What rationalizations does a computer company use to justify the development of a new dashboard device that is certain to cause accidents and take lives? The same ones, I suspect, that are employed by auto manufacturers to justify selling cars with the feature. Continue reading
Health and Medicine
New York’s Junkie Primer: Unethical and Absurd
The New York Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene, has a new brochure out for heroin addicts. It’s goal: help them break the law, become addicted, abandon their responsibilities and eventually kill themselves as safely as possible.
I’m not kidding. Continue reading
Ethics and the Suicidal Student
Ethics often comes down to answering the basic question, “What is the right thing to do?” Sometimes the wrong option will be easy to identify, but finding the right action is nearly impossible, complicated by diverse stakeholders, conflicting values and legal entanglements. This is the situation universities face when a student becomes suicidal. What action is in the best interest of the student, as well as the other students and the institution itself? Continue reading
Well, It’s Better Than Senator Burris’s Version…
[An Ethics Alarms reflection on the Christmas Eve Senate vote passing that esteemed body’s version of health care reform…in the tradition of “A Visit From Saint Nicholas,” because 1) you haven’t read enough parodies of that poem this year, 2) it seemed appropriate, but mostly 3) the version Sen. Burris read on the Senate floor was so terrible that I had to get its taste out of my mouth.]
Punishing Pregnant Soldiers
The outrage expressed by women’s groups over the Army’s announced intention to discipline and even court-martial female soldiers who become pregnant in war zones was as predictable as a sunrise. It also carries political firepower, and public appeal.
The complaints are, however, ethically nonsensical. Continue reading
Ethics Notes: Santa, the Senate, and Snow
Some random thoughts on ethics matters as I try to simultaneously finish the Ethics Alarms 2009 Best and Worst lists and deal with a series of bad extension cords running up my Christmas tree…
The “Rock the Vote” Sex Extortion Video: All’s Fair in Health Care
A new YouTube video by the supposedly civic-minded group “Rock the Vote” is so wrong, so objectionable in its attitude and unethical in its spirit in so many ways that it almost justifies the screaming rants that it is certain to provoke on talk radio and from excitable cable commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. Continue reading
“Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew” and Reality Show Ethics
Duncan Roy is a director, producer and writer whom I had never heard of, and I didn’t watch his exploits as a patient/reality show performer on VH1’s “Celebrity Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew .” The reason for the latter was a mixture of ethics and taste: feeding the fame addiction of celebrities while supposedly treating their other addictions seemed wrong to me, and inducing sex-addicted female porn stars, beauty queens and models to go into therapy with similarly attractive and sexually obsessive men is ridiculous, like setting “The Biggest Loser” at a 24 hour, all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. Continue reading
Proof of Dead Ethics: Attacking Your Adversary’s Family
It is a standard threat in movies about the Mob and TV dramas about thugs: “Do what I tell you, or your family’s dead.” The tactic of going after loved ones as a particularly awful form of revenge is a calling card of the truly despicable. That is why the Valerie Plame scandal so damaged the Bush Administration’s popularity, even though it was never clear (and still isn’t) that anyone there really did try to “out” Plame’s CIA status to get even with her obnoxious husband’s fueling opposition to the Iraq invasion. Just the plausible suggestion that Vice President Cheney’s gang may have committed such an ethical outrage was too much to bear.
You would think, then, that those who most revile Cheney’s no-holds-barred approach to political combat would be the least likely to emulate him. You would be wrong. Continue reading
When Money Curdles Ethics
A stimulating ethics alarm drill surfaced over at Freakonomics, where Stephen Dubner challenged the site’s readers to help him compile a list of goods, services and activities that one can legally give away or perform gratis, but that when money changes hands, the transactions become illegal. It is a provocative exercise, especially when one ponders why the addition of money should change the nature of the act from benign to objectionable in the view of culture, society, or government. It is even more revealing to expand the list to include uses of money that may not create illegality, but which change an act from ethical to unethical. Continue reading
