Welcome to the first annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the best and worst of ethics in 2009! These are the Worst; the Best is yet to come. Continue reading
Popular Culture
The Wrong Lesson from Tiger’s Fall
So that’s the lesson, is it?
As the year end lists almost unanimously “award” Tiger Woods the distinction of engineering the Scandal of the Year, pundits also seem to be nearing consensus on the lesson we should take from the golfer’s fall, which is: “Don’t make athletes and celebrities your role models or heroes. They are human beings like everyone else, and are guaranteed to disappoint you.”
Oh, I see…it’s all our fault. Continue reading
Illinois: A Clash of Law, Ethics, Christmas and Festivus
Any one with lingering doubts about whether law is capable of navigating the nuances of ethics should ponder the Christmas display at the Illinois State Capital, where an effort to avoid state support of religion has resulted in an offensive mockery of it that is inappropriate for any season.
The collision of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause (and the Supreme Court’s broad interpretation of it) with the cultural, traditional. historical, artistic and commercial aspects of Christmas have created an annual fiasco that looks silly, irritates everyone, and accomplishes nothing constructive. It would be better to have no Christmas display at all, and that fact proves the limitation of law, and the subordination of ethics. 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.]
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 Ethics of Letting a Lying Defendant Testify
It’s snowing like crazy outside, and I’m stuck putting the lights on a nine-foot tree. My only escape from the pine needles assaulting my tender skin is ethics reverie, and I find myself thinking, once again, about the classic criminal defense attorney’s ethical challenge:
What do you do when your guilty client wants to claim he’s innocent in the witness chair, under oath? 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
Ethics Dunce: Tag Heuer
Swiss watch company Tag Heuer announced today that it would drop Tiger Woods from its advertising. The CEO of the company told Swiss paper Le Matin, “We recognize Tiger Woods as a great sportsman but we have to take account of the sensitivity of some consumers in relation to recent events.”
Translation: We, of course, would never presume to question the character and integrity of a husband and father who engages in serial adulterous affairs with any cocktail waitress, lingerie model, porn star, reality star or other owner of two x chromosomes as long as she had the physical dimensions of Jessica Rabbit, but such conduct apparently displeases some of our customers, heaven knows why, and though we’d use Martin Bormann as a spokesperson if he sold enough watches, our guess is that Tiger won’t. So he’s out.
This is called “doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.”
But these are the Swiss, after all. They wouldn’t even take a stand against Hitler.
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
The Casinos and the Whale
Japanese tycoon Terrance Watanabe gambled away nearly $127 million at the Caesar’s Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, and now is suing the casinos even as he faces criminal charges for refusing to pay them over $15 million in additional debts. He claims that the gambling establishments allowed him to gamble while intoxicated in violation of state casino regulations, and otherwise share blame for his outlandish losses, believed to be the most any gambler has amassed in a single year. Continue reading
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