Around the World

Obama, the Bomber, and the Dangers of Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I live in the Washington,D.C. area, and I often say that deceit is the official language here. Deceit is an artful form of lying in which literally truthful statements are made in a manner, tone and context designed to deceive others into believing something that is not true, by playing on their assumptions, hopes or trust. Like any other lie, it allows the liar to gain tangible benefits, but with less risk than with a normal lie.  If a deceitful statement is unmasked after an individual has relied on it, the originator of the deceit  can and often does blame the duped listener, who “misunderstood” or “jumped to conclusions.” That’s the special upside of deceit.

The downside of deceit is that it is the calling card of especially slippery people, the preferred device of the verbally adept and the unconscionably manipulative. Effective deceit takes work and talent; show me someone who can be deceitful easily, and I will show you someone whom neither of us should trust.

That is why this statement by President Obama from last week is so discouraging, and perhaps, a tipping point in his relationship to the American people: Continue reading →

Al Gore, Bill Cosby and the Ethics of Flawed Messengers

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

We can wait until the whole sordid mess plays out, but as someone who has spent a lot of time researching and training managers about sexual harassment, it is all but certain that Al Gore’s reputation is a goner. One accusation of sexual harassment can be and often is a false alarm. When more allegations of the same type begin to surface after one accuser has broken the dam, however, it is a sure sign that the accused is a serial harasser. The National Enquirer, which has a nose for sleaze (see: John Edwards) is reporting that two more masseuses in two different locales have reported in-room encounters with Gore that echo that of the Portland masseuse whose complaint about Gore was first stifled by her environmentalist friends, and later by the Portland police. This news puts in a new perspective Gore’s unseemly defenses of Bill Clinton’s conduct when Al was Veep, and may even begin to solve the mystery of why the “Love Story” Gores ended in divorce.  Al, in other words, probably really is a “crazed sex poodle.”

Will this development greatly damage his ability to exercise influence in the climates change debate? Of course it will. Continue reading →

CNN’s Ocatavia Nasr: Another Victim of Cognitive Dissonance

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Octavia Nasr, a CNN editor and reporter for two decades, just got her walking papers for a 140-character tweet reading, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” The problem is that this particular “giant” was an anti-American, anti-Israeli terrorist who advocated suicide bombings and who encouraged terrorist acts by Hezbollah. In an explanatory blog post that failed to save her job, Nasr blamed the limitations of Twitter, and explained that she didn’t really admire him, just his stance against the abuse of Muslim women.

Maybe. Continue reading →

The Slippery Slopes of Religious Freedom and Female Genital Mutilation

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The American Academy of Pediatrics slipped on the slipperiest of ethical slopes when earlier this year it attempted to balance multi-culturalism with pragmatism and traditional medical ethics. The topic was the genital mutilation of young girls in a form of (so-called) “female circumcision” practiced by some Muslims, in which the clitoris is cut and mutilated in order to make future sexual activity less enjoyable, thus ensuring a female’s “virtue.” The AAP argued that its members could ethically agree to inflict a lesser “nick”—a ritual drawing of blood— to fulfill a patient’s parents’ request for the ritual cutting, because to do otherwise might lead to greater harm to a girl’s genitalia if the parents sought a full-fledged mutilation abroad or elsewhere.

This policy effectively repealed the ancient ethical standard of “First, do no harm” by employing the versatile rationalization, “If I don’t do it, someone else will.” Predictably, women’s rights advocates were horrified. Equality Now proclaimed in May… Continue reading →

Some Ethics Catch-Up Due on Climate Change

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It is clear that the Obama Administration, if only to bolster the fading support of its most Left-ward constituency, is going to try a full-court press to get some form of carbon tax or “cap and trade” bill. These were once referred to as “climate change” measures, but since polls are showing that the American public’s belief in Al Gore’s jeremiad is waning fast, now these are “prevent more oil spills like the one going on now” bills. Obama, much to the global warming zealots’ dismay, only snuck in one little “climate” in his Oval Office speech, and that was without “change.”

This is all just politics, but the fact is that the American public has some straight talk coming, and it doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon, or even the Deep Horizon. In the past year, the Climate Change Express has pretty much jumped the rails, with the collapse of international summit; the East Anglia “Climategate” revelations that supposedly objective scientists were blocking dissenting conclusions and hiding inconsistencies,  the uncovering of evidence of unprofessional  practices at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),  and some embarrassing pronouncements and predictions that appeared to be off by hundreds of years or so, or wrong entirely.

Despite all this, the U.S. media has been caught in a time warp, with no major news organizations altering their previous official conviction that the fact of catastrophic climate change and the main cause of it–human activity—are “settled science,” even though this is just plain false. Continue reading →

What’s Wrong and Not Wrong About the BP CEO’s Yachting Weekend

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Tony Heyward. the beset and beleaguered BP CEO who has become the public face of the oil company blamed for the devastating Gulf oil leak, took the weekend off to attend a yacht race off the Isle of Wight. For this he is being pummeled with more criticism, from Rahm Emanuel to Sen. Richard Shelby to angry bloggers on the Left, Right, and Center. Is going to a yacht race really that wrong, in ethical terms? Does it breach any duties or obligations? Here is the score card on what’s right, or at least “not wrong” about his conduct, and what is worthy of legitimate criticism. Continue reading →

When An Ethical Parent Must Veto a Child’s Dream

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It looked grim for a while yesterday, when the media was reporting that the sailboat carryingAbby Sunderland, the 16-year old seeking to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo by sea, had been lost. Now it looks like she may be safe after all, as a rescue of her crippled craft is underway in the Indian Ocean.  That a tragedy may have been averted, however, doesn’t mitigate that unethical abdication of responsible parenting and trust by Abby’s parents that set the stage for a calamity.

Had the ill-conceived adventure ended fatally, it is certain that we would have heard her heart-broken parents eulogize their daughter as intrepid,  courageous and mature beyond her appearance, who lived a full life in her sixteen years, and perished “living her dream.”  All true, but those aren’t the facts that matter.  What matters is that she is a dependent, trusting, sixteen-year old child who desperately needed her older and supposedly wiser parents to say “No. Being the youngest woman to sail around the world is good, living long enough to go to college, have a family, have a career and experience the joys of life over many decades is better. Sorry. It’s too dangerous. When you understand a little bit more about life, you may be capable of deciding when to risk it.”

They failed her, and the fact that she isn’t dead as a result is only luck. Continue reading →

Debrahlee Lorenzana, Looks, the Workplace, and Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The Debrahlee Lorenzana controversy raises important ethical issues, even though we may yet discover that it was wholly manufactured by Debrahlee.  Right now, this ethics train wreck in progress is a classic “employer said/ ex-employee said” dispute in which all the facts have yet to be sorted out.  Lorenzana, the former employee, alleges that she was terminated by Citibank for being so va-va-voom! attractive that she distracted her otherwise staid bank coworkers and supervisors. Citibank, the employer, has told the media that “Ms. Lorenzana has chosen to make numerous unfounded accusations and inaccurate statements against Citibank and several of our employees.  While we will not discuss the details of her case, we can say that her termination was solely performance-based and not at all related to her appearance or attire.  We are confident that when all of the facts and documentation are presented, the claim will be dismissed.”

The timing of her lawsuit certainly seems too good to be accidental.  Stanford Professor Deborah Rohde’s recently published book, The Beauty Bias, argues that attractiveness is such a powerful factor in hiring that the nation may need tough new laws to combat “lookism.” Just as the bloggers and op-ed writers were starting to argue about whether we need yet another protected class of Americans and, perhaps, quotas of ugly people in the workplace, here comes a victimized beauty claiming that discrimination cuts both ways. As John Travolta’s character says in “Face-Off,” “What a coinkydink!” Continue reading →

Saga of an Ethics Train Wreck: Climate Change Science

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

For those of you with an open mind: Der Spiegel has posted an exhaustively researched and remarkably even-handed explanation of how the clash of policymakers’ time-tables, advocates, researchers and an immensely complex area of science has the climate change issue confused beyond easy repairing. Its saga shows a true ethics train wreck, beginning with scientists compromising their credibility and objectivity by allying themselves with environmental advocates. Opponents of global warming used deceptive tactics to minimize the significance of legitimate research results, the media and politicians hyped results beyond their actual meaning, and then pro-climate change researchers compromised their own integrity by adopting unethical practices of their own. This process has been ongoing, and deteriorating, for almost a decade. Continue reading →

Armstrong, Bonds, Steroids, and Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Barry Bonds was forcibly retired from baseball despite general agreement that he could still hit a ball better than most active players. No team would hire him, because he had become the symbol of baseball’s steroid and performance-enhancing drugs scandal that casts a permanent shadow over the game’s image, statistics, integrity, and current stars. Bonds never has admitted to using P.E.D.’s, but the evidence that his remarkable late-career success was illicitly aided by banned substances is overwhelming, and indeed was overwhelming while he was playing. [I have written about the fairness of judging Bonds a cheater and the tortured rationalizations employed by his defenders here, here, and here.] At the same time, another individual who dominates his sport, cyclist Lance Armstrong, has managed to convince most of the media and his adoring public that accusations that he used steroids are false, even though the circumstantial evidence against him rivals what has condemned Bonds. This has always had the stench of a double standard; now, in the wake of new allegations by a former team mate, the only excuses for not giving Armstrong the Bonds treatment are unethical ones. Continue reading →