Ethics Train Wrecks

In Case You Were Wondering: Yes, the Washington Post Is, In Its Panic, Even More Openly Pimping For Biden Than The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…which, you have to admit, is quite an achievement. It also is terrified of democracy and the just desserts its proper functioning portends, like the rest of the Axis of Unethical Conduct. For example, I am stunned that the Axis (“the resistance”/Democrats/ the mainstream media) is stooping to try to use a four year-old completely ambiguous incident involving the flying of the distress signal (and upside down U.S. flag) over the Alito home to argue for the Justice’s recusal from any of the Trump cases that may come the Supreme Court’s way. Senator Durbin, among the more shameless Senators, is beating that DOA metaphorical horse; depressingly, some of my Trump-Deranged colleagues in the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers are arguing that the complaint against Alito is valid, even though his wife flew the flag, and if she didn’t nobody can prove otherwise.

Nothing approaches, however, the Washington Post editorial on May 8th in which the paper directly stated in black-and-white that the threat of Donald Trump being elected was so dire that it justifies Machiavellian measures. “So trim your principles, Democrats, and pander away,” the Post concludes. ” Just remember: The only thing worse than playing Machiavelli for a good cause is playing Machiavelli for a good cause and losing.” This monstrosity actually appears to argue that its okay if Biden’s tactics to win the election ends up killing some blacks, as long as Trump is defeated. Collateral damage, I guess.

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Round and Round and Round the Cultural Destruction of Basic Concepts of Justice Goes, and Where It Stops, Nobody Knows

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Increasingly, Americans no longer agree on what justice and the rule of law mean. This is a very important societal problem, and gee, it would be nice if we had two, or even one, Presidential candidate who could articulate the elements of the crisis well and persuasively enough to make a sufficient proportion of the public aware that this trend must be addressed and reversed.

But we don’t, do we?

The most recent story that brings this into focus comes from Arizona, one of many states with a fracturing, incoherent culture these days. Melody Felicano Johnson, 39, attempted to murder her husband, putting bleach in his coffee at least twice. The woman’s husband, a US airman, began suspecting that something was amiss in March of 2023 when he was stationed in Germany; his wife’s coffee was never very good, but for weeks it had been especially foul.

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“The Ethicist” Gets A Genuinely Hard Question…And I Don’t Like His Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This time, I’d like to concentrate on the answer “The Ethicist” gave to a question more than the question itself. Prof. Appiah was asked by a woman (or man) who had been sexually molested by his (or her) father whether it was time to finally inform family members about the abuse, now that this son or daughter has decided to cease contact with the father for other reasons as well as the obvious one. He or she says the mother and siblings think the decision to cut off Dad is cruel, and that the father should have a chance to make amends—but they don’t know the whole story.

“If I were to share these details with my mother, I’d risk destroying a decades-long marriage in a single conversation,” the inquirer writes. “If I were to tell my siblings, I’d do irrevocable damage to their relationship with our father. Should I continue my silence to protect the rest of my family from emotional harm? Or do I owe it to them to tell them the truth? As I write this, I’m also painfully aware that if I break my silence, he will try to manipulate them into believing that none of this is true, that I’m delusional — he has done it successfully before.”

I’m not a nuanced kind of person regarding situations like this. My reaction: The truth shall set you free. Would I want to know if my spouse or father was a monster? Absolutely. That the information would be painful doesn’t mean I’d rather live in contrived ignorance. The writer has no obligation to protect his father, and it’s not protecting the mother or siblings to enable a lie.

Here’s the philosophy professor’s answer, in a few bite-size chunks:

“Now, an immediate issue is whether your father could be in a position to repeat his crimes with other children — that there aren’t others suffering in silence. If that’s the case, staying silent isn’t an option. You don’t raise this as a concern, but you need to be confident that it isn’t one.” 

And how exactly could that confidence be justified? It can’t be. The writer has already stated that this man has managed to fool his entire family for decades. The rest of “The Ethicist’s” answer is superflous: “staying silent isn’t an option.” A man who molested his own child isn’t trustworthy, and never can be.

Suppose you told him that you’ll keep quiet if he tells the family that he accepts that you don’t want to see him owing to a serious wrong he did to you. The problem is that questions would arise about the nature of that wrong, and that he may not be willing to deal with them. Nor is it obvious that keeping the details vague would leave your parents’ relationship intact. Besides, your father doesn’t sound like the sort of person who could be talked into taking responsibility.

Never mind that: bargaining with the damaging information comes to close to extortion for my ethics alarms.

Even if you reveal the truth, he may be confident, rightly or wrongly, that he can get people to believe you’re not to be trusted.

So what? Don’t be a weenie. Tell the truth, and if the family chooses to believe the abuser, that’s their problem, and their tragedy.

Whatever you decide, though, you shouldn’t be motivated by the thought that you owe this truth to anyone. It’s not that there isn’t reason to care that they know the truth. Many people in your family have relationships predicated on ignorance. They might even feel, were it to come out, that you should have told them before, precisely because we want to live a life in which our important relationships are not based on a failure to understand what our intimates are like.

Yet these reasons to disclose what happened don’t impose a duty on you of doing so. You may judge that they are outweighed by the fact that sharing the truth will cause pain and disruption to many lives without doing enough compensating good. Nor are you obliged to subject yourself to the pain and disruption that your father’s manipulations may bring you.

I disagree completely. There is no duty owed to the father to keep the ugly truth from the family, but the family has a right to know.

“Which brings me to my final thought: Taking measures to protect your well-being isn’t selfish when you are, objectively, the wronged and wounded party. Will your well-being be best protected by your admittedly painful policy of steering clear of both your father and the tumult of disclosure?…”

“It’s OK to be a coward if that’s the easiest path for you.” Again, I disagree.

The last point I have to make is that I doubt very much that the mother doesn’t know about the abuse. Spouses of child-abusing parents almost always either know or are in denial.

Comment of the Day: “A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

See? An Ethics Alarms Comment of the Day does not have to be the length of an honors thesis to qualify for the honor.

This one, courtesy of A.M. Golden, resonated with me the second I read it. The post commented upon was about my discussion last night with a very dear friend—one of those relationships in which it doesn’t matter how long you are apart, it picks up, unchanged, from exactly where it was whether it’s after five minutes or 20 years—who was noticeably wary about expressing a clear opinion on the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck in our conversation. Here’s the Comment of the Day, on the post, “A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend,” and I’ll elaborate after you read it….

***

We’ve had more than one careful conversation with a family member here and there myself.

Isn’t it a shame that your Jewish friend felt he had to test the waters before expressing his opinion, though?

We’re losing something precious in this country.

***

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A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I received a surprise phone call today from a freind I have not seen for many years, and not seen frequently for more than a decade since he retired with his wife to Boca Raton. There are not too many people that I’ve known in my life who are as essentially good to the bone as—well, I’ll call him “Micah.” He’s a talented artist in many mediums, intuitive, sensitive, kind and wise. We decided to meet for a beer.

We didn’t lack for things to talk about—there was my wife’s sudden death, of course, but we also know so many of the same people and have many similar interests. I don’t think in all the years we have known each other, political topics have ever come up. But we got on the topic of our kids and our friends’ kids, my son’s decision to eschew college, and from that onto the recent disaster at Harvard, as Micah mentioned in passing that my having a degree from there “didn’t hurt.” My brief but detailed exposition in response regarding Harvard’s ethics rot led to his off-hand comment, “The stuff around the war in Gaza is really upsetting.”

My old fiend was being careful: that could mean anything. He didn’t want to draw me into an expression of opinion that might lead to a rift, and in over 40 years, we’ve never had a rift of any kind. Then he said, still being careful, “I can certainly understand why Netenyahu feels he must do what he is doing.

Micah is Jewish, though that aspect of his life almost never comes up. He added, “I know a lot of innocent people are being killed.” Then he dropped a clue: “….although they might not be as innocent as people think.”

Ah! My cue! I replied immediately, “If you want your family, your children and yourself to avoid the consequences of being in a war, you shouldn’t elect terrorists to run your government. And if you want to make certain that the terrorists next door don’t kill your children, your only choice is to do whatever is necessary to get rid of them permanently.”

Micah turned to me with a look I could only describe as relief. “Thank-you,” he said.

There was only a brief coda to the exchange, after which we went back to pleasant subjects (well, other than the death of my wife). I said, “President Biden’s attempt to take both sides at once is indefensible.” Always trying to see the other person’s point of view as is his wont, Micah replied, “Unfortunately it’s an election year, and whatever position Biden takes will have negative consequences.”

I said immediately, “When that’s the case, it should be relatively easy to do the right thing.” He looked at me with relief again. “That’s how I feel about it too.”

Then we talked about theater, baseball, sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings….

[WordPress’s crack AI bot tells me to tag this “Bible study.”]

Alternate Realities in the Manhattan Trump Trial, Except Only One of Them Is Real…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump for 34 felonies that are exactly one misdemeanor on which the statute of limitations has run is not just an unethical case, it’s a revealing one. It should let the objective members of the public know, if they have the opportunity and inclination to pay attention, just how undemocratic and trustworthy the 21st Century mutation of the Democratic Party has become.

“Dangerous” is also an adjective that belongs in that sentence.

I’ve been beginning mornings lately jumping back and forth between the coverage of the trial on CNN and MSNBC—you know, the Pravda channels—and Fox News, which would be claiming that Trump was as innocent as the driven snow even if he were as guilty as O.J. It is astounding how completely divergent the impressions one is given from the Left and Right sources are—that, and horrifying. The public has no reliable way to get the information it needs to figure out “What’s going on here?” because all of the coverage is agenda-driven. Very few members of the public have the time (or education) to puzzle it out either.

Interestingly, Abe’s observation—the one that begins, “You can fool some of the people…“—again seems to be holding true, and God Bless America for that. A recent poll suggests that a majority of the the public regard Democrats and the Biden administration as the true existential peril to American liberties and freedom, and not Donald Trump. Might it be that the spectacle of four dubious prosecutions in Democratic Party strongholds by Democratic prosecutors all taking place in an election year and aimed at putting the likely GOP nominee and former President behind bars before an election the Democratic resident of the White House looks poised to lose suggests a slight totalitarian bent, mayhap? Perhaps? Ya think?

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Unethical—But Revealing!—Quote of the Month: Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College, London

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Remember: Trust the scientists! They know best…

“If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”

—British vulcanologist and climate scientist William J. McGuire, “Bill” to his friends, cheering on human death in a tweet he quickly removed after colleagues advised him “Uh, Bill? We’re not supposed to say things like this out loud…”

Of course, the professor might have been saying that the economically disastrous measures being proposed and in some cases adopted by foolish governments like the Biden administration won’t affect the climate sufficiently to make a difference, so the whole movement is futile, irresponsible, based on speculation, and, to be blunt, stupid, but of course he wasn’t. No, this scientist, who is among those we are supposed to trust and obey—you know, like the health “experts” who crippled the economy, our society and the educational development of our children based on guesses about the Wuhan virus that were represented as fact?—believes that the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe (and we all want to do that, right?) is to have millions of people die as soon as possible, one way or another. A plague is a good way! Or we could just execute them, like Mao did. Of course, he shouldn’t be one of those sacrificed for the greater good, because his life is too valuable.

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Biden Stabs Israel in the Back to Keep His Anti-Semitic Vote and Gets Justly Hammered For His Betrayal? Mainstream Media To The Rescue!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” To be fair, it’s past time to rephrase the oft-used Ethics Alarm catch phase as, “Nah, the mainstream media doesn’t just take marching orders from the Democratic National Committee to cover for Biden’s indefensible leadership!”

Too long, I know. OK, it needs some work.

Suddenly, all through the news media over the weekend, the tale of how President Ronald Reagan intervened with a threat to withhold arms that had already been approved for delivery to Israel to force the nation to change its military strategy was being thrown in the faces of Biden critics and Israel supporters. Huh. Where did that come from?

Surprise! It came from the New York Times, the flagship of the corrupt, partisan media, just in time to fuel the “advocacy journalists'” efforts over the weekend to help block Israel’s right to defend its existence and its citizens from terrorism.

Interviewing GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, and by “interviewing” I mean debating as she took the side of Democrats, the Biden Administration, the anti-Semitic students roiling campuses and Hamas, NBC News anchor Kristen Welker said, “As you know, former President Ronald Reagan, on multiple occasions, withheld weapons to impact Israel’s military actions,” Welker said. “Did President Reagan show that using U.S. military aid, as leverage, can actually be an effective way to rein in and impact Israel’s policy?”

What a perfect factoid to weaponize for an appeal to authority and Rationalization #32. The Unethical Role Model: “He/She would have done the same thing”! The timely Times revelation: in August of 1982, Israel was shelling Palestinian terrorist strongholds in Lebanon, then a failing state in the throes of a civil war, with Palestinian forces controlling territory on its southern border. President Reagan saw films of a Lebanese child horribly wounded in the attack, and called up then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to threaten a withdrawal of U.S. aid if the shelling didn’t stop. Begin gave in. The Times also informed its readers that President Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions and to cut off aid to force Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after it invaded Egypt in 1956. So, the Times concluded, “If it was reasonable for the Republican presidential icon to limit arms to impose his will on Israel…it should be acceptable for the current Democratic president to do the same.” Well, the Times wrote “they argued,” meaning defenders of all-things Democrat, but we know, or should, that by “they” in such situations, the mainstream media means “we.”

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I Don’t Understand This “Niggardly Principle” Story At All…Or Maybe I Do and Am Just Afraid To Accept the Truth

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-odlCalifornia teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well. 

A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.

I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.

Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”

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The Student and the Homeless Man: A Cautionary Ethics Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Or, “Why It’s Unethical to Behave in Defiance of Reality.”

Or, “Why the old saw ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is constantly being affirmed.”

Or, “Why progressive wishcraft keeps blowing up in society’s metaphorical face”

Sanai Graden (left), a University of California at Berkeley senior (presumably you know what that means) was hit up by a homeless man as she visited Washington, D.C. He said his name was Alonzo, and told her he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The sympathetic young woman paid for his medication at CVS. She also got him a hotel room for the night. Sanai was a TikToker , and told her followers that she needed to raise money for Alonzo, whom she called “Unc.” Soon she bought Alonzo, aka. “Unc,” a cell phone, and put him up in a hotel for a week.

Awwww. How Christian! How kind! How progressive!

Her video became a Tik Tok sensation, with millions of views. Graden started a GoFundMe account, and it quickly raised more than $400,000. Her legion of followers multiplied: one admirer set up a GoFundMe for her that eventually raised over $26,000.

Isn’t that a nice story?

Then a report from local D.C. TV station Fox 5 revealed that “Unc” was Alonzo Hebron, 64, a long-time criminal who numbered among his convictions one for a violent assault on a homeless woman. In another, he stabbed a man in the neck with a screwdriver. Donors started asking for their money back.

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