Around the World

Ethics Hero: David Letterman

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

No Free Speech weenie he. Yale, take note.

I stopped watching David Letterman years ago, when I learned that he was an unapologetic serial sexual harasser.  I don’t like to patronize the work of professionals, however talented, who should have been fired and would have, if their employers had any integrity. As a result, I missed Letterman’s ascent into ethics hero territory. It pains me to admit this, since I neither like nor generally respect him, but that is where David Letterman belongs.

On the June 5, 2011 edition of “The Late Show with David Letterman,” the host smilingly pulled his finger across his throat to note the U.S. military’s reported killing of Ilyas Kashmiri, an Islamist terrorist who was one of the organizers of a deadly attack in India that killed and wounded hundreds of innocent civilians. On a roll, Letterman made a joke about Osama bin Laden’s death as well.A group of radical Islamists took offense, and in a posting on the Islamist web forum Shumukh al-Islam, called for Letterman’s murder, urging the eventual assassin to cut out Letterman’s tongue.

Continue reading →

God, Accountability, and Adrian Gonzalez

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

That bishop move over North America? That's Carl Crawford missing the catch in the 9th inning. God has it all worked out.

Now before you start complaining that this is yet another Red Sox post, let me have my say. Yes, the incident that inspires it relates to the recent event that is slowly driving me to the brink of madness, the collapse of the Boston Red Sox(Go Rays!).  But it is not about baseball.

It is about the misuse of God.

Red Sox Boston Globe beat writer Pete Abraham, interviewed many of the fallen in the Red Sox clubhouse after Wednesday’s final humiliation, to gauge the reactions of the players. He got this response from Adrian Gonzalez, the  superstar first-baseman, who blamed the Boston failure to make the American League play-offs not on the team itself, nor on his own mediocre performance down the stretch, but on the Big Manager in the Sky, who as usual was moving in mysterious ways. Gonzalez told Abraham: Continue reading →

The Ethically Messy, Legally Muddled, Drone Killing of Anwar al-Awlaki

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Ah, those were the good old days: when warfare was simple, fair, brutal and stupid!

The C.I.A. drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was also an Al Qaeda leader, is raising multiple ethical controversies that pollute each other,  making ethical coherence all but impossible.

The issues:

  • The target was an American citizen. Whatever his crimes, shouldn’t he have the right to a trial before being summarily executed?
  • There is no conclusive proof that he actually did anything that resulted in violence against Americans, or posed an imminent threat to national security. Was he targeted for his words, rather than his conduct? How can it be legal or ethical for the U.S. to target a citizen for death because of his political views?
  • The United States has officially forsworn assassination as a military or intelligence tactic. Yet this appears to have been one.
  •   Yemen is not a field of combat, and there was no imminent threat to human life creating an exigency to require U.S. forces to target someone there, whether he was a citizen or not.

If Fox Will Fake A Headline, What Else Will It Lie About?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As part of its coverage of the NFL opener for the Chicago Bears, Fox Sports wanted to use as graphics some news media headlines from last season that questioned Bears quarterback Jay Cutler’s courage and guts in the NFC Championship game, when he left the field with an injury that some felt Cutler should have played through.  It couldn’t find any such headlines, however because there weren’t any. No problem: Fox just had its crack graphics department make some up.

Fox flashed three newspaper headlines across the screen:

Cutler Leaves With Injury
Cutler Lacks Courage
Cutler’s No Leader

Fox announcer Daryl Johnston then told viewers that “these are the actual headlines from the local papers in Chicago.” But one of those local papers, the Tribune, decided to check. There were no “actual headlines” like those, in Chicago, or anywhere else. Caught in an outright misrepresentation, Fox Sports came clean, sort of. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Does The Golden Rule Ever Make You a Sucker?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

For Ken Anderson, an alternative tattoo instead of "Mother"

With great trepidation, I visit our friends to the North for the second time in a week…this time, for an Ethics Quiz.

Ken Anderson, 47, of British Columbia, has been fighting a lawsuit by his aged mother, Shirley Anderson, since 2000. Using a rarely used section of B.C.’s Family Relations Act, she is demanding that he pay her $750 per month in “parental support.” The law declares that adult children are responsible for legally supporting parents who are “dependent on a child because of age, illness, infirmity or economic circumstances.”

Anderson isn’t keen on the request, since both his parents abandoned him when he was a mere tyke of 15, leaving him behind as they moved away with two younger siblings. He lived with other families and then quit school to find work. Now he’s married with two kids, and makes his living driving a truck. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Nobel Prize Recipient Ivar Giaever

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

"You keep using that word 'incontravertible.'; I do not think it means what you think it means."

Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever just resigned as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in protest over the group’s official position that

 “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring,” the APS stated. “If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.”

Giaever, an 82-year-old Norwegian, sent an e-mail to the APS  announcing his resignation, saying he  “cannot live with the statement” on global warming. Giaever wrote:

“In the APS, it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is ‘incontrovertible?’ The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.” Continue reading →

Richard Cohen, National Interests, and the Ethical Duties of the US to the World

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

There used to be no columnist who infuriated me more consistently than Richard Cohen. Those were the hazy, golden days before I discovered E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman and Harold Mayerson, however, whose rigid ideology virtually precludes objective analysis. Cohen isn’t biased, he’s just wrong more often than not. But he is also capable of bursts of moral and ethical clarity. Today was an example, as he took on the isolationist voices on the left and the right that make up a large component, if not the majority, of our elected leadership today.

Cohen begins by recounting a section from  Erik Larson ‘s book,“In the Garden of the Beasts,” about how the American foreign policy establishment in the Thirties resisted efforts by William Dodd, then ambassador to Germany, to protest the Hitler government’s increasing persecution of Jews. Humanity, and the U.S., paid a steep price for its inward-turning perspective after World War I, as we abdicated our traditional role as defender of liberty, freedom, democracy and human rights on the world stage. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day on “Ethics Bob Opens An Ethics Can of Worms…”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Chase Martinez enters the debate on the ethics of Nike’s labor practices abroad, raised by a post by Bob Stone on his blog, and explicated here with some business ethics questions that have long perplexed both critics and advocates of American capitalism.Here is his Comment of the Day:

“The company has a duty to make money.”

“I think what is unethical is consumers abdicating their ethical duty to make informed choices. In big business, “everybody does it” is self-propagating because there is no consumer pressure to be better than your competition. The “free market” assumes an informed consumer-base that punishes companies who disagree with their values by taking their business to those that do. This doesn’t happen, and while some fault lies with companies for using the EBDI rationalization, most, I think, lies with consumers for being apathetic. As long as American consumers don’t care about Chinese peasants working for a dollar a day because they don’t know any better, corporations like Nike have no reason to care.”

Ethics Bob Opens An Ethics Can of Worms, All Named “Nike”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Ethics Bob opens an ethics can of worms with his latest post, “Is It Ethical For Nike To Make It’s Shoes $4 a Day?” Among the worms, some older than dirt:

  • If workers agree to work for a given price, is the company’s obligation to pay them more?
  • Should any company pay less than a living wage for full-time work, whether or not desperate workers assent?
  • Is it better for a company to pay fair wages and go out of business because it can’t compete with competitors who pay less, than to keep creating jobs, products and wealth for investors by keeping the business profitable?
  • Is a US company justified in using local standards of fairness when it is doing business in a foreign country, rather than America’s ethical standards?
  • Can a company wash its hands of the arrangements made by its foreign contractors, no matter how unjust or exploitive?
  • Is it not per se unethical for a company like Nike to pay millionaire athletes obscene amounts of money for mere endorsements while it pays only $4 a day to the workers who make their shoes?

You can, and should, read Bob’s post here, and then we can argue about the above questions for the rest of our lives.

Memorial Ethics,Part I: Recalling The Martin Luther King Memorial Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

  (For Memorial Ethics, Part Two, go here.)

[It is almost forgotten now, but when the design of the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was chosen back in 2007, there was much unhappiness in the black community. A Chinese artist was chosen to design the memorial, and this raised issues both ethical and ironic. Now that the memorial is completed (the planned dedication this week has been postponed due to Hurricane Irene), it seems clear that critics aimed their objections in the wrong direction: the problem wasn’t the designer, but the design, an imposing piece of classic Socialist-Worker art that would look at home in Red Square. But, hey, there’s lots of bad art in Washington, covering an abundance of styles: the large bust of JFK in the Kennedy Center makes it look like President Kennedy was made out of chewing gum. At least some bad Communist statuary is a change of pace.

The debate over the choice of artist was interesting, and is even more so in retrospect. It is worth pondering as the new monument joins the National Mall. Here is my article on the matter, slightly edited from the original published on The Ethics Scoreboard in 2007, followed by a response from the artist selection’s most vocal critic.]

An intense controversy surrounds the choice of a statue’s sculptor, specifically the Chinese artist whose design was selected by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation to become a major monument to the martyred civil rights leader in Washington, D.C. Continue reading →