Love

The “Other Woman” Scorned Asks The Ethicist: “Is It Ethical To Wreck the Bastard’s Marriage?”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

I’m surprised she didn’t ask if she could cook his little girl’s bunny too, like Glenn Close did in “Fatal Attraction.”

It amazed me that someone like this reads a NYT column called “The Ethicist.” She’s sounds like she’s never heard of the concept. She writes,

Last summer, I was dating a man in our weekender community outside New York City who seemed like a wonderful guy. A month after we became intimate, he told me that he was married but that he had been separated from his wife for a year. He explained that the reason he has not gotten a divorce is that she has cancer and is on his health insurance. He said she had just had surgery and was recovering. Naturally I felt compassion and said I wouldn’t push him. Eventually, I ended the relationship, because I started feeling I wasn’t getting the full story. When I mentioned our relationship to a friend who also knows him, I learned that my instincts were correct. Apparently, he is very much still with his wife, and she is healthy. I am so shocked by this. Should I contact his wife and let her know this is what he is doing and saying? Given that they are both journalists, I would think veracity would be a priority.

Translation: “I hate this lying bastard and want to hurt him, and his wife too. That’s OK, right?”

Uh. no. I haven’t even read The Ethicist’s answer, but Prof. Appiah, for all his faults and weaknesses, surely can get this one right. Let’s see…

Yup. In a mealy-mouthed way, but he agrees.

The Ethics Alarms 2025 “It’s A Wonderful Life” Ethics Companion

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

2025 INTRODUCTION

Once again, the annual Ethics Alarms posting of my guide to watching the 1946 classic is in Thanksgiving week, first, because I concluded a few years ago that it is a Thanksgiving movie, and second, because I personally need the movie right now. It’s a Thanksgiving movie because a man learns through divinely orchestrated perspective that he has a lot to be thankful for, even if it often hasn’t seemed like it in his life of disappointments and dashed dreams. He’s married to Donna Reed, for heaven’s sake! He has nothimg to complain about.

I just finished re-reading last year’s version and making some additions and subtractions. You know what? It’s worth reading again. I wrote the thing, and I still get a lot out of it.

Last year was a particularly gloomy one for me, and I’m afraid my annual introduction reflected that. It was hard for me to even watch “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which was my late wife’s favorite movie (well, tied with “Gone With the Wind” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”) last year, and, though I have had 364 days more to get used to existence with out her, I’m more resigned than better.

This year, in September, I had an “IAWL” moment when a lawyer whom I had only known for a few days pulled me aside at a gala celebration of the 52nd year of continuous operation of a student theater group I had founded my first year in law school. He said that his two young children, who I could see playing in the courtyard, wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t started the organization  where he met his wife, and he wanted to thank me.

The reunion of lawyers who  participated in the over 150 plays, musicals and operettas produced by the group revealed that dozens of lasting marriages and their children had been an unanticipated result of the unique organization, the only graduate school theatrical group in the U.S. “Strange, isn’t it?,” Clarence says to George as the metaphorical light finally dawns. “Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving this year for too many reasons to go into, but I guess I’m thankful that I’m here instead of a hole. It’s a lowly measure of success, but I’ll take it.

Grace so loved the final scene when Harry Bailey toasts, “To my big brother George, the luckiest man on earth!” and everyone starts singing  “Auld Lang Syne.” She always started crying, and, to be honest, I think I’ll skip that part this year. When I watched it last year, it almost killed me. 

Besides, Billy Crystal (actually Nora Ephron, who wrote his lines) pretty much ruined “Auld Lang Syne” for me with his observations in “When Harry Met Sally.” The song really doesn’t make any sense, it just feels right. One might say the same thing about “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

I won’t, however.

PREFACE

Frank Capra must have felt that the movie was bitterly ironic. It was a flop, and destroyed his infant project with some other prominent directors to launch a production company called “Liberty” that would give directors the liberty to put their artistic visions on the screen without interference from the money-obsessed studios. “It’s A Wonderful Life” was the first and last film produced by Liberty Studios: it not only killed the partnership, it just about ended Capra’s career.

James Stewart was, by all accounts, miserable during the shooting. He suffered from PTSD after his extensive combat experience, and the stress he was under shows in many of the scenes, perhaps to the benefit of the film.

It is interesting that the movie is scored by Dmitri Tiompkin, a Russian expatriate who is best known for scoring Westerns like “Red River” and “High Noon.” He wasn’t exactly an expert on small town America, but his trademark, using familiar tunes and folk melodies, is on full display. Clarence, George’s Guardian Angel (Second Class), is frequently underscored with the nursery rhyme “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” because he is represented by a star in the opening scene in Heaven. The old bawdy tune “Buffalo Girls” is another recurring theme, an odd one for a wholesome film, since the buffalo girls were prostitutes.

Donna Reed is a revelation in the film. She is best remembered as the wise and loving Fifties mom in “The Donna Reed Show” (in the brilliant satiric musical “Little Shop of Horrors,” doomed heroine Audrey singing about her dream of domestic bliss “somewhere that’s green” sings “I cook like Betty Crocker and I look like Donna Reed.”) But she was an excellent dramatic actress, and Hollywood did not do her talents justice. She was also, I am told by my freind and hero Paul Peterson who played her young son Jeff, as nice and admirable in person as she seemed on the show.

Lionel Barrymore, once described by a critic as an actor who could overact just by sitting still, is nonetheless a memorable villain. It was no coincidence that he was known at holiday time for playing Scrooge in an annual radio prouduction of “A Christmas Carol.” Barrymore was an alcoholic like his two siblings, John and Ethel, both regarded more highly as actors but less able to work reliably through their addiction. Lionel was in a wheelchair for his latter career; he wouldn’t have been if he had been born a few decades later. He needed hip replacements and those weren’t possible for his generation. As a result, he is the only memorable wheelchair-bound film actor of note.

Thomas Mitchell, George’s pathetic Uncle Billy, was one of the greatest Hollywood character actors of his or any other era. He is memorable in many classics, including “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach” and more, while also starring in several successful Broadway plays.  On stage he created the role of the rumpled detective “Columbo,” his final role.

The cop and the cab driver, Bert and Ernie (names borrowed by “Sesame Street” in a strange inside joke) were played by Ward Bond, another prolific character actor who shows up in key roles in too many great movies to list, and  Frank Faylen, who made over 200 movies with IAWL being the only certified classic. Both Bond and Faylen found their greatest success on TV, Bond as the cantankerous wagonmaster and star of “Wagon Train” and Faylen as the apoplectic father of highschooler Dobie Gillis in “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” I don’t think any character on TV made my father laugh as hard as Faylen’s “Herbert T. Gillis.”

Now that the introductions are over with, let’s go to Bedford Falls…but first, a stop in Heaven…

1. A Religious Movie Where There Is No Religion

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Ethics Alarms Encore: An Ethics Tale, A Romance, And A Ghost Story…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Happy Halloween, from Ethics Alarms!

***

The Highwayman

By Alfred Noyes

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.   

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.   

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,   

And the highwayman came riding—

         Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

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The Villain In The Phillies-Marlins Ball Heist Was NOT the Obnoxious Phillies Fan…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

No, indeed.

The incident that has “gone viral” from the stands at a Phillies-Marlins game in Miami is covered in the videos above. Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader hit a home run into the left field seats. The ball hit the bleachers and rolled around as four fans tried to nab the souvenir. A man appeared to win the battle, returned to his seat and gave the ball to his young his son, who rewarded him with a hug.

Enter Cruella DeVille. A woman who had been scrambling for the ball, wearing Phillies gear, confronted the man and demanded the ball, claiming she had a hold of it before he got it. The father complied, taking the ball out of his son’s glove and handing it to the woman. Of course the incident was filmed and posted on social media, with the unidentified woman being quickly dubbed “Phillies Karen.”

Sensing a public relations opportunity, the staff at the Marlins’ LoanDepot Park (another horribly named baseball park: money isn’t everything, guys!) wanted to make things right, so they sent a stadium employee to give the son and his sister a goody bag full of baseball stuff.

Awwwww…

The villain in this incident was not the horrible woman. (She doesn’t know her baseball ball-chasing rules, incidentally. In those scrambles for bouncing balls, whoever gets a firm grip on the ball first wins fair and square. I have been in many of these tussles, one of which featured a little old lady snatching the ball from me —a Mickey Mantle foul!—just as I thought I had it in my grasp….) No, the villain was the weenie father.

What a disgrace. This guy gave up in the face of an unjust and unreasonable confrontation because he didn’t have the guts to tell the woman to buzz off, de-gifting his son of a prize—it was his birthday!—in the process. In that moment, he taught to boy many things, none of them good. Don’t fight for what’s yours. Let bullies win. Avoid unpleasant confrontations at all costs, even when it means letting unethical tactics prevail.

He also taught his son that his father is a weenie. Good to know, I guess.

The Ethicist Rejects Unconditional Love

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I don’t.

“My Brother’s an Unpleasant Drunk. Can I Cut Him Off?” the headline to The New York Time’s weekly ethics advice column reads. Well, obviously you can cit him off, but this is ethics: should you cut him off? I must confess, I developed a healthy dislike of the inquirer, who may not be a drunk but is also unpleasant. He writes in part…

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Examining Two Unethical Pathologies

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The substacker “Holly Mathnerd,” not for the first time, has a well-written and interesting post about her reaction to a book by the “star” of a reality show I had never heard of and definitely never watched. Christine Brown Woolley’s memoir “Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom,” released today, is about one of the “stars” of “Sister Wives,” a reality show that has been running for 15 years, including 20 seasons. The show centers on Kody Brown, a fundamentalist Mormon man with twelve children from three wives. His “family” dwells in what Holly calls a “polygamist house”with three apartments branching off a shared common space. That’s Kody above with one of his other wives.

Yikes.

I really don’t care about the details. Polygamy and polyamory (the same thing but without bothering with the marriages) are unethical; never mind the morality issues. Like adultery and prostitution, these are practices that undermine families, real marriages, subjugate women and harm children. Libertarians see nothing wrong with polygamy, or at least think it should be legal, which adequately tells you what’s wrong with libertarians.

I can’t imagine buying a book by a woman who voluntarily submitted to a polyamorous relationship and now wants to make money by writing about what a mistake it was. Gee, ya think? I put Woolley’s memoir in the same category as I would a book by someone who used to shoot nails into his head but who now realizes it was probably a mistake.

From Holly Mathnerd’s account, it seems like the better part of the book is its account of just how phony “reality” shows are, not that this should be a shock to anyone who is familiar with the genre. Holly writes in part,

“…The memoir also peels back the curtain on how fake “reality” really is. Watching the show, you’d think you were seeing the Browns’ daily life: family dinners, arguments, weddings, tears. But Christine makes clear that what you’re really seeing is a carefully curated product — sometimes scripted, sometimes manipulated, always edited with an eye toward what would get people talking on Twitter.

Kody, in particular, seemed to understand this instinctively. He weaponized the cameras. He would drop painful revelations on air — things Christine was hearing for the first time along with millions of strangers — and then claim that the wives couldn’t “control the narrative” because they weren’t “being honest enough.” Meanwhile, what they were really up against was the power of editing: hours of footage boiled down into forty-two minutes that could make anyone look like a saint, a villain, or an afterthought depending on what the producers wanted.

It reminded me of the gaslighting built into the whole setup. The audience was constantly asked to question its own eyes: “No, you didn’t see favoritism; you saw family unity. No, you didn’t see cruelty; you saw tough love. No, you didn’t see neglect; you saw the noble sacrifice of plural marriage.” Christine’s memoir blows a hole in that façade by admitting what fans always suspected: our eyes weren’t lying, the edit was….

Another benefit of the post was that the blogger introduced the term “parasocial relationship,” which I had never encountered before. She didn’t define it, but I looked it up: Google’s bot says that “a parasocial relationship is a one-sided, one-way connection in which an individual develops a strong sense of intimacy, familiarity, and emotional investment with a public figure or fictional character they don’t know personally. These relationships are common and often occur through media, such as television, social media, or podcasts, where an individual feels like they have a personal connection with the person or character on screen or in their feed. While these relationships can be a natural part of human behavior and even provide positive influences, they become unhealthy if they interfere with real-life interactions or daily functioning.” 

Good to know! You can read Holly’s post here….

I Guess, This Being An Ethics Blog, I Have To Post On “Coldplaygate.”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Social media has gone bonkers since last Wednesday night, when Andy Byron, the married CEO of New York-based software development company Astronomer, was caught by a “Kiss-cam” cuddling Kristin Cabot, the company’s head of human resources, on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert at Gillette stadium in Foxborough, Mass. When the two realized they were on camera, they went out of their way to look as guilty as possible, pulling apart, with her turning her back on the camera and him ducking out of view.

Morons. When you are caught beyond escaping, life competence dictates that you must have the presence of mind to maintain whatever shred of dignity you may have left. (Practice helps.) The couple’s futile efforts at a cover-up prompted Coldplay front man Chris Martin to say from the stage: “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy.”

Then the clip gained millions of hits on X, TikTok and Instagram, so it was easy to identify the illicit lovers. Astronomer announced that it had put Byron on leave, saying, “Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability.” Over the weekend, Byron resigned.

The incident is an instant classic, which means people will remember it longer than the usual day-and-a-half. The Philadelphia Phillies made fun of the scandal by screening a video on the Jumbotron during Friday night’s game showing the team’s mascot Phillie Phanatic in an embrace with a fuzzy green companion. Commemorative merchandise, such as a sweatshirt bearing the legend “I TOOK MY SIDEPIECE TO THE COLDPLAY CONCERT AND IT RUINED MY LIFE” can be purchased online.

Ethics notes…

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An Unsolicited Letter From Ashley Madison…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Today this unwelcome turd turned up on my mailbox from a “Kerry Brad”…

Good morning!
What if I told you the typical Ashley Madison member isn’t a reckless playboy but a brown-haired engineer, a highly successful Virgo, and – more often than not – the eldest child in their family? New data from Ashley Madison, the discreet dating platform with more than 80+ million members worldwide, reveals a surprising reality about who’s engaging in non-monogamy – and it’s not who you might expect.

The numbers tell a fascinating story:

  • More than one-third (33%) of respondents say they’re happy in their marriages/relationships.
  • 70% of members stick to just one affair at a time, debunking the myth of serial cheaters, while only 2.7% have had four or more affairs simultaneously.
  • Women seek affairs earlier than men – 13% of women have been in their relationship for less than a year before looking elsewhere, compared to just 3% of men.
  • While men in engineering and trades make up a significant portion of members, women in sales, IT, and law enforcement also turn to affairs.
  • Virgos, Geminis, and Scorpios are among the most likely to stray.

This data challenges everything we think we know about who joins Ashley Madison and why. I’d love to connect you with Paul Keable, Chief Strategy Officer at Ashley Madison, who can dive deeper into the typical profile of an Ashley Madison member, what this reveals about modern relationships, and more. Let me know if this data would be a fit for an upcoming story. I look forward to hearing from you, either way!

The letter cam complete with a copy of the company’s member survey. Not familiar with Ashley Madison, you lucky stiff? Its website homepage used to welcome viewers (maybe it still does; I am not moved to check) thusly:

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Goodbye, Elphie, and Thanks

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

My sister had to have her beloved Havanese Elphie (short for Elphaba, the character in “Wicked”) euthanized early this morning just after midnight. That’s not Elphie above, but it’s close: I don’t have a picture of her.

I’ve dreaded this day for my little sister almost from the moment she brought Elphie home as a puppy 16 years ago. My sister not only had never owned (or lived with) a dog before; she had been phobic about dogs her entire life, an unfortunate mindset she inherited from my mother. But true to her defiant, determined character, once my sister, divorced after a miserable marriage, knew that both of her children would be moving far away from the D.C. area, she set out to become a dog owner. “I’m not going to come home to an empty house every day,” she told me, “and for once, I want to have someone close who is always happy to see me.”

She researched dogs for a full year (“Dogs 101” on the Animal Planet channel was a crucial resource), ultimately deciding on the Havanese, the Cuban bichon, as the ideal “starter dog.” It was a wise choice, as the breed is small, friendly, devoted to its owner and innately adorable. I was amazed how quickly the little dog made a positive difference in my sister’s life and whole outlook on life. Always insecure and prone to depression, she seemed happy literally for the first time since childhood. Within months my sister went from being a dog owner to a dog nut, learning all the breeds, bonding with the last two dogs Grace and I owned (sweet Rugby and then Spuds), and vastly enlarging her circle of friends by meeting the other dog owners in her neighborhood, and my sister had never had a large number of friends before, and often none at all.

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Comment of the Day: A Spammed Commenter…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…who shall remain nameless.

This:

“Experience the future of companionship with an AI girlfriend chatbot. Designed to listen engage and respond with intelligence and warmth this virtual partner offers meaningful conversations, emotional support, and personalized interactions. Whether you seek a friend a confidante or just casual chats this ai girlfriend chatbot companion is always there for you anytime anywhere. Enjoy a unique ever-evolving connection powered by artificial intelligence.”

I think a blow-up doll is more ethical. The product is as perilous as crack or heroin, and destined to cripple and manipulate vulnerable, lonely people, like, say, me. It is the logical and inevitable next step from 800 sex chat phone lines. They can’t be made illegal; someone will undoubtedly argue that AI girlfriend chatbots can be therapeutic and even, on balance, capable of accomplishing more good than bad.

Sure. As for me, I’m reminded of this post from 2017: The Unibomber Had A Point.

Res ipsa loquitur.