Hollywood is buzzing and griping about the manner in which Ricky Gervais chose to host the Golden Globe Awards last night. The L.A. Times pronounced him “too nasty,” and it was clear as the night went on that his pointed and often personal jibes at the film and television egomaniacs filling the ballroom at the Beverly Hilton were often infuriating or embarrassing his targets. There was even speculation during the show (via Twitter) that he had been fired mid-ceremony. Continue reading
Month: January 2011
Police Raid Ethics
At 5:30 a.m. on Thursday of last week, police officers, weapons drawn, burst into the home into the house and pointed guns at the McKay family of Spring Valley, New York. David McKay said officers were screaming for someone named Michael, and when he tried to explain that nobody by that name lived there, the police pulled him, in his underwear, outside into the freezing cold. Then officers ordered McKay’s 13-year-old daughter out of her bed at gunpoint, a trauma that caused her to vomit, faint, and later to have an asthma attack. Continue reading
Becoming a Society Without Empathy
Attorney, blogger and legal ethicist Franco Tarulli has a thoughtful post on The Ethical Lawyer about the results of a recent study I had missed, and now that I know about it, I almost wish I was still missing it. The findings are ominous. Continue reading
Unethical Web Post of the Month: William Rivers Pitt
I had been unaware of the existence of a writer named William Rivers Pitt before yesterday, and I now I will look back on those days of naive and blissful ignorance with nostalgia and deep mourning for innocence lost. The face of unreasoning hate and bigotry is always ugly, but one seldom encounters such purple-complexioned, vein-popping, spittle-spewing fury on the web, especially from a published author with a vocabulary exceeding “Deliverance” levels. I had been aware of the website Truth-Out, a hard Left commentary site that I now know exercises no editorial discretion whatsoever.
Mr. Pitt’s rant is entitled “The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right,” which, if it were written by anyone with a history of the relative moderation of, say, Richard Cohen, Nancy Pelosi or Bill Maher, I would assume was satire. Continue reading
Ethics Quiz: Who’s Responsible When You Hand Your Child An Uzi and He Shoots Himself?
The answer to the quiz, according to Massachessetts. authorities, apparently is that the organizer of the 2008 machine gun shoot at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club is responsible.
Christopher Bizilj, age 8, died when the Uzi submachine gun he had taken in his small hands suddenly tilted upward and backward as it fired, and a bullet blew off part of his head. The boy’s father, Dr. Charles Bizilj, signed a waiver before letting his son shoot the gun, acknowledging and accepting the risks, including the boy’s death. But law enforcement officials applied the common but ethically-misguided principle of “the crime carries its own punishment” for the devastated father, thus shifting all accountability on the organizer of the shoot, Edward Fleury, who was prosecuted for manslaughter. Continue reading
Marketing the Glock and Corporate Social Responsibility
Dr. Chris MacDonald has a thoughtful post on this topic on the always excellent Business Ethics Blog. “The social benefits of selling handguns may be fundamentally contentious; in other words, reasonable people can agree to disagree,” he writes. “But I doubt that the same can really be said for marketing moves designed, for example, to foster the sale of high-capacity magazines (ones that hold 33 bullets instead of the usual 17).”
You can read the whole article here.
The Maine Incivility Project
Thank goodness for the Maine Incivility Project.
With all the talk about incivility sparked by the media’s determination to blame a madman’s shooting rampage on Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party, it rapidly became evident that civility is a somewhat elusive concept. For example, while shouting “You lie!” at the President while he is speaking is definitely uncivil, arguing that the President was really foreign born isn’t—it’s stupid, but not uncivil. Calling Rush Limbaugh “a Big, Fat, Idiot” in the title of your book, as Sen. Al Franken did, is uncivil, as is calling Nancy Pelosi “the Wicked Witch of the West,” as Rush Limbaugh did. Using cross-hairs to designate Democratic House seats that Republicans are “gunning for'”, “targeting” or “taking aim at”, on the other hand, is not uncivil…just unsettling if one is metaphor-challenged or hoplophobic (having a pathological fear of guns.)
Never fear, however. Before the echoes of President Obama’s call for Americans to come together had barely faded, the public got a handy lesson from the Governor of Maine about what incivility sounds like, as his term launches the new Maine Incivility Project. Continue reading
The Comment of The Day: Yes, It’s About Tide Commercials, But Read It Anyway
Ethics Alarms reader Lianne Best weighs in on the Tide (with Acti-lift!) ads, with a valuable observation with far broader ethics significance. She aptly describes exactly how norms of appropriate conduct become corrupted and coarsened (or sometimes enlightened and improved!) over time:
“I hope I’m not too late to the Tide with Acti-Lift! party, but for those who say these ads are “just marketing” and don’t have any real impact … the first time I saw each of these ads, I was horrified. With each subsequent viewing I was less and less offended, until they became normal. Participating in unethical behavior starts with it becoming normal, so these seemingly innocuous commercials are actually pushing the snowball down the slippery slope. Those with influence, whoever they may be, must be cautious with its use.”
Tucson Aftermath: Don’t Let The Barn Door Close On Freedom, Please
In the wake of Jared Loughner’s attack, the “barn door fllacy” is in full operation as intensely, and foolishly as I’ve ever seen it. Everyone from social reformers to yellow-bellied Congress members are proposing changes and suggesting “dialogues” aimed at stopping Jared Loughner’s completely unpredictable conduct, which, they seem to forget, has already occurred. Almost always, when everyone rushes to lock the metaphorical barn door after the horse is gone, they make the barn and everything around it uglier, less useful, more expensive, and less respectful of basic human dignity and freedom: witness the TSA’s outrageous new pat-down procedures, designed to stop 2009’s exploding underpants terrorist, who was unsuccessful. Continue reading
The Ignorant Citizen’s Ethical Duty Not To Make Others As Stupid As He Is
Here is the problem, of which the worst of the Tea Party movement is only the latest in a long line of examples.
We want typical citizens to participate in the democratic process. It is critical that they do. But the Framers recognized that participation in self-government needs to be responsible, and that responsible democratic government requires knowledge, common sense, and wisdom. They also recognized that the majority of any population doesn’t possess that; this is why they originally limited the right to vote.
Okay, that was a big mistake: if you are going to have free society, everyone should have a say in it. Still, a citizen has an obligation to be civically literate before he or she starts trying to tell everyone else the best way to run the town, the state or the country, and civic literacy, as anyone can tell by reading the comments on any news or public affairs website (except this one, of course), civic literacy, not to mention common sense, is in short supply. People either don’t value civic literacy, or more likely, don’t recognize when they don’t have it. Continue reading
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