Citizenship

Ethics Hero Emeritus: National Guard Sergeant Dennis P. Weichel Jr. (1983 -2012)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There are those who say that human beings are incapable of truly altruistic conduct, and that everything we do, no matter how outwardly generous and selfless, is in fact self-serving. There are others, and I am among them, who believe that human beings have natural ethical instincts that lead them to sacrifice for the benefit of society generally, those in peril, and those who are weaker than themselves, especially children. Those instincts can be nurtured by our culture or extinguished by it, but I believe that they are there in most of us….for a while, at least, sometimes weak or dormant, but there, nonetheless.

They were obviously there in Specialist Dennis P. Weichel Jr. of Providence, Rhode Island, a National Guardsman serving in an Afghan province east of Kabul. On March 22, he left the 16-ton gun truck he was riding in to disperse local children who were wandering in front of his heavily armored convoy, searching for treasure, the brass shell casings that could be melted down for other uses or be sold.  Suddenly a small girl saw a casing and ran into the path of one of the huge military vehicles. Weichel, a father of three, dashed to her, grabbed her, and threw her to safety unharmed. The gun truck struck the Guardsman instead, fatally injuring him.

Weichel was engaged to be married. He is the first member of the Rhode Island National Guard to die in Afghanistan.

Nothing can erase the tragedy of the U.S. serviceman who turned mass murderer in Afghanistan a month ago, and Weichel’s heroism is unlikely to change any hearts and minds there. That wasn’t Weichel’s objective anyway. He saw a young life in danger and acted, risking his own. It would be a better United States if all of us were raised to react as he did, and if our culture more unambiguously encouraged our best instincts rather than our worst ones. The cliché mouthed by politicians is that our military combat personnel are fighting for American values. Dennis Weichel demonstrated that they also carry American values with them, and in his case, he displayed the very finest.

Weichel was promoted posthumously from specialist to sergeant and awarded the Bronze Star, which is appropriate, and Rhode Island’s flags are being flown at half-mast. The honor he most deserves, however, is to be remembered and emulated by the rest of us.

Ethics Flashback: A Letter From Kurt Vonnegut

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Mr. Vonnegut

[From the lovely website Letters of Note comes the memory  of this, a letter sent on November 16, 1973 to the Chairman of the Drake, North Dakota, School Board by the late author Kurt Vonnegut. The Chairman, Charles McCarthy, (a name evoking, appropriately, both the rights-flattening Senator of “Have you no decency?”  fame and the dummy) had been outraged that a teacher at the high school had used Vonnegut’s classic novel, “Slaughter-House Five,” in class, and with the support of his board, saw that all the copies of the book purchased were burned in the school’s furnace, followed by others that he deemed “obscene.” Vonnegut, whose novels teem with ethical themes, especially the importance of kindness, learned about the book-burning from news reports, and wrote the following correspondence.

Apparently he received no reply.]

“Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am. Continue reading →

A Facebook Suicide and the Duty To Rescue

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

One takeaway from Claire Lin's death: it's a good idea to have Facebook friends with character.

In Taiwan, a distraught young woman sent streaming photos* of her suicide attempt as she conversed with nine Facebook friends. Some urged her to stop, but none tried to contact police or rescue professionals as she asphyxiated herself with burning charcoal fumes. Yes, her attempt was successful. You can read the disturbing story of Claire Lin’s Facebook suicide here.

Would this happen in America? I wouldn’t be surprised. Sociologists are already weighing in with opinions about the isolation of social media and how the internet makes reality seem less real. I doubt that any of that was especially important in this incident. There have been so many other examples of people left to die with potential rescuers aplenty that were documented on Ethics Alarms and elsewhere, from the Mount Everest climbers who walked past their dying companion, to the more recent case of the Apple store employees who listened to a women get beaten to death in Maryland, that teach us that too many people have the natural inclination not to take affirmative action to help another in distress, and that the instinctive rescuers are the exception, not the rule.

Our culture should teach and reinforce the shared societal duty to come to the assistance of others in peril, but in fact it teaches the opposite. Most of us are told to mind our own business, to think of “Number One”, and  make reverse Golden Rule calculations to rationalize inaction (“He wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help me!”) We are taught to fear lawsuits, to wait for professionals (even if they aren’t coming), and to be fearful of making a bad situation worse. And, of course, we are conditioned to let the other person take the risk, so we can have our cake (not get involved) and eat it too ( see the situation resolved without anyone being harmed). And if we wait just a bit too long for that other person to do the right thing, we can always blame him (or her), saying, “I thought someone else would do it!” Continue reading →

Trayvon-Zimmerman: Stop This Ethics Train Wreck!

/ Jack Marshall / 86 Comments

Unstoppable?

The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman episode is escalating into a full-scale ethics train wreck at a frightening pace, pulling in participants and bystanders alike, and threatening to become a national catastrophe. Usually such things need to play out until all the carnage is exhausted, but this train wreck is different. Too many parties, including the media, are behaving irresponsibly, given the sensitivity of the issues at hand and the possible worse case scenarios. If the train can’t be stopped, it desperately needs to be slowed down.

At this point, however, I wonder if it can. The activists now driving the action obviously no longer care about little nuances like facts, fairness, and law. The participation of Ethics Train Wreck Engineer Extraordinaire Al Sharpton perfectly suits the situation. Whatever the witnesses say, whatever the facts may appear to be to rational and reasonable observers, too many people are invested in the presumption that a white racist shot an innocent black teen for “walking while black,” and nothing short of harsh punishment will avert claims of society-wide racism and the attendant anger, protests, and violence to come.

Disgracefully, more respectable media figures than Sharpton are also throwing kerosene on the fire.  Here, for example, is Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson’s opening to today’s column: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: What if the Westboro Baptist Church Is Just Kidding?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I know just how you feel, Homer.

This is a unique Ethics Alarms quiz, because I am offering it while having absolutely no idea what the answer is, or even, perhaps, what the right question should be.

The story you can read here describes the Westboro Baptist Church’s interactions with an openly gay DJ. You will recall that the church’s followers have achieved infamy by loudly protesting on the scene of private funerals for military personnel killed in combat, with “God Hates Gays” being one of their signature protest signs. Yet the DJ, when he visited the group, found them to be friendly, unthreatening, civil and kind. They hugged him. The asked him over for dinner.  The surprised and puzzled writer suggests that the Fred Phelps followers’ act may be a form of First Amendment-testing performance art, sort of like Bill Maher. Maybe they aren’t really hateful after all. Maybe they just act that way!

My Ethics Quiz question for you to consider:

Does the fact that they can be kind, tolerant and accepting in the privacy of their abode make the Westboro Baptist Church protesters less unethical, more unethical, or does it make no difference at all? Continue reading →

Integrity Test For The Left

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

So...how many progressives and Democrats agree with Voltaire? I wonder.

It should be obvious by now that the furious indignation leveled at Rush Limbaugh for his denigrating rhetoric against activist Sandra Fluke has been expropriated by those who want to limit free speech to their own standards of what constitutes acceptable discourse….and opinion. This has made itself evident both by the strained efforts of eager Limbaugh boycotters to distinguish his use of misogynistic words and the same or worse language used by friendly boors and misogynists against conservative targets. There is a distinction: Rush was engaging in illogical below-the-belt bullying of a barely-public figure for the offense of disagreeing with him, while Bill Maher, for example, was just showing his contempt and disrespect for women generally, which is what anyone who uses the terms “twat” and “cunt,” as he did, is doing. The argument that this ethical divide is so great that it justifies boycotts on one side and complete apathy—or even appreciation!—on the other is unsustainable, which is why Limbaugh’s statement that the organized campaign to take him off the air is not based on the Fluke affair at all. “They’re not even really offended by what happened,” he said. “This is just an opportunity to execute a plan they’ve had in their drawer since 2009.” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quiz: Holder’s ‘Brainwash’ Comment”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

"You want 'consensus'? I'll give you consensus, Pilgrim..."

Penn, who has been on a roll lately, has another Comment of the Day regarding the prospects of a cultural shift in public attitudes toward guns in America. I’ll have some thoughts afterwards, but right now, here is Penn COTD on the post, Ethics Quiz: Holder’s “Brainwash” Comment:

“I’m seeing a problem here that’s as insoluble as “what to do with the homeless.”  It comes up again and again: defending the right to bear arms against teaching non-violence — okay, that’s simplistic, but I think you know what I mean. Since arguments on both sides have been validated, their proponents feel duty-bound to reiterate them.

“Granted, consensus is a no-go in our culture. You win or you lose: compromise is a dirty word, and a win/win situation, while given lip service as a goal (e.g. good sportsmanship), is not an acceptable outcome.  Thus neither argument, in theory or in practice, takes a step further in solving in the short-term the problem of what to do with an increasingly violent society (schools, families, criminals, celebrities, etc.), a society embedded in an ever-shrinking, increasingly threatening world. Thinking that these guns/no guns arguments have some pragmatic use keeps us, so to speak, backward. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: 29 Wisconsin Judges

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yes the gavel's fuzzy, but then so is the judgment of the person on the other end of it.

There is something seriously wrong with the ethical culture of the judiciary in Wisconsin. I suppose this was already obvious, as it is definitely a bad sign when two members of the state Supreme Court accused each other of physical attacks. Nonetheless, the news that 29 of Wisconsin’s sitting judges placed their names on the recall petition for Gov. Scott Walker would seem to settle any remaining doubts.

Is doing this a strict, slam-dunk, violation of the Wisconsin Code of Judicial conduct? No, probably not. It is in a gray area of the Code. Judicial ethics codes prohibit judges from becoming involved in political contests, but a recall petition a judge signs as a private individual (Personally and professionally, I don’t think it is possible for a judge to sign a petition as “a private individual”) don’t fit neatly into the definition of political activity. Other states, such as New York and New Mexico, have allowed judges to sign nominating petitions for candidates on the theory that it is the equivalent of voting, the right to which judges do not give up by ascending the bench.

Still, the judicial codes don’t exactly give a ringing endorsement to this kind of activity, and I would say the better interpretation is that the ethical rules preclude it. The ABA’s Model Judicial Code, for example, says… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Lake County Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

….or, to be more precise, whoever the Maoist idiot was who approved the above flag.

A group of veterans confronted Democratic personnel and demanded that the Obama flag, which was flying under the U.S. flag at Democratic party headquarters in Lake County,  Florida, be taken down. It was finally removed. Continue reading →

Well THAT Didn’t Take Long: The Next Step in School Censorship of Student Speech

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Huh. You know, I just didn't think it would come from the schools! Well, live and learn...

Ethics Alarms has been steadfast in its position from the very first reports of schools presuming to punish students for what they post online, in their own time, in their own homes. That position is, and will forever be, that this is a gross abuse of power that must not be tolerated, much less encouraged. Every time I have written about this, there have been defenders of the practice. This story, from Minnesota, should convince them of how wrong they are. Continue reading →