Ethics Train Wrecks

Labor Day Weekend Ethics Inventory [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Two “the rest of the story” items to kick things off:

  • As we all hoped would be the case, MLB reprimanded umpire Doug Eddings for telling rookie St. Louis Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon to straighten his cap and to “Grow the hell up!” Eddings issued an apology. EA covered the episode here. But last night, as many suggested, many Cardinals wore their caps askew as a visual rebuke to Eddings, who was the umpire at third base. Interestingly, some of the Colorado Rockies had their caps tilted as well. Eddings claimed that he admonished Rincon because a Rockies batter, Hunter Goodman, flagged the rakish angle of the young pitcher’s headgear. Goodman, however denies that he said anything.

See? I said this was an ethics train wreck!

  • In this post, EA discussed the absurd controversy involving “Stars and Stripes” staff maintaining that they were “independent” of the Pentagon. In a 24-page ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden turned down the entreaty by the newspaper’s publisher, editor-in-chief and Middle East reporter to stay their firings while a lawsuit challenging the terminations as First Amendment violations works its way through the court system.  McFadden found the government probably did not violate their First Amendment rights by firing them. I think their claim came perilously close to being a frivolous suit. If it were to prevail, no reporter or journalist could be fired by a government publication for an inflammatory or anti-American output because it could be framed as “censorship.” Editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte told CBS in an interview that they “worked for Stars and Stripes, “not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker.” They were asserting total independence and autonomy, despite being a Pentagon publication and funded by tax-payers.

Meanwhile…

1. The NFL is increasingly ridiculous, and I continue to wonder when it’s core audience will just say, “Enough already! Bye!” The league’s woke virtue signaling and DEI embrace is obnoxious, but its recent decision that football needs screamingly fey male cheerleaders boggles the mind. Look at this guy:

What the hell? I find female NFL cheerleaders an embarrassment, but this…any idea what the NFL is going for here or why? Tim O’Brien writes in part,

“I mean, who in the world asked for this? What market research told the NFL that what it really needed to do was complement all that toxic masculinity during the game with this? Seriously, are gay men a viable market for the NFL? How big is that market? Perhaps even more pointedly, as a percentage, how many not just gay men, but flaming gay men, watch the NFL on Sundays? Are we missing something? …[T]he NFL continues to find ways to alienate me and the millions of others who tune in because all we want to do is watch good football, see a little patriotism, and get a dose of a high-energy, traditional game-day atmosphere, nothing more….All of it is telling me the NFL no longer wants or needs people like me as fans. I’m cool with that, but if I have one message for the league, it’s this: “Be careful what you wish for.”

The NFL is already the most unethical sports league in existence (after the WNBA, of course). More on that tomorrow.

2. Speaking of the WNBA, ESPN’s headline was “Cathy Engelbert, who oversaw WNBA boom, to retire as commissioner.” It could well have read, “Cathy Engelbert, who proved completely incapable of leading the WNBA as it found itself immersed in racial and gender controversies, is running away. Good.” “Over the years, it has been amazing to watch WNBA players thrive and lead the massive cultural surge around women’s sports,” Engelbert said in a statement. “I retire knowing we have built something bigger, stronger and more enduring than we could have imagined. I am grateful to the WNBA and NBA team owners and staff, players, investors, fans and the powerhouse league office staff, who believed in what this league could become. I retire with immense gratitude and tremendous optimism for the future of the WNBA, with the best yet to come.”

Englebert is an accountant, and served as the CEO of Deloitte. She was brought in to develop the WNBA as a business, but had no skills or orientation that qualified her to deal with the league’s image and public relations problems. It took some gall for her to talk about the surge in “women’s sports” as so many of her league’s coaches speak as if they don’t know what a woman is.

Players and coaches have described her as “negligent.” One player said that the WNBA had the “worst leadership in the world.” From my observations, this was a severely limited leader who saw her job in the narrowest possible terms. She was hired to cut business deals and make money for the owners. She was good at that. Meanwhile, under her stewardship the WNBA has acquired the reputation of being dominated by lesbian thugs who resent the few white heterosexuals in their midst.

Maybe the WNBA should acquire the NFL’s gay cheerleaders…

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“Nah, There’s No Mainsream Media Bias!” CNN’s Headline

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I have a backlog of significant and interesting ethics developments so I’ll be posting a multi-issue collection a bit later today. This latest example of the disgusting bias of the news media as it tries to rig the mid-terms against Republicans so the Democrats can “stand up to Trump”—meaning obstruct his performance of his job with multiple impeachments in the House—is worthy of a solo call-out.

The obvious inference a reader is supposed to take from that headline is that all those people in Nepal were killed because of Evil Donald Trump. This reflects back to the Axis theme when DOGE started cutting funds that had nothing to do with the USA: “People will die!” It was a stupid appeal to emotion even to the extent that it was true: The United States isn’t responsible for the lives of everyone in the world. Incredibly, the same progressives who want the U.S. to pay to save lives everywhere in the world (you can’t get much more remote than Nepal) also are trying to make the National Debt a Democratic issue. The two positions are completely incompatible, but never mind. The party thinks the public is stupid, and issues messages accordingly. Or Democrats are stupid. Or both.

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More Ethics Notes On The Lindsay Clancy Case…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Things are not as simple as the Babylon Bee would have us think. Ethics Alarms already posted two essays on this case, here and here. The latter, a Comment of the Day by Tim Levier, concluded by describing the protesters and demonstrators thusly:

The Protestors / Defenders / Supporters – Providing financial and material support to someone with whom they have no prior connection.

These people are deranged and one has to question where they came from and who has time to commit to such folly at a time when everyone and their mother is complaining about the cost of things. Why would anyone protest due process? She’s making her case in a court of law and the fair process will play out resulting in a judgment. This isn’t an area for “opinions” and to influence an outcome. Its meddlesome and the act of a narcissist that believes in one’s own “greatness” or “importance” over that of an impartial judicial institution.

Clancy’s trial, presumably the first of two (at least), ended in a mistrial yesterday due to a hung jury. A single juror, widely believed to be one of the three men on the 12 juror panel, was apparently refusing to budge from his unshakable belief that the woman who has confessed to murdering her three children is guilty of murder. I dunno, that seems like a defensible verdict to me, but I wasn’t in the courtroom during the trial.

But I digress. Here are recent ethics-related developments and observations:

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Case Study Of An Ethics Train Wreck: The Crooked Cap Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Baseball has been doing a bang-up job lately validating my baseball ethics posts. My conviction is that the game is and has always been a cultural ethics microcosm, revealing and clarifying ethical dilemmas and conflicts with applications far removed from the game itself. Yesterday there was another example.

Behold…

During the sixth inning of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 7-6 victory over the Colorado Rockies last night, Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon, making his first appearance in a big league came, wore his cap rakishly askew. Rincon was pitching to Rockies batter Cole Carrigg when home-plate umpire Doug Eddings decided to react to the query of the previous Rockies batter, who had asked Eddings, “Hey, can he wear his hat like that?”

Batters since the dawn of baseball time have tried to find ways to wage psychological warfare against pitchers; EA had an earlier example this season, here. This one worked: the comment inspired Eddings to join the fashion police. Eddings halted the game, motioned to Cardinals catcher Leo Bernal, and told Rincon to fix his cap, punctuating the request with “Grow the fuck up!” Rincon complied. Three pitchers later, Carrigg hit an inside-the-park home run and Rincon exited the game shortly thereafter.

Later in the inning, Cardinals manager Oli Marmol was ejected from the game by Eddings. Marmol explained: “We have a kid making his debut, and in between an at-bat, he tells him that he needs to fix his hat and, ‘The kid’s not going to wear his hat like that on my field.’ Last I checked, this is Coors Field, so I took issue with it.” Not only did Eddings eject Marmol, but he also called a pitch-clock violation that gave Rockies designated hitter Troy Johnston a 1-0 count to start his at-bat against the new Cardinal pitcher. That was not a valid use of the rule, but umpires think they are God sometimes. It’s tradition!

“And then the pitch violation while I’m out there having a discussion, that’s also stupid, in my opinion,” Marmol said later. “So there’s a lot of moving parts to that one. At the end of the day, I thought they handled it poorly, and I’d like an explanation at some point.”

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Apparently a 250th Commemorative Collectable Coin Threatens the Republic, or Something

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I was going to use Marlon’s “The Horror!” clip, but he’s been over-exposed here lately. I decided to use a shot of the 1926 Sesquicentennial of American Independence half-dollar, which carried the face of that infamous autocrat and self-promoting narcissist, President Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge. That coin caused no controversy at all; in fact, I’ve read three Coolidge biographies and not one of them thought it was worth mentioning…because it isn’t. But a commemorative coin bearing the current President’s face (you know, to provide historical context?), now THAT is scandalous. For the U.S. 250th Commemorative coin was released yesterday, and the Axis of Unethical Conduct is furious.

Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, says that the coin “violates both federal law and historical practice.”

I smell the Axis “norms” canard again!

“The Department of Treasury is bound to follow federal law. Its efforts to maneuver around federal law are illegal,” Gerhardt tells said. “The fact that the coin is commemorative does not immunize it from being covered by relevant federal law.”

As far as I can see, it does follow Federal law. The Trump Deranged keep pointing to the federal law that states: “Only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency and securities.” Commemorative coins are not currency, however, but collectables. If you spend one of the 250th coins on—what costs only a dollar now?—you’d be an idiot, because they cost more than twice that, and presumably will gain in value over time.

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To Be Fair: The Washington Post Is Still As Ridiculously Biased As The New York Times…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

It is only fair to flag this idiocy, since I routinely call out the Times’ progressive and Democratic Party propaganda under the “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” banner and leave the Post, which I stopped subscribing to a decade ago because it was so infuriatingly biased, relatively unscathed, :

One of my few non-Trump Deranged Facebook friends posted that tweet today with the wry legend, typical of him, “I don’t see the problem…”

We have “respected” news organizations literally telling the public that there is something cruel and unjust about deporting people who come here illegally as long as they don’t kill, rape, rob or set fires. This logic is in the same bonkers category as that irresponsible New York State Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher who feels shoplifting should be legalized. Yet I bet all of your progressive friends agree with the Post.

This wasn’t among my planned posts for today, but after picking on the Times in the previous post, I feel ethically obligated to point out that the Washington Post is an “enemy of the people” too.

A Note On The Latest Axis Freak-Out Over Trump Trivia

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The graphic above was based on data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), White House executive orders, and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary’s Orders to chart notable geographic renamings in the U.S. from 1963 to 2026.

While renaming two large bodies of water is certainly an unusually flamboyant example of changing names of geographical locales for political or other reasons, Trump’s contributions to the map certainly have plenty of company. The hysteria attached to the most recent “horror,” the renaming of Lake Ontario (Who. Cares.) is, in this context, wildly excessive.

It is also, as an astute conservative contrarian on my Facebook feed pointed out, hypocritical. The same people foaming at the mouth over the loss of “Ontario” to name a lake shared by the U.S. and Canada were all-in as schools, streets, plazas, parks, buildings and more had their names changed by wokesters when The Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the land. They applauded attempts to erase from cultural memory such crucial figures as Founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley and John Tyler, and important historical figures like Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun….and I’m not even talking about all the toppled statues.

As an aside, I saw for the first time, the brilliantly gold-refinished hyper-muscular horses and riders that grace D.C.’s Memorial Bridge as I crossed crossed from from the Old Dominion to the Lincoln Memorial. They look great, in stark contrast to their tarnished, ruined appearance for, oh, as long as I’ve lived in the area. But I bet the Trump deranged still hate the upgrade, because he did it. For example, a Trump-hater posted on X a representation of how Trump’s arch would block the view of the Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery. Huh. So you wanted to pull down every statue of the General across the country, but his plantation’s mansion is sacred!

Fascinating.

Asshole.

An Ancient Viewpoint on Modern Ethics and Our Current Ethics Train Wreck Environment

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Guest Post by James Rogers

[Note: I am abashed that over the years Ethics Alarms has neglected formal ethics theory far more than it has focused on it. Thus I was thrilled to receive this excellent guest post, submitted by faithful Ethics Alarms reader James Rogers. JM.]

It is evident to many, perhaps even a majority, that we have been living through and are still in a substantially unethical period in US and world history. How can we objectively determine if this is true? The multiple ethics train wrecks highlighted by our blog host is certainly one. Another reasonable and slightly less subjective method would be to consider how an eons-old founder of our civilization measured ethical people and behaviors generally and in the realm of politics.

Recently, I took the opportunity to read two books on the matter by Aristotle (4th Century BC), ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ and ‘Politics’. In those readings Aristotle directly addressed both the individual and societal perspectives on ethics and ethical government. This perspective has additional appeal as it isn’t tinged by modern religious biases.

Since we are humans, tackling individual ethics seems foundational as societal ethics comprises humans behavior and interactions regarding governance and broader economic and social commerce. Starting there, Aristotle points out there are three essential reasons for human action:

  • Pleasure (personal gain or goal achievement),
  • Honor (public recognition, affirmation, or reputation), and,
  • Virtue (for the benefit of another or others though it may also benefit you) without expectation of any recompense or acknowledgement.

These are universal in our human motivations, regardless of a person’s status, wealth or education.

Finding a truly or purely virtuous person or people to interact with is more than tough to find. In fact, it is fairly certain that person or set of people do not exist. Potentially someone independently wealthy, who needs nothing, who simultaneously is pursuing virtue is possibly out there,  but it would be more than challenging to find and identify them. If this is an accurate assumption, the human race is likely facing tough choices individually, as they strive to be virtuous themselves while finding others to engage with who will behave, at least in part, virtuously. As a result, we often make our own personal ethical compromises and also in our associations.

This is not promising.

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Ethics Quiz: The Law Student’s AI Query

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I am something of a persona non grata on the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (because I’m on to them, and they know it) listserv, but the list still has its uses. For example, one of the more ethical ethics lawyers circulated a question he received from a student in his legal ethics class regarding the use of artificial intelligence in class:

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