Month: November 2012

Are Employers Ethically Obligated Not To Take Advantage of Women’s Negotiation Choices?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 

Yet another career for Shatner—coaching female job-seekers.

A recent study of 2500 job seekers indicated that men are far more likely to negotiate salary and benefits in job situations where it has no been stated that the salary is negotiable.

I am not surprised. Running non-profit organizations with limited resources, I always ended up with primarily female staffs because women would accept a lower offer than men with similar qualifications. This meant that the women got the jobs for salaries their male competition turned down. This, in turn, may have effected their salaries for a long time to come, in subsequent jobs. Is this bias?

Clearly not. The negotiations between an employer and potential employee are ethical and the conditions are known. A skilled negotiator (I am personally incompetent at negotiating my own fee; in ProEthics, my partner handles all of that) will get a better deal; a poor or reluctant negotiator will get terms more advantageous to the employer. It is not bias if the most aggressive and effective negotiators happen to be men.  Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck Watch: The Petraeus-Broadwell Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

There is too much information awaiting disclosure to do a thorough ethical analysis at this point, but it is already clear beyond question that the David Petraeus-Paula Broadwell scandal is an ethics train wreck, with many more individuals and perhaps institutions involved than the direct participants. Today’s news reports that the adulterous affair prompting the much-respected CIA Director’s sudden resignation was triggered by Broadwell’s  threatening e-mails to another women she suspected of vying for the General’s affections clinches train wreck status. This thing is still rolling.

Other features of the wreck-in-progress: Continue reading →

Ethical Quote of the Month: Gen. David Petraeus

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position as D/CIA. After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation.”

—-Gen. David H. Petraeus, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in a public statement announcing his resignation from that position.

How quaint.

Democrats and Republicans must have felt that they had stumbled into the Way-Back Machine and delivered into England circa. 1904. A high government official resigning over adultery, sex,…”personal misconduct?” How bizarre! Naturally, Sen. Diane Feinstein, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee,  announced that she would have supported Petraeus if he had chosen to stay. “I wish President Obama had not accepted this resignation, but I understand and respect the decision,” she said in a statement, and described Petraeus’s resignation as an “enormous loss for our nation’s intelligence community and for our country.”

The right way to leave after an affair, apparently, is to try to cover it up, submit to extortion, corrupt others in the process, and only quit when the hideout is surrounded, the hounds are clawing at the door and someone is yelling at you through a bullhorn—you know, like former GOP Sen. John Ensign, who waited two years to resign while his colleagues, like Feinstein, looked the other way. Nobody gets it in Washington—“it” being the ironclad principle that leadership must set the highest example, not the lowest level it can get away with, or the whole system rots below. Nobody, apparently, except the man who just resigned. Continue reading →

CREW vs. Issa: Biased Accuser, Guilty Accused

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Unethical for Rep. Issa to make it, and unethical that CREW didn’t

The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington does almost half a great job in its stated role as a government ethics watchdog. The supposedly non-partisan group is obviously partisan, since it goes after unethical Republican officials with frequency and relish while targeting unethical Democrats with infrequency and reluctance. CREW’s complaints, however, are almost always well-supported and legitimate. Why almost half a great job? CREW can’t be as effective in its efforts to expose unethical Republican conduct as it needs to be because its obvious bias makes the organization’s motives and judgment less trustworthy and more vulnerable to attack.

We have a perfect example in the news. “The Hill” reports that CREW….

“…has asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) violated rules by producing a video that attacks President Obama. Continue reading →

Porn and the NFL: In Search of A Biased Referee

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

With condoms, what, 2.5 X’s?

55% of California voters decided yesterday to make porn stars wear condoms on the job—good for their health, bad for the health of the state’s booming XXX film industry. It is a reasonable guess that injecting condoms into the proceedings will put California’s porn products at a significant competitive disadvantage, and also a reasonable guess that the voters who enacted the measure couldn’t care less. So legal enterprises may go bust, their employees may lose their careers, and consumers may lose a form of entertainment they crave because of the policy priorities of those who hold all three in low regard, and who are unlikely to apply any kind of balancing standard. It’s safer for all concerned to require condoms, that’s all. Porn companies, porn careers, porn lovers—who cares about what they want? Continue reading →

The Golden Rule Sets Off An Ethics Alarm At Popehat

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I posted earlier here about the efforts by lawyers (and bloggers) Marc Randazza and Ken at Popehat to foil the despicable operators of “IsAnybodyDown?” That vile website solicits and uses nude photos of women who have not given permission for them to be posted. It often posts contact information for the women as well, and, as a final touch, promotes an alleged legal service that guarantees that it will get the photos taken down. This is a good bet, since the legal service is operated by the same two men who run the site, though it is very unlikely that the “lawyer” really exists. After Marc and Ken challenged the site, its purveyors launched another one accusing them of secretly working for pornography interests and being funded by the Mob.

These are not, in other words, nice people.

In his most recent post about their ongoing battle, Ken recounted an e-mail exchange with Chance Trahan, who founded and operates  “IsAnybodyDown?”with Craig Brittain. It is an exchange that confirms what one would assume about someone who engages in a business like his. A typical tweet from Chance to Craig reads in part, “You aren’t shit to the world you immoral fuck.” Yet Ken was moved to reflect upon even this individual’s humanity, applying the Golden Rule to and musing about how even the likes of Trahan and Brittain can have redeeming qualities. In doing so he provided as profound and lovely reflection on the ethical process of reciprocity, as well as kindness, fairness, forgiveness and empathy. With Ken’s permission, I present it here. Continue reading →

Accountability Check: Blame Yourselves, Conservatives

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

…twice shy.

The rhetoric, accusations, insults and breast-beating from conservative talk radio and its audience are every bit as offensive as Michael Moore’s bleating that American voters were morons after the 2004 election. No, it is more offensive—that’s right, more offensive than Michael Moore. Conservatives thoroughly disgraced themselves when they had control in Washington, and have barely improved since. They deserved to lose in 2008 because of their unethical conduct from 2000-2008, and that they are still paying for those years in 2012 is obvious and just. If conservatives don’t like the Obama Administration and its policies, if they think the United States is in deep trouble as a consequence, they should stop blaming voters and admit that it couldn’t have happened without their greed, stupidity, arrogance and incompetence: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Golfer Blayne Barber

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Aspiring professional golfers can’t just join the PGA tour. They have to qualify by completing and passing PGA school.  Blayne Barber is one such golfer, and his dreams of winning tournaments and cash prizes will have to wait at least another year, if they are realized at all. He washed out this year. The way he washed out, however, is remarkable, and shows that if he does make it into the PGA ranks, Barber will be a credit to his sport.

Indeed, most pro golfers are credits to their sport, because golf has managed to hold the line against the increasing cultural acceptance of poor sportsmanship better than any of our professional pastimes, with tennis a distant second, and third place too far away to see without binoculars. This is a sport where the honor system is mandatory. One reason the tradition of self-regulation has persisted in golf may be because cheating in contests is so easy, and because there are so many ways to do it. Players find their own balls, and write down their own scores. Anyone who has seen James Bond and Auric Goldfinger take turns cheating each other in the famous grudge match from the movie knows that amateur golf can be cutthroat and nasty. The pros have built a culture that requires exemplary conduct.

Few would be this exemplary, however. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Non-Voting Americans

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“Eh, what’s was the big deal?”

Amazingly, after all the ink spilled and  broadcast blather about how vital this election is to the future of the nation, it now appears that fewer eligible Americans cared enough to haul their butts to the polls than four years ago. Did anyone predict this? I sure didn’t. With an unusually stark choice and the intensifying of social media, I assumed that intensity levels would be higher, or certainly as high, as 2008.  The conservatives and Republicans in particular, who had all their heralds proclaiming death and destruction, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together—I’m either quoting “Ghostbusters” now or Mark Levin—and uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds warning of the “broken glass factor,” with anti-Obama patriots so energized that they would be “crawling over broken glass” to reach the polls, flopped like a dead fish in Sonny Corleone’s lap. All the pundits are wondering how it is that a liberal President with low approval ratings and high unemployment could win the election in a nation that is supposedly “center right”?  What’s the mystery? Less than 60% of that public cared enough to participate in their own government! Who knows or cares what they believe or think–they can’t be bothered to do anything. If conservatives are horrified and angry, let them be horrified and angry at those who may have agreed with them but who abdicated their duty as Americans because they were too lazy to follow the issues, too illiterate to understand the positions, too complacent to work for change, too irresponsible to share the burden of self-government. Continue reading →

“Is We Getting Dummer?”*: Special Election Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

BOCA RATON, FL :

“A woman attempting to vote in West Boca Raton this morning was initially prohibited from entering the polling place because she was wearing a t-shirt with the letters MIT. BocaNewsNow.com has heard from multiple sources that an election supervisor at the polling place ultimately realized that MIT stands for “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” — a school where students tend to know how to spell — and was not a campaign shirt for the Republican candidate, who spells his name MITT. Campaigning is not permitted within several yards of a polling place. The woman was ultimately allowed to vote.”

This, mind you, was an election supervisor.

This certainly helps me understand why it is just thinly-veiled voter suppression to insist that voters be able to identify themselves at the polls, because nobody would ever try to try to vote under a false identify when our democratic process is being guarded by our best and brightest.

Once again, let me state that any electoral result is preferable to having another election hinge on the integrity of the system in Florida.

* A quote from “IQ 83” by Arthur Herzog