Around the World

Ethics Quiz: Miss Zimbabwe!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Guess which beauty won the Miss Zimbabwe title! It was 21-year-old Brooke Bruk-Jackson, the only white woman among the contestants.

Brooke was crowned Miss Universe Zimbabwe, and will represent the African nation at the next Miss Universe pageant. Reportedly fewer than 1% of the African nation’s population is white. Her victory has upset many residents of Zimbabwe. “All those beautiful melanated women, and you telling me the European woman won a contest for Black people?” one outraged X-user tweeted.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Was giving the prize to a white woman ethical?

This is a bit of a trick question. In a normal competition, the answer would be easy: if she won, she won. Beauty contests, however, are like dog shows: they are completely arbitrary and subjective contests pretending to be objective. It’s a Bizarro Wotld ethics problem: such competitions are phony (that is, unethical) anyway. They have no integrity; how can they have an ethical or unethical result?

Since any result is tainted by the inherent lie that it is based on objective criteria, isn’t this an ethics zugzwang situation? Choosing the only white woman in the competition has the appearance of bias and discrimination; so too does not choosing a competitor because she’s white, if her “objective” qualities would have made her Miss Zimbabwe if she were the “right” color.

If I were a judge, recognizing that beauty contests are absurd and that the criteria is hopelessly subjective, I would avoid choosing the only white contestant because it would raise all of these questions. If a black contestant were crowned Miss Zimbabwe, nobody would blink a metaphorical eye. Now Brooke is a target of hate mail and death threats, the pageant is under attack, the black population feels insulted, and everyone is miserable.

Good job, everybody!

An Ethics And Integrity Dilemma: When Is A Personal Boycott Of A Company Ethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Some lines need to be established, and the sooner the better, but boy, I am having trouble drawing them.

Ethics Alarms has consistently taken the position that it is wrong to discriminate against people for their beliefs and opinions. The idea that business establishments would refuse service to customer based on their political affiliations (or because they wear a MAGA hat) is repugnant to the the value of pluralism and individual liberty, both central to the founding principles of the United States. Similarly, EA has taken the position that corporations should be judged solely on the basis of how well they deliver the services they render and the quality of the products they introduce. How those companies or their owners use their profits, as long as what they do is legal, should not be the consumer’s concern. Investors have a different perspective: investing in a company makes the investor a participant in that company’s activities beyond producing products and services.

Starting with these basic principles, Ethics Alarms opposed the efforts in several cities to punish Chic-Fil-A because its owner was a prominent supporter of groups that opposed gay marriage. I regard this as economic extortion to bend an individual (or his/her company) to the majority’s will, and dangerous to democracy.

The key distinction is whether the company itself, in delivering good and services, connects its business to political and social advocacy. Nothing in the Chic-Fil-A restaurants hinted at any position regarding gays or same-sex marriage, and the company’s owners (or its foundation) should be allowed to support whatever groups and political positions they choose, just like anyone else. But what if a company starts using its products and services, marketing and public visibility to promote political positions, public division, and questionable social engineering?

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Ethics Hero: Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovsky

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I barely have to comment on this one. Incredibly, the British House of Commons sent the letter above to Chris Pavlovsky, asking Rumble’s CEO to censor actor/comic Russell Brand as YouTube has (discussed in this post from yesterday.)

Pavlovsky’s response:

The Brits really never have gotten our Constitution, have they? Unfortunately, an increasing number of Americans, including those who run news, social media and Big Tech platforms don’t get it either.

Two Women Who Never Read Kant

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

German philosopher Immanuel Kant ( 1724 – 1804) was the all-time champ at rules-based ethics, concocting several useful formulations of what he called “the categorical imperative,”or the principle of absolute morality. All of them are, as absolutes, the starting points for hopelessly convoluted debates and “what ifs?,” but philosophy geeks love that stuff. For me, the main value of Kant’s absolutism as that they are useful for pinging ethics alarms.

Kant’s “Formula of Humanity” stated (in German, of course): “So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means,” or in the short version, “Never treat another human being as merely as means to an end.”

Abortion, for example, is an ethical controversy that Kant clarifies quickly: abortion rationalizers have long tried to duck the “Formula of Humanity” by denying that a fetus with human DNA created by humans that will grow to be a born and eventually a walking, talking, member of human society isn’t a human being at all, and thus killing it for the benefit of its mother isn’t using whatever it is as a means to an end.

You can get in the high weeds of Kant’s most famous rule here. For instance, Kant holds that it may be wrong for a person to treat himself or herself merely as a means: now there’s a metaphorical rabbit hole. But for the purposes of this post, let’s just look at two recent examples of people who probably can’t spell Kant, never mind recognize when they are defying him.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: I Think Mexico Might Have A Teeny Ethics Culture Problem…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I could be wrong, of course.

Out of the 30,000 participants at last month’s Mexico City Marathon, about 11,000 runners have been disqualified for cheating by using illegal means to beat the 26.2-mile course. More than 1 out of 3 racers used various non-foot methods of transportation or other unethical tactics.

Mexico has become a drug and crime infested hell-hole, with large portions of the country run by cartels. Its presidency has been license to steal and accept bribes for a couple centuries now. No wonder illegal immigrants breaching our laws to get here see nothing wrong with their conduct: their nation has been rotting from the proverbial head down for as long as they can remember. What constitutes ethics in Mexico today? In 2015, Donald Trump was accused of racism and bigotry for saying that Mexico wasn’t sending us “their best people.” It is beginning to look like Mexico’s “best” are the ones who are leaving, and even they aren’t trustworthy.

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A Rationalization #22 Mitigation Of U.S. Progressive Racial Spoils: Canada Is Even Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Rationalization #22, in my view the worst of the over 100 rationalizations on the list, is called “The Comparative Virtue Excuse,” or “It’s not the worst thing.” I immediately thought of it when I read the head-exploding account of how a father escaped jail time in Canada for incest that resulted in the birth of a disabled child who has been placed in foster care. The father admitted that he had regularly had sexual relations with his daughter since she was 19 or 20. Incest is typically punishable with a jail sentence of at least two years and as high as 14 years, but a majority of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decided last month that the father shouldn’t have to spend any time in jail at all, just two years of house arrest, with a monitor. That’s nice. He can even continue his loving relationship with his daughter under those rules.

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This War Crimes Prosecution Is Vengeance, Not Justice

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

After Ethics Alarms looked at the case of a German tennis player freaking out because a fan quoted the Nazi-era lyrics of the German National anthem while he was playing a match, I found out that the German justice system has metaphorically said, “Hold my beer!”

German prosecutors announced last week that they have charged a 98-year-old man with being an accessory to 3,300 murders because he served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945. The indictment states that he “supported the cruel and malicious killing of thousands of prisoners as a member of the SS guard detail.”In recent years, German courts have ruled that people who helped a Nazi death camp function can be prosecuted as accessories to the extermination there without direct evidence that they participated in any particular deaths.

If a trial goes forward, the unnamed defendant will be tried as a juvenile. He was only 17 when he was required to be a concentration camp guard.

I certainly hope putting a 98-year-old man through the ordeal of a trial and, if he lives long enough, imprisonment for not opposing the Hitler regime as a teenager when the adults around him were going mad makes Germans feel better.

The fact that this cruel prosecution is being brought underlines the deep cultural problems that led Germany to Hitler, and shows that they still are distorting the nation’s understanding of right and wrong.

More Weird Tales Of “The Great Stupid”: Martha Stewart Abuses An Iceberg

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Mock away. The climate change fanatics are truly bananas.

Lifestyle media icon Martha Stewart was vacationing on a cruise around Greenland and posted a photograph of a cocktail chilled by ice she said had been chipped off an iceberg. “End of the first zodiac cruise from @swanhelleniccruises into a very beautiful fjord on the east coast of Greenland,” she wrote in the post. “We actually captured a small iceberg for our cocktails tonight.” Wait a sec—Marlon would like a word…

Stewart was immediately scorched on social media because using ice from an iceberg is promoting global warming, or cruelty to icebergs, or anti-Semitic (“Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?”) or something. “Wealthy white people drinking their iceberg cocktails while the planet is in flames is a bit tone deaf,” wrote a typical hysteric. “Please don’t use an endangered whale or seal to make any elitist meals like you did with the disappearing iceberg,” wrote another. You know: morons.

Martha is no weenie: She followed up by posting a photograph of an iceberg and wrote, “Pleated iceberg. Perfect for cocktails!”

Perfect response, too.

I would have been tempted to post a photo of me eating a polar bear steak.

“Ick” vs. Ethics: The Nazi Gems Collection

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Once again, we encounter the conundrum of so-called “dirty money.”

In May, the auction house Christie’s sold a collection of jewels and jewelry from the estate of Heidi Horten, an Austrian philanthropist. The auction earned $202 million, establishing the Horten sale as the biggest precious gem sale ever. There was, however, an ethics controversy: all that jewelry had been bought with a fortune amassed by Horten’s husband Helmut, a Nazi who bought up Jewish businesses in forced sales during the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Educational Trust called the May auction a “true insult to victims of the Holocaust.” Yoram Dvash, president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, wrote, “In a time of Holocaust denial and the resurgence of antisemitism around the world, we find it especially appalling that a world-renowned auction house would engage in such a sale.” David Schaecter, president of Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, which represents support groups for victims’ families in the U.S., called the sale “appalling” and said it had perpetuated “a disgraceful pattern of whitewashing Holocaust profiteers.” But Christie’s officials argued that the proceeds of the sale would go to the Heidi Horten Foundation, which supports medical research and a museum containing her art collection. The auction house also pledged to donate some of its own profits arising from the sale to Holocaust research and education.

Since May, however, attacks on the collection, Chistie’s, and the money paid for the jewels at auction have escalated. Christie’s announced this week that a scheduled November sale of more lots of jewelry from the Heidi Horten collection would be canceled, citing the “intense scrutiny” from Jewish organizations and some critics. The Jerusalem Post reported that other Jewish groups had rejected Christie’s donations from the May auction.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Without facts or economics on their side, they [“climate deniers”] flatly deny what is happening to our planet and what we must do to save it. They incite a movement against what they falsely label ‘climate change fanaticism,’ as they conveniently forget that the dictionary definition of a cult is the dismissal of facts in devotion to a lie.”

—-Biden Administration “climate envoy” John Kerry, speaking in Scotland after arriving on his private jet that emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than any of the automobiles I have driven or will drive in my lifetime.

Wow. Imagine, people actually voted for this boob to be President. And what a wonderful example of projection: has there ever been any movement that smacked of cultism more than the climate change freak-out? Kerry, whose entire public career has been a sustained war against facts (most people still think he’s Irish, for example), embodies the discredited theory that saying something is true when it isn’t constitutes a fact. Here’s a fact: crippling the U.S. economy to reach climate change policy goals will achieve nothing except hardship and disaster unless a magic formula is developed to force China, India, Russia and developing nations to do the same, and there is no such formula. What is it, then, that we “must do” to save the planet, John? Accept a Democratic Party dictatorship? Put the U.N. in charge of everything and everybody? Put YOU in charge?

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