog posts, had also addressed the issue of editing blog comments.
Unlike some blog platforms, WordPress does not have a feature that allows commenters to review or spell-check their own posts. Despite this, many of the regular commenters here have a better record of avoiding typos than I do, and I have preview and spellcheck features. When they make a spelling or grammatical error (and I notice it), I will fix it for them: WordPress allows me to edit comments. Sometimes a commenter will e-mail me personally and request an edit, and I am happy to oblige.
A while ago, one new commenter whose post was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors accused me of letting her errors stand to make her look unintelligent because she had disagreed with my original post, while I continued to edit comments that were more friendly. In her case, I actually hadn’t read the previous typo-infested comment that she was referring to, and treated her complaint as a request to edit it, which I did. But it was a mess, and I wondered then if it made sense, or was even fair, to turn an inarticulate, careless comment into a clear and persuasive one.
Today I have read several posts on the endless Tide commercial thread from a 15-year-old girl. The post is in text-speak, essentially, without capitals, punctuation or any attention to style. It is a clear comment, however,even if it is obviously the expression of a 21st Century teen. Should I edit her comment to give it more credibility, by punctuating it, for example?
What is an ethical editing policy regarding comments on an ethics blog? The options, as I see them, with their ethical pros and cons: Continue reading
At the risk of being accused of proving the old proverb that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, let me offer the observation that the apparently acrimonious departure of Keith Olbermann from MSNBC, despite being the cable channel’s biggest star, is a cautionary tale about ethics.
The lesson: the absence of respect for the opinions of others, accompanied by a lack of humility and a surplus of contempt for fairness and civility, will doom even intelligent, talented and hard-working individuals to inevitable failure, because they cannot be trusted, not by employers, not by colleagues, not by friends.
This is why ethical values are valued: they are essential to individual success, because they contribute to societal and social success. This is, I believe, the fourth time an Olbermann show has ended like this, and like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” he is doomed to repeat the pattern until he learns how to be a more caring, more trustworthy human being.
I hope he makes it. Keith Olbermann has the ability to help make this a better country, instead of a nastier, meaner, more divided one. I hope he gets another chance, and that this time, he figures out how to use his abundant talents to do it.
Mere “Ethics Dunce”-dom doesn’t suffice for P.Z. Myers, gonzo biologist and professor who writes the intermittently enlightening, frequently infuriating blog, Pharayngula. Writing about the horrific case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, an abortionist/quack/butcher whose method would make him a likely model for an episode of “Criminal Minds,” Myers wrote this, referring to the charges against him based on the fact that his version of “abortion” consisted, in at least seven cases, of inducing a live birth and murdering the baby afterwards, with a scissors: Continue reading
The Comment of the Day is from Joshua, from the lively thread on the post “Facebook Wars: Parental Abdication, School Abuse of Power.” Continue reading
First, the quote:
“I said Goebbels lied about the Jews, and that led to the Holocaust. Not in any way whatsoever was I comparing Republicans to Nazis. I was saying lies are wrong…I don’t know who got everybody’s panties in a wad over this statement.”
—–Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), in his initial dismissal of criticism over his rant on the House floor regarding Republican characterizations of the health care bill.
This quote is really remarkable, for it is hard to pack so many kinds of dishonesty into so few words.It’s hard to know where to begin. Continue reading
Physician/novelist Michael Palmer is something of the new Michael Crichton, though unlike the eclectic late author of “Jurassic Park,” Palmer generally restricts himself to medical thrillers. He is promoting his latest novel, “A Heartbeat Away,” with a series of “ethics brainteasers,” as he called them in a recent Twitter post. Here is the latest, which he posted on his Facebook page and asked fans to discuss:
“What if a close friend confides to you that he/she has committed a heinous crime and you promise that you’ll never tell. However, you soon discover that an innocent person has been accused of the crime and is possibly facing significant jail time. You plead with your friend to give him/herself up, but he/she refuses and reminds you of the promise. What should you do? What if the if jail time was only a few months? What if the sentence was death?” Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 