Daily Life

Art Ethics: We Are Not Bowls of Fruit

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

During his legendary questioning by Clarence Darrow in the Scopes trial, Williams Jennings Bryan famously answered one of Darrow’s queries by saying, “I don’t think about things I don’t think about.” (Darrow’s rejoinder: “Do you think about the things you do think about?”)  One of the ethical issues I hadn’t thought about was whether an artist drawing a subject in public without his or her consent is being unethical. Thanks to a post by an inquiring artist on an art blog who heard the faint ringing of an ethics alarm in his head, I’m thinking about it now, and it is trickier than you might think.

Once the artist starts rolling, he has a lot of ethics questions: Continue reading →

Dubious Ethics Studies, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

There are good reasons to be skeptical of all studies purporting to analyze what people think according to how they fit into common ideological categories. In 2003, a study purported to portray conservatism as a kind of mental disorder. In 2008, another series of studies was packaged to make the case that liberals were compassionate in words only, that when it came to putting one’s money where one’s conscience was, it was those mean old conservatives who opened their wallets. Now comes a study called “Do Green Products Make Us Better People?”published in the latest edition of the “Journal of Psychological Science.” Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, did a series of experiments comparing the behavior of patrons of “green” products and the conduct of the less environmentally correct. Continue reading →

Biden’s Incivility: No “Big Fucking Deal”?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

For the most part, the media and the culture have given Vice-President Joe Biden a pass on his ebullient violation of a civil discourse taboo, on national TV and during an official ceremony, caught on a microphone for all to hear. That only makes the consequences of Biden’s inability to control his potty-mouth worse, though not for Biden. Biden has made so many embarrassing public utterances that he is treated by the media and much of the public as sort of a crazy uncle, someone we expect to do and say outrageous things because he can’t help himself (it stands as the smoking gun proof of the media’s bias against Sarah Palin that her verbal mistakes were—and are—pounced upon and used as evidence of her incompetence, while her Democratic counterpart’s career-long fondness for saying silly and outrageous things was —and is—excused.) But national leaders set cultural standards, and the shrugging off of Biden’s F-bomb permanently lowers our standards of civility as much as “Baby killer!” or “You lie!” So thanks, Joe, for making America just a little bit less gentile, just a little bit cruder. We knew you had it in you. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Boston Sportswriter Pete Abraham

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I try to keep the number of Ethics Heroes and Ethics Dunces in rough balance here, and sometimes I despair of how few of the former and how many of the latter I have to choose from. Perhaps part of the problem is that good conduct is more common than bad conduct, and thus has to be especially flashy before the media notices. Or perhaps I am not giving sufficient credit to small, ethical gestures that in their own way make a difference.

This brings us to Pete Abraham, a writer on the Red Sox beat for the Boston Globe. Pete writes the “Extra Bases” blog, and does something that I have not seen before. At the end of his post every morning, Pete signs off with, “Thanks as always for reading the blog.”

It is a small but genteel exhibition of civility and manners that, for me at least, serves the same purpose every morning as Ben Franklin’s Daily Questions. It sets the ethics alarms for the day and reminds me to not get so focused on work, tasks and problems that I forget to help smooth out the edges for those around me.

I’ve never met Pete Abraham, but I hope I do some day. He is obviously a kind and caring person who understands the importance of civility. He knows how to set his ethics alarms.

And best of all, he’s a Red Sox fan.

Oh—I almost forgot! “Thanks as always for reading the blog.”

“It’s Just Sex”? No, It’s Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There isn’t much good that can come out of the sordid infidelity Trifecta of John Edwards, Tiger Woods, and Jesse James, but maybe there will be this: Perhaps after the public has observed and measured all the pain and suffering the outrageous conduct of these three men has inflicted on innocent third parties, especially those who depended on them and trusted them, it will not be so quick to accept the facile argument, perfected during Bill Clinton’s ordeals, that adultery is “just sex.”

The latest flagrant celebrity dog, Jesse James, is an especially powerful case for leaving the Clinton Excuse with Clinton. He had a wife who clearly adored him, the late-marrying Sandra Bullock, who touchingly paid a tribute to her supposedly devoted husband in one of her several Best Actress acceptance speeches this year by saying that she knew he “had her back.” Now tattoo models and strippers are coming out of the woodwork to say they had affairs with the chopper-maker, and the revelations may end up sending his six-year old daughter back to her porn star mother, though James and Bullock had been awarded custody.

Destroy a family, devastate the woman who loves you, uproot your child. But hey, it’s only sex. Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” vs. Citizenship

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Anyone who reads Randy Cohen’s New York Times Magazine column “The Ethicist” quickly discovers that one of Cohen’s biases is an intense distrust of law enforcement that would be right at home in the Berkeley campus of 1967. The problem with this attitude for an ethicist is that citizenship is a core ethical value, and assisting and cooperating with law enforcement efforts are among the duties of a citizen to society. Thus the Ethicist’s advice tends to become unethical when a correspondent asks about matters involving the police. This week’s column contained a prime example.

A restaurant owner discovered that an employee was stealing from the establishment, and confronted him. The thief offered to pay back what he had stolen, and was fired. The owner asked Cohen if he should report the crime to the police; some of his friends had argues that “losing his job was punishment enough” for the light-fingered ex-worker. Can you guess Randy’s answer? I swear: I composed it in my head before I checked. I was right on the money. Continue reading →

Web Ethics, Due Diligence, and the Happy Maxi-Pad

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

There is no denying it any more. It is per se unethical to pass along information discovered on the web to anyone, much less to put it on a blog or in an e-mail, until you have performed due diligence and determined with reasonable certainty that it is accurate and true.

All the more reason, then, to praise the Snopes “urban legends” website, which does a superb job tracking down and clarifying web hoaxes, rumors and other misinformation. A lot of the latter isn’t even intentional, but the consequences of not checking the facts can still be significant and harmful,

I thought about this after encountering an amusing bit of web lore that many of you may have already seen, on aan old blog post that introduced the piece like this: Continue reading →

Why Professional Reviewers Are Unethical, and Why We’ll Be Better Off Without Them

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

When Variety recently announced that it was firing its in-house film and drama critics, there was much tut-tutting and garment-rending over the impending demise of professional reviewing in magazines, newspapers and TV stations. The villain, the renders cry, lies, as in The Case of the Slowly Dying Newspapers, with the web, which allows any pajama-clad viewer of bootleg videos to write film reviews, and any blogger who cares about theater to write a review of a play. “I think it’s unfortunate that qualified reviewers are being replaced,” said one movie industry pundit, “but that’s what’s happening.”

I say, “Good. It’s about time.” (And also: “QUALIFIED?”) If there has ever been an excessively influential non-professional profession that caused as much damage as reviewing, I’m not sure I want to know about it. The end of full-time film and drama critics as we know them can only prove to be a boon for artists and audiences alike. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Prof. Peter Tague and Chief Justice John Roberts

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In today’s world of text-messaging, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, intentionally throwing a rumor into a crowded room is only marginally better than falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowed theater. Thus Ethics Alarms regretfully has to pronounce Georgetown Law Center professor Peter Tague’s puckish stunt of last week irresponsible and unethical.

Demonstrating how unreliable it was to accept media accounts from un-named sources, Prof. Tague told his first year law class that he had learned from a “reliable source” that Chief Justice John Roberts was about to announce his retirement. Some nimble-fingered Twitter-user (or many) promptly sent the rumor into cyberspace, where it rapidly found its way onto scoop-hungry websites, especially those made giddy by the prospect of President Obama having the chance to replace one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative judges with a progressive one. By the time Tague announced to the class that his “scoop” was a fraud, just thirty minutes later, the fake story was multiplying like a virus. Continue reading →

Pit Bulls and Bigotry

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Writer Charles Leerhsen has experienced a conversion. After witnessing his best friend being viciously attacked and nearly killed on a city street without provocation, he has embraced bigotry with both hands. Now he writes screeds condemning not the attacker, but all individuals of the attacker’s race. In a passionate and angry essay for The Daily Beast, he denigrates not only those individuals but also anyone who defends them, such as “certain PC urban professionals who long to tell the world that they are super-sensitive and understanding souls.”

It’s an ugly essay, emotional, doctrinaire, and illogical, employing the well-worn racist technique of generalizing from the individual to the group and back again. Why would any respectable media outlet print such bile?

Perhaps it is because Leerhsen’s best friend was Frankie, a Wheaton terrier, and Frankie’s attacker was a pit bull. Continue reading →