Religion and Philosophy

Your Weekend Ethics Update

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sure, it's touching..but is it sincere?

Here’s what you may have missed if your attention was focused on non-ethical considerations over the weekend:

  • A Washington, D.C. Charter school has been using scenarios out of horror movies to teach math—to third graders.
  • Saturday Night Live gave fallen child star Lindsay Lohan a chance to be something other than an addict and scofflaw again. Was it exploitation or was it kindness? Kind exploitation, perhaps?
  • Rush Limbaugh became a victim of his own mouth, attacking a Georgetown Law student’s advocacy of insurance-covered contraceptives not by questioning her logic—which is questionable—but her character, and in crude and degrading terms. Indefensible.
  • At least two NFL team, it was revealed, put bounties on the heads of opposing teams’ stars, offering thousands to players for knocking them off the field and into hospital beds. Unethical, a violation of league rules, cheating, and criminal…and the reaction of players is, “What’s the big deal?” A culture problem perhaps?
  • While conservatives were rending their garments in grief over the sudden death of conservative web warrior Andrew Breitbart (and too many liberals were disgracing themselves by applauding an early demise that left his young children fatherless), a far more influential and infinitely more ethical conservative voice left us: scholar, author, social scientist, philosopher, historian…and Ethics Hero Emeritus… James Q. Wilson.
  • Rush apologized after his sponsors began to flee. With great power comes great responsibility, and Limbaugh has more power than he can possibly be responsible for. He still is accountable.
  • Finally…Is a forced apology a “real” apology? It depends.

Ethics Hero Emeritus: James Q. Wilson (1931-2012)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Denmark or Luxembourg can afford to exhibit domestic anguish and uncertainty over military policy; the United States cannot. A divided America encourages our enemies, disheartens our allies, and saps our resolve—potentially to fatal effect. What General Giap of North Vietnam once said of us is even truer today: America cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but it can be defeated at home. Polarization is a force that can defeat us.”

James Q. Wilson wrote that, in an essay on America’s polarization. The scholar, author, philosopher and social scientist who died yesterday at the age of 80 was a passionate conservative who believed in winning arguments, influencing policy and changing conduct with the power of ideas, facts, studies and analysis. That the media, especially the conservative media, treated the death of Andrew Breitbart as a thunderclap and the death of Wilson as a footnote tells us as much as we need to know about our culture, values and intellect. I watched GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum respond to the news of Breitbart’s death as if the culture warrior was the equivalent of Martin Luther King. Breitbart died too young, at 43; he had a family, and reputedly was a nice guy. But his contribution to the American scene was to use his various websites to increase the intensity of partisan warfare, and to help banish fairness, compromise, civility and mutual trust from public discourse. One of the last videos of Brietbart showed him screaming insults at Occupy protesters.

I had stopped using Breitbart’s sites for source material: I couldn’t trust them. The editing of James O’Keefe’s ACORN sting was one strike; the misleadingly truncated Shirley Sherrod speech was another. I wasn’t going to wait for a third. It tells me something alarming about conservatives in this country that such an unethical new media figure could be so lionized upon his death, when his methods were so frequently aimed at destruction rather than elightenment.

Wilson, in contrast, got substantive and wide-ranging results.His 1981 essay “Broken Windows” argued that community policing, rather than mere law enforcement, was the secret to changing urban culture. He wrote (with co-author George Kelling): Continue reading →

Weekend Ethics Catch-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If you took an ethics break this last weekend of February, here’s your Ethics Alarms make-up assignment:

 

Robot Ethics: Let’s Not Get Silly About It

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Today seems to be “Ethics Questions That We Shouldn’t Have To Ask Day,” and Andrew Sullivan, over at the Daily Beast, phrases his entry this way:

“Is Sex With A Robot Adultery?”

Sherry Jackson as a robot on the original "Star Trek." Lovely, convincing, but still basically a toaster.

Gee, I don’t know, Andrew: is sex with a toaster adultery? What has Sullivan asking such nonsense is a new book called Robot Ethics, which has some legitimate issues to explore, and then some other phony controversies included to get publicity and interviews. The field of robot ethics still includes little that hasn’t been thoroughly explored by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but as a few of these dilemmas are likely to enter reality from science fiction in the foreseeable future, it is reasonable to dust off the issues again as long as we don’t get silly about it. Getting overly excited for the Boston Globe, however, Josh Rothman writes: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Richard Dawkins

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

The headlines shout out: “World’s Most Famous Atheist Admits: I Can’t Be Sure God Doesn’t Exist!”

Wow, what a confession. Stop the presses.

Can anyone be 100% sure this doesn't belong in the Sistine Chapel?

To his great credit, and knowing how the 50% (that is, those of below median intelligence, a sad number of whom reside in the profession of journalism) would react, Prof. Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist who is point man for the atheist assault on religion, told a student audience at Oxford during a “discussion” ( translation: informal debate) with the Archbishop of Canterbury that he thinks “the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low,” but he can’t be 100% certain.

Well, of course not. While this will be taken as a sign of weakness by the faithful who, of course, are 100% certain of the Supreme Being’s existence, no honest, intelligent, fair individual suffering from less than clinical levels of egomania and omniscience could possibly claim to know with certainly where the universe came from. Bravo to Dawkins for his honesty and integrity.

Comment of the Day: “Charles M. Blow’s Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Michael, who is now the Ethics Alarms all-time leader in the Comment of the Day category, scores another with a thought-provoking post inspired by the New York Times’ stunning disinterest in its columnist tweeting a religious slur about Mitt Romney. I’ll have some added reflections at the end. Here is his Comment of the Day on “Charles M. Blow’s Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2…”:

“I remember an article about this when I was in college. In analyzing how the news media treated different races, they came up with the PC Hierarchy. Anyone higher on the hierarchy can criticize or be insensitive to anyone below them. If there is a conflict between two groups, the one higher on the PC scale is assumed to be right”

PC Hierarchy of Races… Continue reading →

Charles M. Blow’s Bigoted Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2: Ironies, Regrets, and Hypocrisy on the Left

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Charles M. Blow, trapped in regret-apology hypocrisy. Fortunately for him, his paper doesn't care.

Charles M. Blow, the New York Times columnist who sent his followers an uncivil, unprofessional and bigoted tweet regarding Mitt Romney and his faith during Wednesday’s debate [“Let me just tell you this Mitt ‘Muddle Mouth’: I’m a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear.”] issued a fascinating…something...today in response to criticism, which did not come from the supposedly bigotry-sensitive left. He tweeted:

“Btw, the comment I made about Mormonism during Wed.’s debate was inappropriate, and I regret it. I’m willing to admit that with no caveats.”

It is fascinating to me that this is being called an apology by Blow’s supporters and conservative critics alike. If it is an apology, and that is open to dispute, I’d like someone to explain to me how Blow can use “regret” as a stand-in for “I apologize,” and yet the same commentators who are interpreting the word that way have insisted that President Obama’s repeated use of “regret”to refer to past U.S. foreign policy actions was not the equivalent of apologizing, and have in fact stated that this interpretation by conservative critics is “a lie.”

Among those who have defended the President in this way, I believe, is Charles M. Blow. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NY Times Columnist Charles M. Blow, and the Times, If It Doesn’t Do Something About Him

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Behold the above tweet from last night, appearing on the Twitter feed of Charles M. Blow, a regular New York Times op-ed columnist. And note:

  • This is supposed to be a respected and respectable journalist of the preeminent U.S. newspaper, and he is sending gutter-level messages via social media, plus
  • …his tweet immediately descends to crude name-calling (“Muddle-Mouth”) aimed at a Republican presidential candidate, and
  • …goes lower still, making first a crude reference to underwear, and
  • …making the reference a religious slur as well. Continue reading →

NOT Unethical Website of the Month: “All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Concise, pointed, attractive, harmless, and funny, while calling timely and appropriate attention to the core presumptuousness of the Mormon practice of Baptizing dead Jews and others to save their eternal souls.

Excellent work, whoever you are.

Check it out here.

[Yes, I found this one on Fark.]

Child Predator Minister? No Problem! Just Tell the Kids To Stay Out Of Church!

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

Every picture I could find to illustrate this story was offensive, so here's a bald guy with a dog on his head.

Combine the comments I’m getting from the “cannibelles” launched at Ethics Alarms from the “Wisconsin Sickness” website (“Personal conduct has no bearing on professional trustworthiness!“), and add the film negative of the recently posted Ethics Hero, the selfless pastor, add some eye of newt, and ABRACADABRA! You get…. Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, whose pastor, Darrell Gilyard, is a registered sex offender! 

And of recent vintage, too. This apparently doesn’t faze the good parishioners of Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist because—well. pick your rationalization…I’m sure they have:

  • “There but the grace of God go I!”
  • “Everybody deserves one mistake!”
  • “Let Him who is without sin cast the first stone!”
  • “Who are we to judge?”
  • “It’s not like he killed someone!”
  • “What he does in his private life is nobody’s business!”
  • Look at the Catholics! At least our pastor molests girls!
  • “Christians believe in redemption!”
  • “It doesn’t matter: he’s an excellent preacher!”

Gilyard’s last church wasn’t so understanding, but then it was that congregation’s underage girls who he pleaded guilty to molesting in 2009. You can’t blame them too much for being intolerant.

But his new church is being reasonable about this as well as broad-minded; they are taking the responsible course. Children aren’t allowed in church while Gilyard is preaching.

Problem solved!