Government & Politics

Ethics, History, and Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

James McAvoy as Frederick Aiken, a Civil War era Ethics Hero you've never heard of.

Throughout Hollywood history, there have been actors who regularly used their screen personas to explore ethical issues: Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Paul Newman, John Wayne of course, Clint Eastwood, and recently, George Clooney. None of these focused their artistic attentions on ethics more sharply than Robert Redford, however, in such films as “All the President’s Men,” “The Candidate,” “The Proposition,” and “The Natural,” and he has continues his exploration of ethics as a director, in such films as “The Milagro Beanfield War” and “Quiz Show.”

Redford’s most recent film, “The Conspirator,” is another ethics movie, as well as one that explores law and American history. I am a Lincoln assassination buff, and I was eager to see the movie until I read several reviews criticizing it as a heavy-handed allegory attacking the Bush administration’s response to 9/11. Score one for the confirmation bias trap: the movie is nothing of the kind. Continue reading →

God, Beck, and the Confirmation Bias Trap

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Hurricane Irene proves that God agrees with Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck says so, and he must be right, because God agrees with him. Hurricane Irene proves it.

Policy makers, decision-makers, journalists, and indeed all of us have an ethical obligation to be on the alert for confirmation bias, that insidious human tendency to interpret all external phenomena as confirmation of our established opinions and beliefs. Why do we have the obligation? We have it because confirmation bias makes us dogmatic, inflexible, close-minded, incompetent, and, in a word, stupid. Life can make us wiser, but not if we misinterpret everything so as not to disturb our most cherished certainties. Continue reading →

A Damning Role Model For Wisconsin’s Public Union Protests

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Fair game for Wisconsin's public unions

The ethical line between Fred Phelps’ anti-gay protesters who disrupt the funerals of  soldiers killed in action, and the self-righteous union protesters opposing Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker’s budget balancing efforts has thinned to the vanishing point.

On Friday, Walker visited the Messmer Catholic Preparatory School in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, to read to third-graders. The third-graders have no political agenda, but 100 protesters felt it was appropriate to disrupt a special day for school children to show their hatred for the governor.
Just as the Westboro Baptist Church feels that its homophobic crusade justifies interfering with military families’ private grief, Wisconsin’s ethically tone-deaf unions feel that innocent student are appropriate collateral damage in their quest to hold on to their privileged status among Wisconsin workers, and elections, laws, deficits and common sense be damned. How especially cynical of the teachers unions, to disrupt the experience of Catholic school students, who, apparently, don’t count. Tell us again, you dedicated teachers, how it’s “all for the children.” Continue reading →

Ethics Reading Assignment…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

If you are waiting for Irene to hit or simply looking for some ethical enlightenment, here are some scintillating posts from around the web on ethics, social norms and morality. It is also an opportunity to check out some of the excellent blogs and websites in the Ethics Alarms links, which I heartily recommend.

Here are...

The Michigan Saloon Legislator Lock-Out: Not Quite “Here Comes The Bride” Unethical, But Wrong All The Same

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Michigan saloon, bar and restaurant owners are upset that the legislature passed a workplace smoking ban, so the advocacy group Protect Private Property Rights is fighting back  by organizing 500 bars statewide to ban state lawmakers from their premises, beginning September. 1.

This isn’t bigotry or gratuitous cruelty, like the New Jersey bridal shop refusing to sell a gown to a gay customer. It’s not illegal, either: state legislators aren’t a protected class, and discriminating against them isn’t invidious, since, well, they probably are hated with some justification.

No, excluding the lawmakers is unethical for other reasons. To being with, it’s un-American. Continue reading →

In the Aftermath of Biden’s Human Rights Betrayal, Little Integrity From The Media

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Like Diogenes of Sinope searching for an honest man, Ethics Alarms has been searching for a political progressive, here or anywhere, who will acknowledge the blatant pro-liberal, pro-Obama, anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-Tea Party bias of the mainstream media. Obvious examples are routinely explained or rationalized away, even when they are criticized by a media outlet’s own internal ombudsmen and ethicists.

The media’s coverage of the recent toadying remarks of Vice-President Biden to the Chinese, as he gave a pass to China’s  long-time policy of limiting families to one child, has been a particularly vivid and disgraceful case in point. Despite the fact that Biden’s remarks were a shocking diplomatic gaffe and human rights betrayal, they were almost solely criticized by Republicans and conservative pundits, and only fleetingly covered at all by the mainstream media. While the so-called “conservative media” kept Biden’s gaffe in the news, the rest either covered the coverage, as in “Right Wing Critics Attack Biden,” or framed the criticism of Biden as a pro-life vs. pro-choice dust-up, as if anyone but a lunatic could describe a program limiting births by law  as “pro choice.” Continue reading →

Ethics Bulletin To Camden, New Jersey: Money Isn’t The Solution To Everything

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Just pay him to come to school, and he'll be a model student. No, really!

It’s not that surprising that the people who run the city of Camden think that money is the panacea to every problem. After all, that is the predominant message sent by our leaders in Washington, the media and the popular culture. Still, Camden’s new policy of  rewarding selected high school students $100 each to go to school in the first three weeks of the year displays ethical obtuseness rare even for school systems.

The idea is to fight truancy with a new program called I Can End Truancy (ICE-T). To receive their promised C-note, each of 66 targeted students must attend classes as well as conflict-resolution and anger-management workshops for the first three weeks of school. “We had talked about it [truancy] for a long time,” Camden Mayor Dana Redd told reporters. “We wanted to come up with an innovative model.” The required state minimum attendance rate is 90 percent, and Camden is threatening to miss it. After all, it’s the statistics that count, not whether the students actually pay attention in school, or learn anything. If this plan doesn’t work, presumably Camden will bring the required number of children to school at gunpoint, and drug them unconscious until the bell sounds. Continue reading →

Biden’s China Gaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Homer Simpson made some comments in China yesterday,,,wait, my mistake. It was Joe Biden.

I saw the transcript of the Vice President’s remarks in China yesterday, and several thoughts went through my mind:

 How craven. How callous.What a betrayal of decency and American values!

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 This is what happens when a once-great country is a trillion dollars  in debt to a human rights monster.

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I hesitate to speculate what other nations that look to the U.S. as the champion of human rights must think when they hear the American Vice-President call forced abortion “a policy which I thoroughly understand.” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Carnage in Wisconsin…”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Pat earns the Comment of the Day by refocusing my attention on an issue I had been planning to examine in detail, only to be distracted by the swirl of current events. The issue is the ethics of public unions, a controversy in sharp focus during Governor Scott Walker’s overhaul of public employee pensions and collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin. Thanks, Pat, for  both your thoughtful comment and for getting me back to this important matter. You’ll  have my response soon.

Here is Pat’s commentary on “Ethics Carnage in Wisconsin: the Ethics Grades So Far”:

“No one need be a member of the union of concerned scientists to figure out the problem of collectivism in government. If Congress (or the Union) together decided to vote themselves $1,000,000 salaries per year (or exorbitant pensions for life), they could do it. That is the problem of collectivism and it is the problem of democracy – that can defeat the purpose of the freedom of elections. Ordinary taxpayers can be defeated by their own democracy in that regard, and it is no better than having a dictator under tyranny.

“The function of having free elections is to avoid that tyranny, i.e., by electing persons to office temporarily, not to be saddled with them for life (which is what congressional pensions produce). By most ethical standards, it would be congressional embezzlement by the nature of the authority to grant itself those pensions. The same would be true if Congress worked in conjunction with government employees to help them get reelected in order to perpetuate elective office for incumbents so that it can be effectively, for life.

“Both methods defeat the purpose of freedom of elections that is built into the congressional constitutional scheme that separates the elective office from the appointed and the government employee. Government pensions meant for government employees alone has been unethically and grossly inflated and granted to Congress and appointees in a blatant self-serving reward that defeats the purpose of having elections. Terms limits is the only method that can control that abuse of power.

“If government unions demands are too high, they may also need term limits to prevent arbitrary tapping into the proceeds of the taxpayer’s treasury, and thereby limiting what can be paid, and what can be taxed for.

“Public finance can defeat the purpose of democracy without such protections, and it is a necessary feature of all democracies to prevent the power of authority to abuse the power of the people, or there will be only wage slavery by government taxation.

“By tradition before government exploitation, government pensions were granted only to government employees – distinct from those elected – because they were employees. Elected persons are only temporary employees, and meant to be only temporary employees, and therefore not entitled to pensions. But that tradition has been grossly abused by self-serving elected employees to become privileged as elected and privileged as employees where it was designed to be one “or” the other, not one “and” the other.”

Gays, Bridal Shops, Judges, and the Anger of Grief

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Gay rights opponents are locked in the anger stage of the five stages of grief identified by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Frankly, I thought they would be farther along by now.

The American public has made rapid progress in its acceptance of gay neighbors, gay sons and daughters and same-sex marriages, but those who regard homosexuals as practitioners of an aberrant and corrupting lifestyle, while recognizing, I think, that the cultural battle is lost, are deep in grief. Anger is only the second stage of the grieving process, and the most destructive as well as the stage that generates the most unethical and irrational conduct. If we can somehow get the grief-stricken to bargaining, depression and acceptance, the final three stages, everyone,including them, would be better off.

The signs are clear right now, however, that anger is the prevalent mood among anti-gay bitter-enders, after the first two stages, denial and isolation, have played  out. As a consequence we are seeing more and more instances of gratuitous cruelty and aggression against gays. It is usually diagnosed as hate, but its root is the anger of grief. The culture is changing in ways that some never dreamed it could or would, and they are furious. Continue reading →