Character

From Massachusetts: Proof That It CAN Happen Here…and Does; That It CAN Happen To You…and Might.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tortured. At his Special Needs school. By good people like us.

As I recently wrote to a commenter on another post, Ethics Alarms is not intended to catalogue every prominent example of unethical conduct, and not just because attempting to do so would require a fleet of bloggers. If it is discussed here, an incident usually requires some kind of ethical analysis to determine whether it is ethical or not, or has larger cultural or societal significance. That the incident at the center of this post was unethical (as well as illegal), there can be no doubt, and that, ironically, is why it is worthy of special attention. The conduct is self-evidently horrific and beyond justification, and yet it occurred anyway, in a community, state and nation where virtually every sentient citizen over the age of nine would say that it could never happen—not here, not in the United States of America, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The fact that it did happen is both a revelation and a warning.

Film footage under seal since 2002 was finally shown in a Massachusetts courtroom this week. The film shows how the staff of a school for special needs students in Canton, Mass., the Judge Rotenberg Center, strapped a disabled 18-year-old student named Andre McCollins to a table and proceeded to torture him, administering 31 jolts of electricity to the screaming boy over a seven hour period. Lawyers defending the school in a lawsuit have claimed that the atrocity was “treatment,” but other evidence indicates that it was punishment—for  McCollins’ defiance of a teacher’s demands that he remove his jacket in class. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Former Fox Mole Joe Moto

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“I am a weasel, a traitor, a sell-out and every bad word you can throw at me… but as of today, I am free, and I am ready to tell my story, which I wasn’t able to fully do for the previous 36 hours.”

–—Joe Moto, upon getting his walking papers at Fox News. Moto, a producer on the O’Reilly show, had been sending anti-Fox posts to the gossipy and ethics-free website Gawker, denigrating the company that was paying his salary. His work as the “Fox Mole” didn’t last long, as he was discovered and fired after only two undercover posts.

Joe Moto, while at Fox News

Joe Moto is a fick.* He can’t justify his conduct, which is as low as it gets. In his statement above, which is part of his first post-Fox column, he acknowledges that he has no ethical argument left to him for his disloyal, cowardly breach of an employer’s trust, but informs the world that he intends to cash in anyway. I will say this clearly: anyone who ever hires this guy for any job, from working in TV to yard work, is insane. Continue reading →

Trayvon Martin’s Mother Says That The Killing of Her Son Was An Accident. Well, That’s Certainly A Generous and Reasonable Thing For Her To—Wait, WHAT???

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Great. Thanks for that statement, Sybrina. Now look what you've done to my head!

You think the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck is almost done? Ha! I would love for you to be right, but the signs are not promising:

  • Yesterday, the special prosecutor ended the suspense and announced that Zimmerman would be charged, putting a sock in the collective mouths of activists who claimed that the case was already closed. That was nice, but it also allowed Al Sharpton to claim that it was the demonstrations, the threats and the public outcry that forced that outcome. This is bad in three ways:

1.) It suggests that the U.S. justice system can be manipulated by mob rule;

2.) It tells the public that any citizen might be arrested, not because law enforcement believes it has a legitimate case, but because his rights have been balanced against other political and popular factors and found to be dispensable; and

3.) He may be right. Angela Corey, who made the decision to charge Zimmerman without a grand jury, strongly denied Sharpton’s point, and we should all hope she was being truthful.

  • But she almost certainly over-charged. Again, with a second degree murder charge, she is saying that there was no self-defense and that Zimmerman shot Trayvon out of spontaneous anger, animus or other cause that does not include any excuse or legally recognized mitigating factor. Here’s hope again: I hope she has sufficient evidence to support this. Otherwise, she has set everyone up for another round of mob fury and even violence, when Zimmerman is released by the judge who must rule on the “Stand Your Ground” law’s application to Zimmerman before trial, or when a jury finds that the evidence doesn’t support the charge beyond a reasonable doubt. Unethical: if Corey took this path  intentionally to take the city and state off the hook, guaranteeing that a judge would take the heat, and everyone could attack the judiciary for following the law, since that is the current fad. Unethical: if she overcharged to give the jury the unenviable job of freeing Zimmerman, since people are used to blaming Florida juries. (See: Anthony, Casey) Requiring less suspicion is the theory, advanced by some defense lawyers, that Corey is over-charging to put leverage on Zimmerman (he will be facing life imprisonment) and squeeze him to agree to a lesser charge, like manslaughter. Prosecutors are not supposed to charge citizens with crimes they know they can’t prove in trial; it is professional misconduct. I know, Jack McCoy used to do it all the time on Law and Order. So do too many prosecutors. It’s still unethical.
  • Zimmerman promptly turned himself in, which means that his blabber-mouth lawyers were even more unethical than I thought they were, suggesting that Zimmerman was on the run and out of state when, obviously, he wasn’t. George is well rid of these two.

If this wasn’t enough to prove that the Trayvon train wreck was still rolling, Sybrina Fulton, the dead teen’s mother, weighed in with this jaw-dropper: Continue reading →

Were The Marlins Right To Suspend Ozzie Guillen for Loving Fidel Castro?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

And imagine...Media Matters had NOTHING to do with it!

‘”I love Fidel Castro,’ blurts Ozzie Guillen, the new manager of the Miami Marlins, in his Jupiter, Fla., spring-training office before an early-March team workout.”

And with that spontaneous utterance, quoted in a Time magazine feature, Guillen, who was hired during baseball’s off-season to lead the long-languishing Miami baseball franchise to elusive community popularity and on-the-field success, suddenly found himself at the epicenter of a career-threatening controversy. Cuban groups in the Miami area were horrified, and demanded that Guillen be fired. Guillen immediately went on an apology tour, arguing that he had “mistranslated in his head from Spanish to English,” and that he emphatically did not “love” the Cuban dictator, but in fact hated him. Even though he said he loved him. That’s some bad translating.

“I feel like I betrayed my Latin community,” Guillen said to one Miami group, according to ESPN’s translation of his comments in Spanish. “I am here to say I am sorry with my heart in my hands and I want to say I’m sorry to all those people who are hurt indirectly or directly. I’m sorry for what I said and for putting people in a position they don’t need to be in. And for all the Cuban families, I’m sorry. I hope that when I get out of here, they will understand who Ozzie Guillen is. How I feel for them. And how I feel about the Fidel Castro dictatorship. I’m here to face you, person to person. It’s going to be a very difficult time for me.”

He got that right. Today the Marlins suspended their manager for five games, saying in a statement, Continue reading →

The Donald’s Dangerous Ethics: Loyalty Trumps Honesty On “Celebrity Apprentice”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Your ethics ignorance makes me angry, Donald. You won't like me when I'm angry...

The original version of Donald Trump’s self-promoting  reality show competition “The Apprentice” occasionally created a useful business ethics scenario. Once The Donald started using B-list celebrities instead of real aspiring executives, however, the show deteriorated into ego insanity and the kind of freak show conflicts one would expect with participants like Jose Canseco, Joan Rivers and Dennis Rodman.

Surprisingly, last week’s episode blundered into a substantive, if confusing, ethics lesson. It was Donald Trump’s ethical priorities that were exposed, and as should surprise no one, they are as warped as Trump himself.

I can spare you all the details of the episode, which involved the weird assortment of celebs breaking into two teams to see who could devise the better commercial for Entertainment.com, as judged by the website’s execs. As usual, the losing team’s leader and the two team members fingered by her (in this case) had to have a show-down with Trump in “the Board Room” to determine who would be on the receiving end of Trump’s trademark line, “You’re fired!” This time one of the three potential firees was none other that  old Incredible Hulk himself, Lou Ferrigno, who has distinguished himself this season as a perpetual whiner, especially adept at blaming the members of his teams rather than accepting responsibility himself. He was richly deserving of the Trump pink slip in this episode, especially for the over-the-top violent and disparaging language he leveled at a female team mate, comedian Lisa Lampanelli. In the eyes of Trump, however, Lou clinched his demise not by being an unprofessional boor, but by being…honest.

“Who do you think had the better commercial?” Trump asked the former green alter-ego of the late Bill Bixby. It sure didn’t sound like a trick question. Ferrigno responded that the winning team’s commercial was better, an eminently reasonable response given that he and the other two celebrities on the hot seat were there because the commercial they had crafted had been judged as inferior. This, however, was seen by The Donald as a rank betrayal. He fired Lou, in part for his slug-like performance on the assigned task, but mostly, he said, for Ferrigno’s “great disloyalty” to his team.

Whaa? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Week: Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Presenting one of the very best Comments of the Day

Rick Jones, whose own blog Curmudgeon Central should be on everyone’s list of bookmarks and visited often, delivers one of the finest and most thoughtful comments ever to grace Ethics Alarms, and we’ve had many excellent ones. His topic is my post regarding Professor Dyson’s comments on ABC this Sunday about criticism of President Obama, but Rick makes a perceptive connection to the Trayvon Martin controversy as well.And here is the really amazing part: there is not a word here that I don’t agree with completely.

Here is his Comment of the Day, on the post Unethical Quote of the Week: Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson:

“It strikes me that President Obama has come in for at least his share of sniping—legitimate and otherwise. But that isn’t the issue here. Rather, how much of that criticism is based on race? The honest answer is that we can’t say with certainty, but we can make some pretty fair conjectures. Continue reading →

What Do You Do When The Ethics Alarm Sounds Late? This…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

A photography site that knows about ethics, too.

SmugMug is a photo sharing website that comes complete with a blog on photo sharing issues, including ethical ones. Here is the blog’s most recent post, a remarkable confession and an apology, as excellent an example of  taking responsibility for a mistake, being accountable and apologizing sincerely to the party harmed as there is. The post is entitled, “What Were We Thinking?”

“Sometimes you see the dumb things companies say and you wonder, ‘What were they thinking?’

I never imagined that happening to us, but we did something so dumb in a blog post, we’re now looking at each other blankly and asking, what were we thinking? The post was about image theft and we used examples from pro photographer Valerie Schooling’s site and gave the impression she was doing things wrong, which she wasn’t.

To make matters worse, we somehow embedded screen captures of her site without asking her permission.  If it weren’t such a dumb thing to do, I could explain why we did it other than the obvious: she and her photos are awesome. Naturally, her friends and other respected photographers in the industry asked us what we were thinking, and unfortunately the honest answer was, “We weren’t.”

We learned a lesson we’ll never forget because we also betrayed ourselves, since we are photographers.  We apologize for the time and angst this caused a lot of wonderful people.”

“Chris MacAskill
President & co-founder
Not usually so clueless”

Perfect. Continue reading →

“Blue Bloods” Ethics: The Good Lie?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Tom Selleck as NYC Chief of Police Frank Reagan

Tom Selleck’s CBS drama “Blue Bloods,” chronicling the exploits of  the Reagans, an improbable fictional New York City family that dominates NYC’s law enforcement, featured an excellent example of a necessary lie last night, in which utilitarian principles would hold that the lie,  a rather serious and extensive one—many interlocking lies, really—was the most ethical option available.

The situation arose because the Chief of Police (Frank Reagan, played by Selleck) learned that his police officer son, Jamie Reagan, had rescued a child from an explosion, and the press and city were clamoring to know who the hero was. (Nobody saw the rescue, which is a contrived detail, but necessary to set up the ethical dilemma.) But Jamie was also working undercover in a serious and dangerous operation, having infiltrated an organized crime family. (Why was a uniformed cop allowed to stay on the street while leading a double life? Seems reckless to me, but Father Chief knows best.) To protect the undercover operation and his son, Frank Reagan decides on an elaborate deception, persuading his son’s partner, who was on the scene of the rescue, to take the credit and even accept a commendation in a public ceremony.

Lying to the public and the press to such an extent is almost always inexcusable, but protecting an anti-crime effort in the public interest, as well as the imperiled officer involved in it,  is a rare case in which the balance tips away from the truth. The “Blue Bloods” solution was the best one available given the situation and the law enforcement priorities.  But… Continue reading →

Naked Teacher Principle Sighting in Ohio

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

News from Independence, Ohio:

“A part-time Catholic elementary school teacher was fired for posting nude photos of herself on the Internet.

The Cleveland Catholic Diocese said today the teacher was employed at St. Michael’s Elementary School.

Officials declined to release the teacher’s name, age or length of time she was employed with the diocese. They also declined to explain where the photos were posted or how they learned about them.

“In accordance with the Diocesan Education Department’s policies in such matters, St. Michael’s school officials took immediate action to terminate the part-time instructor,” a news release said. “The well-being of the students is paramount in these cases and assistance has been offered to students and their parents.”

More teachers need to read Ethics Alarms  ( especially the Naked Teacher Principle)…at least until the profession develops a useful code of ethics.

By the way, how are you coming with that, teachers?

Ethics Dunce: Laurie Penny

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Laurie Penny, in an alternate universe America where we don't bother about trivial things, like saving pompous, ungrateful British journalists.

Laurie Penny was the woman saved from being flattened by a New York cab this week by none other than Ryan Gosling, the dashing actor and and celebrity heart-throb who has already been honored here for his willingness to come to the rescue of others in peril. He pulled her back as the British journalist was about to step off the curb in Manhattan without looking, right in the path of a speeding vehicle.

The celebrity and gossip media went bonkers over this, as you might imagine. After all, a typical headline for this crude segment of the media is that Tia Tequila got a new tattoo or that a Kardashian broke a nail. Let’s see…what’s today’s buzz? Ex-child star Amanda Bynes was bailed out if jail following her DUI arrest, and Heidi Klum filed for divorce. But the attention being paid to Gosling’s good deed just annoys Penny, and, she says, is proof that America is trivial and misguided. In a piece authored for the gossip site Gawker, entitled, “Ryan Gosling Saved Me From a Speeding Car But There’s War In the Middle East So Everyone Calm Down,” Penny exposes herself as the kind of person Gosling might live to regret rescuing. Continue reading →