Comment of the Day

An Ethics Alarms Comment Of The Day Spectacular: “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Manson Cult Murderer”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

It’s a conundrum: the more comments a post attracts, the more optimistic I am that I’m not wasting my time. But once the number of comments tops about 20, the chances of them being read diminishes rapidly. Generally I am a poor judge of which posts will generate the most dialogue; this time, I wasn’t surprised. The question of whether one of the Manson cult murders should be paroled raises ethics issues general and specific, including some that have caused arguments for centuries. Not only has it sparked 87 comments to date, the topic inspired so many Comment of the Day-worthy posts that if I posted them individually they would swallow the blog.

So, in order both to facilitate reading the highlights of the discussion and to give the best of the best exposure to a larger audience, what follows are the Comments of the Day by on the post “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Manson Cult Murderer,” by Steve-O-in NJ, Steve Witherspoon, Humble Talent, Ryan Harkins, Tim Levier, Alicia, Extradiminsional Cephalopod and Tom P. though I recommend reading all 87, even if they include two esteemed EA commenters taking shots at each other like the Earps and the Clantons. (You might want to read the original post, too.)

First up is Steve-O-in NJ:

Life in prison should mean life in prison. Some crimes are just so bad that the person who committed them should never be allowed to rejoin society. I think Charles Manson is the most undeserving recipient of the mercy that came with the temporary abolition of the death penalty whoever existed. I also think his followers, who, young as they might have been, we’re still old enough to be responsible for their actions deserved the same fate.

Don’t get me wrong, 54 years in prison is a damn long time. It’s longer than I’ve been alive, and the idea of spending all that time staring at concrete is very unpleasant. However, the families of those victims who were butchered should not have to see this person walking around free. Too often the victims and their families get forgotten in all of this. The victims here did not a thing. It isn’t as though they had bad blood with the offenders or had done something to the offenders. This is a case of someone who is as close to evil as any human ever was working his spell over other humans who let him work his spell on them and using that control to destroy lives who he really had nothing to do with and no reason to destroy. This is also a case of individuals who could still tell the difference between right and wrong choosing to go as wrong as any human possibly could. I say let this woman rot in prison for the rest of her days, I believe she should only be released if she is in the throes of a terminal disease and doesn’t have very long to live. Then by all means, release her to die.

Now Steve Witherspoon…

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Comment Of The Day: “Depressing Ethics Notes From The Education Apocalypse, Part I”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

In his Comment of the Day on today’s post about various graduation-related ethics stories, JutGory provides a veritable feast of delicious ethics morsels. It all began when he sent me an email suggesting as an ethics quiz candidate the story involving the student who had ChatGPT write the speech he submitted for approval to high school officials, intending all the while to sandbag them and deliver a different speech he knew they would never approve. I gratefully used the item but not as a quiz, judging it too easy: the Ethics Alarms position would be that using artificial intelligence to write anything one is supposed to write unassisted is unethical. Jut followed up with this COTD teeming with related ethics conundrums.

***

When I submitted #4, I asked if it might be an ethics quiz whether using ChatGPT to write the address.

You asked if I was being tongue in cheek.

The answer was not entirely. When I sent the e-mail, I had not finished thinking about the issues. Here were things I was mulling over:

1) Having AI write a speech for you is not as bad as a lawyer using it to write a brief.

2) It is certainly not as bad as the bait and switch in the other ethics breach he committed.

3) It was still deceptive to propose a speech you had no intention of giving; so was the wrong thing committed in the proposal of the speech, or in the drafting itself, or both?

4) It would not be plagiarism to give the speech because you are not really copying anyone.

5) This reminded me of the ownership issue of the photo taken by the monkey (you covered this); if you put in the parameters to ChatGPT, how much of the product can you claim as your own (because ChatGPT can’t really copyright it (Can it? Does it?)?

6) It also reminded me of the artist who entered an AI painting into a competition (again, covered here) and there were no restrictions on such submissions in the contest.

After I sent the e-mail, I concluded it was wrong but primarily based upon the dishonesty. Actually using ChatGPT to draft an address raises some of these other issues and the answer fits somewhere in the middle of that mess that I laid out.

Follow up question: would it be even worse if he had ChatGPT draft his negative address, as well? Does he get any credit for actually writing the address he gave? (That’s a little tongue in cheek, but still an appropriate question in this context.)

___________________

I’m baaaack….to offer my answers to the (let’s see) eight enumerated issues and the two follow-up questions at the end:

1. Rationalization #22.

2. Ditto.

3. Using any speech to deceive was the ethical breach, regardless of how it was written.

4. I agree. It’s not plagiarism, just as submitting a paper sold by a term paper mill isn’t plagiarism.

5. I expect this issue to be litigated sooner or later.

6. I wrote about that one, too. In that case, the program used can fairly be called just an artist’s tool, absent either a rule that prohibited it, though an ethical entrant would have checked with organizers before submitting the art for a prize. In this case, there is no question (is there?) that the student knew a speech written by a bot would be rejected.

7. No. The substituted speech was unethical from the first word: it couldn’t be made more or less unethical by the means of its production. I suppose the content could have made the speech more unethical, if, say, it were obscene or racist, or revealed national security secrets.

8. No. You don’t get credit for not doing something unethical.

Comment Of The Day: “This Doesn’t Mean Wine Aficionados Are Pompous Frauds But It Sure Points In That Direction”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A wide-ranging Comment of the Day by commentariat regular Other Bill. It begins with this post on the wine-tasting frauds, and moves on to other vital matters, including the meaning of Memorial Day.

Here it is…

***

This is depressing. I enjoy decent wine and have a reliable source for good, reasonably priced wines. I doubtless pay the guy a premium but it’s like buying insurance. The wines are invariably good. Most all wine sold is priced below twenty bucks a bottle, and yes, there’s always Two Buck Chuck. But frankly, I think it’s unfortunate that the vast majority of wine drinkers have never tasted decent wine and have no idea how unpalatable the stuff they put up with is.

I’m with Ben Franklin: The quote originally came from a letter that Franklin wrote to his friend André Morellet while he was in France. He stated, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!” (Personally, I’d say the same thing about good, loving, monogamous sex.)

Just had a flyover here at the house in Phoenix by a formation of four WWII vintage trainer biplanes (I’m assuming they’re Stearmans) in their bright yellow and blue livery. Lots a pilots trained in Arizona during the war, and I know about 80,000 U.S. airmen were killed while doing strategic bombing from England. And who knows if it even worked. An unimaginable sacrifice.

A C-47 just flew over. Remembering my HS English teacher’s husband who retired as a check pilot for Pan Am after having flown The Hump in WWII. And my mother’s cousin who was an ambulance driver in India and killed when the plane he was flying in was shot down by the Japanese. And my son in law’s uncle Mike killed in Vietnam, as well as a neighborhood kid my brother’s age, Steve Gomez killed in Vietnam shortly after graduating from high school.

Comment of the Day: “Another “Great Stupid” Milestone: Mayor Adams’ Plan To Stop Shoplifting”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

An April 28 post on “Homeroom,” the official blog of the Department of Education (ED) called on schools to remove the criminal background question from admissions. The post exhorted “institutions across the country” to “re-examine their admissions and student service policies and holistically determine how they can better serve and support current and formerly incarcerated students.” We call on you to ban the box,” it concluded.

“Ban the box” refers to a campaign started by the civil rights group “All of Us or None” in 2004. “The campaign challenges the stereotypes of people with conviction histories by asking employers to choose their best candidates based on job skills and qualifications, not past convictions,” the campaign’s website explains. The fallacy of that characterization should be apparent: it assumes that a criminal conviction doesn’t reveal anything about an individual’s character, ethics, trustworthiness or values, as if committing a crime is just something that happens to people, like catching the flu. On the other side of the argument is the principle that a citizen can “pay his or her debt to society,” and once that debt is paid, the metaphorical slate is cleared.

Ryan Harkins wrestles with these issues in his Comment of the Day on the post, “Another “Great Stupid” Milestone: Mayor Adams’ Plan To Stop Shoplifting”:

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One thing that seems to be a common theme in decriminalization is the notion that people will just do the right thing if their situations weren’t dire. If people are shoplifting, it isn’t because they think they deserve stuff for free, or get a thrill out of thieving, or think theft is no big deal. No, they have to be shoplifting because that is the only way to acquire what they need. If they can just be shown there are alternatives, if they can just be instructed in the right behavior, and perhaps even the circumstances that is forcing them to steal are mitigated, that’s the true means of decreasing crime. Surely the last thing we want to do is give someone a black mark that will just make his circumstances worse and thereby drive him into even more crime, because then he really doesn’t have any choice but to shoplift. Who would give him the time of day if people knew he had a criminal record?

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Comment Of The Day: “Wait! Is THIS Peak Stupid In The Age Of The Great Stupid?”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Yesterday’s post about the theology PhD student telling a congregation that Jesus was transsexual based on artist renditions of him was calculated to trigger lively responses, and indeed it has. CD-VAPatriot is one of the Ethics Alarms readers who doesn’t comment often but is always sharp and provocative when she does, and this Comment of the Day is another example. (I have recently figured out that EA has a lot of female participants here. Good.)

Here is CD-VAPatriot‘s Comment of the Day on the post, “Wait! Is THIS Peak Stupid In The Age Of The Great Stupid?” …

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I’m often left speechless by Woke World, but this one takes the cake. I’m physically sickened by this claim.

I have no problem with the LGBTQ crowd, although when their group constantly holds their needs/wants/ideals over the importance of everyone and everything else, it becomes an issue. As for the trans community, I feel very sorry for those adults who believe they were born the wrong gender. I feel that this conviction comes from the mind of someone who is mentally ill. Mutilating healthy body parts, removing healthy organs, using heavy duty medications one’s body doesn’t actually need is considered Xenomelia (Body Integrity Dysphoria)…which is classified as a mental illness. I consider transgenders in this category. My heart breaks for someone in that much pain. I believe that someone suffering from such a serious illness should be treated with complete compassion.

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Assorted Ethics Observations On The Durham Report, Part II: Prelude

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ace commenter Humble Talent has performed a service to Ethics Alarms and its readers by reading the entire Durham report and explicating it. This was a comment on the previous post on Durham’s investigation, and I encountered it after I had started to write Part II, covering ethics take-aways from the report’s substance. Since Humble’s analysis will be useful background for Assorted Ethics Observations On The Durham Report, Part II, and because no similarly thorough annotation of the report has yet appeared, I’m giving it a stand-alone post.

Thanks, Humble.

***

Churning through it now…. Some of it is unsurprising, but it’s nice to see put in language as clear as he used:

Page 11 (On the Steele Dossier)

“Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting. Nor was Steele able to produce corroboration for any of the reported allegations, even after being offered $1 million or more by the FBI for such corroboration. Further, when interviewed by the FBI in January 2017, Danchenko also was unable to corroborate any of the substantive allegations in the Reports. Rather, Danchenko characterized the information he provided to Steele as rumor and speculation and the product of casual conversation.”

Page 60 (On opening Crossfire Hurricane)

“As it relates to predication for opening Crossfire Hurricane as a full investigation, after Strzok and Supervisory Special Agent-1 had traveled to London and interviewed the Australian diplomats on August2, 2016, the following Lync exchange between UKALAT-1 and Supervisory Special Agent – 1 on August 11, 2016 is instructive:

UKALAT- : Dude, are we telling them [British Intelligence Service] everything we know, or is there more to this?
Supervisory Special Agent – 1: that’s all we have
Supervisory Special Agent – 1: not holding anything back
UKALAT- 1 : Damn that’s thin
Supervisory Special Agent- 1: I know
Supervisory Special Agent-1: it sucks

UK ALAT – 1 went on to tell the Inspection Division that in discussing the matter with a senior British Intelligence Service – 1 official, the official was openly skeptical , said the FBI’s plan for an operation made no sense, and asked UK ALAT- 1 why the FBI did not just go to Papadopoulos and ask him what they wanted to know, a sentiment UK ALAT- 1 told investigators that he shared.

Later in the Fall of 2016 , UKALAT- 1 was at FBI Headquarters with some of his British Intelligence Service- counterparts . While there , members of the Crossfire Hurricane team played the audio /visual recordings of CHS- 1’s August 20, 2016 meeting with Carter Page . UKALAT – 1 said the effect on the British Intelligence Service – personnel was not positive because of the lack of any evidence coming out of the conversation:

UKALAT – 1 told the OIG that after watching the video one of his British colleagues said, “For [expletive ] sake , man. You went through a lot of trouble to get him to say nothing.” At a later point in time, after the Mueller Special Counsel team was in place, UKALAT – 1 said that the Brits finally had enough, and in response to a request for some assistance [a British Intelligence Serviceperson] basically said there was “no [expletive] way in hell they were going to do it.”

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Comment Of The Day: “Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

There I was, thinking dark thoughts and moping about the horrible traffic here over the weekend, and along comes A.M. Golden to remind me that this blog has always sought to inspire quality rather than quantity, with this superb Comment of the Day on the post about the enterprising Mr. Clifford, who feels that IBM isn’t him paying him enough not to work for 30 years, Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”! Here it is; it even has a “Facts of Life” reference!

* * *

Stipulated: The plaintiff’s disability could be a legitimate one. We don’t know. That doesn’t really change my answer.

How did we get here?

The Deep Pockets Rationalization aka The Jo Polniaczek Excuse: Named for Nancy McKeon’s character on the ’80s show “The Facts of Life.” In one episode, Jo borrows a watch belonging to her frenemy, wealthy Blair Warner, without asking so she can time herself while taking an exam. On her way back, the watch is damaged when she jumps into a quick basketball game. She blows it off because Blair is wealthy and has a lot of watches.

The Deep Pockets Rationalization states that the person with the most money should pay even if not at fault. A guy driving a Hyundai hits a guy driving a BMW. The Hyundai driver tries to argue that the BMW driver should pay for everything because he has more money. A person trips in a store and tries to compel the business to pay even though she tripped because she wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing. Or a restaurant is pressured to pay for a disfigured child’s surgery after the family failed to extort money with false allegations against employees (Remember the KFC incident from a few years’ back?).

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Comment Of The Day: “Unethical Quote Of The Month: President Joe Biden’s Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Perhaps you could tell: I was disgusted by President Biden’s speech at Howard. Was it more destructive demagoguery than his “Soul of the Nation” speech last fall? At such unethical depths, comparisons don’t matter. Is it worse to try to turn half the nation against the other half, or to poison the minds of young college graduates by using the authority of the Presidency to convince them that their own country is a dark and dangerous place with large segments of the public determined to harm them because of the color of their skin?

For those sufficiently independent-minded, Biden’s speech was not just hypocrisy, but stunningly thinly-veiled hypocrisy. Ann Althouse focused on one example, Biden referring to SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “one bright woman.” The blogging retired law professor wrote,

“Isn’t that a microaggression? It’s my subjective experience — disagree with me if you want — that “bright” is a patronizing word. It’s used for children, and when it’s used on an adult, it’s looking down on the person as if they are something like a child. It expresses vague surprise that the person stands out and can do reasonably difficult tasks, but it sets them apart as not able to do the most sophisticated things that the speaker imagines himself to be doing. Older men in superior positions have said it through the years about younger associates and, especially, women. And I think it’s what a racist would say about a capable black person.”

The routinely perceptive and incisive Mrs. Q. picks up on the same vibes in her Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Quote Of The Month: President Joe Biden’s Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address”:

* * *

Where to begin…

Who was Biden’s mentor? An Exalted Cyclops who recruited at least 150 members into his chapter of the KKK.

What did Biden tell a digital audience on a black man’s podcast?
That if they had trouble deciding if they were for him or Trump, then they “weren’t black.” Last I checked an old white guy mentored by a formerly virulent white supremacist should be last person to tell blacks if they were in fact black.

Who said this about Obama?
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That was Biden.

Who said this during his campaign?
“…poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” That was Biden.

And who said this gem?
” You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.” Biden of course!

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Comment of the Day: “More Weird Tales From The Great Stupid: Oh Yeah, This Will Work Out Well…”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Unlike so many of us here so often, Jim Hodgson is writing about a topic in which he has directly relevant experience as he explains some of the issues involved in the Los Angeles (nutso-cuckoo) proposal to have non-law enforcement personnel regulate traffic violations. His Comment of the Day is lengthy but ethically delicious and nutritious, so I am going to be uncharacteristically brief in my introduction. Here is Jim’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More Weird Tales From The Great Stupid: Oh Yeah, This Will Work Out Well…”:

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There’s a lot to be unpacked on this topic. I have never found the term “pretextual stops” accurate for typical traffic stops, even when there is an enforcement emphasis on interdiction of illegal drugs or firearms. Officers are trained to be alert for signs of criminal activity and to investigate accordingly. When suspicion rises to the level of “reasonable suspicion,” officers are authorized (and expected) to detain people to determine whether or not there is criminal activity.

If reasonable suspicion becomes confirmed to the point of “probable cause” to believe that a felony crime is being or has been committed, then arrest is authorized. In my state and every state with whose laws I am knowledgeable, the traffic code is separate from the criminal code (except for overlap in areas like vehicular assault, vehicular homicide and perhaps habitual drunk driving) and are instead considered a regulatory function.

A legal traffic stop will begin when an officer witnesses a traffic violation and either initiates the stop or communicates with another officer who does so. If there is no actual traffic violation then there is no valid basis for a stop, making it a Fourth Amendment violation. If the traffic stop is factually valid, and the officer subsequently sees evidence of crime in plain view, or develops reasonable suspicion based on what he or she perceives with the five senses, the traffic stop can move into the territory of a “Terry stop,” justifying further inquiry, leading to a decision of whether or not there is probable cause for arrest.

Officers are trained to always cite or charge the violator with the original violation that precipitated the traffic stop, whether or not the extended detention results in an arrest. (In the litigious world we live in, officers are growing less and less prone to issue mere verbal warnings for traffic violations, due to frequent subsequent claims that, “If I had actually broken the law, the officer would have written me a ticket!”) This traffic stop process applies whether the violator is merely a bad or careless driver, a drug trafficker, gun runner, a burglar carrying a trunk load of stolen loot or a kindly-looking guy with a dead body in the back floorboard.

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Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Further discussion of the Jordan Neely case is appropriate, as Daniel Penny, the US Marine veteran who apparently killed Neely, a homeless and mentally-disturbed man, while trying to protect passengers on a New York City subway train earlier this month, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter.

I expected that, and while the pressure being placed on authorities by race-hucksters trying to make this tragedy into George Floyd II probably played a part, I think Penny had to be charged. He used excessive force to engage in a defensible act of civic responsibility, and a man died. That’s manslaughter. “We believe that the conviction should be for murder because that was intentional,” said Neely family attorney Lennon Edwards said today. Right: it must have been intentional, because all white people are looking for excises to kill blacks. I can forgive the family for being angry, bitter, and legally ignorant, but Edwards’s statement is unforgivable.

Then there is the news media spin, with outlets like the Associated Press describing Neely as a “homeless street artist” to make him sound like he was restrained for painting portraits of subway riders without their consent. He was screaming at them and threatening them, and had harmed strangers before. The news media is already doing its Kyle Rittenhouse act on Penny. They want him to be tarred as a racist and murderer.

Here is Null Pointer’s Comment of the Day on Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”:

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In order to live in a civilized society, citizens must agree to abide by a the rules of a social contract. No defecating in the streets. No fornicating in public. No random acts of aggression or violence. Things like that. Over the last few decades, a portion of the citizenry has decided to unilaterally rewrite the underlying rules of the social contract without any buy-in from the rest of the citizenry. What they don’t seem to understand is that this buy-in is necessary. If the vast majority of the citizenry does not agree on a new social contract, and the old contract is destroyed, then the civilization is destroyed. It reverts to fragmented tribal groups who refuse to cooperate with one another.

The attempt to normalize random acts of violence and aggression will never be agreed to by the majority of the citizenry. Safety is one of the base blocks in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If civilization cannot offer a baseline level of safety to its citizenry, then there is no reason to buy into it. The entire reason people form civilizations is to obtain a baseline level of safety. If a civilization does not offer a baseline level of safety, then what reason is there for people to subvert their own desires, customs, culture and beliefs to a larger group? Especially when that larger group also demands a large portion of the fruits of individual’s labor to be handed over to them to support that civilization.

The civilization saboteurs can keep kicking the pillars out from under the civilization, but they will not be able to stop the collapse that occurs as a result. More riots may not have the effect they are hoping for.