In Minnesota on November 5, 1862, more than 300 Santee Sioux were sentenced to hang for their part in an uprising that was justified by outrageous mistreatment by the U.S. government. A month later, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences and granted a last-minute reprieve to one more, but the other 38 were hanged on December 26 in the largest mass execution in our history. This, of course, makes Abe a racist and a purveyor of genocide, so that memorial in Washington just will have to be blown up, that’s all. Fanaticism doesn’t do nuance, or even utilitarianism. But as Ethics Alarms explained here, Lincoln had a civil war to win in order to re-unite the nation and end slavery. The Sioux were collateral damage in a very difficult trade-off but an unavoidable one.
1. In coincidental ethics news relevant to the above...An Oct. 27 New York Times story , perhaps motivated by the fact that Kamala Harris got her law degree from the school, revealed Serranus Clinton Hastings role in Native American massacres during the late 19th Century. Somehow, either the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco’s administrators and donors weren’t aware of their institution’s founder’s sordid history, or chose to ignore it. Now they want California lawmakers to change the school’s name. A press release explained that the Hastings name “is written into state law” and a name change requires legislation, the press release said.
This is called “restorative justice.” But the school also owes its existence to Hastings, who donated $100,000 to start the law school in 1878. Hastings was a politician, lawyer, landowner and California’s first chief justice. What Hastings donated is worth between $2,836,711.48 and $39,924,610.20 today, depending on what standard you use, but whatever it’s worth, Hastings gave a lot of his money to establish the law school. Where’s his justice? The University and its law school graduates have benefited from his generosity greatly, indeed existentially, but the reasoning is that his misdeeds unrelated to the school justify its taking his money and explicitly dishonoring him. This is exactly the logic being used to justify airbrushing Thomas Jefferson out of our history.
2. More on the unacceptable failure of pollsters: In a column for NJ.com, pollster Patrick Murray says that he “blew it” and expresses his own doubts about whether election polls now do more damage than good.
“The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the [New Jersey]governor’s race,” he writes. “So, if you are a Republican who believes the polls cost Ciattarelli an upset victory or a Democrat who feels we lulled your base into complacency, feel free to vent….I owe an apology to Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign — and to Phil Murphy’s campaign for that matter — because inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.”
In related news, Ciatarelli is refusing to concede, though the election has been called for incumbent Murphy.
Murray concludes that it might be time to quit polling. “Some organizations have decided to opt out of election polling altogether, including the venerable Gallup Poll and the highly regarded Pew Research Center… Other pollsters went AWOL this year. For instance, Quinnipiac has been a fixture during New Jersey and Virginia campaigns for decades but issued no polls in either state this year,” he says. “Perhaps that is a wise move. If we cannot be certain that these polling misses are anomalies then we have a responsibility to consider whether releasing horse race numbers in close proximity to an election is making a positive or negative contribution to the political discourse.”
