Character

Unethical Quote of the Week (Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck Division): George Zimmerman

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“I feel like it was all God’s plan…I do wish there was something, anything I could have done that wouldn’t have put me in a position where I would have had to take a life.” 

—–George Zimmerman, shooter of Trayvon Martin, now facing charges of second degree murder, in an interview this week with Sean Hannity on Fox News

In the sage and concise words of frequent commenter and Ethics Alarms critic tgt, who brought this quote to my attention ( the idiocy of a murder defendant submitting to a televised interview was too much for me, and I could not bear to watch it):

“Whether it was murder or self defense, don’t pretend you were just a bystander in the process. You absolutely could have done other things. If you think you made the right choices, defend them. Don’t pretend they were out of your hands.”

And the ethics train wreck rolls on…

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Pointer: tgt

Facts: Orlando Sentinel

Graphic: Without a Peer

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.

 

“You Didn’t Build That” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

With those words, President Barack Obama handed the Romney campaign a rich and evocative phrase more ripe for political exploitation than even his Republican opponent’s juiciest gaffes, like…

  • “I like being able to fire people “
  • “I’m not concerned about the very poor “
  • “Corporations are people”

Since every one of these quotes were misrepresented by both pundits and Democrats, taken out of context and unfairly characterized, it’s hard to blame Republicans for jumping on President Obama’s provocative rhetoric, and using it for all it’s worth…which, I suspect, if you want to paint the President as a socialist who wants to punish success and give the fruits of  risk-taking and hard work to the slack and unsuccessful, is a lot.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

“The president’s remark was a direct attack on the principle of individual responsibility, the foundation of American freedom. If “you didn’t build that,” then you have no moral claim to it, and those with political power are morally justified in taking it away and using it to buy more political power. “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” Obama said in another candid moment, in 2008.”

And here’s Mitt, making the most of it: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Sen. John McCain

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

It’s good to have the old maverick doing what he does best.

“Bachmann!”

Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota’s shame, used her oxymoronic presence on the House Intelligence Committee to argue in a June letter to the State Department and a letter this week to fellow Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, that  Huma Abedin, the top aide of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, may be a security risk  because Abedin’s late father, mother, and brother had or have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Abedin’s position, Bachmann suggested  ominously, ‘‘affords her routine access to the secretary and policy-making.’’ Her letter to Ellison was signed by  five other Republicans: Reps. Trent Franks of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Thomas Rooney of Florida and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.

Sen McCain angrily took to the Senate floor to call this example of ethnic profiling and Muslim bigotry what it is: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Boy Scouts of America

/ Jack Marshall / 148 Comments

I owe a lot to the Boy Scouts: namely my father. An only child whose father abandoned his family, forced to move from school to school as his mother sought work during the Depression, my dad was quite literally raised by the Louisville area Boy Scout troop that provided his only lasting friends and only stability. They taught my father well, too: if any man lived his life being faithful to the Scout oath…

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight…

…it was Jack Marshall, Sr. Had it not been for World War II, I have no doubt that Dad would have made scouting his life.

Thus it is painful for me to see the Boy Scout organization reject its core values and relegate itself to irrelevance and cultural estrangement by refusing to alter its archaic policy excluding gays from participation. After the Scouts received a narrow (and correct) affirmation by the U.S. Supreme Court that it had the right, as a private organization, to refuse to accept gay scoutmasters into the organization, they commissioned a panel to decide whether it was time to enter the 21st Century, and banish the faith-based bigotry that made the Boy Scouts hostile to gay Americans. The Scouts just announced that the two year inquiry resulted in an affirmation of the Scouts’ traditional position, unchanged after 118 years: gays aren’t welcome. Continue reading →

The Bill James Effect, Or How Nature Conspires To Make Us Irresponsible

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Quiz: What do Gen.Lee and Bill James have in common?

You see, our strengths do us in, sooner or later. The greater the strength, the more successful it has made us, the more dangerous it is.

In the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee was the smartest general on the field…so smart that he broke iron-clad rules of battle strategy again and again, and prevailed every time. When everyone told him how it was usually done, always done, Lee knew that he could get an edge by doing something else. You never divide your forces, his aides, subordinates and the military books told him. So Lee did, at Chancellorsville, and won an incredible victory.

Then came July 3, 1863: the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and Pickett’s Charge. Everyone told Lee that a massed Napoleonic assault, over an open field, into enemy artillery and a fortified line, was suicidal. But when conventional wisdom dictated a course of action, that was when Lee had always succeeded by ignoring it. So he ordered Pickett’s Charge. This time, conventional wisdom was right. The same qualities of creativity, courage, certitude, and willingness to resist the power of convention that had caused Lee’s men to trust him unconditionally had resulted in the massacre of thousands. Pickett’s Charge wasn’t bold or ingenious. It was irresponsible. Lee, because of a lifetime of success challenging what others thought was obvious, was no longer able to tell the difference. Continue reading →

London’s Curfew Fiasco: Sir Paul, The Boss, and Exception Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

It was the stuff of legends, the kind of moment that onlookers would cherish and tell their grandchildren about. American rock icon Bruce Springsteen was on a roll before a huge Hyde Park crowd, and suddenly he was joined on stage by Sir Paul McCartney. The two giants of rock and roll began spontaneously jamming, and then some bureaucrat who worked for the concert organizers pulled the plug, cutting off power because the concert was running over its permit allotment and a local sound curfew.

Good ethics can require knowing when rules and even laws should be stretched, amended, finessed, or even ignored. This takes some skill, of course, and some character. It is much easier, and certainly entails lower risk, to just go by the book, and permit no exceptions. It is also lazy, uncaring, and leads to needless fiascos like this one. Continue reading →

Obama Resorts To Swiftboating

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“It was despicable what they did to John Kerry. Hey! Maybe it will work on Romney!”

I didn’t see this coming from the Obama campaign, and I suppose I should have. The President has shown a willingness to abandon virtually every one of the principles his piously stood for during his “transformational” 2008 campaign; the unifying, bi-partisan, President-of -all-Americans has meticulously worked to seed distrust and enmity between black and white, Anglo and Hispanic, business owners and labor, rich and poor, non-Catholic and Catholic, young and old, men and women, and, of course, Republicans and Democrats, as a desperate and cynical strategy to stay in power, disregarding the inevitable harm such a scorched earth strategy will do to the nation. If anyone can recall in our history such a total breach of integrity by a major American political figure, please enlighten me. The closest I can find is President Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain, who thoroughly disgraced himself to fend off a tea party challenger in his 2010 Senate bid in Arizona….and it really isn’t close.

Still, I didn’t expect the President to resort to Swiftboating, the political tactic that derives its name from the attacks on John Kerry’s military heroics from some of his fellow Vietnam swift boat commanders (“Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”) who financed a devastating series of negative campaign ads alleging that Kerry’s decorations for valor were based on fraud. Though the ads were based on rumor, hearsay and animus, they put Kerry on the defensive in his 2004 campaign against President Bush. I doubt that the smear really lost Kerry the election—he was a terrible candidate—but Democrats have continued to cite the Swiftboat ads as proof of conservative perfidy and ruthlessness. They, of course, would never stoop so low. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Tia Skinner

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Tia wonders why her family has abandoned her. Uh,…Tia? Aren’t you forgetting something?

“It’s been rough. It’s hard losing your whole family in a blink of an eye. It’s tough because that’s my family; they’re supposed to stay by you through thick and thin.”

—– Tia Skinner, a teenager serving life in prison for plotting a home invasion attack  that killed her father and seriously injured her mother, who was stabbed 25 times.

That’s right, Tia: it’s your family’s fault.

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Pointer: James Taranto

Facts and Graphic: Detroit Free Press

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.

Boooo!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

When we can’t even figure out what ethical conduct is, it’s hopeless.

Mitt Romney’s appearance before the NAACP this week gives us a classic and depressing example of how the collision of confirmation bias, an unprofessional news media, impenetrable partisanship and political cynicism not only obscure the truth, but make it literally—and I mean literally literally, not as Joe Biden uses the term, which is to mean figuratively—impossible.

Consider:

  • The media, in almost every case, highlighted the fact that Mitt Romney was booed by the NAACP audience when he swore to abolish “Obamacare.” Did you know that at one point in his speech, when Romney mentioned defending traditional—as in same sex—marriage, the audience applauded, and some stood? If you do, you only found out by digging into so-called “conservative media sources.” Why isn’t this more of a story than the booing? Why wasn’t at least part of the story? Isn’t that useful information? Why does the media want to show nothing but enmity between African-Americans and the Republican nominee? Why wouldn’t the fact that the audience was listening to the substance of his remarks and responding positively in some cases be significant?
  • The NAACP has criticized prominent Republicans for not accepting it invitations to speak, maintaining the fiction that this wholly owned  subsidiary of the Democratic Party is “bi-partisan,” as its charter falsely claims. Then when one of them accepts such an invitation, these gracious hosts boos him. Booing is bad manners at a baseball game; in this circumstance, it is infinitely worse. If Romney had advocated a return to Jim Crow or used a racial epithet, then maybe booing would be justified. He did not. He merely stated a policy position, repealing the Affordable Care Act, that audience members did not like. They boo him, and this indignity becomes the story, thanks to the media’s tunnel vision. Why would any Republican accept such an invitation? The NAACP has proved itself to be an unethical and abusive host. Continue reading →

The Ethical Fate For Joe Paterno’s Statue

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

In the wake of the Freeh Report’s revelations regarding the extent of the late Joe Paterno’s involvement in allowing Jerry Sandusky’s child molesting appetites to be sated with Penn State’s  assistance, many are calling for the campus statue honoring the now-disgraced coach to be removed.

I am generally opposed to removing memorials and honors to historical figures according to the popular verdicts of the day, for several reasons. The main one is that every individual who ever achieved something worthy of such honor also was guilty of misconduct that someone could convincingly argue outweighs it on moral or ethical grounds. New facts are uncovered, cultural values shift, and over time, no revered figure is safe from deconstruction. The reverse is also inevitable: if a life can be judged unworthy of honor, subsequent generations may well disagree. The verdict of a community, a culture and an era should be given due weight and respect;  a statue, memorial or monument not only recognizes an individual but also represents the judgment of our predecessors. Leave their judgments alone, and if we disagree with them, try to make ours better. Continue reading →