Family

Tales From The Moral Luck Files: The Truck, The Ice, and the Hero

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
"I'm a hero!"

“Woo-Hoo! I’m a hero!”

A story from Manitoba, Canada raises the question, “Should someone get full credit for being a hero when he rescues the victim of his own poor judgment?”

A father on an ice fishing trip with his daughter drove his pick-up truck onto the ice of frozen Lake Manitoba, misestimating just how frozen it was. The truck broke through the ice, and he reportedly had to dive deep into the freezing water to rescue his daughter from an icy death. Is it heroism to repair the results of a near tragedy you caused yourself?

Let’s consider at a range of possible frozen ice scenarios:

1. You see someone else’s truck break through the ice, and rescue the occupants from drowning at great personal risk.

2.  You tell a driver that its safe to drive his truck onto the ice, and it breaks through because you were wrong. You rescue his daughter.

3.  You watch several trucks drive on the frozen lake without incident. You follow them, and your truck falls through the ice. You have to rescue your daughter.

4. You drive onto the ice without proper precautions, and after your truck falls through, you rescue your daughter.

5. A local citizen warns you about driving your truck on the ice, which he says is too thin. You do it anyway, and have to save your daughter.

6. The Homer Simpson scenario: You see a truck fall through the ice, and yet drive yours onto the ice anyway. You rescue Lisa. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Christmas Shaming

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Ethics Alarms participant Jeff Hibbert asks my reactions to this photo:

Blurry face boy

[The sign reads: “I have to take back my PS3 that I was getting for Christmas because I wasn’t grateful to receive a Captain America action figure (That I received from Church) so I’m going Christmas shopping for other kids with the refund money!”  The actual photo on the web shows the unblurred face of an unhappy boy, and that is how I originally posted it. However, after some prompting by Jeff, I concluded that I was adding to the boy’s plight by helping to publicize his identity. Ethics Alarms commenter texagg04 kindly provided this version, as well as three others that gave me some Christmas mirth by replacing the boy’s face with Bart Simpson’s, a smiley face, and most inspired of all, the face of recent Ethics Alarms’ subject John Dillinger.]

I can’t find any context for it, back-story, or the name of the family involved. (I’m glad about that last part, by the way.)  If it is what it appears to be, a young boy’s parents are subjecting him to rather harsh punishment for displaying inadequate gratitude for a gift he didn’t care for, by forcing him to return his favorite gift, a Play Station 3, and use the money to buy gifts for presumably needy children. Continue reading →

Holiday Ethics Quiz: The Family Stuffing Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Families can fight about anything.

Further proof that families can fight about anything.

In the category of the kind of ethics controversy only families can devise comes this one, from an old friend from high school, who just e-mailed me for advice:

She is having her sister and her sister’s family, all adults, over for Christmas dinner. She is cooking all of it, turkey, stuffing, chestnuts roasting on a open fire, Andy Williams on a spit—the works. Today her sister tells her that her daughter will be bringing her own turkey stuffing, because she likes her recipe best. My friend said, “Fine,” and hung up. Now she is quietly fuming. She asks, “What kind of behavior is that? I’m inviting them to dinner. Who brings their own private courses because it’s their personal preference?” (She adds that nobody has ever complained about her stuffing. I can personally vouch for that: I’ve eaten it in past years, and it’s excellent.)

My friend thinks the whole idea is an insult and bad manners, and wants to call up her sister to say, oh, lots of possible things, like “You know Christmas Eve when we’re coming over to your house for dinner? Well, my daughter will be bringing hamburgers, because she thinks the food you serve is crap,” or, “Tell Phyllis she’s welcome to make her own stuffing and get her ass over here at 6 AM to stuff it in our bird, or she can live with what I’m serving,” or “Why don’t you all just bring your favorite damn dishes and we can just have pot luck?”

So it’s a two-part Christmas Ethics Quiz for the Ethics Alarms faithful:

1. Is the daughter’s conduct inexcusably rude?

2. Should my friend say anything about it? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “What’s Next for the Alisal Union School District…John Dillinger High School?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The second Comment of the Day on my post about a Salinas, California school district choosing to name an elementary school after an executed thief and murderer from that state’s colorful past is an unusual one. When I was first presented with J.S.’s comment protesting what he took as a false assertion that Mr. Dillinger was a killer in addition to being an epic bank-robber, I took him to be Dillinger fetishist, like the warped souls who are obsessed with villains like Billy the Kid and Charles Manson. I was wrong: as he explains here, he is a Dillinger family member, and has a valid reason for insisting that the original Public Enemy #1 is only condemned for the (many) crimes he actually committed. Here is S.S’s  heartfelt Comment of the Day, on the post “What’s Next for the Alisal Union School District…John Dillinger High School?”: Continue reading →

Introducing “The Marmion Award” and Its 2012 Honorees, Lavera Irene Hammond-Jackson and Stella Hammond-Jackson

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
Don't be so gloomy, Sir Walter! Here, let me cheer you up by telling you about the tangled web woven by the

Don’t be so gloomy, Sir Walter! Here, let me cheer you up by telling you about the tangled web woven by the Hammond-Jacksons!

I may never award this particular prize again, but a spectacular episode of incompetent mendacity like this needs to be immortalized. The Marmion Award is named in honor of “Marmion,” the long epic poem by novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). The work is best known for its lines:

Oh! what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive!

A Palmer too! No wonder why.

I felt rebuked beneath his eye.

I don’t know what Palmer has to do with it, but the reasons for the award will be immediately apparent when one reads the hilarious and deadpan Oconee County Sheriff’s Office account of the shoplifting arrest of a mother-daughter team at a Walmart’s in Oconee County, South Carolina. While it is refreshing, in an era when so many teens are estranged from their parents and reject their values, to see a mother and daughter so close in interests and ambitions, I cannot help reflect on how the daughter in this case never had a fighting chance to join the ranks of honest, respectable, productive members of society, since her mother has obviously raised her to be a shameless thief and a liar, and by the evidence of this report, succeeded in her goal. The report also shows, unfortunately, that a proud mentor’s offspring is unlikely to become a convincing liar if her mother and teacher is this inept at it herself.

Here is the report, reprinted in the Oconee Patch. I want to thank the patch, Fark, which flagged it, the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office, which preserved it for posterity, and especially the Hammond-Jacksons for giving me, in my depressed holiday state, the best laugh I’ve had in a long, long time.  Continue reading →

Lisa Long’s Unethical, Despicable Bargain: Betrayal For A Blog Post

/ Jack Marshall / 90 Comments
No silver for this mother's betrayal...just blogging fame..

No silver for this mother’s betrayal…just blogging fame..

I hope free-lance writer Lisa Long enjoys her brief notoriety as a result of her blog post on The Blue Review that was  re-published on the Huffington Post and  Gawker, guaranteeing millions of readers. That should be worth at least a few more published articles for her, and maybe even a cable interview or two. After all, it would be a pity  to deliberately and callously burden the life of her emotionally disturbed son and get nothing out of it at all.

One thing she is already getting as the result of her sensationally-titled essay “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” is harsh criticism for making such a cynical and self-serving bargain. In her post, Long relates the harrowing tale of her life with her 13-year-old son, whose erratic behavior and emotional outbursts terrify and dismay her. In the most quoted portion of the post, she proclaims his equivalence to well-known serial killers:

“I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.”

Gee, thanks Mom! Continue reading →

The 8 Useful Ethics Tips From “The Tale of the Well-Meaning Kidnapper”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Luis Trinidad, safe but confused

Luis Trinidad, safe but confused

Ethics Tip #1: If you are this stupid and irresponsible, it’s unethical to have children

A Bristol, Connecticut man parked his car outside a store with the doors unlocked, the motor running, and his two-year-old son in the back seat.

Ethics Tip #2: When you witness child endangerment, make sure rescuing the child does not require breaking the law, unless there are no other options to save the child. Calling the police is usually another option.

Outraged by the father’s irresponsible conduct, a citizen who happened to pass by the car, 24-year-old Devon Mills, decided to take matters into his own hands.

Ethics Tip #3: When you hear yourself saying, “This guy needs to be taught a lesson,” stop and think things through: that may be true, but you may not be the appropriate deliverer of the lesson, and the statement is an invitation to overstep one’s authority.

Mills decided that it would serve the father of the child and owner of the car right if he got scared out of his wits. Continue reading →

UPDATE: A Cynical Ethics Tale That Wasn’t So Cynical After All

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In the recent Ethics Alarms post The Asperger’s Child, the Company With A Heart, and the Cheapskate Parents: A Cynical Ethics Tale, I expressed both ethical and credibility doubts about the heart-warming story of a little boy who was sent the out-of stock LEGO set he had saved to buy for two years, only to discover that it was no longer manufactured and could only be purchased at premium rates via collectors or online auction. The child’s joyful reaction when he opened the box containing the set sent to him as a gift by the toymaker was captured in a family video that subsequently went viral on YouTube.

I won’t rehash my analysis here; read the post. I questioned why the family wouldn’t just contribute the necessary funds to ensure that the child’s long effort to obtain the toy didn’t come to naught, and I expressed skepticism that LEGO’s generosity wasn’t part of a pre-arranged quid pro quo in exchange for the video, especially since the father is professional videographer, and the YouTube product functioned as a promotion for LEGO.

By purest coincidence, a personal friend here in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Jeff Westlake, is also a close personal friend of the Groccia family. He was privy to the events of the story as they unfolded, and relayed information to me about both the family and the events surrounding the YouTube video that were not evident in the media reports. Thanks to Jeff’s insight, I am now satisfied that the family’s decision to explore every avenue of obtaining the LEGO set was reasonable rather than penurious, and that there was no quid pro quo with LEGO.

I apologize for mistakenly impugning the Groccia’s motives and account in the episode. I don’t apologize for raising the ethical issues that I saw implicit in the media accounts. That’s my job, and provoking discussion and debate over the ethical or unethical conduct of public figures is why this blog exists. If a family is going to participate in making an occurrence in their lives the subject of news stories, features and blog posts, they cannot insist that all commentary be unequivocally positive. I thought the doubts I expressed were legitimate and fair; it happens that they were not borne out by the facts.

Mr. Groccia was offended, understandably, and not so understandably, decided to respond here with, first, an anonymous comment noting that my “foil hat must be too tight as it appears to be impeding your cognitive abilities.” I didn’t know who the author was, and informed him via the email; address accompanying the comment that I would post his remarks if 1) I had a real name, as the Comment Policies require,  and 2) if the screen name he used was not a commercial website, since this would lead to the comment being spammed. He responded that he “knew” I wouldn’t have the “spine” to print his comment, which is manifestly not the case. I told him that I would be happy to publish a more thorough account by him, and would retract my suspicions if I was persuaded by it. Instead. Mr. Groccia chose to send a series of alternately insulting and threatening e-mails, none of which were substantive, and all of which served to reinforce my doubts. There the matter would have laid, except for the intervention of Jeff Westlake. I’m grateful to him for setting the record straight.

 

Comment of the Day: “The Asperger’s Child, the Company With A Heart, and the Cheapskate Parents: A Cynical Ethics Tale”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Death StarFrom new commenter Ron Bishop, a Comment of the Day on the post, The Asperger’s Child, the Company With A Heart, and the Cheapskate Parents: A Cynical Ethics Tale, It is self-explanatory. I would like to know, however, and have asked, what these parents would have done if, after all their son’s toil and planning, the Death Star had cost a hundred dollars or so more than he could raise. Would they have had him ask LEGO for help, or helped him out themselves?

“I believe it’s a real story, because my family has lived a very similar story. My 11 year old with Aspergers Disorder, also a Lego fan and in a social skills group, wanted the $400 Death Star set. Sensing a “learning moment”, I told him, if he saved up the money, he could purchase it. Continue reading →

The Asperger’s Child, the Company With A Heart, and the Cheapskate Parents: A Cynical Ethics Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

This is a sweet and gooey ethics tale with, I fear, a fishy center.

James, luckily captured in spontaneous celebration over the completely unexpected gift from the LEGO company

James, luckily captured in spontaneous celebration over the completely unexpected gift from the LEGO company

James Groccia of West Boylston, Massachusetts was nine years old when he told his parents that his dream gift was an Emerald Night Train LEGO Set. His parents, seeking to build his character before he could build his dream train. told the boy that he had to save up for the expensive set, which cost $100. James has Asperger’s Syndrome, which means that he obsesses about things that interest him to an extreme degree, and he made the Lego set the object of his tunnel vision. After two years of meticulous saving, he finally had enough money saved to purchase his prize—-and discovered that it had been discontinued. Now the  Emerald Night Train could only be obtained from collectors or in expensive online auctions, costing far more money than James had saved. The boy was devastated.

At the suggestion of James’ Asperger’s counsellor, his mother helped him write a letter to LEGO, explaining his devotion to the toy and asking if the company could track one down for him. It responded, with regret,  that indeed the Emerald Night Train LEGO Set was out of stock and was no longer made. Then, a few days before James’s birthday this October, a box addressed to James arrived at the family home. Yes, Virginia, it was a brand-new model of the Emerald Night Train! The accompanying letter from Lego said, Continue reading →