Ethics Quotes

Ethical Quote Of The Week: Justice Amy Coney Barrett

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Does (a decision) read like something that was purely results driven and designed to impose the policy preferences of the majority, or does this read like it actually is an honest effort and persuasive effort, even if one you ultimately don’t agree with, to determine what the Constitution and precedent requires?”

—-Justice Amy Coney Bryant during remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, explaining how Supreme Court decisions should be judged and assessed.

She predicated that advice with the recommendation, “Read the opinion.” Of course, most Supreme Court critics, even those writing op-ed critiques, often don’t bother to read SCOTUS opinions. The public almost never does, and the vast majority of the public is inadequately educated to understand the opinions if they did read them. Its so much easier to treat holdings that clash with one’s politic preferences as politically-driven positions rather than carefully worked out exercises in law, history and balancing of rights and interests.

She added,

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Andrew Sullivan Finally Can’t Take It Any More: Ethics Quote Of The Day

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“This is the poisonous heart of CRT: that white people, by virtue of merely existing, are all morally problematic and always will be. Even if all the systems have been repealed. Even if you’d never racially discriminate yourself. Even if you spent your life fighting racism. That is why Bond called the Abolitionist movement indistinguishable in terms of its racism from the KKK! Why? Because whites are only ever whites…Absorb that for a moment. This foul race essentialism, this view of white Americans as a single, undifferentiated blob of hate existing through the centuries as a force for the oppression of non-whites is simply the inverse of the old racism. It’s replacing hatred of blacks with hatred of whites; it’s replacing discrimination against blacks with discrimination against whites and Asians and others. It’s being used to make even more money for rich white people, to provide some elite whites with a weapon to destroy their career rivals, and to help build a new racial spoils system that leaves any notion of colorblindness or individual rights behind.”

—Blogger Andrew Sullivan, after being metaphorically mugged on comic Jon Stewart’s new TV show on an episode titled “The Problem With White People,” where Stewart and another guest called him a white supremacist.

If Sullivan’s substack newsletter were Ethics Alarms, his intense post called “The Trouble With Jon Stewart” would be tagged as a “Popeye,” as in “That’s all I can stands, ‘cuz I can’t stands no more!”

Andrew is at heart a moderate conservative and an intellectual. He started playing a progressive on TV when he decided to elevate being gay above all of his other priorities and values, but he wore the mask uncomfortably. A wonderful writer, Sullivan had never aimed both barrels of his solid knowledge and logic at the George Floyd Freakout and the resulting rush to embrace anti-white racism in the schools, private sector and government, but apparently his mugging at the hands of Stewart, and especially Stewart’s woke guest Lisa Bond, a white woman who runs an organization called Race2Dinner that charges other white women $2,500 per dinner to be harangued for their racism, was a tipping point.  (You gotta admire her entrepreneurial brilliance for that one! P.T. Barnum would be proud of her.)

As Bruce Willis would have said to Sullivan in the actor’s better days, “Welcome to the party, pal!” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Sen. Amy Klobuchar

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“The facts are clear here. This is unbelievable. You have the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice … advocating for overturning a legal election to the sitting president’s chief of staff. She also knows this election — these cases are going to come before her husband. This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him from these decisions.”

—-Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn) on ABC’s “This Week,” blathering nonsense to co-anchor Jonathan Karl today, as he, predictably, showed neither the erudition nor the guts to correct he, as she insisted that a conflict of interest that does not exist in law is a “textbook case.”

I was tempted to let the Senator’s outrageous misinformation (Will Twitter suspend her for it? Nah….) slide, except that 1) Too many lawyers and reasonable progressives of my acquaintance settled on her as their favored 2020 Democratic Presidential hopeful, and she said ridiculous things like this throughout the debates, using false certitude for fact and reason, and it ticked me off; 2) her statement isn’t just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, and 3) you know how I hate to see high officials that the public trusts use their megaphones and influence to make it even more ignorant than it already is.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Maybe The Year): Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

“As long as they’re dangerous, I hope they all die in jail if they’re going to go back and kill Americans. It won’t bother me one bit if 39 of them die in prison. That’s a better outcome than letting them go. And if it costs $500 million to keep them in jail, keep them in jail. Because they’re going to go back to the fight. Look at the fricken Afghan government that’s made up of former detainees at Gitmo. This whole thing by the left about this war ain’t working.”

Senator Lindsey Graham in a meltdown at the confirmation hearing for SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, before walking out in a tizzy.

Hmmm. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that high ranking elected officials from both political parties appear to have little regard for core Constitutional principles? I’m going out on a limb here by stating that it’s a bad thing.

In fact, it is terrible.

Graham, an alleged conservative, proudly went on record as supporting “pre-crime” punitive measures (Watch “Minority Report” for a fair assessment of how that works) along with a pure “ends justifies the means” endorsement, spiced up by some “if it saves just one life” false logic. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Senior Judge Laurence Silberman

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“The latest events at Yale Law School in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech prompts me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified for potential clerkships.”

—Judge Silberman in a letter to his fellow judges, in reference to the disruption of a March 10 panel at Yale Law School that was intended as a debate over civil liberties  hosted by the Yale Federalist Society. About a hundred students attempted to prevent the panel and Federalist Society members in attendance from speaking.

Well, you know: Yale. Equally disturbing, perhaps, was that Ellen Cosgrove, the law school’s associate dean, attended the panel, was present the entire time, and did nothing to restrain the protesters nor remind them of their ethical duties.

The school has a policy that specifically condemns such speech-chilling conduct, but more than 10 days after the event, no consequences appear to be forthcoming for the privileged and arrogant thugs who are going to be entrusted with the task of protecting future attacks on Constitutional liberties.

In an editorial endorsing the judge’s suggestion, the Wall Street Journal wrote in part,

Some readers may think these students should be forgiven the excesses of youth. But these are adults, not college sophomores. They are law students who will soon be responsible for protecting the rule of law. The right to free speech is a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution. If these students are so blinkered by ideology that they can’t tolerate a debate over civil liberties on campus, the future of the American legal system is in jeopardy.

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Prof. Michael Ignatieff

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Lincoln should be with us all these days especially since ‘malice toward none’ has been replaced by malice toward all, as if in our ideological arrogance we have forgotten that neither God nor justice is necessarily on our side.”

—-Philosophy scholar Michael Ignatieff, Ph.D. professor at  Central European University in Vienna, Austria, in his recent book, “On Consolation,” his examination of how figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing tragedies and crises.

In a chapter devoted to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered in March 4,1865, near the end of the Civil War and with his own assassination six weeks away, Ignatieff explains that Lincoln concluded that “neither side could ever know what God intended by the fiery trial,” so “the victor had no right to raise the sword of vengeance while the defeated had the right to claim the dignity of honorable defeat. Humility about the ultimate meaning of the war, in other words, created the space for mercy.” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Ex-NY Governor Andrew Cuomo

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“If you want to cancel something, cancel federal gridlock, cancel the incompetence, cancel the infighting, cancel crime, cancel homelessness, cancel education inequality, cancel poverty, cancel racism.”

—-Disgraced Democratic ex-NY Governor  Andrew Cuomo, speaking at a Brooklyn church and claiming victim status in the “cancel culture.”

Wow.

This goes right into the Ethics Alarms “What an asshole!” file. It’s sickening virtue signalling (Hey look everyone! I’m against all these bad things! How can you not love me?) combined with throbbing demagoguery—not one of those problems can be “cancelled,” and he knows it—mixed with misdirection. We can and should cancel corrupt, abusive, bullying, ruthless sexually harassing men like Cuomo by finding them unfit to hold positions of influence and power, then kicking them out of public favor and their jobs permanently, because they are not worthy of trust.

Cuomo isn’t quite the monster Harvey Weinstein is, but his protestations ring just as offensively as they would coming from Harvey, who was, after all, just a Hollywood producer. Cuomo was entrusted by his state’s citizens with their welfare. Nobody, not even Harvey, deserves to be “cancelled” more than he does.

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Pointer: Althouse

Serious Question: What Kind Of Person Would Want Someone To Be U.S. President Who Would Consider Something Like This…

/ Jack Marshall / 172 Comments

…never mind say it out loud?

During a speech to donors in New Orleans, Louisiana a few days ago, Donald Trump actually, really, honest-to-goodness said that maybe the U.S. could trick Moscow and Beijing into fighting each other by disguising its F-22 fighter jets with Chinese flags “and bomb the shit out” out of Russia! “And then we say, China did it, we didn’t do, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.”

Oooh, good plan!

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Actor Tim Considine (1940-2022)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Thank God there’s no justice in this world.”

Disney and “My Three Sons” actor Tim Considine, who died last week at age 82, in an interview quoted in his New York Times obituary.

Considine was referring to his success and rich experiences in life, which he felt were relatively undeserved. He did not regard himself as especially talented or ambitious.

The more I ponder his statement, the more profound I think it is. Understanding that there is no justice in the world is a necessary predicate for committing to an ethical life for the right reasons. Society needs as many people as possible striving to be good, having their lives exert a net benefit on others, and being exemplars of ethical values as often as they can. These habits and objectives must be committed to while fully understanding that they only collectively and on balance result in desirable results, and sometimes not even that. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Criminal Defense Attorney Scott Greenfield

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“A perpetual concern, particularly in criminal defense, is that the next generation of lawyers will lack the skills needed to do their job, to zealously represent their clients. They struggle to tolerate the language we encounter in the ordinary course of our work. They are blinded by hatred of their prosecutorial adversaries, the law enforcement witnesses, the judge who denies their pleas for “justice.” Can they mount effective arguments against their clients if they can’t tolerate hearing arguments with which they disagree?”

—Criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield, on his blog “Simple Justice,” reacting to the law students at UC Hastings shouting down Georgetown Law professor Illya Shapiro, who was supposed to be engaging in a civil debate with a Hastings professor.

Ethics Alarms discussed the Hastings incident here [#4]; I should have probably made a solo post of it, because as Greenfield correctly points out, it has wider implications. Later he writes,

The reaction to these students was split, with many woke law students and baby lawyers applauding their action while more experienced lawyers were appalled at what they viewed as a failure of a law school, of law students, to demonstrate the minimal capacity to engage in the manner that will be expected of them as lawyers. If tactics like this are what law students deem acceptable, will they ever be capable of being lawyers?

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