Professions

Ethics Phooey: No Self-Serving Bias When I Really Need It

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

At least I'm finally home.

Last month I posted a list of the Top Ten Thought Fallacies That Undermine Our Ethics. This week, I really, really wanted to use one of them. But integrity beckoned. Damn integrity.

I just returned from a week-long speaking trip that took me to Palm Springs and Maui, and involved a total of about 38 hours travel time for a total of 3 hours of actual lecturing and instruction. It would have been about eight hours less and not have required me to be awake for 50 hours (and counting) straight if I had not managed to miss my flight to L.A. out of the Maui airport. Somehow, I got it in my mind that the flight was at 3:30 PM, when it was really at 12:30 PM. I had managed to check the time on the wrong page of my itinerary, and then never looked at my boarding pass. Only dumb luck got me the last seat on the last flight out of Maui on Sunday night. Continue reading →

Chess Learns to Cheat

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The French chess federation has suspended three of its best chess players for cheating in a tournament last Fall. Sébastien Feller, a 20 years old grandmaster, Cyril Marzolo, and Arnaud Hauchard, who is the French team captain, secretly used a computer to feed them moves during their matches. The games were broadcast over the Internet, and a confederate fed the game positions into a computer with a sophisticated chess-playing program (computers beat the world’s best human player very regularly now).  Once the computer made its move, the confederate sent it to the human grandmaster using a text message. The three French chess whizzes matched the  computer almost move for move.

Amazing. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: The Staff and Administrators of Summerlin Hospital (Las Vegas)

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

 

Lincoln and Cecilia Rogers wanted to treat their newborn's illness their own way...

The angry parents of a newborn have sparked protests against Summerlin Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada, by revealing that their baby was kept at the hospital against their will after a nurse contacted social services for what they describe as an “unjustified reason.”

 

The “unjustified reason” was that Lincoln and Cecilia Rogers wanted to take baby Lilia home and treat her jaundice “the natural way,” according to her mother. Whenever hospital staff hears a parent say that the family wants to eschew hospital treatment of a child’s serious health problem “the natural way’—or, for that matter, “the supernatural way”, as in “we’re going to put it in God’s hands,” a child’s life is in danger. This is the time for a hospital to stop thinking about legal issues (“Make sure they sign a waiver and consent form!”) or public controversy, and to think about the endangered welfare of the child. Continue reading →

The Charlie Sheen’s Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour : Unethical Performer, Unethical Audience

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

"Ladies and gentlemen, CHARLIE SHEEN!!!

Charlie Sheen charged the public money for his “Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour” and didn’t bother to give them anything coherent or entertaining for it. Live blogging of the “show’s” first performance in Detroit indicates that Sheen is simply continuing to spout the semi-surreal egomaniacal gibberish he has been giving to various interviewers, and doing little more. Audience members are walking out in droves.

Unprofessional. Unfair. Disrespectful. Dishonest.

Theft.

As for that audience, yecch. Those who are there to support Sheen, a preening, sexist abuser who is neither trustworthy nor reliable, and who places his own pleasures above commitments, family and friendships, are endorsing antisocial values and despicable conduct. Those who bought tickets in hope of witnessing a “happening” are arguably worse, enabling an addict tottering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and hoping that they will be there to see it.

Irresponsible, reckless, mean

Cruelty.

Sheen is unethical to charge money for doing nothing worth paying for; his audience is the equivalent of the saloon patrons in the Old West who paid drunks to dance. They are preying on each other. What a revolting and depressing spectacle it must be.

Natalie Portman Ethics, Part II: The Body Double

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This looks like Oscar, but it's really his body-double, Chip.

Sarah Lane, Natalie Portman’s Designated Ballet Dancer in “Black Swan, ” has caused a controversy by revealing that it was her, not Natalie (okay, maybe Natalie’s head on Sarah’s body), in some/many/most of the dance sequences. This has caused some commentators to suggest that Portman’s Academy Award was based on a sham. The film’s PR flacks made a big deal out of how Portman, with no more ballet training that your sister, worked so hard to acquire professional level dancing skills. Could this have made the difference in the Academy’s decision? Continue reading →

Oh, All Right: Montana State Rep. Alan Hale is the Incompetent Elected Official of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Rep. Marino just got bumped to second place. Here is the Republican Montana state rep (also bar owner) Alan Hale—no relation, presumably, to the actor who played the Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island,’ or his almost identical and more versatile, father, Alan Hale, Sr., who played Little John to Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood in the MGM classic film—extolling the virtues of drunk driving.

No, seriously.

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Thank God we're not in AFRICA...

Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA), talking to the Scranton Times-Tribune this week, criticized the Obama administration’s actions in Libya.

“Where does it stop?” he said. “Do we go into Africa next? I don’t want to sound callous or cold, but this could go on indefinitely around the world.”

Marino is still a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as the House subcommittee on African foreign policy.

Libya, meanwhile, is still in Africa.

The Giffords Fiasco, Continued: “Gaby Giffords For Senator”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Would Arizona Democrats run El Cid for the Senate?

The Gaby Giffords saga has officially moved from irresponsible to offensive.

If Rep. Giffords, shot in the head by Jared Loughner in January, is able to return to her challenging job after such a violent brain injury, she will be the first such victim to do so in medical history. She has been incapacitated for three months, and her inability to return to her duties for the rest of 2011, one-half her term, is assured barring a miracle of Biblical proportions. But no effort is being made to fill her de facto empty seat, and it increasingly looks as if her staff, party and supporters are determined to keep her in a job she cannot perform, Arizona and the Congress be damned, for her entire term.

This is irresponsible enough, but now there is this: the New York Times reports that Giffords’s aides, backers and supporters are seriously laying the groundwork for Giffords—who currently cannot speak, except in short sentences—to run for retiring Senator Jon Kyl’s  seat 2012: Continue reading →

The Teacher’s Pilgrimage

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

KHAN!!!!!

In August 2008, nine months after starting her job as a middle school math teacher in Berkeley, Ill., Safoorah Khan asked her school to give her three weeks off in December for a pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. Though a Muslim is supposed to make the pilgrimage, called a hajj, once in a lifetime and Khan was under 30, she insisted that this was the time for her to go, and believed that the school’s refusal—it argued that having to replace her for that length of time in the middle of the school year was unfair to the students and a burden on the school’s budget—was discriminatory. She quit, made her pilgrimage, and thus infused with the wisdom of Allah is suing the pants off of her former employers. Her lawsuit alleges that by refusing to make a “reasonable accommodation” to her request, it was discriminating against her on the basis of her religion.

Meanwhile, Eric Holder’s Justice Department is joining the case on her side. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NBC

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

An Ethics Dunce, in ten easy steps

  1. General Electric Co. earned $14.2 billion in worldwide profits last year, including $5.1 billion in the United States, and paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes.
  2. This especially interesting because Jeffrey Immelt, G.E’s CEO, is also the Obama’s administration’s link to corporate America.
  3. The story was widely reported by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and thousands of lesser media outlets.
  4. NBC is owned by General Electric.
  5. NBC could not find room in its news broadcasts for the tax story. Continue reading →