Civility is a core ethical virtue but a tricky one, both to define and to maintain. Peter Wehner has written a superb (and short!) essay on the topic at the Commentary Magazine site, applying it especially to political discourse.
” We can possess civility while at the same time holding (and championing) deep moral and philosophical commitments, ” Wehner writes. Continue reading
Complete cultural and intellectual rot in America gets ever closer, thanks to people who think and act like the honchos at New York’s 92nd Street Y.
It sponsored an evening of conversation between art critic and New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon and Steve Martin, who is many things: a comedy writer, a wit, a banjo player, a slapstick comic, a serious actor, a novelist and a playwright. (Also a second-rate Inspector Clouseau.) In this case, it was the novelist Martin who had come to chat; Martin’s new novel, An Object of Beauty, has just hit the book stores to rave reviews. But the sold-out audience of 900 and pay-per-view television audience apparently didn’t want or expect to hear THAT Steve Martin…they wanted the one with the arrow through his head and “happy feet.” So many of them complained, some in e-mails send during the event, and after the subdued and erudite session was over, that the Y sent them refunds, with this note: Continue reading
Today the New York Times extensively documents the unethical business strategy used by the owner of a web-based eyewear business.
After making the discovery that Google does not distinguish between positive and negative mentions of a business on the Internet, he resolved to treat complaining customers as badly as possible to encourage complaints about his company on consumer sites. I do mean “as badly as possible”: the Times relates the accounts of customers who received insulting phone calls, threatening mail, and other harassing and bullying communications from the entrepreneur, who uses multiple aliases. The method works well: since on-line diatribes, complaints and bad reviews have piled up over his poor service, outrageous conduct and often shoddy merchandise, the man’s business is booming. Its name consistently nears the top of Google’s search results when a potential customer types the name of his or her favorite eyewear designer and “eyeglasses,” sometimes placing higher than the designer itself. Continue reading
Yes, it has come to this. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas season is a pre-unethical condition, getting worse every year. (Pre-unethical conditions are situations that experience teaches us deserve early ethics alarms, since the stage is set for habitual bad conduct.) The financial stresses on the public and the business community in 2010 will only fuel the creeping tendency to ignore the moral and ethical values that are supposed to underlie the winter holidays—charity, gratitude, generosity, kindness, love, forgiveness, peace and hope—for the non-ethical considerations that traditionally battle them for supremacy: avarice, selfishness, greed, self-pity, and cynicism. Combine this with the ideological and political polarization in today’s America and the deterioration of mutual respect and civility, and the days approaching Christmas are likely to become an ethical nightmare…unless we work collectively to stop that from happening. Continue reading
I, like you, have been reading and listening to my various “My Obama, may he always be right, but my Obama, right or wrong” friends try to argue that having TSA agents sexually assault non-consenting adults is a perfectly reasonable and benign exercise of government power. I, like you, am tired of the posturing and excuse making. Their arguments, in essence, all boil down to: a) they have no choice b) they have our best interests at heart c) it’s no big deal, and 4) trust them, they know what they are doing.
I suggest that you, as I will, pose the following questions to your trusting friends, perhaps beginning with a preliminary query regarding whether they themselves have undergone the humiliating and invasive pat-down procedure that they so willingly approve of for others.
Then ask them these: Continue reading
“Going out there and winning this would mean a lot. It would be like a big middle finger to all the people out there that hate my mom and hate me.
—Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin’s daughter and blatantly undeserving finalist in ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars,” on the show’s finale Tuesday’s night, prior to the revelation of the results of the audience voting. (She lost.) Continue reading
My least favorite website, the ethically challenged Gawker, became the latest media source to publish rapidly spreading tales of the gay sexual escapades of a well-known Hollywood leading man who is also married, has children, attracts a great deal of positive publicity because of his family life, and, to cap it all off, is a high-profile member of a church (the Church of Scientology) that has in the past treated homosexuality as a curable malady. A book is coming out, and the author is pumping up interest in the tabloids.
The ethical question: is this legitimate news? Should it be reported? If it isn’t news, but rather a vile and mean-spirited invasion of privacy, then Gawker, as usual, is wading in slime. If, however, it is news, then why is the mainstream media ignoring the story?
This is a messy ethical conflict. Continue reading
Don’t you just hate it when you give a snarky, belittling, “you’re such an idiot to believe that” response to someone’s complaint, only to discover that they were right and you are the idiot? I sure do, and yes, it has happened to me.
The ethical way to avoid this, if you are Gawker, the habitually unethical gossip website, is to 1) not violate copyright laws by publishing long, bootlegged excerpts from Sarah Palin’s as yet unreleased new book without the publisher’s permission, 2) not respond, when she suggests in a tweet that this is illegal, by saying—
“Sarah: If you’re reading this—and if you are, welcome!—you may want to take a moment to familiarize yourself with the law. Try starting here or here. Or skip the totally boring reading and call one of your lawyers. They’ll walk you through it.” Continue reading
“Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present.”
This was the very first edict in the list of civility rules memorized by George Washington as a child, rules that shaped his character and significantly influenced not only his life and career but the fate of America. Like most of Washington’s 11o rules, the first has universal and timeless validity, pointing all of us and our culture toward a society based on mutual respect, caring, empathy, and fairness.
Recently, however, there has been a powerful cultural movement away from George’s rules and the culture of civility that they represent. Rudeness has always been with us, of course, and public decorum has been in steady decline since the Beatniks of the Fifties, to the point where it is unremarkable to see church-goers in flip-flops and airplane passengers in tank-tops. Something else is going on, however. Like the colored dots of paint in a George Seurat painting, isolated incidents and clues have begun to converge into a picture, and it is not one of a pleasant day in the park. I believe we are seeing a dangerous shift away from civility as a cultural value, which means that we are seeing a cultural rejection of ethics. The past two weeks have presented damning evidence that this true. Continue reading
Not many of you chose to read about the “Cook’s Source” fiasco, which is a shame. It is admittedly a tiny blip on the ethics radar screen–a dispute between a writer and a narrow audience website that launched an Internet vigilante movement—but there are many useful lessons to be learned. Now one of the two key figures, “Cook’s Source” editor Judith Griggs, has generously provided us with yet another: how not to apologize. Continue reading
