Daily Life

Fat Ethics and Kevin Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Cult film director Kevin Smith was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight last week for being fat. The talented  director (and sometime actor: he plays the character of “Silent Bob” in several of his own films) of “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma,” and the Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan comedy “Cop Out” was deemed too obese to fly, although he passed the supposedly definitive armrest test: he could lower both. Smith says this has never happened to him before, perhaps because he is in the habit of buying two seats—not because he needs them, but because he says he “hates people.” Although the airline apologized to him, Smith still hates Southwest, and is inclined not to let the matter drop.

Apparently a lot of people hate him too, just because of his weight.  Continue reading →

Lindsay Vonn and the Fairness Obsession

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethicist Rushworth Kidder has challenged the fairness of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, specifically the Ladies’ Super-G skiing event. U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn, the gold medal winner in the Ladies’ Downhill Alpine Skiing event, only won the bronze despite finishing the course in one minute and 20.88 seconds, because Austria’s Andrea Fischbacher at 1:20.14,  and  Slovenia’s Tina Maze at 1:20.63 were less than a second faster. Italy’s Johanna Schnarf, the fourth place finisher, got no prize at all, because she was a miniscule  11 hundredths of a second behind Vonn.

Dr. Kidder is crying foul. Continue reading →

An Idiot’s Guide to the Golden Rule

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

We usually think of the Golden Rule as a check against wronging others through our actions, but it should be applied to basic consideration and convenience issues as well. As I learned in two separate incidents that may have raised my blood pressure levels permanently, some people don’t understand how to do that.

Especially idiots.

In the first incident, emergency household repairs forced me to make a midnight drive to the local CVS to buy a roll of duct tape. In response to my inquiry, the one clerk in the huge, deserted store directed me to “Aisle 4.” Each aisle had a prominent number over it, from 1 to 26, though the order of the aisles was a bit skewed because some were horizontal and others were vertical. I couldn’t find Aisle 4. Determined to do so without asking for further help, I did a sweep of the entire store, getting more frustrated with myself and the store’s layout with each passing minute. Finally, I surrendered. I walked back to the check-out area and asked the clerk, “OK, I give up! What’s the secret to finding Aisle 4? I can’t see the sign anywhere.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: PZ Myers

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

PZ Myers, according to his blog, Pharyngula, is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Yesterday, however, he was just one more arrogant, mean-spirited bully (if this were not an ethics blog, I would have used the term “jackass”), ridiculing Catholics who chose to follow the traditions of their church by displaying a smudge of ash on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

Like all bullies, he chose the weakest and most defenseless targets for his attack: “little old ladies,” whose religious devotion made him want to “pull out a hankie, spit on it, and clean them up.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Passivity cloaked in tolerance results in nothing being done.”

—-National Public Radio Correspondent Megan Williams, reporting on how Italians are apathetic regarding the ugly graffiti marring virtually every public building, including churches, in Rome.

Tolerance as a virtue receives too much unqualified praise.. Often what passes for tolerance is really ethical negligence and laziness, or, as in Rome, apathy. Some things do not deserve toleration, and tolerating what should be intolerable is no virtue at all.

The Duties of Citizenship, Ethics, and the Happy Rape Victim

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A few months ago,  Washingtonian Magazine printed the harrowing memoir of Amanda Pagliarini, a woman who as a teenager was raped by some friends of her boyfriend as he looked on and did nothing. Entitled “How Could He Just Stand There?” the article recounts how she first came to be involved with “Juan,” how the rape affected her life, and remarkably, how she came to talk with her ex-boyfriend about the tragedy and his role in it years later. One of his revelations was that the gang that raped her also had done the same to other girls.

Her article concludes with this: Continue reading →

The Doritos Super Bowl Commercial

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

So obsessed was I with the Tebow Super Bowl ad that I temporarily forgot that there usually are one or more product ads that inflame the culture wars.  Sure enough, this time there were two: Audi’s “Green Police” commercial, which has political implications but no ethical ones that I can see, and the Doritos ad, chosen by post-game polls as one of the best and most popular. That one did raise some ethical issues, recently collected by conservative columnist and radio host Dennis Prager.

The spot begins with an attractive woman greeting a date at the door, and asking him inside as she gets ready to leave. She has a young son, four or five years of age, who is snacking on a bowl of Doritos. We ( and the child) see the male date’s face express some combination of excitement, lust and pleasure at the sight of the woman’s comely derriere as she walks into her bedroom. He then sits on the sofa, smiles at the boy, attempts to make pleasantries, and starts to munch on a Dorito. The child sternly slaps the man across the face, and says to him, menacingly, “Put it back,” referring to afore-mentioned Dorito chip. “Keep your hands off my mama…keep your hands off my Doritos,” he continues to the shocked date, getting nose to nose with him in the process. All the actors in the spot are African Americans.

Television commercials can be culturally damaging and irresponsible if they appear to approve, encourage, or endorse wrongful behavior and attitudes. Was this such an ad? Prager thinks so. Let’s examine his objections individually: Continue reading →

Futile Ethics Lessons From the Luge

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Long before Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili of the Republic of Georgia crashed and died on a training run there, Vancouver’s Whistler Sliding Centre, now the site of the Olympics luge, bobsled and skeleton competitions, had been the target of complaints, warnings and controversy regarding its safety. After the first international training event at Whistler in November 2008, the president of the luge governing body openly expressed worries over the speed of the track. Since then, there have been sufficient accidents on the track, not only in the luge, but also bobsled and skeleton races, that the fatal accident there could not fairly be called “a surprise.”  Just a  day before the Georgian was killed, United States luger Mark Grimmette was quoted as being concerned about the course’s speed, saying, “I think we’re probably getting close, too close, to the edge.” Later the same day, a Romanian luge racer was knocked unconscious during his training run. The frequency of crashes during the training runs last week were far above the norm.

Nevertheless, Olympic and luge officials chose not to make changes to the course that would limit the speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour that luge, bobsled and skeleton competitors were reaching, speeds beyond what they were used to, or had trained to handle.

And yet… Continue reading →

Blizzard Ethics and Parking Space Etiquette

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Great Blizzard of 2010 inspired The Washington Post to publish a piece about snow ethics, focusing especially on this touchy question: Is it ethical to park in a space shoveled out by someone else?

The problem with the article is that it doesn’t ask the ethically crucial second question: Is it ethical for someone to hold one of the rare cleared parking spaces on the street open, when other motorists desperately need a place to park? Continue reading →

Beware of Ethicist Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On Ethics Alarms, as with its progenitor, The Ethics Scoreboard, commenters frequently accuse me of manipulating ethical arguments to endorse or support a political agenda. I often find such comments unfair, intellectually lazy and wrong, but please, keep making them. Avoiding a political or ideological slant is one of the most challenging tasks in rendering ethical analysis, and it is so easy (and tempting) to fall into the trap of letting bias rule reason that it helps to be regularly smacked upside the head.

Even with repeated smacks, true objectivity is nearly impossible in ethics, because of the central role played by ethical conflicts—not the ethical problem of conflicts of interest, but the philosophical problem of designating priorities among competing ethical values. Ethical conflicts require choosing which ethical value yields to another: a doctor knows a patient is dying and that nothing can be done. Is the ethical course to be honest, or to be kind? In public policy, ethical conflicts abound, and often involve deciding between two different versions of the same ethical value. Which version of “fair” is fairer, for example: allowing a talented, hard-working individual to keep the money she earns for her and her family, or for her to have to share some of that money with others, perhaps less talented and hard working, but also perhaps less fortunate, who do not have enough to survive? Ethical problems pit compassion against accountability, responsibility against forgiveness, autonomy against fairness, equity against justice. Continue reading →