Craig Calcaterra, a former lawyer who now does baseball blogging over at the NBC sports site, has once again called for baseball stadiums to include protective netting along the stands from home plate to first and third base. This time the impetus is a frightening incident in Milwaukee at a Brewers game, in which a broken bat handle went flying into the stands and hit a child. These types of incidents have been happening with greater frequency in recent years, although these is some disagreement about why. Some say it is the more brittle maple bats, others that it is the whip-thin handles of the bats now in vogue, and still others blame the new glut of baseball parks seating fans closer to the field. Continue reading
Daily Life
Ethics Quote of the Week
“Maybe there’s only one revolution, since the beginning, the good guys against the bad guys. Question is…who are the good guys?”
—Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster) in the 1966 Western “The Professionals,” script by Richard Brooks, from the novel by Frank O’Roarke. He is responding to a question from the horse wrangler played by Robert Ryan, who asks why Dolworth and other Americans had fought in the Mexican revolution.
Lancaster’s casual reflection turns out to be significant, because the whole movie hinges on the problems arising from mistaking good guys for bad guys and vice versa. In ethics and in life, it is useful to remember that the people we think are wrong, misguided, ill-motivated, irresponsible and unethical often think the same of us, and might even be right. Even more disturbing is the possibility, always present, that an individual we admire, follow and look to for guidance and inspiration may be one of “the bad guys.”
Ethics Collision at MSNBC
Donny Deutsch, a guest host at MSNBC, lost his gig, at least for now, after including MSNBC’s Angriest Man, commentator Keith Olberman, in a segment called “America the Angry.” It examined how media pundits are stoking public anger with inflammatory rhetoric and appeals to emotion rather that reason. MSNBC objected to the criticism of one of its own on its own airtime.
Based on stated policy, the objection and Deutsch’s punishment were justified. MSNBC boss Phil Griffin had send a stern warning to all producers and on-air talent, saying, Continue reading
Arizona, Illegal Immigration, and Ethics
The State of Arizona has passed a controversial law to address the serious social, economic and law-enforcement problems caused by the bi-partisan abdication of the core government responsibility to protect our borders and enforce a fair and rational immigration policy. President Obama calls the law “misguided,” which suggests, in the absence of any current efforts by his administration to deal with the illegal immigration crisis, that he believes that doing nothing at all is “well-guided.” It isn’t. It is irresponsible and unethical.
The governance ethics principle involved here is clear, and it is one that the Obama Administration has been willing to embrace when it considers the objective important enough. For example, national health care insurance reform will not work unless everyone who can afford to do so buys health insurance. This raises serious issues of Constitutionality and, as two seconds of listening to conservative talk radio will let you know, slippery slope problems. Never before has the State presumed to order individuals what to buy. (You don’t have to buy auto insurance if you’re willing to eschew driving.) It doesn’t take much imagination to think of ways this intrusion into personal liberty could be abused, but the alternative is not to fix the problem, Obama reasons, and that is even more unacceptable, at least if you care about the problem. In leadership and government, fixing the problem is the prime directive, and yes, this means Utilitarianism in its strongest and most potentially dangerous sense. You have to make the system work, and often, more often than we like to admit, that means ethical trade-offs. The government ethics principle is “Fix the problem with a good faith solution, and do everything possible to minimize the bad side effects as they appear.” Continue reading
More Bad Parent Ethics
None of them shipped their child to Russia, this week’s bad parents betrayed an infant, a 13-year old boy, and an adult daughter spiraling toward disaster… Continue reading
License Plate Ethics: Is a Hateful Message Unethical If Nobody Understands It?
Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles, following analysis worthy of the cracking of the ENIGMA code during World War II, concluded that a vanity plate reading “14CV88” was “racially offensive” and had to be pulled from the road. Prof. Eugene Volokh raises the issue of whether this violates the First Amendment (he suspects it does), but the more interesting question, at least for me, is whether there is anything unethical about displaying a message like this.
Oh! I forgot to explain to you why you too should be horribly offended at the “message!” Continue reading
Ethics, Punishment and the Dead Child in the Back Seat
Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten received a Pultitzer Prize for his feature, “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?” Focusing on the grief of parents who caused the deaths of their own children by negligently leaving them locked in over-heated cars, Weingarten, to his credit, doesn’t advocate a position in his article, although it would be impossible to read it without feeling compassion and empathy for his subjects, both those who have been prosecuted and those who have not.
The article squarely raises a classic ethical conflict, as well as the question of the role of punishment in society. As always with ethical standards, the issue ultimately encompasses how we decide what is in the best interests of society. Weingarten points out that there is no consensus on whether parents who inadvertently kill their children in this way should be brought to court: some prosecutors bring charges, others do not. Which is right?
I don’t like my answer much, but I think it is inescapable, once the emotion is left behind. Continue reading
Progress, with a dash of…WHAT???
Penguin Group Australia had to reprint 7,000 copies of its new cook book, Pasta Bible, last week,when it was discovered that the recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto called for “salt and freshly ground black people.” (“It’s a cook book!!!!!“—“To Serve Man,” The Twilight Zone)
Guess what it was supposed to say. That’s right. Continue reading
Crash the Tea Party Today, Teach America’s Youth Tomorrow?
Jason Levin is a media lab technology teacher at the Conestoga Middle School in Beaverton, Oregon, and for all I know, a good one. Jason Levin is also a passionate political activist whose sense of fair politics is a little bit skewed: he has gained notoriety through his plan, detailed on his website http://www.crashtheteaparty.org, to discredit and undermine the political movement through a series of unethical tactics, such as infiltrating rallies and shouting racist and homophobic slogans, seeking out reporters and making wild claims posing as Tea Party advocates, holding mis-spelled signs, and dressing in Nazi uniforms.
Needless to say (I hope), Levin’s idea of political warfare is unethical in every way. Misleading the public and media about a party or group rather than contesting its positions on the merits is dishonest and a disgrace to the democratic system. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: George O. Wood
George O. Wood, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, was one of a more than a hundred Christian leaders who signed the “Covenant for Civility”, a statement with the admirable purpose of encouraging respect, moderation and tolerance as citizens debate contentious political and social issues. Now Wood has withdrawn his name from the petition….because he doesn’t want his name on the same piece of paper as those who disagree with him on contentious social and political issues.
“The problem is the tent that has grown so large on the signatures of this that they are including people who are supportive of gay marriage and abortion rights,” explained a spokesman for Wood’s church, the nation’s second largest Pentecostal group. “He says that he cannot be a part of signing a document that includes people who are taking a viewpoint in their own issues that are clearly contradictory to the moral teachings of Scripture.”
Ah.
Wait a minute…What???
I don’t think Mr. Wood quite understands this respect and civility stuff. Respect other points of view, as long as they agree with yours? Use moderation in words, but display utter disdain for others in your actions? Why the heck did he sign this petition in the first place?
Now he’s doing the cause of civility a favor: getting George O. Wood’s name off the petition only strengthens it. Now somebody needs to send it to him to read. On second thought, never mind; he doesn’t respect the names on it enough to have the courtesy to consider it.
Ethics Alarms 