Month: December 2012

Ethics Dunce Déjà Vu: Drew Curtis’s Fark

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
"Ma'am, your teenage son was raped by this woman, Isn't that great?"

“Ma’am, your teenage son was raped by this woman, Isn’t that great?”

Once again, one of my favorite news aggregation websites, the prolific and often hilarious Fark, is laughing at child rape. Its comment on the story from Nehalem, Oragon about the arrest of a 31-year-old model for sex crimes involving at least three under-age boys—15 and 16 years old—was this…

“…niiiice”

Not funny. An adult woman using—that’s the correct word, using—teenage boys as her personal sexual aids isn’t niiice—it’s criiiiminal. In October, I gave Fark an ethics dunce cap for an earlier wink-wink-nudge-nudge comment about a teacher who added statutory rape to her duties, and that was surely worse; after all, she was a teacher, and violating the trust of the school, the parents, the students and the community to get herself laid. Nonetheless, the conduct of model Anna Walsh was neither harmless nor trivial. I know: Fark’s official stance is sophomoric; I get that. I also get that sophomores, and other morons, have staked out the position that any male child who has obtained a sufficient level of sexual maturity to be used as a human dildo by a “hot” woman is a lucky dog. Well, that spectacularly stupid and unethical position does a great deal to help sexual predators like Walsh victimize children, who are misled into feeling that something must be wrong with them if they really don’t want be used.

Since the site is a repeat offender, I’m sure Fark’s wags intend to keep doing this. So I guess Ethics Alarms will have to keep reminding everyone what irresponsible ethics dunces their warped sense of appropriate treatment of young boys shows them to be.

“Duuuunce”

____________________________

Spark: Fark

Facts, Graphic: KATU

Football Fashion, Ethics, and Our Wasteful Consumption

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
The many fashion choices of the Oregon Ducks...and children are starving in Appalachia.

The many fashion choices of the Oregon Ducks…and children are starving in Appalachia.

On his excellent ethics blog, the Ethics Sage, a.k.a. Dr. Steven Mintz, recently expressed dismay at the increasing trend in college and high school football teams that has them changing uniform designs for no discernible reason, but at significant expense. Focusing on the multiple uniforms used over a season by the Oregon Ducks, he wrote:

“The poverty line threshold in the U.S. ($23,050 for a family of four) is, on a daily basis, about $16 per person per day. If my estimates are close, the cost to outfit the Duck football players for a year is about $48,000, double the poverty level for a family of four and enough to sustain 3,000 people for one day or about 8 people for one year. When you think about the extravagant spending on uniforms by the Ducks, you begin to understand that it reflects a society where glitz and glamor are valued over feeding the hungry — not a pretty picture”

I am not sure what to make of this argument. Is Mintz arguing that the Ducks are ethically obligated to send the money they spend on extravagant uniform diversity to the poor? Isn’t this really just the old “How dare you waste those perfectly good peas when children are starving in Ethiopia?” argument? Realistically , there is no way the university’s football uniform budget is going to be able to help feed the poor. Why pick on the Ducks? He goes on to write, Continue reading →

The Shock Jocks and the Suicide: A Moral Luck Cautionary Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments
With every action we take, we're rolling the dice...

With every action we take, we’re rolling the dice…

Jacintha Saldanha, a nurse at the King Edward VII hospital in Great Britain, happened to be the staffer on duty when two Australian disc jockeys made a prank call to the hospital ward where the Duchess of Cambridge was staying for treatment of the symptoms of her recently disclosed pregnancy. The DJs, Mel Greig and Michael Christian,  pretended to be the Queen and Prince Charles, and the gullible nurse discussed the royal patient’s condition with them, violating protocol and security.  Three days later, Saldanha, the 46-year-old mother of two, was found dead of an apparent suicide.

Now the disc jockeys are off the air indefinitely, and being pilloried as virtual murderers in some local media as if Saldanha’s death was a predictable and reasonable outcome of their admittedly irresponsible gag. It wasn’t. Presumably the same people screaming for Gaig’s and Christian’s heads would also be doing so if the nurse had been asked, in the fashion of a gentler, dumber era of phone pranks, if she had Prince Albert (tobacco) in a can (“You do? Then for God’s sake, let him out!”) and killed herself in humiliation. This was not a natural outcome of their juvenile routine. This was an unhinged over-reaction that had to have underlying causes far deeper than a practical joke phone call. The shock jocks were the victims of moral luck, the same phenomenon that leaves a tipsy partier who drives home without incident a respected citizen, but turns a driver who is no more intoxicated and  attended the same party into a community pariah because a careless child ran in front of his car. The two drunk drivers were identical in their conduct. One was lucky. The other was not. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Month: Ken At Popehat

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“Evil exists. Good people should fight evil. But government is often the wrong instrument to fight evil. The people doing sick and contemptible things to children in the name of “curing” homosexuality very likely feel as strongly as I do, and might — if they got their way — use government to achieve their ends. People who love liberty must fight with their heads, not just their hearts.”

—– Ken, the First Amendment besotted lawyer/blogger/libertarian/wit who reigns at Popehat, writing about his doubts regarding California’s ban of so-called “conversion therapy.”

I recommend that you read the whole post, and everything Ken writes, basically.

I’m somewhat less conflicted than Ken in my opposition to this legislation, and wrote about the ban earlier this year, here, and here.

UPDATE: A Cynical Ethics Tale That Wasn’t So Cynical After All

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In the recent Ethics Alarms post The Asperger’s Child, the Company With A Heart, and the Cheapskate Parents: A Cynical Ethics Tale, I expressed both ethical and credibility doubts about the heart-warming story of a little boy who was sent the out-of stock LEGO set he had saved to buy for two years, only to discover that it was no longer manufactured and could only be purchased at premium rates via collectors or online auction. The child’s joyful reaction when he opened the box containing the set sent to him as a gift by the toymaker was captured in a family video that subsequently went viral on YouTube.

I won’t rehash my analysis here; read the post. I questioned why the family wouldn’t just contribute the necessary funds to ensure that the child’s long effort to obtain the toy didn’t come to naught, and I expressed skepticism that LEGO’s generosity wasn’t part of a pre-arranged quid pro quo in exchange for the video, especially since the father is professional videographer, and the YouTube product functioned as a promotion for LEGO.

By purest coincidence, a personal friend here in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Jeff Westlake, is also a close personal friend of the Groccia family. He was privy to the events of the story as they unfolded, and relayed information to me about both the family and the events surrounding the YouTube video that were not evident in the media reports. Thanks to Jeff’s insight, I am now satisfied that the family’s decision to explore every avenue of obtaining the LEGO set was reasonable rather than penurious, and that there was no quid pro quo with LEGO.

I apologize for mistakenly impugning the Groccia’s motives and account in the episode. I don’t apologize for raising the ethical issues that I saw implicit in the media accounts. That’s my job, and provoking discussion and debate over the ethical or unethical conduct of public figures is why this blog exists. If a family is going to participate in making an occurrence in their lives the subject of news stories, features and blog posts, they cannot insist that all commentary be unequivocally positive. I thought the doubts I expressed were legitimate and fair; it happens that they were not borne out by the facts.

Mr. Groccia was offended, understandably, and not so understandably, decided to respond here with, first, an anonymous comment noting that my “foil hat must be too tight as it appears to be impeding your cognitive abilities.” I didn’t know who the author was, and informed him via the email; address accompanying the comment that I would post his remarks if 1) I had a real name, as the Comment Policies require,  and 2) if the screen name he used was not a commercial website, since this would lead to the comment being spammed. He responded that he “knew” I wouldn’t have the “spine” to print his comment, which is manifestly not the case. I told him that I would be happy to publish a more thorough account by him, and would retract my suspicions if I was persuaded by it. Instead. Mr. Groccia chose to send a series of alternately insulting and threatening e-mails, none of which were substantive, and all of which served to reinforce my doubts. There the matter would have laid, except for the intervention of Jeff Westlake. I’m grateful to him for setting the record straight.

 

I Guess Remembering “The Maine” Is Out of the Question

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
Hey, Matt: What was this? Anybody?

Hey, Matt: What was this? Hello? Anybody?

I was going to write a depressing post about how neither the Washington Post nor CNN, nor the Today Show (though I missed some of it, and can’t be completely sure) bothered to mention Pearl Harbor this morning, on the anniversary of the day when a sneak air attack by Japan nearly destroyed the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor at Oahu, Hawaii. 2,335 U.S. servicemen and sixty-eight civilians died in the attack, as 1,178 soldiers and civilians were wounded. The tragedy launched U.S. participation in World War II, which took another 416,000 American lives among the horrendous 60 million killed in that conflict. Naturally, none of this was deemed worthy of mention by our journalistic establishment, or perhaps they just forgot. After all, the Grammy nominations were announced last night.

Then I caught this exchange among Harold Reynolds, Ken Rosenthal, and host Matt Vasgersian on the MLB Network’s live off-season show, Studio K, leading into a story about the Philadelphia Phillies obtaining outfielder Ben Revere in a trade yesterday: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Censoring a First Grader’s Poem

/ Jack Marshall / 157 Comments

No-GodThis is a different kind of ethics quiz, because the question is where the blame for an unethical result lies. The result is clearly wrong, but I am uncertain who or what should be blamed for it.

A first-grade student in North Carolina wrote a Veterans Day poem honoring her grandfather, a Vietnam veteran. She had been selected to read the poem at a November 8 Veterans Day ceremony.   One of the lines was, “He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength.”

The Horror.

The school forced her to remove the line. Continue reading →

The Perfect Ethics Story: The Dilemma Of The Extra iPads

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Your ethical dilemma just arrived!

Your ethical dilemma just arrived!

Now here is an example of a consumer episode in which everyone involved behaved with exemplary ethics, and without hidden agendas. There is no need to draw this out—Consumerist does a great job telling the story, and you should read it here. A quick summary:

  • A woman who ordered one iPad from Best Buy received five.
  • Her e-mail to the store about what she should do was unanswered.
  • Legally, she was within her rights to keep the extra merchandise, but (correctly) worried about possible consequences to the worker who made the shipping error,
  • She consulted the consumer advice maven at Consumerist, who tracked down someone at Best Buy to deal with the problem.
  • Best Buy’s rep contacted the consumer, thanked her for her honesty, and sent her this letter: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: CBS Tampa

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Today’s canine bigotry, misinformation and blatantly terrible reporting prize goes to the CBS affiliate in Tampa. It reported a story involving  a man who left a 10-month old baby alone in a home to go out drinking, with only a dog in charge of the child. But the CBS headline was “Man Leaves Pit Bull To Babysit Infant Child,” and included this stock photo of a snarling pit bull:

FILES - Picture taken 24 August 2000 inThe implication of both the headline and the photo is that the child’s peril was increased by its being left alone with a vicious dog. Actually, the child was probably safer with a pit bull than any other breed: this is a breed, after all, that was known as “the nanny dog” for much of the 20th Century. If the mention of the breed had been intended as possible mitigation for the jerk that left the baby without human supervision, that might be legitimate reporting, but what CBS did was pure sensationalism and distortion based on the ignorance of the reporter and the editor. The headline invoked the irrational fear of pit bulls, based on ignorance stoked by reporting like CBS’s. The photo didn’t depict the actual dog involved, which just as easily might look like this…

smiling-pit-bull-dog

… and was intentionally chosen to create the impression that the man, in addition to deserting the baby, left it at the mercy of a dangerous beast. Would the headline have mentioned the breed of dog if it had been a Labrador or a poodle? The breed was only relevant to the story if you believe that it placed the child in more danger than just being left home alone. Journalism is supposed to make us better informed, not more ignorant than we already are. This requires, however, responsible and intelligent journalists.

____________________________

Source and Graphic: CBS

Now THIS Is Sexual Harassment!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Meet your new boss...

Meet your new boss…

In Chicago, “A Cook County highway boss asked a woman who worked for him ‘to come into his office every day at around 4 o’clock while he watched porn and masturbated,’ the woman claims in court.”

There’s really no ethics controversy in stories like this, other than the same three questions I have after all of them:

1. How can someone be in a position of authority in the 21st Century and not know this kind of conduct toward an employee is not only horribly wrong, but illegal?

2. Why would any woman put up with this for so long…16 months, according to the complaint? Shouldn’t the first episode be the last one? Would you say to such a creature, “Now, that’s enough. I don’t want you calling me into your office to watch you masturbate ever again. Okay?”

3. What the hell is  the matter with men, anyway? Continue reading →