The NFL emphatically rejecting corruption and standing for honesty and integrity would have been one, small, positive step in the culture to slow the ethics rot. It failed, in part because the NFL’s corruption is soul deep.
Do I know this is what happened? Can I prove it? No. This is, however, how organizations become corrupt and rot, and how the unethical leaders that rot them behave.
If we accept blatant cheating in our sports, we will be inured to it in the life of our nation, and eventually, because we cheer the cheaters, join their ranks.
The NFL has to make certain that Belichick was the architect of Deflategate, and then, if it gives a damn about not sending the message to young football fans everywhere that the only crime in cheating is getting caught…
Why didn’t we think of that before! The way to win elections is to arrest the leaders of the opposing party! That will save democracy!
These are going to enter the list as a group, like #6,The Biblical Rationalizations. They will be trotted out for other purposes, no doubt, but no set of excuses better defines the unethical mindset of a cheater’s defenders than these three.
Good.
Part II of the Worst of Ethics, 2015
It’s Atrocious People Day at Ethics Alarms, and no Atrocious People Day would be complete without Harry Reid.
It wasn’t the infraction alone that made this serious; it was the suggestion, magnified by Brady’s smug attitude, that cheating in a play-off game is no big deal and nothing to be upset or ashamed about. But there is another injustice here that isn’t getting as much attention as the suspending of New England’s smirking, cheating star.
Ethics Alarms 