Ethics Heroes

Ethics Hero: Washington Post Columnist Carolyn Hax

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I’m breaking some precedent here: I don’t usually pick Ethics Heroes based upon writing alone, and I don’t usually reprint long sections from someone else’s column. But relationship advice columnist Carolyn Hax has long displayed a brilliant feel for ethical analysis, and expresses it sharply and entertainingly to the great benefit of her readers. Good general readership ethical analysis is all too rare, and she deserves accolades.

Today she provided as clear and as deft a lesson in how responsibility, honesty, fairness, bias and accountability work as I can imagine, while chiding a man who wants to rescue a younger woman from the relationship he didn’t have the guts to pursue herself. It shows her at her best, and is impeccable ethics as well. Brava!

Here is the inquiry and Hax’s response: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The great Marlene Dietrich, Ethics Hero

It was on this date in 1992 that the magnificent Marlene Dietrich died, in her sleep, in her Paris apartment at age of 91. She had hidden her face from the world since she had stopped performing over a decade before, saying that the public should remember her as she had been. Sadly, Dietrich is one of those former icons of Hollywood whom the public is slowly failing to remember anything about at all; most are more familiar with Madeleine Kahn’s send-up of her in the Western spoof “Blazing Saddles” than they are with Marlene herself. That is wrong, for she deserves better. Not only was Marlene Dietrich a unique performer and important cultural figure, she was also an Ethics Hero.

She was a rising German stage and screen actress when director Josef von Sternberg cast her as Lola-Lola, the beautiful, cynical leading character in “Der blaue Engel,” (The Blue Angel), Germany’s first talking film. The movie made Dietrich a star. Von Sternberg took her with him when Hollywood beckoned and signed her with Paramount Pictures. There Dietrich built her image and legend by perfecting her femme fatale film persona in a series of classic films directed by her mentor: “Morocco” (1930), “Dishonored” (1931), “Shanghai Express” (1932), “Blonde Venus” (1932), “The Scarlet Empress” (1934), and “The Devil Is a Woman” (1935).

Meanwhile, she had already begun fighting Hitler’s regime. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: New Orleans Saints QB Drew Brees

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Drew Brees is one professional athlete—yes, there are others—who sees the riches he acquires in his high-paid trade as a star NFL quarterback as tools to achieve good ends. He has established an impressive foundation to assist children in New Orleans, and now he is using his wealth to keep his team together and get them ready for the coming season.

As NFL training camps remain in limbo while the courts decide the legality of the owners’ lock-out, Brees’s Saints are training anyway, because he is picking up the bill, paying Tulane staff to help out during practices and flying in his personal trainer to oversee the team’s conditioning program, even arranging for the Tulane Institute of Sports Medicine to provide insurance for players who need it. Brees has also arranged for lodging for some of the younger players on the team.

Quarterbacks are always team leaders in name and reputation, but Drew Brees is exhibiting exemplary leadership and character by acknowledging his special resources and using them for the benefit of his colleagues during a crisis. Wealth and influence can accomplish wonderful things if the individual who is wealthy and influential has the ethical character to make it so. Drew Brees is such an individual, and a magnificent example of leadership as well.

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Note: Ethics Bob posted on Drees right about the same time I did. You can read his comments here.

Ethics Heroes: World Journalists

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Chris Hondros (left) and colleagues

I know Ethics Alarms is critical of the media and journalists for breaches of objectivity and fair reporting. Nevertheless, there are few professions more inherently heroic than journalism, especially when it requires on-the-scene reportage under dangerous conditions. This was demonstrated, once again, by the recent death of Chris Hondros, a distinguished photo-journalist who was killed last week in Libya.

May 3 is World Journalist Day, and an excellent time to honor the tough and dedicated professionals who bring us important and hard-to acquire news, often risking their lives in the process. To that end, there is no better on-line destination than the website of New York-based non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists, dedicated to making it possible for journalists to do their jobs without fear of reprisals.  There you can learn about the perils faced by media personnel all over the globe, and read about the journalists killed since January 2010 while trying to let us know what is going on in the world.

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Phoebe Snow 1950-2011

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

She sang a little too.

I thought Phoebe Snow had died long ago, when she was really just being an Ethics Hero.

In the mid-1970’s, the strong-voiced writer and singer of “Poetry Man” had two gold records at the young age of 26. She was hailed by critics as one of the most interesting and versatile singers in the pop world. “She appeared on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and recorded duets with Paul Simon and Jackson Browne. She made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, which pronounced her voice ‘a natural wonder,’” recalled the Washington Post in her obituary today. Phoebe Snow was an entertainer and an artist, and had reached the place where all artists strive to reach but few ever do: being paid a fortune to do what she loved and was talented at doing.

In December 1975, she had given birth to a daughter, Valerie Rose, with severe brain damage and other disabilities. Most recording stars of her stature, as well as actors and those in other intense, lucrative and competitive fields in the arts and out of them, would have placed Valerie in an institution. (Arthur Miller, the moralist playwright, not only institutionalized his Down Syndrome son during his Broadway career but hid his existence from the public.) Snow, however, put her show business success on hold to care for her daughter. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Attorney Paul Clement

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

John Adams defended the guys in red, and Paul Clement understands why.

Law firm King & Spalding announced Monday that it would no longer represent congressional Republicans regarding the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the controversial 1996 legislation that defines marriage as being only between a man and a woman.. In response, the firm’s chief appellate lawyer, Paul Clement, who was handling the case, resigned from the firm.

In February, the Obama administration announced that its Justice Department would refuse to defend DOMA in a number of lawsuits, an unusual, controversial and troubling decision. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to conceive of other federal laws another administration might decide to render dead letters by non-defense despite being duly passed by the people’s representatives. A government has an obligation to duly execute its laws or repeal them. The policy of the Administration regarding DOMA raised issues of governmental integrity quite separate from the provisions of the law itself. Continue reading →

Flashback: “Ethics Test at McDonald’s”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Background: The McDonald’s beating and video story reminded me of another ethics essay arising out of a McDonald’s incident, one that I was personally involved in. This post first appeared on The Ethics Scoreboard in 2006, and reading it again, I realized it was one of the first times that I used the ethics alarms imagery that became the basis for this blog. The incident that inspired the essay still troubles me. I wish I could blame McDonald’s for the callousness that my 2006 experience and last week’s incident in Maryland exposed, but unfortunately, our problem relates to the Golden Rule, not the Golden Arches. Here is “Ethics Test at McDonald’s”:

Life gives ethics tests like pop quizzes. You often get no warning, and if you’re thinking about something else, you might not even realize the test is going on. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero, Non-Human Division: The Guardian Deer of Forest Lawn

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Bambi's mother would understand.

Animal ethics are not a major topic here, in part because there is continuing scientific controversy over whether animals are capable of ethical impulses. The pros seem to have the upper hand over the cons, however, due to observations of altruistic conduct exhibited by primates in the wild and other evidence. How a wild deer, at last report standing guard over a widowed goose and her brood at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, NY, fits into the debate is for others to decide, but it’s an inspiring tale.

A mother goose has lost her mate (geese bond for life, it seems) and now must tend to her nest in the cemetery, which is home to many varieties of wildlife.  She spends the day sheltering her eggs inside an empty urn. The job of her deceased mate was to guard the home, and discourage predators, which, as you know if you have ever had a run-in with a goose (as I have), he would have been very capable of doing. Without a guardian, the prospects for the future goslings are not good

An adult deer, however, has come to the rescue and had assumed the role of protector. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There is hope for Arizona yet...

Earlier, I wrote about a bill passed by the Arizona legislature that would broadly allow religious practices and beliefs to trump professional obligations, ethics codes and discipline. The bill, SB 1288, directed in part:

A. Government shall not deny, suspend or revoke a professional or occupational license, certificate or registration based on a person’s exercise of religion.

B. Government shall not deny, suspend or revoke a professional or occupational license, certificate or registration based on a person’s refusal to affirm a statement that is contrary to the person’s sincerely held moral or religious beliefs, regardless of whether those beliefs are specifically espoused by a recognized church or religious body…

C. A person’s exercise of religion is not unprofessional conduct.

It was widely assumed, including by me, that Republican governor Jan Brewer would sign this stunningly awful bill into a law which would allow any practice that could be called “religious” to be immune from community, cultural and professional norms of right and wrong unless they were explicitly illegal. She did not. She vetoed it, an act of responsible leadership and political courage.

You can read her veto letter here.

Ethics Hero: Fox

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Now if you want to see a mad prophet on TV, you'll have to watch "Network." Thank you Rupert, Roger, Fox!

The Fox network, in ending its relationship with Glenn Beck after the expiration of his current contract as it announced yesterday, placed principle over profit. In today’s culture particularly, that is always a welcome development, an ethical one, and deserving of praise.

I can comfortably assign Fox Ethics Hero status and discount the braying from partisan Beck-haters like Media Matters, the shamelessly one-sided “media watchdog” that has declared “war” on Fox because it dares to deliver news from a generally conservative perspective. Beck was not brought down by their attacks, or by the boycotts against him by various interest groups. His show was still one of the most watched current events programs on cable, and Fox was still making money on it. The demise of Glenn Beck’s Fox show was not an example of successful suppression of conservative opinion by the Left. Continue reading →