Month: April 2012

The Worst Ombudsman Ever Strikes Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

"Wait! Wait! It wasn't that good a story! Why did you have to pay so much attention to it? Now Our friends are all mad and everything!"

Patrick B. Pexton, whom Ethics Alarms dubbed The Worst Ombudsman Ever last Fall, has cemented his title with yet another example of bias and incompetence. By rights, he should be in a spirited battle for WOE with New York Times “public editor” (a.k.a ombudsman ) Clark Hoyt, who, among other derelictions of duty, has refused to criticize Times columnist Charles M. Blow for blatant anti-Morman bigotry. At least Hoyt writes about journalistic ethics, which is his (and Pexton’s) job to do, though not always well. The ombudsman’s proper role in any organization is to serve the public interest by answering and resolving complaints against the organization, calling foul when the organization does wrong, and making standards clear when it does not. In a new organization, the ombudsman is the guardian of journalistic ethics, and all that implies, from fairness to objectivity to competence. Pexton seems to see his function as an advocate for the Post when it is under attack, and for the Obama Administration when the opportunity presents itself. That does not serve the public interest.

Thus it is that Pexton has written a bizarre and gratuitous  defense of a Post story that went viral on the internet, arguing that it wasn’t the Post’s fault that so many people paid attention to it, that the story was no big deal, really, and that “only our reactive, partisan, hyperventilating media culture” made it one. Isn’t that strange? A newspaper’s story gets quoted and circulated, and its ombudsman feels that he has to apologize for it? What was the matter with the story? Was it wrong? That would justify Pexton’s professional <Cough!> attentions. Well, no, it wasn’t wrong. Was it unfair? Er, not really, no. What then? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Purloined Championship Team

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Within hours of winning a Final Four national championship, a triumphant college coach not only jumped ship and went to another university, the coach took the entire championship squad.

Nobody went nuts about this over at ESPN, however, because the championship was in chess.

Texas Tech chess coach Susan Polgar took her entire all-star squad of seven chess grandmasters from Texas Tech to private Webster University in suburban St. Louis, home to the World Chess Hall of Fame and the U.S. national championships. Polgar is unapologetic for gutting the Texas Tech elite chess program that she built there beginning in 2007 . “The program grew rapidly, and Texas Tech wasn’t ready to grow with the speed of the program. St. Louis today is the center of chess in America. It just seemed like a perfect fit.”

I’m sure it is, but that leads to your Ethics Quiz: Is it ethical for a coach to take a school’s championship team with her when she accepts a position elsewhere? Continue reading →

The GSA Spending Scandal, Panetta, Biden, the Obama Administration Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Outrageous! Why would the GSA have to hire this clown? Talk about “carrying coals to Newcastle…”

That the GSA’s spending 0ver $800,000 on a Vegas staff fling masquerading as a working conference was unethical and an example of government agency arrogance at its worst seemed so obvious to me that I was going to eschew commentary entirely. When Newt Gingrich, Eric Holder and Kim Kardashian would likely understand what is wrong with any conduct, my analysis is superfluous. However, here are a few observations regarding the more critical issue of what this episode teaches us about the Obama Administration, the culture it has fostered and its leadership:

  • I do not think it is unfair to consider whether  the General Services Administration scandal might be a direct result of the culture in the Obama Administration generally. The overwhelming  impression left by the entire administration from the top down is that austerity is for everyone else. The message sent by continued unnecessary and profligate spending at all levels of the government was bound to be taken as a general green light to be abused by someone, and that someone happened to be at the GSA. Of course, there may be other someones who haven’t been found out yet. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week, Trayvon Martin Ethics Train Wreck Division: Dr. Boyce Watkins

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Sybrina’s words have opened the door for millions of people to understand when George Zimmerman is let off the hook with either an acquittal or a plea bargain for a lesser charge.”

—Syracuse University Professor Boyce Watkins, in a blog post complaining that the comments of Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother stating that she thought the shooting of her son was “an accident” were devastating to the chances of convicting George Zimmerman of second degree murder.

Unmasked at last!

I must confess, I love this quote and the post that generated it. I love it because a race-baiting scholar who later defenders cannot credibly claim didn’t write what he meant, has confirmed what I have argued in multiple posts, in the course of also validating my assessment that Fulton’s comment was itself unethical, though not for the reasons Dr. Watkins objects to it.

In the rest of his post, Watkins confirms my assessment of Fulton’s irresponsible and despicable willingness to stir up hate toward Zimmerman. Continue reading →

Umpire Accountability, As The Day of the Robots Fast Approaches

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

If Robby replaces you, Larry, it's your own fault.

Are baseball’s umpires trying to get themselves replaced by machines? Or perhaps baseball’s brass are conspiring to allow incompetent and lazy umpires to do themselves in, as their miserable work wins over the traditionalists and the Luddites to mechanical ball and strike-calling and their overseers refuse to take decisive action against the worst officials they have. Whatever the explanation, today’s debacle ending the Tampa Rays-Red Sox game in Boston showed an appalling lack of accountability and professionalism in a segment of the game that is critical to its credibility and integrity. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Jackie Robinson (1919-1972)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Yesterday, the media, history buffs and Kate Winslet fans were obsessed with remembering the Titanic, sometimes even with proper reverence to the 1500 men, women and children who lost their lives in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. A strong argument could be made, however, that the most significant event that occurred on April 15 took place in 1947, in Brooklyn, New York. For that was the day that Jackie Robinson ran out to his position at first base as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and became the first African- American to play baseball in the Major Leagues since the earliest years of the game.

With that act, and his epic heroism for the rest of the season, Robinson changed baseball, sports, American society and history. It was a cultural watershed in a nation that had been virtually apartheid since the end of the Civil War, a catalytic moment that served notice that racism was no longer the future of America. Robinson’s dramatic debut in 1947 was more than a year before President Harry Truman desegregated the military, and seven years before the Supreme Court ruled that “separate is inherently unequal” in declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. Further down a difficult road that has not ended yet were the crusade of Rev. Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Act, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, but it was Jackie Robinson who led the way.

And no one should ever think that he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It wasn’t merely the opportunity. It was him. Continue reading →

T-shirt Ethics and Bigotry In Lexington, Kentucky

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

The offensive T-shirt design. Honest.

Hands On Originals is a T-shirt company in Lexington, Kentucky that is now under fire for refusing the business of the Gay and Lesbian Services Organization, which organizes Lexington’s annual gay pride festival every June. The organization wanted to print up some T-shirts, and the company told them to take their business somewhere else. The reason: the T-shirt company is a “Christian organization”, and the owners don’t want to assist in promoting a message that goes against their religious beliefs.

The Gay and Lesbian Services Organization filed a complaint, and now there will be an investigation to decide whether this violates Lexington’s Fairness Act, which protects people and organizations from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Lexington’s mayor has weighed in against Hands On, and boycotts against the company and the closely related company Wildcat Wearhouse have been threatened. Meanwhile the attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the T-shirt company, argues that “No business owner should be forced to violate his conscience simply because someone demands it. The Constitution absolutely supports the rights of business owners to decline a request to support a message that conflicts with their deeply held convictions.”

I am not going to comment on the legal and constitutional issues, but the ethical issue is clear. Should society respect the choice of a business to refuse to provide products or services to groups, individuals or causes it opposes or objects to on moral or religious grounds? Continue reading →

Unethical Ethics: How Business and Government Encourage Unethical Thinking In Their Ethics Training

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Show us the way, O Wise and Ethical One!

Jack Abramoff, the corrupt lobbyist turned federal prisoner, then author and now ethics expert, will be giving a lecture on government and personal ethics at The University of Texas at Austin’s business school on May 2. This is not as unusual as it seems. My biggest competitors are felons and disbarred lawyers—they literally step right out of professional disgrace, and sometimes jail, into the lecture circuit. They are draws, and in a field like ethics, which is often prescribed as substitute for barbiturates, this is irresistible to professional development programmers and conference organizers. It also attracts the participants that most need real ethics training, but who seek what these fake ethics presenter usually have to offer:  real life-based advice on what you can’t get away with. This lesson has about as much to do with ethics as it does with Parcheesi, but unfortunately, that’s what is generally regarded as practical ethics.

Characters like Abramoff don’t have ethics alarms; they have survival alarms.  Business schools, politicians and the media still believe that aiming reforms at those alarms, in the form of tougher rules and enforcement, will make business and government more ethical. Think about it: the cultures will still be unethical; the people in them will be just as unethical, but because proven scofflaws and ethics corrupters like  Jack Abramoff will explain where they went wrong, all these people with dead ethics alarms, further deadened by absorbing  the wisdom of the most corrupt of a corrupt breed, will stop behaving unethically.

Good plan. Continue reading →

The Unethical Rationalization List: 24 and Counting

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ethics Alarms frequently refers to rationalizations, which lie at the core of most unethical conduct. They are, as one ethicist put it, lies we tell ourselves to allow us to pretend that what we know is wrong, isn’t. Some rationalizations are used so frequently, by us and others, that we come to believe them.

The list of rationalizations has been available on the blog under the Rule Book heading from the beginning, but it is constantly updated, and even though posts frequently link to it, it is clear to me, especially from comments that resort to exactly the same examples of flawed ethical reasoning that populate the list, that a lot of visitors never see it. For those readers, and also those who may not have read the Unethical Rationalizations and Misconceptions page recently, I am posting the whole list of 24 rationalizations here. If you have a candidate for #25, please send it in. Continue reading →

From Massachusetts: Proof That It CAN Happen Here…and Does; That It CAN Happen To You…and Might.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tortured. At his Special Needs school. By good people like us.

As I recently wrote to a commenter on another post, Ethics Alarms is not intended to catalogue every prominent example of unethical conduct, and not just because attempting to do so would require a fleet of bloggers. If it is discussed here, an incident usually requires some kind of ethical analysis to determine whether it is ethical or not, or has larger cultural or societal significance. That the incident at the center of this post was unethical (as well as illegal), there can be no doubt, and that, ironically, is why it is worthy of special attention. The conduct is self-evidently horrific and beyond justification, and yet it occurred anyway, in a community, state and nation where virtually every sentient citizen over the age of nine would say that it could never happen—not here, not in the United States of America, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The fact that it did happen is both a revelation and a warning.

Film footage under seal since 2002 was finally shown in a Massachusetts courtroom this week. The film shows how the staff of a school for special needs students in Canton, Mass., the Judge Rotenberg Center, strapped a disabled 18-year-old student named Andre McCollins to a table and proceeded to torture him, administering 31 jolts of electricity to the screaming boy over a seven hour period. Lawyers defending the school in a lawsuit have claimed that the atrocity was “treatment,” but other evidence indicates that it was punishment—for  McCollins’ defiance of a teacher’s demands that he remove his jacket in class. Continue reading →