Before we commence, I do want to thank all of you are keeping me away from Hillary and Trump with more horrible ethics stories than I can keep up with.

Now that I’ve got that over with:

In what warped, sick universe is this kind of thing considered ethical?

Gad. It’s a veritable unethical cascade:

First, high school students takes surreptitious photos of their teachers while they should be, you know, getting educated…

Second, the students post the photos, which have not been consented to by the teachers, on Instagram…

Third, the students add salacious or otherwise provocative comments about the teachers as objects of their lust…

Fourth, the bottom-feeding website BuzzFeed picks up the photos and puts them in a feature called “13 Really Hot Teachers That Will Have You Begging For Detention.”…

How unethical is this? Let me count the ways…

1) It’s a Golden Rule violation. I know, when someone has warped ethics from being raised in a warped culture, the Golden Rule loses a lot of its value. These uncivilized whelps probably think it’s cool to have your face and form posted online for adolescent girls and gay guys to drool over, so, like what’s the big deal, dude? You’re all morons. The presumption is that normal human beings don’t want their photos posted online and commented upon without their consent.  I don’t want to open this can of worms, but it is always unethical to post someone else’s photo on Facebook unless they have at least given you advance consent. Unless the teachers already posted the photos on their own accounts and made them available, it’s unethical to publish them.

2) This uses  individuals as a public sex objects without their consent or knowledge, and is disrespectful, unfair, and wrong. The term for the conduct is creepshots, and is usually applied to women, because double standards reign. There is no difference, however, whether the victims are male or female.

3) For teachers, at a time when sexual predators in the profession appear to be running amuck, presenting a teacher to the web in this manner is a professional insult and an invitation to suspicion. Has the teacher doneanything to encourage student lust and inappropriate conduct? How do we know? A school administrator learning about such photos would be obligated to investigate.

4) Buzzfeed’s conduct is beneath contempt, as the conduct on sites in the Gawker empire frequently is. Says New Statesman about this episode:

“It’s generally considered poor form for a media organisation to obtain covertly taken pictures of ordinary citizens then post them online with sexualised captions.”

Generally? It’s ALWAYS, not just “poor form”–how I detest euphemisms and weasel words in ethics!—but outrageously unethical conduct to publish such photos without the express consent of the subject.

The New Statesman got a quote from one of the victims, Darren Deboer,  a high school teacher in Indiana, who said in part,

I was a bit taken back when I saw my picture. I wasn’t contacted, hadn’t given any consent….I went to a meeting, and in the course of three hours virtually everyone I’ve been in contact with knew about it! People in Florida, Indiana, Iowa, all over, were messaging me and texting me. After seeing the power of social media, I reflected a bit on how crazy this got. What if it were negative? What if it were embarrassing? I wouldn’t have been able to stop it.

My wife got a kick out of it though! She told me not to get a big head and take out the garbage….

In a classroom of teenagers you have awkward and embarrassing things done and said all the time. You have to be a professional and move on.  I have great students and know this type of thing will blow over….

Why thank you for helping to trivialize this breach of online respect and privacy, Mr. and Mrs. Deboer! I guess Darren is one of those teachers who gets that standards are changing, and this is a new era, and if you can’t beat them, join them. Like Buzzfeed.

Make the Deboers my 5) in the unethical cascade.  Rather than properly condemning the conduct (Students should be disciplined for conduct), the victims laugh it off, thus spurring acceptance and a degraded cultural standard.

This irresponsible reaction embraces  Rationalizations 1A. Ethics Surrender, or “We can’t stop it,” 8. The Trivial Trap  (“No harm no foul!”), 22. The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things,”33. The Management Shrug: “Don’t sweat the small stuff!”, 38. The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!” and several more, but that’s too many already. No wonder the schools are raising a generation of sociopathic barbarians with the ethics alarms of Harry Reid.

Teach your students what’s wrong with what they did, you weak, submissive hack, or stop presuming to be a teacher.

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Pointer: Fred