This is an example of why I am disgusted with my field and chosen profession. Just last month I designated Jefferson, a legal ethics professor among other things, as an ethics dunce for her blatantly partisan and biased commentary. This time, it’s personal.
Seeking to find a reliable, trustworthy, accurate source of legal ethics news and developments (since the demise of the excellent legal Ethics Forum, I am reduced to the scattershot, overwhelmingly left-biased commentary on the APRL listserv), I subscribed to the professor’s substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, taking seriously her promise that it would supply a “Monday morning tour of all things related to lawyer and judicial ethics.” But the Legal Ethics Roundup I received this morning, like all its predecessors this month, cheerfully informed me that “For the month of August, the Legal Ethics Roundup is on pause.”
Oh. That’s nice. Was I informed of this before I forked over my subscription fee a month ago? Of course not. Has the rest of the legal ethics world been on “pause” this month? Also “of course not.”
To be fair, the previous products of Ms. Jefferson’s work that I did receive were underwhelming at best and useless at worst, so I don’t feel I’m missing much, except what I paid for. Also to be fair, I’m an idiot: had I read her bio before signing up, I would have seen that she hangs out at MSNBC and is proud of it. Any ethicist who appears on MSNBC and doesn’t use the opportunity to tell the host that the network practices the antithesis of ethical journalism is disqualified to call herself an ethicist.
To me, someone who forced himself to give a scheduled Zoom seminar on legal ethics and professionalism 90 minutes after finding his wife dead in the living room because I had committed to the program and lawyers had paid for it, this conduct by an ethics professor perhaps seems a bit more unconscionable than it might appear to others. Well, I’m right and everybody else is wrong, to quote William Saroyan. Professor Renee Knake Jefferson is a fraud. How can you teach ethics when you have malfunctioning ethics alarms yourself?
Hers was the second substack I subscribed to, and it is the second time this happened to me. Glenn Greenwald, who also was a lawyer, now lapsed, at least provided valuable analysis in his newsletters until he mysteriously stopped delivering them for weeks in an unannounced hiatus due to someone’s illness—maybe his, I don’t recall and I don’t care. When you promise to deliver a product or service and accept money for that promise, you either return your fee when personal matters (like, in Jefferson’s case, the desire to frolic at a resort or in Maine or someplace) interfere, or you deliver them despite your own problems.
I’m through with substack, that’s for certain. I’m also though believing lawyers can be trusted because they call themselves ethics experts.
Ethics Alarms 
someone who forced himself to give a scheduled Zoom seminar on legal ethics and professionalism 90 minutes after finding his wife dead in the living room because I had committed to the program and lawyers had paid for it,
Jack I just want to first say, sorry for your loss, but this is not healthy and really isn’t something you should be using as some sort of ethical model people should follow.
Everyone deals with trauma, loss, etc differently but no one should feel obligated to work instead of dealing with a family emergency. Again, that’s your prerogative.
It was a seminar on professionalism, and I am an absolutist on that topic. The fact is that obligations take priority over feelings, and society’s tendency in the other direction is misguided and corrupting. My wife’s death was my problem, not that of the 100 or so people depending on me and the company who accepted a fee for offering my services. It would have been selfish and a breach of responsibly and integrity to skip that job, even though no one would have criticized me for it. There was absolutely nothing I could do about my wife’s death at that point, and my son was there to deal with the details.
The show must go on.
It would have been more responsible to refund or reschedule to another date when you weren’t dealing with the loss of your wife and could fully concentrate on your job.
People also have an obligation to their family that is way more important than any job.
I don’t take issue with how you dealt with your trauma, I take issue with you saying it’s wrong to not work right after a family emergency.
It is wrong. It’s self-indulgent and a breach of duty. If I didn’t think I could do a professional job because of the tragedy, then it would have been necessary for me to postpone. This is a simple utilitarian calculation, and an easy one. One individual suffering as opposed to a hundred. Ethically, an easy call. Moreover, I’ve been advocating this principle most of my life as it applies to others. To reject it when I was the one having to sacrifice would have been pure hypocrisy.
Just to get your argument straight in my head:
It was wrong for Robert Plant to cancel the Led Zeppelin tour after his son died.
It would be wrong to cancel your presentation to go to your wife’s funeral or close friend.
It was wrong for Robert Plant to cancel the Led Zeppelin tour after his son died.
Different issue. A funeral is an event that requires conduct on behalf of the whole family and extended network. The utilitarian calculation is different. Closer call. (But I didn’t attend the funeral of my grandmother because it came in the middle of tech week for a show I was directing. Had I not been available, the entire cast and crew would have been kneecapped, and the producing organization. And too many actors, singers and other performers have gone on stage after learning that a child or loved on has died. It’s the performer’s creed, which I subscribe to.)
It would be wrong to cancel your presentation to go to your wife’s funeral or close friend.
Wife: Bad analogy. It would be my responsibility to schedule the funeral so that no conflict existed. If I allowed a conflict, that would be unethical.
Close friend: Yes, I have missed friends’ funerals because of other previous commitments, and because they were close friends, they would expect nothing else.
Sorry just to clarify, I didnt mention Robert Plant’s son’s funeral, I just mentioned he canceled the tour because his son died.
According to you, it would be wrong for Plant to cancel the tour to mourn his son?
If you had an important root canal scheduled and your dentist had to reschedule last minute because their child died, you find this to be wrong and a breach of duty to you and other patients?
Also, I wasn’t asking what you would do, that part seems clear, what I’m asking if it would be wrong and a breach of duty for someone to take off of work to attend someone’s funeral.
Why do you keep asking the same question? I get it—you think people should abandon and betray the people who have trusted them and depend on them when they don’t feel like following through on commitments. You have lots of company. Too bad. That’s not how professions work. In a profession, trust is paramount. A soldier can’t beg off a battle because he got a message that a loved one has died. A lawyer can’t punt a SCOTUS argument because a loved on has died. An astronaut doesn’t bet out of a moon shot because of grief. A doctor can’t duck an urgent surgery that only she can do successfully because a loved one has died. A rock singer who takes the same position regarding his craft deserves only praise and admiration.
I’m asking a question in hopes to get a straight answer from you so I understand your stance.
Was it wrong for Robert Plant to cancel his tour to mourn the loss of his son?
Sure, a doctor having to give life saving surgery is an exception, not the rule. We don’t make rules from exceptions. ( I’d also argue I wouldn’t want a doctor to perform surgery on me after they just learned their spouse died.)
Almost any social duty, and many legal duties, have an implied exception that amounts to “you are excused from this duty if you have a compelling reason.” And “my wife died an hour ago” is considered a compelling reason in almost all contexts, certainly including “I have an ethics seminar to give.”
The fact that no one would have blamed you isn’t an irrelevant fact, it’s evidence that in this circumstances you actually didn’t owe the duty any more.
You also have stronger and more important duties to your wife, and more importantly to your living son,
How straight an answer do you need…and how many times do you need it?
Of course there are exceptions. I have been discussing the rule. Plant cancelling the tour was self-indulgent and unfair to his band and the venues and the ticket purchasers. If he couldn’t locate a capable stand-in, he was obligated to do the tour. As I already said.
”you think people should abandon and betray the people who have trusted them and depend on them when they don’t feel like following through on commitments”
You have a bigger obligation to your wife and son than you do 100 paying clients.
Obligation to do WHAT, exactly? My wife was dead—nothing I did would have any effect on her, and my son, raised correctly, was fully able to handle the job of dealing with the post-death situation. You aren’t really talking about an obligation to others. You are talking about self-indulgence, “feelz.” Trendy, but not ethical, and a clear example of non-ethical motivations.
My husband’s father died at 6:10 in the morning, and he was in his office seeing his scheduled patients from 9:00. It’s an obligation, people had appointments for weeks and had arranged transportation (many are elderly and no longer drive), and they’d have had to make arrangements all over again if he had canceled. He didn’t think it right or fair to screw up the days of 30 people because he had a loss. The rest of the family prepared the wake and funeral. I felt so bad for him, but I understood.
Bingo. Now try to explain it to Jill….
Jill,
You are a callous and malicious individual. The question was asked and answered multiple times. Yet you persist in hammering your point that you think Jack’s behavior following the death of his wife was wrong. You skillfully couch it as saying you understand his position for his actions but what is his opinion of others?
Any idiot would know that people tend to judge others based on their own moral code. Since your vocabulary suggest you are not a simpleton, I conclude your actions are meant to surreptitiously harm our host. Your Comments are not welcome. It would be to everyone’s benefit for you to crawl back under your rock.
Yet she seemed so nice that time she and I went up that hill….
Now people at the office are asking why I’m laughing…
If you actually read what I said which you obviously did not, I don’t think what our host did was wrong.
Why are you responding if you can’t read properly?
My issue is him saying it’s wrong for someone to take off from work after they discover their spouse just died because duty to one’s job is more important than “feelings” and their duty to their family.
”if you just got a call that your son just died, it’s wrong to take off from work because you’re upset”
There absolutely zero ethics in that statement and it’s quite inhumane honestly. But you’re free to agree with it
“if you just got a call that your son just died, it’s wrong to take off from work because you’re upset.”
I didn’t say what you quote me as saying. Not once. Nor do I believe that. I do not permit commenters to put words in my mouth. None of the discussion was about “taking off from work.” It involved not following through on substantive commitments because of personal issues.
You accuse Tom of not reading and then pull that crap? You’re disgusting.
You’re a bad faith commenter. I’m sick of your BS, and this blog doesn’t need you or want you.
Get lost. You’re banned.
ALERT: Jill is banned. I was willing to put up with her fatuous argument that a professional should abandon serious obligations to may people because he or she is unhappy, suffering from a non-crippling malady or experiencing a personal tragedy, but deliberately mischaracterizing my position and falsely putting that misrepresentation in quotes crosses a big, thick, red line. I wrote about a soldier skipping a battle because a loved one has died, and Jill interprets that as “taking off from work.” Moron? Dishonest debater? It makes no difference. Ethics Alarms doesn’t tolerate either.
Update: in the comment just sent to SPAM Hell, she writes, “Wow. I honestly can’t believe you think a grieving father’s suffering doesn’t outweigh that of concert goers.”
Ugh. It’s not a suffering contest. “Moron” is looking better and better….
ugh, the utilitarian argument you’re making IS a suffering contest. You don’t even know what you’re talking about or arguing
The conversation here – while a bit repetitive given the persistence of a responder – has been very enlightening for me. It has highlighted a related shortcoming of my own, in which I sometimes glom onto a very slight illness or something that doesn’t feel good (a backache, a general “under-the-weather” feeling, etc.) in order to absolve myself of a responsibility.
I rarely miss work for any illness, but if I’m meeting someone for lunch and I’d rather not go, or there’s a obligation I have that I don’t particularly want to do, I will examine – maybe even sometimes scour – my personal universe to find any “ailment” so I can cancel.
I don’t outright lie – I won’t tell a person I’m sick when I’m not – but if I can justify any real or perceived malady, I will use it as my out.
I now believe my actions are, at best, misleading and, at worst, deceptive and way too close to that “self-indulgence” that our host was writing about. I need to stop doing that, and I will.
My stepmother performed my wedding. She traveled from a few hours away knowing her father was dying in hospice. She and some of my other relatives said their goodbyes knowing he might not be there when they came back. Had they made another choice, I wouldn’t have judged them as “unethical” for breaking their commitment to being in my wedding. He died that morning; I had several other ordained friends whom I told my stepmom could have stepped in if she couldn’t find it within her to do it that day due to grief. That she did it means she went above and beyond; it did not mean she merely met her obligation.
And if she had made a different choice and I heard anyone judge her for it, I would have come unglued.
Just as you had an obligation to your clients, they have an obligation to their fellow man to be understanding of grief. I am not telling you that you should have made a different choice, but if you had, there would have been nothing wrong with it. To your utilitarian point, I do not believe the inconvenience to those who would have missed out on your speech (which could have been postponed) could possibly outweigh the suffering you experienced from your wife’s loss, even keeping in mind the crowd’s size. Your loss was incalculably greater than theirs would have been.
It is not wrong for you to hold yourself to such a high standard that you think speaking to a crowd 90 minutes after finding your wife was the right thing for you to do. That is your call. It is wrong to impose such a standard on others. It’s unreasonable. If I were one of the Zoom attendees and found out what had happened that day, I’d have been mortified. If I knew prior, I would have told you to cancel. Any ethical person would have told you the same. And I know of no other ethicist who’d expect someone to do what you did in that situation. Again, that doesn’t mean you were wrong to do so, it means that it should not be expected.
Glenn Greenwald has a lot of ethical failings, but not updating his Substack while his husband was dying is not one of them.
Fascinating comment; I might make it a comment of the day, depending on if I’m too sick of this topic…
My stepmother performed my wedding. She traveled from a few hours away knowing her father was dying in hospice. She and some of my other relatives said their goodbyes knowing he might not be there when they came back. Had they made another choice, I wouldn’t have judged them as “unethical” for breaking their commitment to being in my wedding. He died that morning; I had several other ordained friends whom I told my stepmom could have stepped in if she couldn’t find it within her to do it that day due to grief.
Which means that it was not a zero sum situaton, and not really on point with this discussion.
That she did it means she went above and beyond; it did not mean she merely met her obligation.
Yes, that’s what professionalism is—exemplary ethics that go beyond the bare minimum required. The bare minimum is compliant, but not necessarily ethical.
And if she had made a different choice and I heard anyone judge her for it, I would have come unglued.
I reject the implied pejorative assessment of “judged.” We must judge the conduct of others to have valid societal standards.
Just as you had an obligation to your clients, they have an obligation to their fellow man to be understanding of grief.
I am increasingly inclined to ding the “understanding” waffle. “Understanding” why someone does something that may be wrong, harmful or an unethical decision doesn’t make the decision better or worse. This thinking has polluted the US justice system and the basic concept of the rule of law! I certainly understand why people from poor, terrible countries try to sneak in to the US, but it doesn’t make their conduct any more legal, or require me to let them continue to do it. I understand why some serial killers become serial killers. So what?
I am not telling you that you should have made a different choice, but if you had, there would have been nothing wrong with it.
Sure there would. I explained what was wrong with it. There was literally nothing I could do to fix or improve my wife’s situation. Skipping my scheduled seminar, in contrast, would have caused a cascade of complications and inconvenience. In that situation, there is literally no ethical system that would find the decision anything but wrong. The fact that people would “understand” hs no bearing on the analysis.
To your utilitarian point, I do not believe the inconvenience to those who would have missed out on your speech (which could have been postponed) could possibly outweigh the suffering you experienced from your wife’s loss, even keeping in mind the crowd’s size. Your loss was incalculably greater than theirs would have been.
Again, emotions aren’t substantive. If I was having an emotional breakdown or my health was threatened, those would have been legitimate non-ethical considerations. I wasn’t. Frankly, I’m just as grief-stricken and depressed now as I was when I found my wife dead. Should I just let all of my obligations go because people would understand? One obligation is as important as 10, to the individual’s whose trust is being betrayed.
It is not wrong for you to hold yourself to such a high standard that you think speaking to a crowd 90 minutes after finding your wife was the right thing for you to do. That is your call.
Do you know what professionalism is??? Maybe, MAYBE, if the topic was not the higher level of responsibility and trust lawyers must hold themselves to despite their personal needs and proclivities, I would have considered postponing the seminar. However to postpone a seminar with that mission would have been total hypocrisy.
It is wrong to impose such a standard on others. It’s unreasonable.
Do yo know what an ethicist is? My job is to help and advocate higher ethical standards. I can’t “impose” them. Ethics have to be voluntary.
If I were one of the Zoom attendees and found out what had happened that day, I’d have been mortified.
I told everyone on the Zoom call exactly what had happened and why I was doing the seminar, right at the beginning.
If I knew prior, I would have told you to cancel.
You would have been 100% wrong.
Any ethical person would have told you the same.
You don’t know what ethics means, then.
“And I know of no other ethicist who’d expect someone to do what you did in that situation.”
I actually know a lot of ethicists, and every one of them would agree with my actions in theory, though not all of them would have the integrity to live up to that standard themselves. Sadly.
Again, that doesn’t mean you were wrong to do so, it means that it should not be expected.
I never expect anyone to be ethical, because so much of the time, I will be disappointed.
Glenn Greenwald has a lot of ethical failings, but not updating his Substack while his husband was dying is not one of them.
While not refunding all or part of the fee paid for regular newsletters? You really don’t understand what ethics means. Or contracts. Or promises.
Brava!
PWS
Hey Jill! If you’re still around to read, THIS post provides evidence that he does.
Excellent commentary Jack. I exceedingly, dislike people who say I am not telling you you’re wrong and then proceed to tell you why you’re wrong. It is very cowardly to employ such tactics. Have the courage of your convictions. Don’t employ deceit or weasel words. As you demonstrated there is a significant difference between can’t, could, and should. You pointed out that had you been emotionally impaired you would have canceled. You don’t dispute that you could have canceled. You empathized that people should fulfill their obligations.
There are too many today who employ excuses to avoid responsibilities. Silent quitting was not soundly denounced by the media it was rationalized. Sadly, there is a severe lack of honorable character and leadership today. Leaders can possess many skills and character traits. One is Leaders inspire and lead by example, tyrants dictate behavior.
I respect your decision. It was yours to make, and no one else’s. Would I have made the same decision? I don’t know. I have enough experience to know that regardless of what you anticipate or prepare yourself to make decisions in stressful situations you don’t know, how you will act until the time comes.
Finally, I think it is exceedingly cruel to tell you made the wrong decision regarding how you handled your wife’s passing. It’s none of their business. If we are conscious and honorable individuals, we second guess and beat ourselves up enough already. We don’t need anyone’s help, particularly, those who may be ignorant of all the facts.
No one has said Jack made the wrong decision. I agree with you 100% that it was his decision and his alone. People grieve in all sorts of ways.
Jack is saying anyone who would not have made the same decision as him would have been wrong. That is what has been objected to here.
Because the argument that it isn’t wrong comes down to minimal ethics and “feelz.”
You call it “feelz,” I call it basic mental health. Some people do throw themselves into work to deal with grief and that can be a valid choice, but most people need to take time for themselves to process a loss of such magnitude before attending to other obligations.
Calling it “feelz” trivializes the effect of such a loss, which I know cannot be your intent. What you’re describing is a traumatic event, and you’re minimizing what would be for other people an appropriate trauma response because yours was different. Again, I believe setting an ethical expectation that one fulfill a professional obligation right after a traumatic event would not be conducive to an ethical or healthy society. It sounds like a weird Klingon-style honor culture. It wouldn’t even be effective; perhaps you did your best work that day, but most people wouldn’t be able to; I wouldn’t want a surgeon operating on me who had just experienced such trauma.
It trivializes the assertion that feelings are relevant to ethics. They just aren’t. No ethics system asserts that. Feelings are non-ethical considerations. They get in the way of ethics, sometimes for justifiable reasons, but feelings do not constitute ethical motivations. They are ultimately biases. If I treat someone I love fairly and someone I don’t unfairly, I can’t justify that by my feelings. The Sixties slogan “If it feels good, do it” was a non-ethical exhortation. Yeah, it would have felt better to just blow off my responsibility to a lot of people and spend the day indulging myself. That wouldn’t cahnge the ethics equation.
It’s issues and ethical principles like this that are why I write the blog. (By the way, I also got two posts up on Feb.29. Both were short, but still. It’s a commitment.
I don’t agree. I can think of lots of situations where feelings are relevant to ethical calculations. If you fire someone for a poor job performance, that’s ethical. If you fire them because you’re jealous that they’re showing you up by performing their duties better than you did in your old job, that’s unethical. If you marry someone because you love them, that’s ethical. If you marry them because you’re pretending to be in love but you really just want their money, that’s unethical.
If you cancelled your Zoom because you just weren’t feeling it that day, or you wanted to watch TV instead, or you realized you forgot to plan out anything for the seminar, I could see a case that that would be unethical. But your wife had just died unexpectedly. That is categorically different by orders of magnitude. You say she would have understood your choice to go on with the show, as it were, and I’m sure that’s true. But wouldn’t she also have understood if you hadn’t?
“If you fire someone for a poor job performance, that’s ethical. If you fire them because you’re jealous that they’re showing you up by performing their duties better than you did in your old job, that’s unethical.”
That statement tolls the bell: you don’t know what you’re talking about. Firing for cause is the conduct, and feelings have nothing to do with it—either the worker deserves to be fired, or not, and if not, its unethical. Firing unjustly for jealousy is a materially different act, and is unethical because of what it does—hurts the company, harms a worker, not because of the feelings involved.
Look, this is Ethics 101, and it’s clearly over your head. I don’t have time to give you a tutorial, but I highly recommend that you accept the fact that you have a lot to learn about the topic. You can learn what you need to know here, but you have to start with the understanding that have a lot to learn.
Ok. Admittedly, I probably don’t know as much about this subject as you do. For example, I can’t think of a single ethicist other than you who argues that you have an ethical duty to go to work the day your spouse dies. Can you inform me by citing one?
Oh, Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Bentham, Mill, John Rawls, Bertrand Russell…there are about a thousand more.
None of those philosophers explicitly argued that you have a duty to go to work the day your spouse dies. I’m asking for a quote from a philosopher specifically arguing that you have an ethical duty to go to work the day your spouse dies.
”It trivializes the assertion that feelings are relevant to ethics. They just aren’t. No ethics system asserts that.”
And this just isn’t true. Kant, for instance, put a lot of emphasis on assessing the motives of an action when determining its moral valence. That is still a fairly widely held opinion by ethicists today. If you canceled the Zoom because you intentionally wanted to screw over the people who paid to hear you speak, that would be judged quite differently than if you did it because of what actually happened to you. And I’d offer to personally fight anyone who judged you for cancelling.
I’m not wasting time with you. Motives aren’t feelings. Look it up. A feeling may contribute to a motive, but motives are what one wants to accomplish with an act—they are reasons. Motives based on substantive reasons can help determine the validity of the ethical decision-making process. Motives based on feelings can’t. Feeling create bias. Bias makes us stupid.
I believe you’re drawing a distinction without a difference. Human emotion is of course relevant to motives, which are relevant to the morality of actions. You brought up utilitarianism earlier, which is about suffering, which includes mental and emotional suffering. Your stance seems to be that all ethicists and ethical philosophies agree that emotion is irrelevant to ethics, and that just is not true. Your stance also seems to be that all ethicists and ethical philosophies agree that one has a duty to go to work the day one’s spouse dies, which I find hard to believe as I have never seen another human being, let alone ethicist, articulate that standard. I am just asking for some evidence that this standard existed before you articulated it, which should be easy to find if it’s so universal.
A serious misreading of Kant, or you’re cherry-picking. Kant, as an absolutist, held that one must never use a human life as a means to an end, and that held regardless of the motive for the unethical use of the life. The Principle of Universality is similarly immune to changing motives.
You wouldn’t have been “using a human life as a means to an end” by cancelling the Zoom. It’s not like you were looking for an excuse to cancel and then used your wife’s death as an easy out. You experienced a trauma. You had a valid reason.
If this had happened to someone else, and they cancelled on you because they found their spouse dead next to them 90 minutes earlier, what would your reaction have been? Would you have lectured them that they should have done the meeting anyway? I don’t think you’d be as harsh on them as you’re being on yourself.
This is an example of shifting the goal posts after you already shifted the goal posts. I was rebutting your tangential claim that Kant measured ethical conduct by motives, which had nothing to do with the matter of my following through on my teaching obligations. I cited Kant’s absolute about using human lives as a response to your tangent, not as a claim that it had anything to do with my situation upon my wife’s death.
This scattershot argumentation method is a hallmark of trolls and sealions, and if you want to have commenting privileges here, know when to shut up. The time is now, at least on this topic. You’re shut off on this post. (Do NOT defy the moderator.) Try another post, but I’ll me watching.
If I May, Jack already explained the errors in your commentary. There is no need for me to repeat them. I find your arguments specious. For example, you state,
“I know of no other ethicist who’d expect someone to do what you did in that situation.”
Really? How many ethicists do you know? Can you name them? Which ones did you relate Jack’s actions to and did they all unilaterally support your position?
You of course are entitled to your opinion. Repeatedly stating others are wrong hoping they agree with you is counter productive. It brings nothing to the table and wastes everyones time.
”Repeatedly stating others are wrong hoping they agree with you is counter productive.”
That is not what I have done. You are describing Jack’s conduct and attributing it to me.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
My stepmother didn’t perform my wedding the day of her father’s death out of “professionalism;” she did it because it was personally important to her, because she loved me and wanted to be part of that day. If she had been a stranger who had planned to officiate my wedding and had told me about her father’s condition the week prior, I would have told her that I would go with someone else, and that she should take the time to be with him (and perhaps to mourn if necessary).
Of course I don’t think there’s anything my stepmom could have done to “fix her father’s situation” after he died; that’s not the issue. The issue is that people typically need time to process a loss and grieve before meeting other obligations. And this was a loss she had prepared for; yours was completely unexpected. Being understanding in this context means giving others the space to grieve, for their mental health; this is in and of itself a valid societal standard that must be upheld. Setting a standard that people must go to work the day they find a loved one dead unexpectedly would not be a standard I would associate with an ethical or healthy society. And I’ve never heard another ethicist advocate such a standard, even in theory.
As for whether Greenwald should have provided a refund, I’d have to see the contract and what promises were made regarding regularity of posts to decide whether that would ethically obligate him to give money back to people who were, in the first place, willing to pay money to read the thoughts of Glenn Greenwald.
Again, you don’t seem to get the “ethics” thing. A substacker promises a regular newsletter, and that’s what I paid for. If I had been informed,”I’ll write one when I feel like it,” I would have no grounds to bitch. That last paragraph is intellectually dishonest. Anyone who said, “Well, it wasn’t in writing!” is not trustworthy. The promise is implicit, but it is still a commitment.
Similarly, WHY your stepmother went through with the ceremony doesn’t change its ethical content: what matters is the act, not the motive. I can give you many possible motives for my doing the scheduled seminar, all of which might have been part of the decision.1) I was fulfilling a contract. 2) 100 people relied on a representation that they would get their mandated ethics credits and paid for the service. 3) The course was on “professionalism,” and skipping the commitment to do nothing but “grieve” would be unprofessional 4) I am a showbiz guy, and “the show must go on” has always been a credo I take very seriously, have stick to before, and have enforced. 5) I was teaching my son a life lesson about meeting his commitments, just as my father taught me. My father was a war hero. 6) My wife not only would have understood, but would have supported that decision 100%. 7. I could use the money. 8. not delivering may have jeopardized my long-term relationship with the provider.
It doesn’t matter. I met my commitment, which is always the right thing to do unless there is another ethical (not emotional, not personal) factor that outweighs it. There is no substantive duty to a family to grandstand grief or make empty gestures while other people suffer.
It is not unethical to take care of yourself when necessary. If you did not find it necessary to cancel or postpone the lecture, that’s fine. I would have found that necessary had it been me.
I grew up in theater. One opening night, the lead’s husband died by suicide. Another cast member stepped in for her. The show did go on; no one expected her to. No one suggested that her choosing not to get onstage that night and pretend her husband wasn’t dead was unethical; I’m not sure what would have happened to them if they had, but it likely wouldn’t been pretty.
Some of the number d reasons you provide are valid, and some are concerning. On point 3, for instance, I simply do not agree that it is unprofessional to take a day to grieve immediately after a tragedy before doing a job. On point 8, I can’t imagine any provider of ethics training failing to understand that you had a valid reason for cancelling or postponing. (Again, the expectation you are promoting just is not commonly held.)
But I am especially concerned about number 5. You say you were teaching your son a lesson about meeting your commitments. But…and I hope this isn’t crossing a line…what if you were also teaching him that when he has a traumatic experience, his needs, feelings, and mental health are less important than doing a scheduled Zoom call for his job? Is that a good lesson? I don’t think it is. I think that is actually very toxic and unhealthy.
Had you presented it as a personal choice, perhaps one done with what was best for your own mental health in mind, then the lesson would not be so damaging. But if you told him the same thing you’re telling me and your audience here—that this was the only right thing to do immediately after facing an unfathomable trauma—that is not a good lesson. It’s the kind of damaging mentality that has been passed on from too many fathers to too many sons. What you’re describing sounds more like generational trauma—a phrase that is not a “trend,” but a very real phenomenon.
I hope you will take these comments in the spirit they are intended. I almost did not comment because this is a deeply personal story for you, but you have presented it as a subject for ethical analysis. I genuinely hope I have not caused any harm by my disagreement with your ethical analysis of this situation. I can only hope you will consider if your position on this is in fact harmful.
There are two points of confusion here, which I will clarify. Here is my understanding of the situation. If I misunderstand, please correct me.
First, Jack confirmed that he believes professionals should make an effort to keep their commitments and maintain the quality of their performance despite hardship in their personal life. If their emotional distress is such that they must cancel their preexisting commitments because they cannot do a good job, this is necessary but reflects badly on their professionalism. To an extent, I’m inclined to agree with that. I would appreciate it if that were the standard, and I’d like to think that I’d be able to uphold that standard myself.
The relevant principles here are challenge and preparation. Ideally, we want people to be able to keep their commitments even thought it is difficult, and we want them to be emotionally prepared to deal with disasters gracefully.
Unlike me, Jack does not seem to realize that many, if not most, humans are not yet at those levels of challenge and preparation, and it may not be reasonable to expect all professionals to meet those standards. Humans don’t all have that kind of resilience. People experiencing stress and grief and dealing with heavy obligations will frequently need extra time and a reduced workload to deal with it so that they don’t break down later, if they can even approximate their normal functionality at all. (Others need to keep working in order to maintain structure and normality when other things fall apart; that might describe Jack.)
Just about all human cultures include an understanding that people will occasionally need to break commitments if they need to be there for their family during emergency or crisis. Just as professionals can challenge and prepare themselves to work through personal disaster, so their clients can challenge and prepare themselves to deal with a situation where the professional cannot work through a personal disaster.
Under such a paradigm, there need not be a breach of trust if someone has to break a commitment due to a disaster. The trust is not that the commitment is kept no matter what, but that someone wouldn’t break the commitment unless a) they could not provide quality performance despite their best efforts, or b) maybe they could, but the effort of suppressing their emotions would cause long-term debilitating emotional problems. Yes, that’s a thing humans have to be aware of. Many of our problems are caused by unrecognized emotional issues, so it’d be great if we could prevent more of those.
I agree with If I May’s points. Emotions describe the relationship between our motivations (what we want the world to be) and how the world actually is. Positive emotions describe alignment between how the world is and how we want it to be; negative emotions describe a mismatch. Motivations are what make ethics possible in the first place: good and evil can’t exist unless people want things. Ethics is about building trust that when motivations conflict, nobody’s going to be trapped in a bad situation or crushed.
Sometimes people need to challenge themselves to stop being utility monsters: beings whose emotional vulnerability cannot be reasonably addressed by others. (In other words, spoiled brats and others whose motivations consume them.) Utility monsters are an extreme case; it is often appropriate to accommodate people’s emotional vulnerability, when it is within generally accepted human parameters. Jack may prefer humans to be less vulnerable. I’d like that as well. I think we all want humans to be smarter, wiser, more honorable, et cetera. In the meantime, effectively dealing with humans means calibrating to human customs. We can help them with challenge and preparation as we go.
Jack’s father may taught him about meeting his commitments. My father taught me that disregarding the emotional vulnerability of others is the easiest way to become a villain no matter how much we intend the best for them. Like it or not, overtaxing emotions causes damage just like overtaxing a muscle. Humans need leeway to make sure their emotions don’t break.
The above describes the first disagreement. Below is the second.
Jill thought that Jack’s statement about not taking time off included not just distinctive professionals with specific commitments, but also people at regular jobs whose roles are more or less fungible. In my opinion, this was an entirely reasonable misunderstanding. The conversation up to that point was only about “professionals” rather than corporate rank and file, who are also often called “professionals”, and nobody thought to draw the distinction.
I don’t think this assumption was bad faith on Jill’s part. Jack assumed that it was, and rather than extending the benefit of the doubt to clarify and come to the realization I describe in the above paragraph, he banned her for maliciously putting words in his mouth.
If I were to disregard Jack’s emotional vulnerability that likely led to this point, I’d be inclined to write him off. As it stands, I think he may need a peaceful night’s sleep or two. Today he has been extraordinarily defensive of his ways of doing things (keeping commitments during grief, refusing to give people the benefit of the doubt or use arguendo) and may feel threatened by the idea that there are other valid ways of handling situations, let alone better ones. Like many humans, he may fear that if his way isn’t the only way, then he hasn’t been good enough.
Jack, you have been more than good enough. It would be unfair for anyone to expect you to know how to do everything optimally, even if there were an objective optimal. Nobody can be optimal in everything, but you know and do so many wonderful things already. You maintain spaces for people to find each other and create great things together. You help people apply the constructive principle of ethics. You bring your insights to a confused world. I’ve been on Ethics Alarms for about twelve years by now, and I shudder to think how much I’d be struggling without the skills I’ve developed from interacting with you and the people who have congregated at your beacon.
You are and have been worthwhile. You don’t become less worthwhile if society accommodates people less superbly reliable than you. You don’t become less worthwhile if accommodating people who are wrong is more effective at helping them realize their mistakes. You don’t become less worthwhile when we treat less capable people as though they are also worthwhile. Accommodation isn’t just an ideal. It can be practical, constructive. Done right, it makes challenge and growth possible.
I’m not entirely sure I’ve addressed the heart of the issue here, but that’s my best effort without more information. Please take some time to rest without assigning guilt to it. When you’re up to it, you can reread our conversations from today and see if you feel differently about them.
Appreciate the thoughtful analysis. As is often the case, the problem Jill had was not being familiar with what I have written here. I have made it clear that professionals by definition hold positions of trust, and that for them what are exemplary ethics for others are mandatory ethics. Jill apparently couldn’t grasp, or didn’t understand the significance of, the fact that the seminar I taught 90 minutes after finding my wife dead and with her eyes staring blankly was “The Law and Professionalism.” I may have made the same decision if 1 hundred people had paid to hear my analysis of Orson Welles as a stage director, but maybe not. The fact that Jill couldn’t comprehend the difference from my situation and “staying home from work after the death of a son” made the conversation useless (and if you’ll examine the thread, I did try to explain it.)
I do not think it is too much to ask that a new visitor here do their due diligence before throwing around accusations. I have put up over 17,800 posts; The search engine works very well. There is a “professions” tag, and it links to about 50 posts. I owe no obligation to rehash what is already on record here to new arrivals. I once directed a one-man show, and I staged a bit where every time an audience member arrived after the show had started, we would start the show again from the beginning. That would be the only way to help Jill, and most of the rest. Except that they aren’t interested in anything but proving me wrong so they can invalidate analysis they don’t like. Well, they’ll have to do a better job than what I saw from that gang today.
As Anthony Quinn says at the end of “The Guns of Navarone,” “Well, you know, I’m not so easy to kill.”
I meant to add that someone in a profession who is not capable of meeting those high ethical standards required of professions has no business being a professional.
There’s one major problem with your approach: The vast majority of people wouldn’t know they needed to go look up your definition of professionalism in the first place. They wouldn’t know there was any possible disagreement about what the term meant. Sure, “professionals” can be distinguished from the corporate rank and file, and I vaguely remember you doing that before, but we usually hear that “professionalism” is expected of all of them, so most people aren’t aware that anyone would ever want to apply different standards to them.
A normal, reasonable person, upon reading what you wrote, would think you held all of those people to the same high standard you described. I thought that, until the misunderstanding came up. The only difference is that I would have continued to phrase my statement as a question, since I would have realized it wasn’t something you had explicitly said. Most humans don’t know to do that either, so it would be unreasonable to expect a normal person to think to phrase their conclusions with humility. Heck, you don’t even do that most of the time.
If I were in your position, I would have just said, “No, that’s not what I said. I draw a distinction between professionals and ordinary workers and I hold them to different standards. Look up the professionalism tag to see what I’ve written on it.” That would have been easy and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
When you learn to recognize and misunderstandings and address them directly, suddenly the world isn’t quite so full of idiots.
(A second problem is that search engine does not work very well. I tried to look up the mayor who was sleeping with her district attorney and the search feature only keyed on post titles, not post content. If the title doesn’t describe it, it’s just about impossible to find unless Google has indexed it. When the internal search function is inferior to an external search engine, that’s a problem.)
“I owe no obligation to rehash what is already on record here to new arrivals.”
Well, now I never want to hear you complain about your lack of readers again. Your statement indicates you will tolerate only people who are well-versed in your ways, which amounts to the people already here. Anyone who wants to join has decades of reading required before they can interact with the community without risking a ban. What do you expect?
There’s one major problem with your approach: The vast majority of people wouldn’t know they needed to go look up your definition of professionalism in the first place.
Well, they need to look up SOMEBODY’S definition of professionalism, or they don’t know what they are talking about. You seem to think trying to discuss topics with people talking strong positions on matters they are mostly ignorant of is a noble pursuit. I don’t. I think it is a futile pursuit, and wastes my time. Jill, May I and Jen didn’t know what ethics is. In that situration, you treat EA as a resource, and jump into the pool when you can swim.
They wouldn’t know there was any possible disagreement about what the term meant. Sure, “professionals” can be distinguished from the corporate rank and file, and I vaguely remember you doing that before, but we usually hear that “professionalism” is expected of all of them, so most people aren’t aware that anyone would ever want to apply different standards to them.
What do you think the tags are for, EC? They are right at the bottom of each post. Setting them is a pain in the neck. That post had both the “Professionals” and the “Professionalism” tags. Not only don’t these commenters not bother to learn what they are talking about, they don’t know how to USE A BLOG! Well, that’s their problem, not mine.
A normal, reasonable person, upon reading what you wrote, would think you held all of those people to the same high standard you described.
I do hold all people to that standard, because exemplary ethics is the highest standard. You’re just off-base here, EC: Jill, for example, was arguing that avoiding obligations out of “grief” was the superior standard. That’s not ethics. That’s self-indulgence. That’s saying “my needs are more important than the needs of others.” Not ethics. You expect me to explain that to an Ethics Dunce in less than 10,000 words? You’re kidding. Or deluded.
The only difference is that I would have continued to phrase my statement as a question, since I would have realized it wasn’t something you had explicitly said.
She put what I didn’t say IN QUOTES. That’s a lie. She didn’t mean it that way? Tough. She needs to learn the proper uses of punctuation too. I specifically say in the comment policies: Don’t put words in my mouth. She was warned, and broke the rules.
Most humans don’t know to do that either, so it would be unreasonable to expect a normal person to think to phrase their conclusions with humility. Heck, you don’t even do that most of the time.
Irrelevant. It’s my place, my rules, and I expect guests to act like guests. That’s also in the commenting policies. There’s nothing modest about presuming to publish one’s opinions and assertions on a website open for public debate. I have humility when its justified.
If I were in your position, I would have just said, “No, that’s not what I said. I draw a distinction between professionals and ordinary workers and I hold them to different standards. Look up the professionalism tag to see what I’ve written on it.” That would have been easy and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
She didn’t have to “look up” that tag, it was right there. When we are at the point where a commenter is using straw men, rationalizations and misquoting me, the end is near.
When you learn to recognize and misunderstandings and address them directly, suddenly the world isn’t quite so full of idiots.
The world is full of idiots, EC, and I deal with them every day, off the blog. I don’t know why you think it’s productive trying to improve a lack of critical thinking skills. Take Jen, who kept talking about trusting Harris because of her “accomplishments.” Like other recent bannees, she couldn’t or wouldn’t name any. If the measure is “success,” on the record such people should trust Trump more: his “accomplishments” dwarf Harris’s by any standards. But that standard is how celebrities gain power: accumulated “accompishments” and general “success” is taken markers of trustworthiness—which is ridiculous.
(A second problem is that search engine does not work very well. I tried to look up the mayor who was sleeping with her district attorney and the search feature only keyed on post titles, not post content. If the title doesn’t describe it, it’s just about impossible to find unless Google has indexed it. When the internal search function is inferior to an external search engine, that’s a problem.)
Not true. The posts with the term in the title come up first, then the posts with the term in the text.
Well, now I never want to hear you complain about your lack of readers again. Your statement indicates you will tolerate only people who are well-versed in your ways, which amounts to the people already here.
Also not true. The fact that I engage with commenters is a plus. I encourage dialogue; I just insist that the dialogue be minimally competent. Your statement makes no sense, EC. 95% percent of bloggers don’t engage at all, and you claim I don’t have sufficient traffic because I don’t engage enough??
Anyone who wants to join has decades of reading required before they can interact with the community without risking a ban. What do you expect?
Now you’re just being silly (human–Oh-Oh!) I require a minimal level of respect and that those who choose to argue do so knowing their limitations and recognizing the restrictions posted in the Comment policies. Not too much to ask.
You made several points that I find unconvincing, but I will leave those be for now because they’re peripheral to the main point.
“Your statement makes no sense, EC. 95% percent of bloggers don’t engage at all, and you claim I don’t have sufficient traffic because I don’t engage enough??”
After all this time, are you so quick to assume I speak nonsense? I think you mean, “I was not able to make sense of your statement.” I claim that you don’t have sufficient traffic because you engage badly. You display contempt for newcomers because you impose… perhaps not unfair, but unrealistic expectations on them. Perhaps they should be in the habit of checking for the comment policy on each platform they visit, but they aren’t. Humans don’t have that norm, if they ever did, and punishing people for violating a norm you *wish* they had is not an effective way to establish that norm. It just establishes you in their eyes as yet another cranky, arrogant old man. It pains me to see you do this when you could easily inspire the respect you deserve.
How about this: I’ll write you a brief boilerplate message so that if someone doesn’t know how to disagree as a guest, you can copy/paste it and proactively inform them with negligible effort on your part. Alternatively, it can go at the top of the Comment Policies page and you can link them to that.
“When you disagree, remember you are a guest here and express yourself as such. A good habit is to approach the disagreement as a misunderstanding between people that you would like to clarify, rather than concluding that someone is simply wrong. Newcomers are expected to put forth extra effort to untangle confusion and to show respect and intellectual humility, in order to demonstrate good faith so we know you are not trying to troll or exhaust the energy of other people here. Check the Comment Policies for more details: https://ethicsalarms.com/comment-policies/.”
How’s that for a first draft?
Under advisement. I do not agree that what you consider less than optimum engagement is 1) “bad” and 2) worse than no engagement at all. It is bad based on your assumption that I want to encourage commenters who display characteristics that I do not think benefit the blog and its discourse. I don’t.
”That’s saying “my needs are more important than the needs of others””
Your wife had just died. In that moment, your needs *were* more important than the needs of others.
Exactly the attitude professionals give up the right to have: soldiers, lawyers, doctors, elected official, police, fire fighters and the clergy. That’s why we can rely on them, or should be able to.
You’re describing jobs which are often called upon when people are in desperate or dire need, but that does not apply to this situation. Doctors might be ethically required to put immediate and sudden grief aside to perform a life-saving surgery (and even that is debatable as their shock might impact their performance), but not to conduct a lecture, no matter how inconvenient it might be to those expecting the lecture. What I see Extradimensional Cephalopod (great name, btw) as saying—and they can correct me if I’m wrong—is that when weighing their inconvenience against the trauma of someone who just lost a loved one, the needs of the latter should win out. Most societies understand this, and I don’t see how a society that doesn’t would be more ethical than a society that does. In this case, the person in dire and desperate need was *you,* not your clients. And perhaps what you needed was to throw yourself back into work; in which case, you did the right thing for you. It would not the right thing for everyone. And it should not be an ethical standard, because that would be absolutely hellish for people who do not process grief the same way you do, and the only upside is that some other people whose wives didn’t just die won’t have to reschedule a Zoom call. You’re right that the ethical calculation here is not hard, but wrong in the result you’ve reached.
Take care of yourself.
1. No, EC is not saying that.
2. I’m describing jobs that are traditionally known as “professions.” Professions are special kinds of jobs. The term is traditionally applied to roles in which the “professional” pledges t place the needs of society above his or her own selfish needs, including, but not exclusively, money.
3. I am a recognized professional ethics specialist and expert and am used as an authority in court cases involving professional duties.
4. You can find some useful background in these articles tagged “professions”
5. I’m taking care of myself. I’m also a parent, and my son’s needs, and taking care of him, always come first. For professionals, their duty is to treat those who depend on them as responsible, ethical parents would treat their children.
My ideal is that people would be able to compartmentalize their grief and keep their business commitments so as not to disrupt the events other people are counting on. When it comes to the death of a close family member, I’m not going to hold most people to that ideal as a standard (no, not even many “professionals”) because I know it’s not a behavior most humans are capable of, and it’s unreasonable of me to demand that they challenge themselves in that way. That’s just not how human emotions work. That’s why we try to prevent and mitigate life-and-death situations that hinge on a single person’s emotional stability.
Humans know this, which is why the standard in just about every Earth culture is that people expect events may sometimes be canceled due to personal tragedy of sufficient magnitude, and that causes no loss of trust. My concept of ethics is derived from fostering and maintaining trust. In this case, mutual expectations matter. People know that sometimes disasters happen and others have to break commitments in order to maintain their own wellbeing. If that happens to them a lot, we stop relying on them as much, but we don’t consider them selfish. If they don’t keep themselves healthy, they’ll fall apart and be incapable of keeping commitments anyway. The leeway we give people is an investment in their ability to deliver on commitments in the future.
It’s the same principle as when a person becomes physically ill. If you try to work through an illness, you can damage your health. If you try to work through grief, you can damage your mental health.
Jack, mental health might not have been a concept when you were growing up, but it is a real aspect of human existence and maintaining or neglecting it has consequences in the real world. I’m glad you’re taking care of yours and your son’s.
“”if you just got a call that your son just died, it’s wrong to take off from work because you’re upset””
If you read what she actually wrote, Jill didn’t say you said that at all. That wasn’t meant to be a quote from you. She said you’re free to agree with that statement. She paraphrased what she thought you meant and gave you a chance to correct her understanding of your position. In your eyes she changed the meaning substantially and thus misrepresented your position, through either malice or ignorance. I still assert most people assume “professionalism” is a standard that applies to any job, and it wouldn’t occur to them that you were excluding some jobs from that standard. They wouldn’t notice the miscommunication until you banned them for malice/ignorance.
Even if you were right about her, *arguendo*, I find that intellectually dishonest people tend to drop the tricks and genuinely engage when I treat them with respect. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy: to a certain extent, people become who we treat them as. I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking a minute to clarify points of confusion instead of assuming people are being deliberately obtuse.
If I did not believe that I might inspire people to learn despite their biases, then I would have no hope for the world. Perhaps humans are incorrigible, but I’ll be damned if I watch human civilization collapse on itself having given less than my best effort to stop it. Succeed or fail, making the effort is the only worthwhile path for me. That is my concept of faith.
I’m not sure how to take this. “Exemplary ethics is the highest standard” presumably means there are lower standards.
When you say you “hold people to a standard”, that tells me that you consider them *unethical*, worthy of castigation, condemnation, or punishment, if they don’t meet that standard. It doesn’t just mean “I wish they would hew to this standard.”
It sounds like you consider a performer unethical if they cancel commitments to maintain their emotional health in the wake of a tragedy such as a death in the family, but you don’t necessarily consider it unethical for a fast food employee to take a sick day for the same reason?
Or is there confusion about whether Jill was defining “taking off from work” as planned time off (which I assume you approve of) versus unplanned time off (like calling in sick). I also suspect you don’t realize that strong negative emotions like stress and grief are similar to physical illnesses. They have physiological symptoms, can be debilitating, require time to recover, and can cause long-term damage and weaken a person further when people try to power through them.
The thing I’m getting at is that it might be work to untangle this confusion, and you might not want to do that work, but that doesn’t mean that Jill is ignorant. That just means the two of you are not as good at communicating as I think you should be, considering you’re both grown adults who are responsible for contributing to human society.
“I’m not sure how to take this. “Exemplary ethics is the highest standard” presumably means there are lower standards.”
Most of the time, I’m working with the Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers. I often throw the rule book on the floor and say “these rules are the least ethical you can be and still be considered ethically fit o practice law. But lawyers can be minimally ethical under the rules and still be unethical.For example: a lawyer is not allowed to assist a client in a transaction that the lawyer “knows” is intended to defraud. But when does a lawyer “know” to an extent that he or she can be disciplined for that? A lawyer can use contrived ignorance, deliberately avoiding the information that would trigger the ethical obligation, and that’s what lawyers often do. (See: Enron) It’s technically “ethical”—professional ethics requires going above and beyond the minimum, and not engaging in tricks like “wilful blindness” and “contrived ignorance.” The standard for professionalism is beyond what is required, thus exemplary ethics.
“”if you just got a call that your son just died, it’s wrong to take off from work because you’re upset””
If you read what she actually wrote, Jill didn’t say you said that at all.
Jeez, EC. If someone puts what they say I said in quotes, that’s literally saying that I said that.