Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

The Ashley Madison Files

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments
Gee, what a great company. Why would anyone want to harm it?

Gee, what a great company. Why would anyone want to harm it?

The unidentified hackers who stole damning customer information from the adultery-facilitating site AshleyMadison.com are finally posting the data online. A huge data dump was posted on August 18, and another on August 20. The files include account details and log-ins for some 32 million users of the social networking site, which calls itself the premier site for married men or women seeking partners for affairs. They include seven years  of credit card and other payment transaction details, going back to 2008, millions of payment transactions, names, street address, email address and amount paid, but not credit card numbers.

“Ashley Madison is the most famous name in infidelity and married dating,” the site asserts on its homepage. “Have an Affair today on Ashley Madison. Thousands of cheating wives and cheating husbands signup everyday looking for an affair…. With Our affair guarantee package we guarantee you will find the perfect affair partner.”

Nice. I named this scummy site an Unethical Website of the Month on the old Ethics Scoreboard in 2005, writing in part,

Adultery leads to shattered families, ruined finances, psychically damaged children and deep emotional scars all around. Most if not all spouses will eventually find themselves in a vulnerable state where unhappiness, anxiety, and stress have them primed to make an impulsive and ultimately destructive decision to pursue an illicit relationship. These are the times when people need good advice, counseling, and perspective. These are the times when AshleyMadison.com instead offers the tools they need to tear apart their commitments, vows and lives: secrecy, betrayal, selfishness, and irresponsibility…Yes: it is all legal. But inducing people to hurt others while subjecting themselves to the risks of remorse, financial ruin, and even violence is far worse than many crimes…

America is having enough trouble keeping its families together without having slick web sites working to tear them apart.

Observations:1. This couldn’t happen to a more deserving company. By all means, let’s catch and prosecute the hackers. As for the harm they did to Ashley Madison: good.

2. Regarding the company’s clients: nobody should have any sympathy for them whatsoever. They were cheating, lying and doing harm by definition, and to those who loved, trusted and depended on them. Their wrong is far greater than the wrong done to them, and without their wrong, no wrong could have been done to them.

3. The AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hundreds of U.S. government employees – including some with sensitive jobs in the White House, Congress and law enforcement agencies – used Internet connections in their federal offices to access and pay membership fees to the cheating website Ashley Madison, The Associated Press has learned.

The AP traced many of the accounts exposed by hackers back to federal workers. They included at least two assistant U.S. attorneys; an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President; a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney in the Justice Department; a government hacker at the Homeland Security Department and another DHS employee who indicated he worked on a U.S. counterterrorism response team.

Are these cheaters trustworthy, or fit to serve in the government? No.  I can understand, sympathize and to some extent accept, the spontaneous, unintended passionate adulterous affair that is neither planned nor sought. It is not, at least, premeditated, and that is a mitigating factor. This conduct, using AshleyMadison.com, isn’t motivated by love, but by a desire to betray. I don’t want government officials who are in the habit of betraying others. If they will betray their families, why would they hesitate to betray me?

UPDATE: Attorney Jay Wolman explains the strong class action case AshleyMadison.com users now have.

Ethics Hero, Maybe For The Ages: The Center for Medical Progress

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

As I said with the release of the first surreptitious “sting video” of Planned Parenthood released under auspices of the anti-abortion group, the Center for Medical Progress, such videos are, in principle, unethical. However, while the unethical should be used in pursuit of a greater good only with great reluctance, moral certainty and a minimum of harm, there are instances when utilitarianism must apply.

This is one of them.

In the case of abortion, the prospect of saving the lives of millions of unborn is certainly worth the incursion on the ethical values of honesty and respect for privacy implicated by these videos. Indeed, it is worth a great deal more. With the seventh video, released yesterday, the conclusion is unavoidable that we, the public, the nation, and humanity, owe a debt of gratitude to the Center for taking radical action to force  confrontation with the reality of abortion so that there can be a real, open and honest debate  that doesn’t duck the central issue. That issue  is not women’s control over their lives, but the ethics of killing innocent human beings to achieve it.

The latest video, like the earlier ones, compels any fair, emotionally functioning and rational observer to accept the brutality and near complete callousness towards human life that the abortion machine creates and requires. In this respect the seven videos—with more to come— are abortion’s equivalent of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” forcing genteel, moral, good people by their own confident assessment to confront the horrors that have been occurring under their noses with their passive approval. Because they chose not to think about what abortion really involved, just as so many Americans had no idea what  slavery was like until Harriet Beecher Stowe forced them to consider it as more than an abstraction, abortion advocates, passive and active, have an ethical obligation to watch these videos. Those who refuse are admitting that they are incapable of letting facts disturb their ideologies. Continue reading →

Disrespect And Assault In The Operating Room: Our Nightmares Are Real

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

clown-in-the-operating-room

“A few moments later, the anesthesiologist walks in the room and asks, ‘What do you got?’ Dr. Canby says, ‘Vaginal delivery. Uterine atony. External massage failed. Give her some ketamine.’”…I look at Mrs. Lopez—her eyes are half-closed and vacant. Dr. Canby instructs me to hold her knee. A fellow medical student holds her other knee….Canby then performs an internal bimanual uterine massage. He places his left hand inside her vagina, makes a fist, and presses it against her uterus. I look down and see only his wrist; his entire hand is inside her. Canby puts his right hand on her abdomen and then massages her uterus between his hands. After a few minutes, he feels the uterus contract and harden. He says something like, ‘Atta girl. That’s what I like. A nice, tight uterus.’ And the bleeding stops. The guy saved her life…But then something happened that I’ll never forget. Dr. Canby raises his right hand into the air. He starts to sing ‘La Cucaracha.’ He sings, ‘La Cucaracha, la cucaracha, dada, dada, dada-daaa.’ It looks like he is dancing with her. He stomps his feet, twists his body, and waves his right arm above his head. All the while, he holds her, his whole hand still inside her vagina. He starts laughing. He keeps dancing. And then he looks at me. I begin to sway to his beat. My feet shuffle. I hum and laugh along with him. Moments later, the anesthesiologist yells, ‘Knock it off, assholes!’ And we stop.”

This is an operating room anecdote related in an anonymously authored article published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a respected medical journal. The publication says that the piece is intended to shine light in a dark corner of the medical profession. Oh-oh. The essay is anonymous, I assume, because the author is afraid that there would be professional repercussions from his revealing this—what? Bad habit? Dirty secret? Crime? Reason for us to go stark, raving mad? Continue reading →

Suggested Journalism Ethics Rule For The Washington Post: If You Want To Publish Race Hate, Anti-American Op-Ed Pieces,At Least Insist That They Don’t Misrepresent The Facts.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Is that too much to ask?

Sunday last,  the Washington Posts’s Outlook section included an anti-American diatribe against police and whites by a California public defender named Raha Jorjani. I know there are black racists that see the world, law enforcement and government as he does, and there is nothing wrong or irresponsible in the Post allowing such screeds to see the light of day in its pages—all the better to expose them. I would feel better if the equivilent racist bile from the white side was not treated differently, but I tire of pointing out this double standard, at least right now.

But no editor should allow such a piece to include factual distortions on the scale of the opening paragraph, which begins,

Suppose a client walked into my office and told me that police officers in his country had choked a man to death over a petty crime. Suppose he said police fatally shot another man in the back as he ran away. That they arrested a woman during a traffic stop and placed her in jail, where she died three days later. That a 12-year-old boy in his country was shot and killed by the police as he played in the park.

Suppose he told me that all of those victims were from the same ethnic community — a community whose members fear being harmed, tortured or killed by police or prison guards. And that this is true in cities and towns across his nation. At that point, as an immigration lawyer, I’d tell him he had a strong claim for asylum protection under U.S. law.

What if, next, he told me he was from America? Black people in the United States face such racial violence that they could qualify as refugees.

The short and well-earned response to his last sentence is “Bullshit.” Before one can even get to his offensive and absurd (and paranoia-seeding: the lawyer must regard it as good for business) thesis, the utter dishonesty of his premises disqualify the op-ed for serious consideration, as well as raise question about the way this guy would practice law. If that is how he represents facts in court, he won’t be a lawyer long: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Rosie O’Donnell

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

rosie-odonnell

“I’d like to take my period blood I no longer have and write, ‘you’re all assholes.’ I’d like to smear it all over some people’s faces.”

—-Former actress, occasional comic and former talk show host  Rosie O’Donnell, extemporizing on her hatred of anti-abortion advocates and conservatives on Jenny Hutt on SiriusXM’s radio program “Just Jenny.”

This kind of vituperative and hate-infected comment poisons public discourse, polarizes society  and harms the nation by not only making a functioning democracy nearly impossible but making living in one ugly. Continue reading →

KABOOM! Sen. McCaskill Disgraces Herself On National Television

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

head blowsWhat a horrible thing for a U.S. Senator to inflict on her state. Brains must have been splattering all over ceilings, furniture, family members and TV screens during her excruciating live interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”  There she was, a member of the U.S. Senate representing the great state of Missouri, grinning like a zany and spewing the Clinton campaign’s desperate talking points—from March!—falsely and insultingly insisting that in maintaining a secret and non-conforming private e-mail server while Secretary of State that, as Democratic hack Donna Brazile said later on a truncated round table, that Clinton did nothing wrong.

Just violating policy, being irresponsible, placing official data in jeopardy, destroying potential evidence, and lying about it, but nothing wrong...

“This is a partisan witch hunt!” said Senator McCaskill. Hillary has been forthcoming and complied with every request! She wasn’t the first Secretary of State to use private e-mail! The materials weren’t classified when she had them! There’s no indication she had a motive to expose national secrets! (This is a new one on the talking points list and an audacious straw man. Nobody has argued that Clinton was a spy or committing treason; what she did was place State Department communications at risk to hackers and exposure for her own protection and advantage.) Then McCaskill paraphrased the “let’s change the subject” talking point we have heard now almost verbatim from Clinton and her surrogates: “Hillary Clinton is a fighter, and she will fight through this and continue fighting for Americans”—all while smiling madly as if the whole thing was a big joke, since it all is “nonsense.” Continue reading →

The Clinton E-Mail Scandal, Part Two: The Corrupter, The Corrupt And The Corrupted

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

corrupted2

Like so many political scandals, the Hillary Clinton e-mail mess has multiple benefits even as it reveals the scabrous underside of the American political culture. Prime among the benefits is that it provides a useful test of who is trustworthy and perceptive, and who is untrustworthy due to an excess of bias, partisan fervor, warped values or just mush-for-brains.

The stunningly cynical and dishonest statement by Clinton communications chief Jennifer Palmieri, dissected in Part One, revealed that the Clinton machine really does have zero respect for the intellect of the American public, that the Clintons still believe that you can lie your way out of anything (even if the lies make no sense), and that a lack of ethics really does eat away at gray matter.

Look: every week, sometimes three times a week, I harangue lawyers about how they are ethically obligated to take careful measures to protect proprietary client information that is stored or communicated through electronic means. They immediately comprehend how it is essential, especially government lawyers. Why? Because the government is the most vulnerable of clients, among those who can be most hurt by careless information technology, and is ahead of much of industry and the private sector in developing policies and methods of keeping information as secure as possible. Hillary Clinton’s casual lies about how her “home-brewed” server was no big deal is literally stunning to these lawyers, because they know that no high ranking government official is as cavalier about official e-mails as Clinton’s repeated statements would suggest she was.  As is a pattern among Democrats during the Obama administration, Clinton’s dissembling is designed to fool the ignorant, because the ignorant are many and useful.  It is based on the assumption that nobody, certainly not the news media, will enlighten them sufficiently to understand the magnitude of what Clinton did, and the breathtaking audacity of her lies. Continue reading →

The Smithsonian Institute Discovers That It Has Booked A Seat On The Bill Cosby Ethics Train Wreck, But It Has No Intention Of Getting Off

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
Cosbys and Cole

The Cosbys and Johnnetta Cole

When three new women accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault this week, the government’s Smithsonian Institution, “the nation’s attic,” suddenly found that it had been lured into assisting a clever PR ploy by the disgraced comedian. [ Full disclosure: I have worked for the Smithsonian recently, delivering a five hour lecture on the cultural and ethical influence of classic Western movies last December.] The revelations were the most graphic and disturbing yet ( Sample: “I was shocked. I didn’t know how I had lost so much time. My clothes were thrown all over the room and I felt semen on the small of my back and all over me…” ), and brought the total number of accusers near the half-century mark. Meanwhile, an exhibition of art owned by Bill and Camille Cosby will be on display at the National Museum of African Art until January 2016.

How many women will have come forward by then? Let’s start a pool! Continue reading →

Look! “An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments”!

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

bad arguments

As various thought fallacies and flawed arguments are constantly being exposed, used, debunked or otherwise referenced during our ethics discussions and debates—the Ethics Alarms compendium is here––this looked like something readers would enjoy. I probably should dedicate this post to former blog Commenter of the Year tgt, in appreciation for his ending—maybe just briefly, we shall see—his latest sabbatical with a flurry of 70 comments while I was lecturing in Newport last week. I didn’t have time to properly engage him or even read all the comments, but he seemed in characteristic form.

Tgt loves the fallacies and delights in slapping them down whenever they occur. His favorite is “No True Scotsman.” I immediately thought of him when I  stumbled upon “An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments” by the multi-talented Ali Almossawi. Tgt’s  pet fallacy is here, as well as ad hominem, appeals to authority, the straw man, equivocation and others, some under different names than those I am used to. I haven’t read it carefully: there may be one or two that needs to be added to the Ethics Alarms list.

This is a well-researched and written exposition of some major fallacies with lovely illustrations, presented like a vintage children’s book. Someone should actually publish a children’s book like this: I would have been grateful for one when my son was a boy, or when I was a boy.  I’m grateful for this now.

You can find this amazing work of art, ethics, rhetoric and logic here. I’ve already sent the link around to many friends, young and old, and you may want to do the same.

 

The Clinton E-Mail Scandal, Part One: Ethics Corrupter For President! Her Campaign’s “Nonsense” Memo

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I'm just making an analogy here--I'm not saying those tentacle-shooting vamps in The Strain are Clinton supporters. That doesn't mean they aren't, though...

I’m just making an analogy here–I’m not saying those tentacle-shooting vamps in The Strain are Clinton supporters. That doesn’t mean they aren’t, though…

Portraying the currently developing scandal regarding Hillary Clinton’s e-mails while Secretary of State as just politics and the “kind of nonsense” that “comes with the territory,” Clinton flack Jennifer Palmieri  sent out a detailed message to Clinton supporters and Democrats. It is designed to mislead them about the critical issues raised by this matter, which are certainly not nonsense, to coordinate with the news media, which is trying desperately and unsuccessfully to embargo this story because it is damaging to Democrats (more on this in Part Two), to make the public dumber about how leadership and government works, and to provide slick rationalizations to those Clinton supporters inclined to be part of the disinformation campaign.

This is sinister and disgusting stuff, the essence of ethics corruption. For an unethical leader, like Clinton, to gain power, she must make a large proportion of the public insensitive or outright ignorant of basic ethical principles, and, if possible, as unethical as possible. The effort to trivialize this serious example of what’s so wrong with Hillary Clinton as just another “vast right wing conspiracy” is part of this process. Continue reading →