Family

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Kidneys of Orlac”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
But first, a last act of altruism...

But first, a last act of altruism?

The presumptive winner of the annual Ethics Alarms award for “Commenter of the Year” in 2013, texagg04,  has delivered a Comment of the Day expanding the topic of the post regarding a condemned prisoner in Ohio who wrangled a postponement of his execution so he could donate his organs to relatives. Here is  texagg04’s  take on “Ethics Quiz: The Kidneys of Orlac.” I’ll have some comments at the end.

“First, a murderer or other capital criminal being held responsible for his or her conduct seems to be in conflict with the same individual being allowed to display charity when you say they  forfeited their freedom, all of it, with their commission of a  capital crime. I’m not so sure it should be viewed from that angle.

Punishment serves a variety of purposes. Some petty crimes receive punishment designed to compensate, as best as can be, the victim – the victim being dead, capital punishment does not serve this purpose. Some crimes are of an anti-social nature, and the apt punishment seeks to rehabilitate or reconcile the perpetrator to the community. Capital crimes are so heinous that we have determined that the perpetrator must be completely cut off from society, through their death. In this case, the punishment does nothing for the victim OR for the criminal; the punishment is designed solely for the benefit of society.

If the criminal wishes to donate his/her organs to (what we must assume is to salve their own conscience – even though we can, probably, cynically assume is just a delaying tactic), we should not care one bit. They are gaining no material benefit from the community, nor are they engaging in any direct interaction with the community – so the act of cutting them off from the community as part of the punishment is still complete. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Liz Sloan, Ellen Browning Scripps Elementary School Principal (San Diego)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“This morning we told the students that there will be no romance in 5th grade.”

–—Principal Liz Sloan, in a letter to the parents of fifth graders at the Ellen Browning Scripps Elementary School in San Diego.

"You're a bully, Charlie Brown..."

“You’re a bully, Charlie Brown…”

When exactly was it that the public schools began believing that they had unlimited power over the private lives of students? That they could encroach upon the authority of parents, as well as the natural autonomy of children themselves? is this a byproduct of the increasingly arrogant micromanagement of our lives by the government, and those who believe that liberty, even as it is expressed in the once sacrosanct realms of the family home or the recreation of children, should be subordinate to what government “experts,” bureaucrats and autocrats believe is “best” for us? I don’t know when, but I do know that I thank the fates every time I reflect on our choice to home school my son, not merely because of its effect on him, but because I fear that it would have taken just a couple of encounters with people like Liz Sloan to give me a police record that would have been a serious occupational handicap.

Here is the rest of her letter: Continue reading →

My JFK Ethics Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

 Shredded Files

As regular readers here  know, I am not an admirer of the character of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, though he had some notable leadership skills that I respect. His reputation as a great man and President is vastly inflated and, in a strange way, I may share some of the responsibility for that.

Several years ago, I had just completed an ethics seminar for the DC Bar. One of the issues I discussed was the lawyer’s ethical duty to protect  attorney-client confidences in perpetuity, even after the death of the client. An elderly gentleman approached me, and said he had an important question to ask. He was retired, he said, and teased that I would want to hear his story. I don’t generally give out ethics advice on the fly like this, but I was intrigued.

“My late law partner, long before he began working with me, was Joseph P. Kennedy’s “‘fixer,'” he began, hooking me immediately. “Whenever Jack, Bobby or Teddy got in trouble, legal or otherwise, Joe would pay my partner to ‘take care of it,’ whatever that might entail. Well, my partner died last week, and when I saw him for the last time, he gave me the number of a storage facility, the contract, and the combination to the lock. He said that I should take possession of what was in there, and that I would know what to do. Continue reading →

Making Sure Obamacare Wrecks The Holidays, Too

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments
What if you choked on that turkey and went into a coma...did you consider that? How would you pay for the the hospitalization? That's why you need insurance...

“What if you choked on that turkey and went into a coma…did you consider that? How would you pay for the hospitalization? That’s why you need insurance…”

Ah, the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas! Time to gather together in safe, friendly, warm and loving homes, united with loved ones, family and friends, to eat good food together, laugh and sing together, exchange gifts, good wishes and hope, perchance to worship and pray, but most important of all, to hector the stuffing out of everyone on behalf of the Democrats and Obamacare, because there really is no private, family time, time to give thanks and reflect of better things for our fellow human beings—just one great opportunity to carry the message of Big Brother to the eager, desperate and gullible, because, after all, the holidays are really about Barack Obama and his struggling health care law. Right?

Yecchhh.

Also..how dare they? Programming an army of Obamaphiles to turn the holidays into an extended infomercial for Obamacare crosses multiple lines, several of which place the stepper into disturbingly familiar totalitarian, collectivist territory, where every citizen is deemed a deputized agent of The One True Authority Over Us All. On BarackObama.com, the faithful Obamabots are given all they need to ruin the holidays, including a helpful “packing list” (to make sure your family has everything they need to enroll in Obamacare),  various ways to plot to ambush your loved ones to turn the conversation away from peace, good will and sugar plums to saving the President’s bacon, and talking points, so you can be just as charming and honest as Jay Carney, David Plouffe and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Presents …The Kaboom! The First Recipient: Fun Mom Judy Viger

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

kaboom

With this post, I am introducing the Kaboom!, a special category reserved for cases that should require no ethics commentary from me, since the ethical breach is beyond obvious, but where the individual’s ethics alarms have proven so spectacularly useless that attention must be paid.

The name of the award derives from the sound my head made as I read the story, because I don’t know how to spell the sound my brains made when they hit hit the ceiling and then slowly fell to the floor.

The first Kaboom! goes to the most deserving Judy Viger, 33, of Gansevoort, New York. Viger is taking a plea deal after being charged with five counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Just for fun, let me tell this story in stages, and let me know when you hear the Kaboom!

1.Police arrested Viger for after she arranged to have two strippers perform at her son’s 16th birthday party in November.

2. Some of the party-goers were 14.

3. The two women performed lap dances for the male teenaged guests, and the birthday boy, of course.

4. Viger did nothing to stop it.

5. One teenaged boy sustained a bitten nipple.

6. Viger then posted pictures of the proceedings on Facebook.

How did you do?

My head went off at #1.

_______________________________________

Pointer: ABA Journal

Facts: Post Star

Ethics And “The Rifleman”

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

If you want to ground your child in basic values and ethics, buying the new DVDs (available next month) with all 168 half-hour episodes of “The Rifleman,” the classic Western TV series, is a good way to start. I’ve been watching episodes recently (they are currently showing on both AMC and Starz), and am struck by how virtually every one has a strong ethics lesson to teach, and teaches it well without interfering with the drama. Most of the TV westerns from the genre’s Golden Age (which had already ended before the demise of “Bonanza,” the last of the great ones) had strong ethical values embedded in their plots, but few made ethics as thematic as the show starring Chuck Connors as a single father, living on the prairie in the 1880s, who used his Winchester rifle the way other cowboys used a pistol, but faster and with more accuracy.  Because Lucas McCain was trying to survive while teaching his young son (played by original Mousekateer Johnny Crawford) how to be a good man and citizen, he was always striving to be a role model while solving the difficult and often dangerous problems that came his way. Unlike many Western heroes, McCain didn’t always get it right, sometimes letting his emotions get the better of him or being unfair or impetuous, and had to undergo an ethical course correction by the end of an episode.

A repeated theme in the show was redemption and trust, as McCain often became the champion of a fallen woman or reformed criminal, or had to rely on an ally with a less than sterling past.  Villains in “The Rifleman” sometimes saw the error of their ways at the last second, committing a noble act before dying or going to jail. And sometimes they didn’t, and got shot with the Winchester. I’m sure that “The Rifleman,” with its gun-happy opening sequence (it presents the rifle as the star of the show as much as Connors) will seem like an unlikely source of ethics to the gun-queasy parents out there, and that is a shame. There is much to learn from “The Rifleman.”

You can watch some episodes of the show here,  here and here. The catchy theme music is here; I was surprised to discover that it had lyrics, which by the standards of the generally terrible lyrics of westerns that had songs that were actually sung on a show, aren’t too bad. The best of its endless verses:

                           
THERE IS A MORAL TO HIS EXPLOITS                         

AND HE’S TAUGHT IT TO HIS SON

SPEAK SOFTLY TO YOUR ENEMY

BUT LET HIM SEE YOUR GUN!

Chorus:             

THEY CALL HIM THE RIFLEMAN
THE STRONG, COURAGEOUS RIFLEMAN
A GREAT BIG MOUNTAIN OF A MAN!

 

___________________________________

Sources: Wikipedia, The Rifleman, Chuck Connors,

Jimmy Kimmel, Child Abuse, And Signature Significance

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
In Jimmy's defense, Japan thought "Kill the Chinese!" was funny too...

In Jimmy’s defense, Japan thought “Kill the Chinese!” was funny too…

What a surprise—Jimmy Kimmel did something despicable involving children.

This time, the smug and unethical-to-his-very-DNA ABC late night host may have also triggered an ethics train wreck. Perhaps at last the network and his tasteless, enabling viewers will finally conclude what has been obvious for years—that Jimmy is a cultural corrupter whose miserable methods and values should be rejected, condemned, and sent packing to an obscure corner of table TV!

Nah.

Kimmel’s latest hilarious stunt aired on Oct. 16, in a segment called “Kids Table,” where Funny Uncle Jimmy asks small children who have no idea what is going on or  that a creepy middle-aged man is luring them into saying things that will haunt them on Youtube until the day they die to comment on issues of the day. This time, Mirthful Machiavellian Jimmy caught comedy gold: when he asked a six-year-old how the U.S. could solve the $1.3 trillion trade imbalance, the giggling answer came back, “Kill everyone in China!”

Nice. Continue reading →

Halloween Ethics: Fat-Shaming Kids in Fargo

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

halloween letter

UPDATE: There is some persuasive, if not conclusive evidence that “Cheryl” is a hoax. As usual in such cases, my analysis is the same regarding the conduct whether it actually occurred or is merely hypothetical. All forms of media hoaxes are unethical, unless they are obvious or flagged by the perpetrator before other media picks them up as factual. I detest them, and I detest those who create them.

____________________________________

If she follows through as promised, a Fargo Morehead, West Fargo, N.D. woman we know only as “Cheryl” will be handing out fat-shaming letters to trick-or-treating children who in her unsolicited opinion are too fat. The letter, sealed but certain to be read, if not immediately recognized, given the pre-October 31st publicity, by the unlucky children receiving them tells parents of the costumed kids she considers porkers that they need to do a better job parenting.

Cheryl is a presumptuous, meddling jerk, and if I got handed such a letter by my child, Cheryl would have to worry about a lot more than toilet paper in her trees and flaming bags of poop on her doorstep. Continue reading →

When Worlds Collide: Maryland’s Attorney General Doug Gansler Flunks His Ethics Test

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler (D) is running to be his party’s nominee for Governor, which, since Maryland is one of the Bluest of states, means that success equals the statehouse, or should. But the intense spotlight that such a quest creates can be hot and unflattering, and Gansler’s character and integrity is now being called into question…especially after this photo from last summer surfaced on Instagram, showing Maryland’s top law enforcement official in the middle of a wild teen beach party at a beach house by the Delaware shore. He’s the guy in the white shirt and the cell phone:

Gensler Party

There you have it: the exact moment when Attorney General Doug Gansler, Candidate for Governor Gansler and Father of a Teenage Son Who Graduated From High School And Wants To Party With His Friends Like In “Animal House” Gansler officially collided. Many, especially many Democrats, especially many Bill Clinton fans, and definitely aspiring toyboy lawyer Brian Zulberti, would argue that only one of them is really there: Father Doug. The others, being absent, are immune from criticism. This position is popular, convenient, lazy, ethically corrosive and wrong. There is only one Doug Gansler, yes, but he is bound by three standards of conduct. When you are bound by three standards of conduct, you have to abide by the highest one.

Again, this situation focuses our attention on integrity, a core aspect of character, and crucial to ethics. Does an individual have genuine principles that he oe she lives by, or a constantly shifting set of values that are assumed and then discarded according to situation, convenient, strategy and whim? When an ethical problem arises, do others know how the individual will respond? Are his words consistent with his actions? Trust means that others can rely on an individual’s conduct, and you can’t rely on the conduct of someone whose values and priorities with the wind, locale, attention and personal desires.

Then there is the issue of judgment. Judgement is like intelligence and common sense: an individual either has it, or he doesn’t. And such traits as responsibility, accountability, honesty, prudence, dignity, loyalty  and courage come into play. I know those who embrace the private individual/professional dichotomy are stuck with the argument that the absence of  one or more of these in a private setting has no predictive value regarding public or professional conduct, but it is a hopelessly untenable position, pure denial, and ethics poison. Continue reading →

“BULLY!” Is The New “WITCH!”

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments
"Bully!"

“Bully!”

The Texas father of a high school football player would have been right at home in Salem, in the British New World colony of Massachusetts, around 1692. Then, thanks to hysteria about witchcraft, a vengeful citizen could permanently set the populace against a neighbor who had offended him, say, by winning a lawsuit, stealing a recipe or looking lustfully at his or her significant other, by accusing that neighbor of being a witch. This would inevitably spark an investigation, suspicion, infamy, maybe even a trial…and if the accusation stuck, a sadistic execution, perhaps by piling rocks on the neighbor’s witchy chest until everyone heard the sounds of squishing and cracking.

The cry of “Witch!” doesn’t work so well any more, but accusing someone of being a bully works almost as well. It can cause schools to impose punishment for words and activities that have nothing to do with school, and give law enforcement officials the power to pile rocks on the First Amendment. Now a vengeful father who watched his son’s hapless football team get the just desserts of all hapless teams—losing badly—has successfully punished the victors for being stronger, faster, and better coached, by accusing the superior team—it beat his son’s squad by a score of 91-0—of “bullying.” This mandates an investigation, so the winning team’s coach is now under a cloud, and in peril of seeing his career and reputation squished and cracked.

Mission accomplished! Continue reading →