Daily Life

A Boy Named Sue, A Woman Named Edward

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I think I know where he works…

I have no idea what to make of this: I feel like I fell into a “Seinfeld” episode. Remember the “high talker”?

I received an e-mail yesterday from the executive of a large company inquiring about an ethics training. The first name of the executive was Edward, but when I called the listed number, a very high, very female voice answered the phone. I asked to speak to the executive, and received a perky, “I’m Edward! Thanks for calling me back.”

Come on. Edward? What woman goes by Edward? I was about to make a comment like, “That’s an unusual name—how did you come by it?” when I had an image of “Seinfeld’s” high talker, a short, fat, bald guy, becoming irate when callers mistook him for his girlfriend over the phone. This was a potential client, and I didn’t want to annoy her—or him. On the other hand, surely she, assuming it is a she, knows that her masculine  name causes confusion. I searched through her e-mail messages for any hint of her—if she was a her—gender, and found nothing. Wouldn’t it be reasonable and fair to at least confirm that yes, she was a woman, or yes, he was a male counter-tenor, or yes, he was indeed a castrati, or at least do something to clear up what he…or she, dammit… had to know was confusing to anyone meeting her over the phone? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Randy Cohen’s Scofflaw Cycling: How Did THIS Guy Ever Get To Be Called ‘The Ethicist’?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Reader Lance Jacobs, a New York bicycle instructor, was moved by last month’s Ethics Alarms Post “Randy Cohen’s Scofflaw Cycling: How Did THIS Guy Ever Get To Be Called ‘The Ethicist’?” to write the New York Times about their scofflaw, erstwhile “Ethicist,” who had proudly confessed in a an essay that he routinely broke the law while cycling, and believed that he was right to do so. The Times didn’t print Lance’s letter, an open letter to Randy, and sadly, this blog does not (Yet! Yet!) have the circulation of the Times, but it is an excellent rebuff to Cohen, and a most deserving “Comment of the Day.”

Here it is:

“Dear Mr Cohen, Continue reading →

Oh! THAT’S What Manners Were For!

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments

A young woman posted a harrowing and depressing personal account on the web, describing the  gauntlet of daily sexual harassment attractive females must endure just going through life. “I decided it was important,” she writes, “because in my own way, I can (unfortunately) point out exactly what is wrong with men when they don’t realize how hard it is to be a woman.  How we do not have equal opportunities and freedoms in everyday life.  How most men, even good caring men, have no clue what we go through on a daily basis just trying to live our lives.”

What follows should make every man angry and every woman angrier, a sickening story of a subway ride that became a nightmare, simply because too many young men think of pretty women as quarry, rather than human beings.

She writes, Continue reading →

Movie Ethics: The Disruptive Child, the Weenies, and The Duty To Confront

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Over at Consumerist there is a ridiculous post about a woman, “Kelly,” whose recent movie-going experience was ruined by a couple of boorish and irresponsible parents who brought their pre-schooler to the movie and did nothing while he annoyed the woman, talking to her, nudging her, and generally being a nuisance. You can read her account of the whole fiasco here.

Apparently it never occurred to the woman, or her equally passive and impotent brother, who has apparently been writing indignant e-mails to Regal Theaters after the incident, to tell the couple that 1) they have no right to let their child interfere with other audience members trying to enjoy the movie, 2) they either need to control their child or leave, and 3) if they don’t, then she will go make such a fuss in the lobby with the staff that they will be asked to leave. Continue reading →

Randy Cohen’s Scofflaw Cycling: How Did THIS Guy Ever Get To Be Called “The Ethicist”?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Stop means “stop,’ unless Randy decides it means “yield”—after all, he knows best.

Randy Cohen was the original author of the New York Times Magazine’s column “The Ethicist.” During his tenure he made a name for himself with lively and sometimes witty prose, and on Ethics Alarms, at least, a disturbing tendency to rationalize clearly unethical conduct when it suited his political agenda, which was unapologetically left of center. In one notorious example, he told a student whose wealthy and famous father was paying her college tuition that it would be ethical for her to cash a partial tuition refund check she received from the university to her mother and stepfather, who believed that the father had not paid his fair share of child support. Cash that check, advised Cohen….“You are entitled to this money not because he is successful while you struggle. Such rough justice would also encourage you to sneak into his house, swipe his sofa and sell it on some kind of furniture black market. That would be stealing; this is merely claiming what he owes you.”  Of course, this is also stealing: cashing a check not intended for you because you believe it should be used to settle a disputed debt between the owner and someone else is not honest or fair, regardless of the merits of that belief. But Randy is a class warrior: as “The Ethicist,” he routinely took the position that it was “ethical” for people to use dubious means to get an edge on the evil rich, which in his world apparently means anyone richer than him.

I don’t know what Cohen has been doing since the Times sacked him; it isn’t practicing ethics, as he didn’t do this before his tenure, and confessed when he left the job that writing about ethics didn’t make him practice ethics while he was “The Ethicist” either, something I found and still find incomprehensible. Now, he tells us in a recent Times piece, the Ex-Ethicist is riding around New York City on his bicycle, running stop signs and red lights.

He tells us, moreover, that this is ethical, though it is certainly illegal. “I roll through a red light if and only if no pedestrian is in the crosswalk and no car is in the intersection — that is, if it will not endanger myself or anybody else, ” Cohen says. “To put it another way, I treat red lights and stop signs as if they were yield signs. A fundamental concern of ethics is the effect of our actions on others. My actions harm no one. This moral reasoning may not sway the police officer writing me a ticket, but it would pass the test of Kant’s categorical imperative: I think all cyclists could — and should — ride like me.”

This is arrogant, fatuous, reckless and wrong. But that’s Randy.

Even Coehn’s reading of Kant is wrong. The categorical imperative says that an action is ethical only if it could be the universal rule without harm, and this, despite Cohen’s rationalizations, could not. Who says the cyclist’s judgment of when it is safe to run a red light or stop sign is correct or reasonable in every instance? Why couldn’t motorists also use this same justification for running red lights at will? Continue reading →

The Name Shame

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Millard understood.

Giving one’s children ridiculous, bizarre or otherwise perverse names is the height of parental arrogance and narcissism, an abuse of power in which Golden Rule considerations evaporate in the desire to place a distinctive mark on the child of one’s creation, like a brand or a particularly garish tattoo.

There is some weak historical evidence that an oddball name can point a child to leadership or other kinds of singular achievements by isolating him or her from peers. A number of U.S. Presidents have had rare names, with four using their middle monickers to be more distinctive, and one, Lyndon Johnson, being specifically named by his mother so he “would look good on a ballot.” But there is also evidence that strange names are handicaps, and no doubt at all that they risk making children a lot more miserable than calling them Ed, Elizabeth or Frank.

Over at Deadspin, Drew Magary has harsh criticism for the apparently rising trend of wacko names, and all power to him. He combed through a Parents Magazine survey of the names favored by 13,000 people, and arrived at the horrifying conclusion that “Americans are somehow getting even worse at naming children, and they show no signs of correcting themselves.”  Among his trenchant commentary on the names he discovered: 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.

Banning the Privacy Bomb

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Yes, I think posting this photo is a lousy thing to do to your dog, too.

The stories come out routinely, and the opposing opinions are predictable. A boorish date dumps a woman via arrogant e-mail, which is promptly forwarded to thousands, making him a national laughing stock and pariah. A movie star sends an angry and mean-spirited message to his teenage daughter, who places it in the hands of the celebrity-devouring media…which then use it to savage the star’s reputation.  A Harvard law student takes an e-mail sent by a friend and fellow-student as a follow-up to a contentious discussion about race, and forwards it to minority advocates on campus, who then condemn the “friend” as a racist. A model live-tweets her encounter with the married actor sitting next to her on a flight, as he engages in awkward flirtation. In each case, defenders of the punitive distributor of the embarrassing communication argue that the victim deserved it, while critics of the conduct insist that it is a betrayal of privacy and trust.
We need to decide, as a culture, whether we believe that reasonable expectations of privacy should be respected or not; indeed, whether they should survive or not. Those who endorse, defend and encourage the kind of conduct in these incidents and many more are, whether they realize it or not, fouling the nest of our national culture and community, making not just privacy, but also friendship and intimacy, almost impossible. Continue reading →

How to Tell Whether A Service Provider Will Cheat You, in One Easy Step!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Call. It won’t do you any good, but do call….

I was waiting at a stop light in the left lane when the light changed, and suddenly the boxy little truck with printing all over it look a sharp left turn from the right lane across mine, narrowly missing my car and requiring me to slam on the brakes. After laying on the horn, I saw that it was a truck for a local cleaning service, and voila! There, on the back door in bold print, was the legend: We care about safe driving! 1-888-555-SAFE. And the vehicle’s number, “515 DI.” For once I could actually use one of those numbers to report a reckless jerk on the road!

I have trouble memorizing numbers, so I repeated the information over and over again, out loud, as I drove home: it helped that the little truck was right in front of me most of the way. I reached home, ran up stairs to my office, wrote down the number to be sure, and dialed it.

It was a fake number. it wasn’t even a disconnected number. It didn’t connect to anything.

Now I’m wondering if any of those “How am I driving?” numbers are real, and I’ll say this: if your phone number is a lie, I’m not letting your employees clean my house, especially if they drive like that.

If only the name of the company had been on the back of the truck.

Never mind, though.

I’m going to find it.

Funny, Clever, Convenient, And Wrong: Housebites

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Your dirty pans, sir…just as you ordered them!”

Normally I wouldn’t post about the practices of a U.K. company, since there are already too many U.S. stories involving ethics for me to keep up with. The innovation added to the world of deception by Housebites, however, has United States written all over it, and I predict it will travel across the pond in about a minute and a half.

The British company will not only cook and deliver a gourmet meal to order for your dinner party or romantic evening…it will deliver dirty pots and pans, to give your claims of hard labor in the kitchen that extra believability. From the company’s press release:

“Housebites.com, the takeaway service that delivers restaurant quality food has today announced a service called ‘pretend you cooked’ that allows customers to pretend they have slaved away at a hot stove more convincingly by delivering dirty pans alongside the food. Cooked by a professional chef and delivered to your door, Housebites main courses cost on average between £10 and £12, and now for an additional £5, customers can request the pans used to cook them for added authenticity. Collection of the pans is then arranged as easily as the original delivery slot.”

How nice. Continue reading →