Daily Life

A New Ethics Alarm Goes Off!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I had dropped off Spuds for an emergency visit to the vet: one of his ears suddenly started swelling for no discernible reason. On the way out, I chatted with another concerned pet owner, who was sitting with her adorable aged Yorkie-Chihuahua mix (known as a “Chorkie”: that’s not her above, but it looks just like her—the dog, not the owner). We talked for quite a while, then I took my leave, after asking her dog’s name (April).

Half-way to my car in the parking lot, I started thinking, “That was rude. I talk to this nice, friendly woman for 15 minutes, ask her dog’s name, and never ask for hers or identify myself. I acted like she didn’t matter, and all I was really interested in was her dog. How dehumanizing and disrespectful.” Then I recalled all the other dog owners I know only by their dogs. (Everybody know Spuds.) One of them came by my house two days ago, knocked on the door, and gave me all the ingredients for tacos. “I know you’re having to cook for just one now after your wife’s death, and we had this left over,” she said. I had no idea who she was because she didn’t have her dog with her, a very old Sheltie named Lilly. Eventually I figured it out. (She pretty clearly doesn’t know my name either.)

Back to the vet’s…I turned around, went back into the pet hospital, and found the woman I had just left. “I came back to apologize,” I said. “I asked your dog’s name but never asked what yours was. I really did enjoy speaking with you. I’m Jack.” She smiled and said, “I’m Carla! You don’t need to apologize. That happens all the time!” “I know it does, and it shouldn’t,” I said as I left.

As I drove home, I found myself wondering if the fact that she was black helped trigger the alarm. It might have. Whatever the reason, that alarm is set now.

Comment of the Day: “Presumed Racism Raises Its Obnoxious Head at ‘Social Qs'”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Here is another one of Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s measured, rational, provocative and useful formula pieces. There’s a lot here: Hanlon’s Razor, marital advice, the flaws of presumed racism, weenyism…all in all, a top of the line Comment of the Day.

Here it is, in response to “Presumed Racism Raises Its Obnoxious Head at ‘Social Qs”‘…

***

Alright, let’s break this down. Dealing with people acting unreasonable is what led me to learn deconstruction mindset. We can’t always take the easy way out by pretending people don’t exist. Sometimes we have to get constructive.

My values:

  1. Racists should have their views challenged. If I ran into an actual racist doing actual racist things, I’d ask incisive questions to deconstruct their whole paradigm.
  2. It’s more effective to assume a misunderstanding than malice. If it’s a misunderstanding, then it gets resolved normally with minimal fuss. If it’s malice, then the malicious people find themselves having to either spell out that they’re jerks or pretend to be incompetent, both of which have would tend to erode their arrogance. By assuming a misunderstanding we also get the opportunity to demonstrate that we are thoughtful and respectful people.
  3. I would like more people to make a habit of doing all of the above.

Others’ values:

  1. The inquirer’s wife doesn’t trust that other people might just have made mistakes instead of having ill will towards her. Perhaps due to past experiences, she has some reason to assume that they are more likely to be deliberately mistreating her.
  2. She doesn’t want to make the effort to find out for certain if her assumptions about others are correct. She apparently has a habit of avoiding interacting with people she suspects may be racist, because of the painful possibility of having to deal with an actual racist.

Framing the situation constructively:

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Another Tale From Customer Service Hell!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

On top of everything else going wrong, my Direct TV reception started going on and off two days ago, alternating between no signal, intermittent signals, and stuttering signals. It started during an overcast night with occasional rain, but continued the next day, with clear skies but high winds. So I called customer service, found my way to tech support, and was on hold for 40 minutes, being told every five minutes that my estimated wait was 10 minutes, then told for another 15 minutes that it would be a five minute wait, and so on. There were 8 “30 second” waits.

The representative was nice, and told me that it sounded like they needed to check out the dish. This, he said, would cost $99 dollars. I asked why that was, since I paid for their service and wasn’t getting it, in addition to the fact that I had not been charged the last time someone had to adjust the dish. Whereupon he said, “Oh! Then there will be no charge.” And he set up the appointment.

What is that? A weenie test? A scam? If I hadn’t objected, I would have paid $99. Are we back to the Middle Easter bazaar, where no price is set and we have to haggle over everything?

What’s happening????

A Nelson For the “Get Trump!” Mob and a Lesson in Consequentialism

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I was teaching another legal ethics course today and had occasion to muse about what a foolish ethical system consequentialism is, as I have periodically discussed on EA. The short version is that deciding whether an action was right or wrong, ethical or unethical depending on what the eventual results flowing from it are is both foolish and illogical: an action can only be judged based on what is known at the time the action is taken. What occurs as a result of the action is vulnerable to chaos: once those metaphorical billions of billiard balls start rolling around on the theoretical infinite pool table, anything can happen and frequently does. People habitually say that a decision was “a mistake” or “wrong” when it was neither, just because the results of the decision were the opposite of what was intended.

Think of “The Simpsons'” master of mockery Nelson Muntz above as the spokesperson of the cosmos, and as Donald Trump as his unwitting agent. The previous, pre-Musk proprietors of Twitter, full allies that they were in the coordinated (and unethical) effort by the Axis of Unethical Conduct to bring Donald Trump to ruin for all time, kicked him off the ubiquitous social media platform for insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen, a plausible but unprovable thesis. (I quit Twitter in protest, as the move was totalitarian, reflecting the totalitarian drift of the entire political left—which has continued.) The Trump Haters and Trump Deranged cheered. Trump, given no outlet for his annoying but often effective outbursts, juvenile jibes, rants and trolling orgies, responded by setting up his own pseudo-Twitter platform, Truth Social. It was and is cheesy, but it did its main job, which was to provide the ex-President with a web platform from which he could not be censored or silenced.

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The Grandparents’ Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

As often happens, some click-bait headline sucks me in and I find an interesting ethics topic as a result. This time, the headline was “Woman applauded for demanding parents get noses pierced before they can see granddaughter again.” What???

The story behind that unique description was a woman and her husband took her infant daughter to Mexico to visit her parents. The parents gave the one-year-old girl a pair of earrings for her first birthday, and Mom told them that she would hold on to the gift until her daughter was old enough to have her ears pierced. But when the American couple returned from meeting some friends after leaving the girl in the care of Grandma and Grandpa, they were informed that they “didn’t need to wait [until she was old enough] because they had taken her to get her ears pierced” already.

The couple was furious. The girl’s father said that they could never trust the grandparents alone with their daughter, but his wife announced that she would not take her or any future kids to see her parents in Mexico. The family checked out of their hotel and returned to the States.

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Normalizing Theft

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Since we began the day with a dead canary in the mine of democracy, here’s another. That video shows a thief rampaging through an Apple Store in Emeryville, north of Oakland (where Woke Kindergarten romps). Nobody tries to stop him. Nobody even appears alarmed by him. He escapes by running right by a police car.

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Apparently My Dog Thinks I’m Woke

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Times opinion editor Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer used a podcast to explain how the great political divide affects dogs. Training styles and methods can be as much about identity as efficacy, she has realized. “Are you imposing colonial concepts on your dogs? Are you harming their mental health? Is your style of training woke?”

Alicia’s rescue dog likes to chase joggers. “There are a few ways to deal with your dog having a jogger chasing problem,” she says. “And these solutions maybe fall into one of two camps, positive reinforcement training or balanced training. Positive training is a style of dog training that basically says, we’re not going to make your dog physically uncomfortable in order to get it to behave the way you want. So what it argues for doing is rewarding behavior you like, and basically managing your dog so that it can’t engage in behavior you don’t like, and just kind of ignoring it.”

Balanced training, however, or what I would call Skinnerian training, involves negative reinforcement. “If your dog is doing something that you don’t like,” Alicia explains, “to discourage that, we want to make it uncomfortable for the dog to do that. We want to give some kind of negative stimulus. Sometimes that might be a noise, or sometimes like a squirt of water to the face.”

“But sometimes it’s more physical discomfort than that. That means punishing your dog. And usually that punishment comes in the form of something called an e-collar, a tool that will give your dog an electricity stimulus.”

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Ethics Heroes: My Neighbors, Ted and Linda West

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Wests have been our neighbors on the little cul-de-sac called Westminster Place in Alexandria, Virginia since Grace and I bought our home a week after getting engaged. They are the ultimate good neighbors in every respect. Today they really stepped up.

I have a year-long contract this year to do monthly legal ethics CLE presentations over Zoom for a national audience of lawyers in need of ethics credit. Today was the first of sixteen; with new material and a good impression to be made, I was a bit anxious. Scheduled for 9 am, the program occupied my attentions from 7 am on. Finally, I was ready.

A half hour before the program was scheduled to begin, power at the Marshall house went off. The problem could not be addressed by the power company for several hours. Desperate and panicked, I woke my neighbors (and their gigantic dog, Peaches) from a sound sleep, and asked 1) if one of them had a Zoom account (YES!) and 2) if I could use their computer to conduct my two-hour seminar.

And they said yes to that too. They made me a cup of coffee, set me up, and then fled the house, as most people tend to do when I start talking about legal ethics. I was ready seconds before the program’s scheduled start; it was very well received. Missing the first session in a series would have been disastrous. My neighbors had my back when I really needed them.

As I knew they would.

Ethics Dunce, Life Competence and Workplace Division: Brittany Pietsch

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

My first reaction was to have sympathy for Brittany Pietsch, the Cloudfare account executive who somehow thought recording her Zoomed firing and posting it on social media would be a good idea. Then I learned she was 27. That’s much too old to behave like she did, much less to be self-righteous about it. Her experience ended up on every social media platform and was covered by media outlets from the New York Post to the The Wall Street Journal, and now she is the official “poster girl” for deluded and entitled young workers who don’t get the capitalist system and the competitive workplace.

You can see her nine-minute clip here. If you don’t wince through it, you may need a refresher course in workplace ethics yourself. An at-will employee, Brittany argues with the HR staff who were assigned to dismiss her. Here’s a typical exchange:

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Comment of the Day: “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Wow, those 7 days went by fast! I had flagged this memorable comment by JutGory as a Comment of the Day on the 13th, fully intending to get it up every single day since then, and my plans kept getting derailed (because this is how everything has been going since October around here). Fortunately, this particular entry is timeless, another example of one of my favorite kinds of reader comment, a personal reminiscence with an ethics kick. Also fortunately, the disgrace of Harvard president Claudine Gay, the matter that inspired Jut, is still reverberating. Still, I apologize for my delay.

Here is JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”:

***

I am not sure what to think of allegations of plagiarism.

I am probably both stupid and smart in this regard.

I attended St. John’s College. Plagiarism was hardly an issue. Everything you wrote was supposed to be original. If you wrote about Plato, it did not matter if you failed to attribute criticisms to Aristotle.

No one would plagiarize Aquinas when criticizing Aristotle.

If you plagiarized Plotinus in commenting on Plato, who would know?

The idea was not to research things, it was to think things.

(Amusingly, I attributed to Jesus a quote that was actually one of Rabbi Hillel. Who knew?)

Going into grad school in Philosophy, I was delightfully amused when my Logic Professor was surprised at my course essay. He expected a “book report” sort of essay, while I gave him an original response to the the work. I did not cite anything. Why should I? The thoughts came out of my head, and my name was on the front page of the paper.

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