Character

Ethics Dunce: Kelsey Grammer

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Kelsey Grammer’s reputation as an arrogant and  self-centered jerk is almost as impressive as his reputation as a talented and versatile actor. Yesterday Grammer managed to confirm the former while on a panel to discuss the recent project that had added to the latter, his Emmy-winning turn as a dying Chicago mayor on the Starz cable series “Boss.”

Grammer was appearing before TV critics and writers at the Summer TV Press Tour 2012, when his cell phone started ringing. Of course, unless he was awaiting imminent notice of an available kidney, it was inexcusable for Grammer to leave his phone on while he was appearing before an audience. Never mind that: the former “Frazier” accessed his inner “Sideshow Bob” and took the call. It was Grammer’s wife. Continue reading →

Closing the Memory Hole: Remembering the Dance Marathons

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“Marathon ’33”

“Man lives by a lingering ember,

“And while there are beautiful things to remember,

The ugly things, one should forget.”

—-“Things to Remember” from the musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd”  by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse

Jews sometimes are criticized for evoking the Holocaust at every opportunity. Their explanation is that we “must never forget,” an argument I once thought was bizarre. “Who could forget the Holocaust?,” I wondered. Something so unique and horrible would be impossible to forget; it would be like pretending the Grand Canyon didn’t exist.

That was ignorant of me. Nations, religions, cultures and groups of all kinds are stunningly effective at forgetting historical episodes which challenge their self-image and most cherished illusions. Jews are rightfully and wisely vigilant at reminding the world of what was done to them as the rest of humanity passively looked on in the 30’s and 40’s, because their extermination at the hands of the Nazis is a prime candidate for history’s memory hole, where good and sensitive people, along with their nations, communities and cultures, dispose of memories too ugly to remember. Once the memories are gone, they no longer haunt us, it is true. They no longer teach or warn us, either. The ethical course of action is to remember our worst moments, and evoke them as often as possible. We can only be our best by admitting our worst. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

“He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain. But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?… You guys have said his wealth is $250 million. Not a chance in the world. It’s a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don’t pay taxes for 10 years when you’re making millions and millions of dollars.”

—-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in an interview with The Huffington Post. Reid’s source for the accusation that Romney “did not pay taxes for ten years” is a an individual he refuses to name, and thus one whose allegations cannot be checked or substantiated.

Sen. Harry Reid

In the dirty, slimy world of politics, you can’t get much dirtier or slimier than Senator Reid. Richard Nixon would be proud of him;  Joe McCarthy would applaud, Joseph Goebbels too, and every low-life, gutter-dwelling lie-monger who has used innuendo and rumor to smear candidates, opponents and strategically-chosen victims in between.

Reid is a leader of the Democratic Party, and the Party is accountable for his words. Fair Americans have been justifiably disgusted with the likes of Donald Trump, who has suggested that President Obama’s reluctance to release his scholastic records, and before that his birth certificate, were proof of something nefarious. Guilty until proven innocent—this is the secret ingredient of Big Lie politics, and that is what Reid, who really is beneath contempt here, is practicing. Reid makes Trump look fair and Newt Gingrich look moderate by comparison, and any Democrat, whatever they think of Mitt Romney, that doesn’t have the integrity to condemn this kind of abuse should be have himself fumigated. Continue reading →

Signature Significance, Jonah Lehrer, and That Sinking Feeling

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Yes, uh, a little TOO MUCH creativity there, Jonah…

At the New Yorker, star writer Jonah Lehrer has resigned after it was shown that he fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan for his well-reviewed book “Imagine: How Creativity Works.”

This was the final shoe dropping that began with one untied shoelace, the discovery in June that Lehrer had plagiarized from himself, lifting a section of a piece published earlier in one publication to include in a piece written for The New Yorker. This is a minor ethical incursion—-Lehrer had represented the second essay as original, so using prior published material was dishonest even if he was the author—but it launched his employers on a mission of scrutiny, investigating to see if the one transgression was part of a trend.

When it comes to professional ethics, you see, it often is. The principle of signature significance holds that in some pursuits just one episode can be enough to make certain conclusions. A writer of true integrity never borrows from his own published work without flagging the fact. Doing so even once indicates shaky integrity, and a willingness to cut corners. It may well indicate a proclivity to cheat in more egregious ways. Continue reading →

Megan Merkel, Road Fick

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This isn’t really Megan, just how I prefer to think of her…

We haven’t had a bona fide fick sighting at Ethics Alarms for a while, so welcome to Megan Merkel. A fick, you will recall, coined in honor of Michigan lottery winner/shameless food stamp recipient Leroy Fick, is someone who engages in outrageously unethical conduct and is defiant about it, an individual so ethically deficient that he or she can’t bring themselves to regret or show proper contrition for conduct that is undeniably wrong.

Ms. Merkel, 23, was arrested after her participation in this drama:

According to police, she was driving drunk at 7: 45 AM, northbound on Route 250 in Penfield, a suburb of Rochester, NY, alongside her recently-paroled boyfriend, 22-year-old Mark Scerbo. Scerbo, an idiot, was driving his motorcycle next to Merkel’s car and repeatedly passing it to do wheelies. He lost control of one of them, and hit Heather Boyum, a teacher and mother of two children, who was riding her bike on the shoulder. The impact threw the 40-year-old woman under the wheels of Merkel’s car, causing fatal injuries.  Merkel left the scene and was arrested for DWI.

But wait, there’s more! Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Rev. Stan Weatherford

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Rev. Weatherford with a parishioner

The First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Mississippi has never hosted the wedding of a black couple in its 150 year history, so you can imagine how important it was to the congregation not to break a perfect record. All right, that’s unfair: only a handful of white church members protested to Rev. Stan Weatherford when they learned that he was preparing to wed Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson at First Baptist, but their threat that they would have him voted out of his job if he did was sufficient to cause him to tell Charles and Te’Andrea, just two days before the scheduled ceremony, that they would have to move the event to another church.

“I didn’t want to have a controversy within the church, and I didn’t want a controversy to affect the wedding of Charles and Te’Andrea. I wanted to make sure their wedding day was a special day,” Weatherford told local reporters. Continue reading →

Settlement Corruption and Ethics Failure: The Kelley Currin-Rick Curl Saga

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

” Ah, what a beauty! $150,000 well spent!”

Imagine, if you will, that the late Joe Paterno didn’t take action to expose the child-molesting proclivities of his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, not because he was concerned about his cherished football program’s image, but because Sandusky paid him off with a big check. Can we all agree that this would have been even more reprehensible than what actually occurred? I assume so. Paterno would have been enriching himself with the sacrifice of young innocents to a pedophile.

Now compare that hypothetical with what we know about the developing scandal around renowned swimming coach Rick Curl, who has trained Olympian swimmers for decades. took a leave of absence from the club he founded Wednesday in the wake of accusations that he engaged in a sexual relationship with a teen swimmer and then paid her and her parents to keep quiet as part of a settlement. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Who Is More Unethical…the Coward Who Left His Girlfriend and Child to Die, Or the Girlfriend Who Agreed To Marry Him Anyway?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Would an ethical woman marry George?

I am a great fan of the old Seinfeld show in general and the George Costanza character in particular (all ethicists love George, who  exemplifies how messed up a life without ethical instincts can be), but I didn’t laugh at the episode when he smelled smoke at kids’ birthday party and trampled the children as he escaped in panic from the apartment. And that was just a TV sitcom; the actions of Jamie Rohrs, the Colorado man who ran out of the Aurora movie theater when James Holmes started shooting and drove away in his truck, leaving behind his girlfriend and her two young children—one of whom was fathered by him— go beyond unfunny to revolting. Luckily, and no thanks to Rohrs, Patricia Legaretta and her kids did not die, because a stranger, Jarell Brooks, helped them escape the theater and the massacre.

Then comes the rest of the story, revealed to Piers Morgan on CNN: after his act of aggravated cowardice, Rohrs had the gall to propose to the mother of his child, and Legaretta, incredibly, accepted.

Your Ethics Quiz:

Who is more unethical—Legaretta, or Costanza, er, Rohrs? Continue reading →

“Is It Wrong To Go On Vacation When You’re Unemployed?”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Job hunting…

This is the question asked by unemployed author Fran Hopkins, who, her bio says, ” has been searching for full-time work since losing her job in a January 2010 layoff. While “between jobs,” she’s earned an MS degree in Health Communication, does freelance writing and public relations.” In her article on AOL, Hopkins argues that it isn’t wrong, because “I need to get away, just for a few days, close to the soothing sound and motion of the sea, inhaling salt air and unwinding. I have to restore my mental, emotional and spiritual inner resources. I’m running low.” But she feels guilty, and to read the comments, a lot of people thinks she should. On Fark, where I found the post, the wags there simply answered her query “Yes” and filed it under “Dumbass.”

Nonsense. To begin with, the question is unanswerable, since it depends on so many variables. Is it unethical to spend your kids’ college funds or the mortgage money on a vacation? Yes. Is it wrong to spend public assistance on a vacation? Yes. But these are all irresponsible acts, and taking a vacation to recharge your batteries, relieve stress and clear your mind when there are no negative consequences to anyone else from doing so is not irresponsible, and might be the smartest thing you can do.

Poor Fran has been looking for a job for more than two and a half years, and that is, or should be, hard work. Anyone who says, as some commenters do, that there is nothing for her to take a vacation from either has never looked for a work or has no idea how to do it right. Job hunting is a hard job, and a soul-killing one. After a while you tend to become negative and cynical, or pathetic and desperate, and these attitudes can be fatal to your employment prospects. If a week on Cape Cod or the Jersey Shore can restore your vigor and perspective, it is well worth the time and money.

The most annoying  criticism of Fran are the people who write that it is inconsiderate of her to take a break from job-hunting when so many of her desperate fellow-citizens can’t afford to do likewise. If there is a mutated sub-category of liberals that make me want to get a package deal on an NRA/ Ayn Rand/ Donald Trump/ Rush Limbaugh fan club, this is it: the “you have no right to be happy as long as other people are miserable” crowd. Really, however, all the criticism of Fran is annoying, because it isn’t based on concepts of right and wrong at all. There’s nothing wrong with Fran taking a vacation while unemployed; there’s nothing wrong with her giving up on employment entirely and becoming a retiree, a beach bum, a street corner philosopher, a mime or an ethics blogger, either, as long as she isn’t defaulting on her obligations to others, or sponging off people who are working.

Have a great time on your vacation, Fran. You’ve earned it.

_______________________________________

Pointer: Fark

Source: AOL

Graphic: Sidney Morning Herald

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Bob Nightengale’s Rationalization Orgy

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

“OK, he got caught, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t still the BEST at Rubik’s Cube…”

I was interviewed on a radio news show early this morning, and one of the questions I was asked was whether what the host called “the decline of ethics in the country” could be reversed. I’m not convinced there has been such a decline, but if there is, it sure doesn’t help to have so many  journalists with big microphones displaying infantile analysis of ethics-related issues on a regular basis.

Today’s case was USA Today sportswriter Bob Nightengale, who took the occasion of the annual induction of new members into baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown this weekend to trot out nearly every rationalization and ethical invalid argument imaginable to explain why he would be voting for all the proven or suspected steroid cheats  for the Hall when their time comes:

“There, I said it. I will vote for Bonds. And Clemens. And Sosa. And Piazza. I’ll think about Bagwell. And will continue voting for Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive in his final season when he reached 3,000 hits.”

And then come the rationalizations:

  • “Hey, it’s OK to admit racists, criminals, drunks and recreational drug abusers, but let’s not tarnish the sacredness of the Hall of Fame.” This is essentially a “there are worse things” argument with an overlay of ignorance and stupidity. This is a baseball Hall of Fame with very clear character requirements: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.” No other sports Hall of Fame has such standards: just wait for the fight over admitting Joe Paterno into the College Football Hall of Fame (O.J. is a member in good standing.). Continue reading →