Month: July 2012

Bob Nightengale’s Rationalization Orgy

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

“OK, he got caught, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t still the BEST at Rubik’s Cube…”

I was interviewed on a radio news show early this morning, and one of the questions I was asked was whether what the host called “the decline of ethics in the country” could be reversed. I’m not convinced there has been such a decline, but if there is, it sure doesn’t help to have so many  journalists with big microphones displaying infantile analysis of ethics-related issues on a regular basis.

Today’s case was USA Today sportswriter Bob Nightengale, who took the occasion of the annual induction of new members into baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown this weekend to trot out nearly every rationalization and ethical invalid argument imaginable to explain why he would be voting for all the proven or suspected steroid cheats  for the Hall when their time comes:

“There, I said it. I will vote for Bonds. And Clemens. And Sosa. And Piazza. I’ll think about Bagwell. And will continue voting for Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive in his final season when he reached 3,000 hits.”

And then come the rationalizations:

  • “Hey, it’s OK to admit racists, criminals, drunks and recreational drug abusers, but let’s not tarnish the sacredness of the Hall of Fame.” This is essentially a “there are worse things” argument with an overlay of ignorance and stupidity. This is a baseball Hall of Fame with very clear character requirements: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.” No other sports Hall of Fame has such standards: just wait for the fight over admitting Joe Paterno into the College Football Hall of Fame (O.J. is a member in good standing.). Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: ABC’s Brian Ross

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Now that I think about it, nobody gets shot in Pixar movies. I wonder if movies about violence vigilantes need to be regulated…

He just couldn’t help himself. Learning of the horrible Batman theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, ABC reporter Brian Ross got on the air and reported a possible “tea party link” with the killer, James Holmes, and if you don’t think this sent a thrill up his leg, I have some gold mine shares to sell you. Anything to smear conservatives: why was he looking at tea party web pages, any more than PETA sites, or Parcheesi fan sites? Because, you see, the tea parties are violent—don’t you remember? They inspired that guy to shoot Gaby Giffords! Where else would you expect to find a madman killer?

It was fantasy, of course, and Ross and ABC duly apologized, but never mind: it worked. Confirmation bias is a sure thing. I was in a Food Court at LAX today, and heard someone at the table next to me eating similar unidentifiable swill say, “Did you hear? One of those tea party guys shot all those people!” I finally got to my room in Sun Valley (it was easier to get to Mongolia than Sun Valley) to check what she was talking about. So you see, Brian? Mission accomplished!

Others are politicizing the Aurora shooting in only slightly less outrageous ways, mostly with the sadly predictable rush of anti-gun advocates to point to the slaughter and say, “See? Guns bad.” Then comes the related cognitive dissonance trick, linking gun rights to automatic weapons to madmen and criminals using such weapons to the tragic deaths resulting from said use, hence Republicans and conservatives are really allied with killers and murderers, which gives us some insight into their true character.

I’m sure Brian Ross approves.

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Facts: Huffington Post

Graphic: Shout Omaha

Unethical Quote of the Week (Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck Division): George Zimmerman

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“I feel like it was all God’s plan…I do wish there was something, anything I could have done that wouldn’t have put me in a position where I would have had to take a life.” 

—–George Zimmerman, shooter of Trayvon Martin, now facing charges of second degree murder, in an interview this week with Sean Hannity on Fox News

In the sage and concise words of frequent commenter and Ethics Alarms critic tgt, who brought this quote to my attention ( the idiocy of a murder defendant submitting to a televised interview was too much for me, and I could not bear to watch it):

“Whether it was murder or self defense, don’t pretend you were just a bystander in the process. You absolutely could have done other things. If you think you made the right choices, defend them. Don’t pretend they were out of your hands.”

And the ethics train wreck rolls on…

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Pointer: tgt

Facts: Orlando Sentinel

Graphic: Without a Peer

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

 

Ethics Quiz: The Vetoed Wish

/ Jack Marshall / 65 Comments

“When you wish upon a star…it depends how sick you are!”

This one is so convoluted with cross-cutting issues that I’m not going to even try to make the call until I read some responses.

McKenna May is four-years-old and has survived leukemia. Her mother and grandmother submitted her wish to go to Walt Disney World to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which, according to its mission statement, selects children with life-threatening medical conditions and grants their wishes. McKenna’s wish was granted by the charity, but then withdrawn  because her father, William May, who is divorced from McKenna’s mother, refused to sign the required approvals. He believes that the Make-A-Wish funds should be spent on children who are terminally ill, and not children like McKenna, who have been cured. McKenna’s mother, Whitney Hughes, says that the real reason May has killed his daughter’s dream is to punish Hughes for restricting his visiting rights.

Your Ethics Alarms Quiz Question:

Assuming May is not doing so out of spite, is his decision to pass up his daughter’s dream trip to the Mouse Kingdom so that a more needy child can be helped an altruistic and noble gesture, or an unethical act of disloyalty and betrayal to his young daughter? Continue reading →

“You Didn’t Build That” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

With those words, President Barack Obama handed the Romney campaign a rich and evocative phrase more ripe for political exploitation than even his Republican opponent’s juiciest gaffes, like…

  • “I like being able to fire people “
  • “I’m not concerned about the very poor “
  • “Corporations are people”

Since every one of these quotes were misrepresented by both pundits and Democrats, taken out of context and unfairly characterized, it’s hard to blame Republicans for jumping on President Obama’s provocative rhetoric, and using it for all it’s worth…which, I suspect, if you want to paint the President as a socialist who wants to punish success and give the fruits of  risk-taking and hard work to the slack and unsuccessful, is a lot.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

“The president’s remark was a direct attack on the principle of individual responsibility, the foundation of American freedom. If “you didn’t build that,” then you have no moral claim to it, and those with political power are morally justified in taking it away and using it to buy more political power. “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” Obama said in another candid moment, in 2008.”

And here’s Mitt, making the most of it: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Sen. John McCain

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

It’s good to have the old maverick doing what he does best.

“Bachmann!”

Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota’s shame, used her oxymoronic presence on the House Intelligence Committee to argue in a June letter to the State Department and a letter this week to fellow Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, that  Huma Abedin, the top aide of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, may be a security risk  because Abedin’s late father, mother, and brother had or have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Abedin’s position, Bachmann suggested  ominously, ‘‘affords her routine access to the secretary and policy-making.’’ Her letter to Ellison was signed by  five other Republicans: Reps. Trent Franks of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Thomas Rooney of Florida and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.

Sen McCain angrily took to the Senate floor to call this example of ethnic profiling and Muslim bigotry what it is: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Boy Scouts of America

/ Jack Marshall / 148 Comments

I owe a lot to the Boy Scouts: namely my father. An only child whose father abandoned his family, forced to move from school to school as his mother sought work during the Depression, my dad was quite literally raised by the Louisville area Boy Scout troop that provided his only lasting friends and only stability. They taught my father well, too: if any man lived his life being faithful to the Scout oath…

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight…

…it was Jack Marshall, Sr. Had it not been for World War II, I have no doubt that Dad would have made scouting his life.

Thus it is painful for me to see the Boy Scout organization reject its core values and relegate itself to irrelevance and cultural estrangement by refusing to alter its archaic policy excluding gays from participation. After the Scouts received a narrow (and correct) affirmation by the U.S. Supreme Court that it had the right, as a private organization, to refuse to accept gay scoutmasters into the organization, they commissioned a panel to decide whether it was time to enter the 21st Century, and banish the faith-based bigotry that made the Boy Scouts hostile to gay Americans. The Scouts just announced that the two year inquiry resulted in an affirmation of the Scouts’ traditional position, unchanged after 118 years: gays aren’t welcome. Continue reading →

The Bill James Effect, Or How Nature Conspires To Make Us Irresponsible

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Quiz: What do Gen.Lee and Bill James have in common?

You see, our strengths do us in, sooner or later. The greater the strength, the more successful it has made us, the more dangerous it is.

In the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee was the smartest general on the field…so smart that he broke iron-clad rules of battle strategy again and again, and prevailed every time. When everyone told him how it was usually done, always done, Lee knew that he could get an edge by doing something else. You never divide your forces, his aides, subordinates and the military books told him. So Lee did, at Chancellorsville, and won an incredible victory.

Then came July 3, 1863: the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and Pickett’s Charge. Everyone told Lee that a massed Napoleonic assault, over an open field, into enemy artillery and a fortified line, was suicidal. But when conventional wisdom dictated a course of action, that was when Lee had always succeeded by ignoring it. So he ordered Pickett’s Charge. This time, conventional wisdom was right. The same qualities of creativity, courage, certitude, and willingness to resist the power of convention that had caused Lee’s men to trust him unconditionally had resulted in the massacre of thousands. Pickett’s Charge wasn’t bold or ingenious. It was irresponsible. Lee, because of a lifetime of success challenging what others thought was obvious, was no longer able to tell the difference. Continue reading →

Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck Update: The Unethical “Witness Nine”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

She looks credible to me!

Now where were we?

When we last left this ongoing orgy of unethical conduct in every corner, Mr. and Mrs. Zimmerman were caught lying to the judge about their financial resources, claiming to be destitute for bail purposes, and trying to hide all the money that had come in through contributions to their website. Now the judge is buying a ticket, and has ordered the release of the tape recordings of a woman only known now as “Witness 9.”

Witness 9 has a story that is old, irrelevant, but certainly calculated to inflame the public and the jury pool against the defendant. She says…

  • Zimmerman began sexually molesting Witness 9 when she was six years old and Zimmerman was about 8.
  • It continued until she when she was 16.
  • The molestation included forced kissing, fondling, groping, and inserting his fingers into her vagina.
  •  “We would all lay in front of the TV” to watch movies, “and he would reach under the blankets and try to do things. … I would try to push him off, but he was bigger and stronger and older.”
  • Zimmerman’s family doesn’t “like black people if they don’t act like white people. They like black people if they act white.”
  •  Zimmerman also does not like blacks, though she personally she had never seen him disparage blacks or act as though he hated blacks.

Let’s see:

1. An allegation of sexual molestation that is decades old, very strange (Uh, why did you keep watching movies under a blanket with a molester for ten years, ma’am?), impossible to substantiate, and 100% irrelevant to the crime Zimmerman is charged with committing..

2. A bizarre allegation about Zimmerman’s family, that is incoherent. So do they “like” blacks, or don’t they? I don’t like whites who act like idiots. Does that make me racist? And what is “not acting like a white person,” anyway? Not listening to Donny Osmond music? Not playing cricket? What? Is wandering around  in the rain and looking like you are casing houses acting white, acting black, or just acting like a crook?

3. An assertion about Zimmerman’s opinions of blacks that the witness can’t support with any statements or conduct…

4. …that is apparently not based on any recent evidence.

In addition, we know nothing about this woman on which to assess her credibility, except that she has a grudge against George Zimmerman.

There is a technical term for testimony like this: garbage. It was no less than malicious to release it, and is proof, as if more was needed, that the prosecution in this case is not interested in justice, but serving the agenda of activists who have threatened social unrest and violence if Zimmerman isn’t summarily sacrificed on the altar of racial politics. Fair trial? Can’t risk that.

I suppose, in an ethics train wreck of six months duration, it shouldn’t be surprising that George Zimmerman is being railroaded.

CORRECTION: In the original version of this post, I wrote that Witness 9’s testimony was released by the prosecution, and laid blame on prosecutor Angela Corey, who has tried to poison the jury pool in this case already. A helpful commenter produced an earlier news report that indicates that both the defense and the prosecution opposed releasing the testimony.

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Source: Slate

Facts: Orlando Sentinel

Graphic: tramthuynh

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

London’s Curfew Fiasco: Sir Paul, The Boss, and Exception Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

It was the stuff of legends, the kind of moment that onlookers would cherish and tell their grandchildren about. American rock icon Bruce Springsteen was on a roll before a huge Hyde Park crowd, and suddenly he was joined on stage by Sir Paul McCartney. The two giants of rock and roll began spontaneously jamming, and then some bureaucrat who worked for the concert organizers pulled the plug, cutting off power because the concert was running over its permit allotment and a local sound curfew.

Good ethics can require knowing when rules and even laws should be stretched, amended, finessed, or even ignored. This takes some skill, of course, and some character. It is much easier, and certainly entails lower risk, to just go by the book, and permit no exceptions. It is also lazy, uncaring, and leads to needless fiascos like this one. Continue reading →