Month: February 2012

Ethics Quiz: The Case of the Human Cat

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This is not only an ugly story, but also one that many people are incapable of analyzing dispassionately, or even rationally. I’m going to try.

Michael Puerling is a landlord…some would call him a slum lord…in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.  A tenant in the upper unit of his property had adopted a black and brown stray cat, which she named Sage. Puerling told the woman she couldn’t keep a cat, so she evicted the feline, which eventually took up residence in the vacant lower unit. Puerling discovered the cat had after it had been making itself at home for months, tearing up furniture and generally making the apartment a giant litter box. According to the landlord, he opened the doors and windows and tried to get Sage to leave, but the cat hid under the kitchen sink. Then Puerling tried to remove the cat by hand…not a good idea, as any cat owner could have told him. When he couldn’t grab the scruff of Sage’s neck, he yanked the cat out by his tail, with the predictable result–the cat went crazy, and attacked him.

So Puerling bashed the Sage’s head in by swinging him by his tail against a slab of concrete outside. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “Make Presidents’ Day Super”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The degradation of America’s values continues in seductive and incremental ways.

Take the online petition “Make Presidents’ Day Super,” described as…

“A plan to move Presidents’ Day to the Monday after the Super Bowl. For football. For hangovers. For America.”

The proposal is unethical in many ways, beginning with its dishonest presentation.  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect holiday, seek to take what should be one of our most patriotic holidays and actually give it more meaning, make it more American,” the argument begins. Make it “more American”? How, exactly, does moving a holiday that already minimizes the national recognition of the birthday of George Washington by making it a floating annual date to manufacture a three-day weekend make that holiday “more American”? Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Indiana State Senator Dennis Kruse

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Time to reconsider the Greek Gods...because the oldest theories are the best theories.

Indiana State Senator Dennis Kruse is responsible for Senate Bill 89, recently passed by the Indiana Senate, which would allow schools to teach “creation science” — the oxymoron that really means “The Bible” —as an alternative to the scientific Theory of Evolution. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court specifically outlawed this fundamentalist aganda in the 1987 court decision Edwards v. Aguillard. Kruse however, thinks that the bill could lead to a court challenge, and a Supreme Court reversal. “This is a different Supreme Court,” he has said. “This Supreme Court could rule differently.”

It isn’t that different, Senator. They all have law degrees, they’ve all read the Constitution,they’ve all seen “Jurassic Park.” They all have IQs above freezing, unlike…well, never mind. By the way, Kruse is a Republican, as if you hadn’t guessed. Continue reading →

The Lenahan Effect Meets The Streisand Effect

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

From the Legal Ethics Forum:

The Lenahan Law Firm in Dallas Texas has subpoenaed Google to release the real name of an anonymous critic who posted an un complimentary online review of the firm’s services. The firm wants to sue the poster for daring to question its performance by writing,

“Bad experience with this firm. I don’t trust the fake reviews here.”

For this perceived insult, the Lenahan firm wants to punish “Ben” to the tune of $50, 000 in damages.

Ironically, the lawsuit, rather than the review, proves to my satisfaction that “Ben” has a point. He was clearly expressing his opinion: it is up to him, and only him, whether he regards the experience of working with the Lenahan firm as “bad” or not. In the complaint, the firm says that the declaration that the positive reviews are “fake” alleges dishonesty and fraud by the firm. Utter nonsense. First of all, the allegation, fair or not, is also obviously an opinion. Second, “Ben” is saying that the reviews are fake, which could mean insincere, among other interpretations. He does not attribute them to the firm. He doesn’t say where they came from. He doesn’t know. Maybe I sent them.

On the screen shot included in the complaint, it clearly says that “0 of 3” people found “Ben’s” review helpful. For that, the firm wants $50,000 in damages, since that zero potential client was driven to another firm with his lucrative business.

Unbelievable.

Over at Popehat, lawyer-blogger (and Ethics Alarms 2011 Ethics Blogger of the Year) Ken has been carrying on a vigorous battle against online censorship of free expression by threats and lawsuits. His current target is a ridiculous faux lawyer who is now threatening Ken for pointing out the error of his ways. In his commentary as well as his various emails to the individual, Ken explains with admirable precision why opinions are not actionable assertions of fact, useful passages that I would recommend to the Lenahan Law firm. The firm’s efforts to bully critics by making an example out of “Ben” also unwisely incur the “Streisand Effect,” the online phenomenon by which efforts to censor information on the web has the perverse consequence of giving it more visibility and influence.

I don’t know if there is a name for the effect—“The Lenahan Effect,” perhaps?—by which a law firm’s willingness to pursue a spurious, unnecessary and excessive lawsuit against a former client for expressing his views about the firm’s work has the perverse effect of showing the world why that client feels the way he does, but that’s what the Lenahan lawsuit against “Ben” does.

That’s only my opinion, of course.

Where Should The Alarms Sound For THIS?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

I have little to add to the video above, which is nearly self-explanatory. A student took a video camera to the halls of his Washington State high school to quiz  class mates on basic U.S. history, geography and civics. I’m sure—I hope—that the answers shown on the video were atypical, but never mind: they are scary enough.

The blogger Kevin DuJan on Hillbuzz uses the video to attack teachers unions, writing,

As I watched the video above, two thoughts immediately popped into my head:

1. Why do teachers’ unions claim they deserve more pay and endless benefits when this is the result of their “hard work” in the classroom?

2. I honestly can’t remember anyone this dumb in my Catholic high school back in Ohio when I was going to school in the mid-90s. Continue reading →

A Brief Note Regarding The Supposed Difference Between Male and Female Teens Exploited For Sex By Adult Authority Figures

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"Come on! What 14-year old wouldn't enjoy being forced to submit to sodomy from her?"

I am posting this as my contribution to the epic argument on the post about Nevada’s wrist slap to the teacher who had various kinds of sex with multiple students. The gist of the dispute is whether it is appropriate to give disparate (harsher) punishment to male teachers who take advantage of female students than is given  to their female counterparts in the sexual predator world,  because “boys are different,” and are more likely to enjoy the sexual awakening without long-term adverse affects.

Yesterday’s sexual predator story (for there is indeed at least one every day, it seems) came from St. George, Utah, where a female fitness coach was sentenced after pleading  guilty  to two counts of forcible sexual abuse as part of a plea deal in which prosecutors agreed to dismiss three additional counts of forcible sexual abuse and five counts of forcible sodomy….of a 14-year-old boy she was supposed to be training.

The boy, now 16, says that he is treated completely differently in school now because of  his “experience.” Was he lucky to be made the sex toy of a hot adult fitness coach? It doesn’t sound like he thinks so. Nonetheless, the woman told the boy, “Well, you learned a whole lot, didn’t you?’ in a secretly taped conversation in which she tried to talk him out of helping prosecutors.

You see?  The attitude being advocated in the comments encourages and rationalizes the actions of female predators.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation-Planned Parenthood Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

Unlike the 26 U.S. Senators who are unethically abusing their positions by presuming to demand that an independent non profit organization expend its funds according to their interests, I am not going to tell the board of the Susan G. Komen Foundation how to pursue its mission…because as with the Senators, it is none of my business. Ethics is my business, and the full-blown ethics train wreck surrounding the Foundation’s decision to end its substantial financial support of Planned Parenthood has been created by dishonesty, misrepresentation and a lack of fairness from all directions.

Here are some unpopular ethics truths in this fiasco. Continue reading →

Tales Of Ethics Dunces Past: Recalling the Self-Indulgent Suicide of Hunter Thompson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I can’t claim that I am surprised that my post about the suicide of Don Cornelius attracted comments that either showed a misunderstanding of what I wrote or a stubborn determination to change the subject. It was not a post about the virtues of suicide, but about how suicide’sethical calculations may be changing as a broken medical care system increasingly makes the final years and months of the elderly a burden that crushes families and constricts the quality of life  for the nation generally. In short, killing yourself for your country may have to become an accepted practice, an ethical and courageous act, if something doesn’t change. Killing yourself for yourself—to avoid pain, problems, or the consequences of your own actions, should always be considered wrong, for wrong it is.

Jeff Hibbert, one of my favorite contributors here and also one with a great memory, reminded me that I had written on this topic once before. I had forgotten, but that post may be a useful contrast to the Cornelius post. There is not a word of it that I don’t still believe. It concerned the 2005 suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the cult “gonzo journalist” who lived like frat boy and  wrote like angel. Here it is:

Hunter Thompson’s values were admittedly always a little out of whack, but nothing diminished the self-styled “gonzo journalist” in this world so much as his manner of leaving it. He shot himself to death last February while talking on the phone to his wife, with both his son and grandson in his house with him. Nice. That should guarantee some lucky psychoanalyst or three a comfy income for the foreseeable future. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: George Clooney

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“I think it’s a stupid thing. I think it’s stupid for anyone, whether they’re celebrated or not, I don’t believe their 911 calls should be broadcast around the world.” 

"Poor Demi! The public has a right to hear us humiliate her."

—-Actor George Clooney, speaking during Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards.  He was referring to the release and subsequent airing of a 911 call from a woman summoning rescue workers for actress Demi Moore, who, the caller said, was convulsing and had lapsed into semi-conscious.

Good call, George.

911 calls are considered public, but that doesn’t mean that the public needs or has to hear them, or that sleaze-factories like TMZ should put them online when their only purpose is titillation and to embarrass celebrities. There may be special circumstances that justify making a recording of a 911 call, rather than a  transcript, available to the public, but those should be exceptions. In cases like Moore’s, playing them is unfair and unkind, a clear Golden Rule violation, not that TMZ, or most journalists for that matter, would know about that.

If the media can’t control itself when it comes into possession of a 911 call that will embarrass someone who already has enough problems to deal with, then we need laws to keep 911 calls out of irresponsible hands…in other words, the news media’s hands.
.

 

Don Cornelius, Suicide…and Ethics Hero?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Soul Train” creator and pop culture icon Don Cornelius took his own life at 75 yesterday, using a gunshot to the head to do it. Suicide always conjures up feelings of special sadness for the deceased, sometimes mixed with anger. The act can be cruel and devastating to family members and friends; often it leaves behind crushing problems, financial and otherwise, that the living have to deal with. Suicide is stigmatized in our culture as a coward’s way out of earthly problems; many religions consider it a sin, and many legal systems consider suicide a crime. Yet it may be that American culture will have to undergo a major cultural transformation in the matter of taking one’s own life. While morality tends to ossify, ethics is fluid and adaptable. Changing conditions and new realities can, in rare circumstances, cause societies to conclude that what was once considered right is really wrong, and what was once condemned as wrong is in society’s best interests. I think we may reach that point with suicide. Continue reading →