Month: May 2013

Resolving An Ethics Alarms Ethics Conflict

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

poof-smallI just took down a post, something I have only done four times previously. This decision, unlike the others, was the resolution of a genuine ethics conflict, created in part by the recent discussions here.

Tonight I received a terse demand, phrased as a request but with a time deadline,* from a former commentary subject insisting that I remove a critical post here from nearly a year ago. The post was not factually incorrect, nor  did it make any factual assertions that could support a credible defamation claim. My commentary was pure opinion, though a fairly harsh one. I have pledged, following the inspirational example of Ken at Popehat and also attorney/blogger Marc Randazza, not to countenance web censorship involving bogus legal threats, and thus drafted and came within a finger-stroke of sending a rejection of the demand, and a strongly worded one.

Then I re-read the post at issue. It was a criticism of a tweet from a professional that I believed, and believe, had the effect of unfairly impugning an entire workplace and the identifiable colleagues of the tweeter. The tweet was wrong, but I realized that I was also wrong to highlight it here. I have been writing quite a lot lately about the inherent Golden Rule violation of web-shaming individuals for single and isolated unethical acts that fall short of illegality or such outrageous callousness or cruelty that there is a duty to warn others. I think there is a toxic cultural trend, fed by the power of the internet, that will soon make web bullies and assassins of us all, and potential victims as well. I want to fight that trend, not contribute to it. I think, in the case of that post, I was on the side that I now believe is the wrong one. It was a stupid and thoughtless tweet. It did not justify a web-shaming on Ethics Alarms. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Angelina Jolie

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Jolie

I am pretty certain that actress Angelina Jolie could have undergone a prophylactic double mastectomy and never revealed it, She could have had reconstructive surgery and continuing to appeal to the sexual fantasies of moviegoers, which has been a significant aspect of her movie career. She had no need to disclose the operation, which she underwent last month, and no obligation to. Nonetheless,Jolie revealed her choice to the world in an eloquent, powerful, and courageous op-ed in the New York Times this week, and undoubtedly saved lives by doing so. She also made a critical cultural statement about the worth of women and how they are devalued by being reduced to their body parts in popular culture, the media, and the minds of men.

I think it is one of the most courageous acts by an entertainment figure that we have ever witnessed.

Jolie writes in part… Continue reading →

Further Refining The Naked Teacher Principle: The Firing of Olivia Sprauer,

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments
But she's not naked!

But she’s not naked!

It will be therapeutic, I hope, to  take a breather from considering the steadily increasing seriousness of the various government scandals, as well as reviling the increasingly desperate spin being employed to try to deflect them, and to focus on something both far removed and of vital national interest. Of course, that means buckling down and refining the Naked Teacher Principle, which in its formal explication, is that a responsible high school teacher has a duty to take reasonable care that her students do not see her in the nude, and if she does not, and her students do see her in the nude, she has no standing to complain when the school deems her unable to maintain the proper and necessary credibility and dignity necessary for teaching.

Now comes the news that at Martin County High School, in Florida, a ninth-grade English teacher of otherwise good repute named Olivia Sprauer has been fired for being shown on the web modeling bathing suits, and offering her services to photographers for less clothed presentations. Should the Naked Teacher Principle or any of its variations apply? Continue reading →

How Amy Bouzaglo Makes Us Better People

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments
Run away! But pay attention!

Run away! But pay attention!

I’m not going to take back every negative thing I’ve ever said about reality shows, but there is no getting around it: now and then an episode of one of them is a better training film for good ethics than  “Leave It To Beaver,” “Star Trek, The Next Generation,” and “Father Knows Best” combined.

A case in point was a recent episode of “Kitchen Nightmares,” a Fox reality show that sends chef and restaurateur Gordan Ramsay to turn around failing eateries, usually by his browbeating them into basic management competence and the use of fresh ingredients. This time, however, Ramsay was pitted against the proprietors of Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro in Scottsdale Arizona, specifically the eponymous Amy Bouzaglo, a textbook narcissist who dominates her much older husband and partner, abuses employees, and treats all criticism and constructive suggestions as a personal attack. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Washington Post Columnist Richard Cohen

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
Richard Cohen, a fair and smart liberal columnist who sometimes jumps the ethics rails...like now.

Richard Cohen, a fair and smart liberal columnist who sometimes jumps the ethics rails…like now.

Richard Cohen, the veteran liberal columnist at the Washington Post, is not your usual knee-jerk partisan pundit. He’s that rarity, a thoughtful and fair opinion journalist who does not choose his positions according to which side he would rather have drinks with. He really, really doesn’t like Republicans and conservatives, but he is capable of siding with them, or at least against his philosophical brethren, when common sense and matters of basic right and wrong beckon. I used to think of him as a left-biased partisan, but then I had a chance to read E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson on a regular basis, and Cohen’s relative objectivity and fairness became obvious.

He does have blind spots, however. One is sexual harassment, which, as an older guy who likes flirting with young women at the gym and doesn’t understand that whole “unwelcome advances” thing, he just doesn’t comprehend. Another is the compliance delusion. To be seriously unethical in Cohen’s eyes, you have to break the law. Otherwise, it’s “everybody does it.” Cohen is prone to fall for other classic rationalizations as well.  He is a “gut instinct”analyst where ethics are concerned, and gut instincts aren’t enough. They will eventually lead you astray. They lead Cohen astray.

This was the glaring flaw in his recent column about the Benghazi controversy, where Cohen fell into line with the Obama protectors in the media whose argument is, “So they lied…who cares?” He wrote in part…

“…President Obama was then really Candidate Obama and he surely did not want the words “terrorist attack” uttered during the presidential campaign. In addition, the CIA and the State Department were in a cat fight and could not agree on the wording of the talking points — or even, from a fair reading of their clashing e-mails, who the fanatical enemy was: al-Qaeda or members of Congress? In all this, it’s almost possible to forget that four Americans died in Benghazi. The event was a tragedy and it hardly matters, as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vociferously maintained, if the attack occurred spontaneously or was planned. Either way, it was a success for the terrorists and a debacle for the United States.

“It is good to find out how this happened — who’s responsible for the inadequate security, etc. — and it is also good to hold the Obama administration accountable for putting out a misleading statement. But the record will show that a thorough report was, in fact, compiled. Its authors were Thomas Pickering, an esteemed retired diplomat, and Adm. Mike Mullen, an equally esteemed retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They found the standard mistakes and snafus — but no crime….Watergate, though, was a crime. Iran-contra was a crime. Government officials were convicted and some of them went to jail. Fudging a press release is not a crime. Compromising on wording is not a crime…It is not a crime either to make a mountain out of a molehill, but this particular one is constructed of a fetid combination of bad taste and poisonous politics. Dig down a bit and it becomes clear that some — many? — Republicans suspect that Barack Obama and-or Hillary Clinton are capable of letting people die to cover up a terrorist attack. Either that, or this is what they want us to think.”

It’s a fascinating passage, because you can see Cohen slowly going off the ethical rails: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Day: Ken at Popehat

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“If you practice as a lawyer, you owe it to your clients only to do the things you are competent to do. Embarking on the defense of a man accused of murder as your first trial is a moral and ethical outrage. Regrettably, the profession is barraged with eager voices telling us that attracting clients with puffery and keywords and Twitter accounts is the way to build a practice. Nobody’s reminding us that you have an obligation to know what you’re doing before you accept the client. Somebody should.”

—-Ken, the lead blogger/attorney/libertarian/ wit/ First Amendment champion at Popehat, summarizing the lessons of the Joseph Rakofsky saga. Rakofsky was a green D.C. lawyer ( he is still a lawyer, less green but sadder and wiser) who indeed did take a murder defense as his first trial, made an epic botch of it, and then launched a desperate defamation lawsuit at legal bloggers, like Ken, who had told his cautionary tale to the world with appropriate ire. The law suit was dismissed last week.

What's next for Joseph Radofsky? Maybe he'll run for President....

What’s next for Joseph Radofsky? Maybe he’ll run for President….

Competence is an ethical value, especially in the professions, but also in most pursuits. Taking on the responsibility of accomplishing a task creates a duty, and doing so without being justifiably certain that you will have the skills to do it is reckless and irresponsible.

Ken, an experienced and accomplished attorney whom I have consulted for his professional advice in the past, also knows that inexperience does have to be eradicated with experience, and a strict application of his statement in all cases would lead to a frustrating Catch 22. Every pilot has to take that first solo flight; every head surgeon has his first major operation; and Clarence Darrow had to take on that first murder trial before he could say with complete confidence that he knew exactly what to do. On a more basic level, any lawyer taking on a representation in a type of matter she has never handled before, such as drafting a will, will be, in  a sense, accepting a client before she knows what she is doing, because she hasn’t done it before. That’s okay, however: the ethics rules, as expressed in the American Bar Association’s Rules of Professional Conduct (in Rule 1.1) say its okay, as long as, by the time the task is underway, the lawyer is sufficiently competent: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “‘The Ethicist’ and the Doctor”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
"Your secret is safe with me, but I have to ask...what that stolen Renoir doing up there?"

“Your secret is safe with me, but I have to ask…what that stolen Renoir doing up there?”

Jeff Long scores his first Comment of the Day with a welcome excursion into the thickets of medical confidentiality. As I expected, many readers were troubled by my support of strict patient-doctor confidentiality as dictates by AMA medical standards. Jeff does an excellent job elaborating on why I (and the professions like law, medicine and the clergy) take the position they do. In professional relationships, trust is essential, and you can trust professions that approve of breaching confidentiality when a damaging secret is involved.

Here is Jeff’s comment, on the post “The Ethicist and the Doctor.”

“First, with regard to Matthew’s example of the cheating spouse who contracts an STD, I think it would probably be difficult to come up with a better example of “the system working as intended.” In the world where doctors respect confidentiality, at least one person gets treated. In the world where the doctor blabs to the world (or at least, to the spouse), there’s a good chance that nobody does. In fact, if the cheater forgoes treatment out of fear of exposure, s/he is putting the spouse at even GREATER risk than in the former scenario, since the STD goes untreated and has a larger window in which to infect the spouse. Certainly, the ideal world is the one where the cheater gets treated AND confesses to the spouse, but the onus for that lies with the cheater. It’s not the doctor’s place. Continue reading →

Clash of the Ethics Dunces: The Web-shaming Student and the Angry Principal

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
This doesn't make either of you look very good, guys....

This doesn’t make either of you look very good, guys….

Back when hitch-hiking was in vogue and both hitch-hikers and drivers were being warned about the various horror stories that the transportation transaction had led to through the years, I used to wonder if a murderous hitch-hiker ever got into the car of a homicidal driver, and what ensued. This tale from Riverdale High School (yes, the same school Archie and Veronica go to, apparently), in Georgia is a little like that, though no slaughters were attempted. An ethically inert school principal grossly abused her power in response to a gratuitously cruel student. I suspect this happens rather more often than my hitch-hiking hypothetical.

Student Keandre Varner, on a lark, decided to check and see if a mug shot existed for his high school principal, Jamille Miller Brown.  Sure enough, he found one, so he thought the fair, kind and responsible thing to do was 1) post it on Instagram, and 2) suggest that the mugshot arose from a DUI arrest. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Too Stupid To Be Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments
Little Tommy flunked Ethics 101. Should we blame him?

Little Tommy flunked Ethics 101. Should we blame him?

An incident in Jefferson City Missouri nicely raises an issue I think about often.

Capital 8 Theaters in Jefferson City, Missouri sent actors dressed as gunmen, wearing assault gear and carrying what appeared to be semi-automatic weapons, into a screening of the film “Iron Man 3”  last weekend. Really. Apparently the similarity between this scenario and the deadly shooting last year in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater premiering another big budget movie about a superhero never occurred to the theater manager, because he is, you see, a moron. It sure occurred to the patrons, though, and one of them called in the police, saying that gunmen had entered the theater. SWAT teams were called. Luckily nobody was shot or had cardiac arrest, no thanks to the theater.

Interviewed by a local TV station, manager Bob Wilkins was asked if he had any regrets. “No, my job is to entertain people,” he said. Asked if he considered  how  his stunt might affect patrons who remembered the mass shooting in the theater in Aurora, Wilkins responded, “Absolutely. That’s my number-one priority every day. It’s the safety and security of our guests.”

Okay, this pretty much tells us what we need to know about old Bob, so here is your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz question:

May abject stupidity be a complete defense to the accusation that one is unethical? Continue reading →

The Trustbusters Circle The Wagons: Why?

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

Why do they always do this?

"Thank you, Sen. Reed, for your comments. You can stop spinning now."

“Thank you, Sen. Reed, for your comments. You can stop spinning now.”

Republicans, Democrats—why? Why do they think, when they are caught in an obvious example of misconduct, it is smarter and more useful—it certainly isn’t honest, courageous or ethical—not to simply confess and apologize, even if it’s with hardly an ennobling statement no better than, “You got us. Yeah, we were lying. That was wrong. Sorry,'” rather than continue to lie? The now ridiculous contortions of Democrats (and their knee-jerk supporters in the public and the media, but forget about them, for they are merely pathetic) are doing independent harm, because they destroy trust in government generally, and that, for a democratic republic, is potentially fatal.

Way back in September, when U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice disgraced herself by going on five Sunday talk-shows and stating with deceitful certitude ( “our current best assessment”…”we believe”)  that the deadly attack on the U.S. outpost in Libya was solely the result of spontaneous outrage on the part of extremists over a video, and not an organized terrorist attack, critics said that the Administration was covering up what really happened, and lying about what they knew. The accusation was shouted down and indeed ridiculed by Administration officials, Democrats in Congress, and the Obama-promoting media (it was in the middle of an election campaign) as a partisan smear, but in fact the critics, partisan though they were, were right. Rice was disseminating disinformation. The Administration and its State Department were intentionally blaming a video when they knew better. Why is another story: conservative pundits believe it was to avoid having to admit, mid-campaign, that the signature accomplishment of the President’s term, killing Osama bin Laden and supposedly crushing al Qaida, was not quite the complete victory the Democrats were claiming. If that was the reason, it was a stupid reason, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way. Hiding inconvenient facts before an election is despicable, but lying to the public and the world is serious enough, whatever its motive.

When she was questioned in Congress about the misleading descriptions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled that the Administration was in cover-up mode, both by lying outright (“I did not say … that it was about the video for Libya.”) and making her infamous and ethically indefensible statement,  ”With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided to kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?” Now, thanks to multiple revelations, the testimony of whistle-blowers, and newly released e-mails, there is no question that Clinton’s State Department took the lead in scrubbing the CIA talking points that immediately attributed the attack in Benghazi to identifiable terrorist elements connected to al Qaida, and not a spontaneous demonstration against the video. Not only are the Administration’s defenders refusing to admit that what happened happened, they are recycling old tactics from other scandals to do it, which if nothing else is lazy and boring:

  • “This is old news.” Or, as (Liberal! Obama-loving!) NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd termed it, “It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.” Dowd also correctly identified this as a classic from the Bill Clinton playbook, used for too many bona fide scandals to list. Continue reading →