Literature

On Hoaxes, Avatar, and More Late Night Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Hoax Update

  • Singer, model, television personality and inexplicable celebrity Tia Tequila announced in December that she was engaged to the heiress to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, Casey Johnson. The troubled Johnson turned up dead in squalid circumstances in January, prompting a grief-stricken online statement from Tia in which she spelled her beloved’s name wrong. Shortly after this, it was revealed that the engagement was a publicity stunt by Tequila, who barely knew Johnson. Fake romances for publicity purposes are as old as the Tudors, but this sort of thing further trivializes truth for an entire generation. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Miep Gies, 1909-2010

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Miep Gies, the last surviving participant in the inspiring story of Anne Frank, died last week, a month short of her 101st birthday.

One of the most important objectives of thinking about ethics, and challenging ourselves to find the most ethical courses in the dilemmas and conflicts we read and hear about every day, is to be ready if and when a time comes when lives depend on our ability to determine the right thing to do, and to have the courage do it. I have no idea how much or how often Miep Gies thought about ethics. But when her time came, she was ready. Continue reading →

Well, It’s Better Than Senator Burris’s Version…

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[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.]

Continue reading →

The “Rock the Vote” Sex Extortion Video: All’s Fair in Health Care

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

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 →

When Experts Aren’t: The Ethics of Competence and “The Elements of Style”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Ethics Alarms, and apparently few others who don’t have their TV stuck permanently on Fox News, expressed its outrage of at the revealed ignorance of Al Gore, whose opinion on climate change policy carries weight and influence far beyond his demonstrated ability to comprehend the natural forces underlying his own opinion. (This week Al came up with another howler, stating that the polar ice caps would be gone in a couple of years. The scientist he erroneously quoted regarding this quickly announced that Al must have been talking about some other ice caps.) Experts who are really incompetent cause great harm, which is why competence is a critical, though often ignored, ethical duty for all professionals, from Albero Gonzalez to Bernie Madoff to Ashley Simpson to White House social secretaries.

This excellent article, a long time coming, finally exposes the incompetence of William Strunk and E.B.White, whose 1918 mini-book  “The Elements of Style” was uncritically adopted as gospel by generations of English teachers, many of whom were incompetent themselves. This over-reaching duo was to blame for all the perfectly appropriate split infinitives and passive voice sentences that you were marked down for using in the 9th Grade, and I have a book editor I’m sending this link to as soon as I finish this post who has been quoting  Strunk and White to get me to stop beginning sentences with “And” or “But.”  How many promising, lively young writers were throttled into mediocrity by this book we will never know, but it stands as vivid and tragic lesson on why experts have an obligation to be at least nearly as smart as they claim to be.

Is Gossip Unethical? Is the Pope Catholic?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A recent Wall Street Journal blog post included this surprising statement:

“Amid a rise in office gossip, researchers are disagreeing over whether it is fundamentally good or bad.”

Pardon? Dictionaries are unanimous in defining  gossip as “idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others.” That’s pretty clearly unethical, wouldn’t you say? Continue reading →

Breaking Promises to the Dying and the Dead

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

"Bye, Marilyn...it was nice lying over you."

My Dad detested wakes and viewings, and used to say that after he died, he wanted to be exhibited sitting up, eyes open, with a tape recording that would be triggered every time anyone stood in front of him. The recording would be of my father saying, “Hello! Thanks for coming! Hope to see you at my funeral!” Luckily, Dad didn’t make me promise to do anything that bizarre, although it would not have been out of character for him to do so. His recent death caused me to wonder: what if he had? Would I be obligated to keep my promise? Would I be justified in making such a promise, if I knew it wouldn’t be kept? Continue reading →

Climategate’s Ethics Heroes, Villains and Dunces

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The hacked East Anglia University computer files are slowly revealing the ethical values of more than just the scientists. They are also serving as accurate detector of integrity or the lack of it; bias or fairness, honesty, accountability, and courage.

Almost every day, a public statement, op-ed or news item exposes a hero, dunce, or villain or in the climate change debate, like those nifty reagents and black lights they use in the  “CSI” TV show and its 37 spin-offs. Here are some who have appeared thus far: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Stacy Horton

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ethicists are unduly fond of presenting lose-lose hypotheticals, “Sophie’s Choice” situations in which a necessary action will also create a horrible result, and inaction is not an option. Fortunately for us, such situations rarely occur outside the pages of William Styron novels. A New Zealand man recently faced such a crisis, however, and he took the ethical course, and the only course: the best he could do under the circumstances, knowing he would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life. Ironically, in the ultimate ethical dilemma, ethics becomes irrelevant.There is no right choice, and there is no wrong one, except to do nothing at all. Our sympathy and sorrow go out to Stacy Horton and his family.

“Scroogenomics”: Clueless About Holiday Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I had decided to write about the new book “Scroogenomics: Why you shouldn’t buy presents for the holidays”early yesterday. I should have assumed that our current Scrooge-in-Chief, George Will, would have the same idea. He did, and greeted his readers with typically sour tidings as he heartily endorsed this commercially clever and ethically fatuous book. The brain-child of economist Joel Waldfogel, “Scroogenomics” argues that holiday gift-giving makes no economic or social sense, and is a net drag on everyone. Will’s quote from it is as revealing as any:

Gifts that people buy for other people are usually poorly matched to the recipients’ preferences. What the recipients would willingly pay for the gifts is usually less than the givers paid. The measure of the inefficiency of allocating value by gift-giving is the difference between the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent on gifts and the yield per dollar spent on the recipients’ own purchases.

All of which means that Waldfogel (and Will) are hopelessly confused about the social and ethical value of gift-giving, which has little to do with the ratio of “the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent.”  Continue reading →