Research and Scholarship

Labor Day Ethics Dunce: The Muscular Dystrophy Association

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Jerry Lewis earned the right to say good-bye on his terms--even if they were the wrong ones.

Nobody expected it to be easy for the Muscular Dystrophy Association to part ways with Jerry Lewis, who gave everything he had to building the organization over nearly six decades. Now 85, Lewis, a famously difficult talent with an outsize ego even by show-business standards, was bound to insist that he be allowed to all but drop dead at his post, mid-Labor Day telethon. In recent years, that seemed a real possibility, as Jerry’s health and age made him more a figure of pity and curiosity than a viable host.

Nonetheless, Jerry Lewis has raised, by the MDA’s own calculations, about $2,5 billion dollars, beginning when Eisenhower was president and TV was a novelty. The organization owes him, well, everything. They certainly owed him the opportunity to exit on his own terms, even if it was too late, even if it was self-indulgent on his part, and even if, though this is highly unlikely, it cost the organization more in lost contributions than kicking him to the curb will. Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck Warning: Affirmative Action for the Hideous

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

You won't need that portrait any more, Dorian...the Americans with Disabilities Act has you covered!

It is rare that an ethics train wreck of culture-wide proportions can be prevented with a firm, “Shut up, and go away!” This appears to be one of those times, however, and if anyone is reluctant, I hereby volunteer for the job.

Daniel S. Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas, is shilling for his book, “Beauty Pays,” in which he proves the unremarkable fact that being attractive is an advantage in society , and being unattractive is an impediment. He recently hit the op-ed pages of the New York Times, writing, among other things, this:

“Why this disparate treatment of looks in so many areas of life? It’s a matter of simple prejudice. Most of us, regardless of our professed attitudes, prefer as customers to buy from better-looking salespeople, as jurors to listen to better-looking attorneys, as voters to be led by better-looking politicians, as students to learn from better-looking professors. This is not a matter of evil employers’ refusing to hire the ugly: in our roles as workers, customers and potential lovers we are all responsible for these effects.”

“How could we remedy this injustice?”

Whoa! There it is, the magic words that open the door for ham-handed social architects to do what they always to do, try to remedy the results of natural human proclivities and preferences with laws. Continue reading →

Historical Theft at the King Memorial

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Rev. Theodore Parker

The new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is not just the King-in-Carbonite monolith that has caused so much controversy. There is much more to the National Mall’s latest addition, including inscriptions in marble of quotes from the martyred civil rights leader’s writings and speeches. There are more than a dozen examples of his oratory, a quotation from King’s 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” and an excerpt from King’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1964.

Among them, this:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

But Rev. King didn’t say it. Theodore Parker, an influential and eloquent Boston minister and abolitionist, did. King never pretended otherwise; it was one of his favorite quotes, and he used it often, but he usually credited its originator. Continue reading →

God, Beck, and the Confirmation Bias Trap

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Hurricane Irene proves that God agrees with Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck says so, and he must be right, because God agrees with him. Hurricane Irene proves it.

Policy makers, decision-makers, journalists, and indeed all of us have an ethical obligation to be on the alert for confirmation bias, that insidious human tendency to interpret all external phenomena as confirmation of our established opinions and beliefs. Why do we have the obligation? We have it because confirmation bias makes us dogmatic, inflexible, close-minded, incompetent, and, in a word, stupid. Life can make us wiser, but not if we misinterpret everything so as not to disturb our most cherished certainties. Continue reading →

Ethics Reading Assignment…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

If you are waiting for Irene to hit or simply looking for some ethical enlightenment, here are some scintillating posts from around the web on ethics, social norms and morality. It is also an opportunity to check out some of the excellent blogs and websites in the Ethics Alarms links, which I heartily recommend.

Here are...

Calvin College, Forfeiting Its Right To Exist

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As further proof of evolution, the chimp is behaving exactly like his distant relatives, the adminsitrators of Calvin College

I don’t know what the exact point is that marks where a religious school’s departure from legitimate adherence to its core beliefs metastasizes into a nuisance to society and civilization by affirmatively encouraging life-crippling ignorance. I do know, however, that Michigan’s  Calvin College has passed that point.

Two religion professors at Calvin wrote scholarly papers suggesting that new discoveries in genetics and evolution raised questions about the literal reading of Genesis that could no longer be brushed aside. Neither professor questioned the existence of God or the role of their church, but they argued that the findings of rigorous, modern science may require a theological re-examination of literalist Biblical teachings. Readers of The Banner, the publication of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, promptly blew a Biblical gasket:

“To protect the church and college from false teachers and contrary orthodox beliefs it would be right to let these guys go,” said one commenter. “Clearly, professors who deny the scriptures as interpreted by our creeds and who have broken the promise they made when they signed the Form of Subscription should be fired,” said another. From yet another: “Why is it that so many Christians and academics in Christian colleges seem more concerned about keeping in step with what the world teaches than they are about what God’s Word teaches? Are we ashamed of God’s Word in the face of the beliefs of our worldly peers?”

Calvin investigated the two professors, and as a consequence one of them, John Schneider, resigned the tenured position he had held for 25 years, as part of a settlement with the college. Continue reading →

The Folly and Threat of the Pew 13%

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

From the just-released Pew survey about American attitudes and practices regarding their mobile phones:

“Cell phones can help prevent unwanted personal interactions – 13% of cell owners pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid interacting with the people around them.”

For information and education of those 13% of cell phone owners, here is what I know about you because you engage in this practice:

  • You are rude.
  • You are disrespectful.
  • You are cowardly.
  • You are ignorant
  • You are a liar.

I am sure these same people will happily enter their opinions on blogs about what is and isn’t right about America, despite having avoided all but the most sanitized interaction with it—using pseudonyms to hide their identities, of course. They don’t want interaction, the mutual exchange of  opinions, or to have to deal with anyone who might shatter their ossified, unshakable view of the world with a different perspective. Continue reading →

Do Nicer People Earn Less Money? Of Course They Do. And That’s the Way it Should be.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Leo Durocher figured out that "nice guys finish last" 60 years ago, and he never went to college. Now three academics, after extensive research, have "discovered" the same thing. Ah, scholarship!

A study by Cornell professor Beth A. Livingston,  Timothy A. Judge of the University of Notre Dame and Charlice Hurst of the University of Western Ontario study used survey data to examine “agreeableness” and found that disagreeable men made 18%, or $9,772 annually, more in salary than those who are more accommodating. The salary disparity was  less among women, with disagreeable females making 5% or $1,828, more than those who are easier to get along with. Does this shock you? It shouldn’t.

As is depressingly often the case, the academics who come up with such crack-brain studies—I read this one, and will want that wasted hour back when I’m on my death-bed so I can watch one last re-run of “Magnum, P.I.”—have so little experience with the working world and the reality of non-academic cultures that they don’t even comprehend their own research and draw absurd conclusions from it.

“The problem is, many managers often don’t realize they reward disagreeableness,” Livingston told the Wall Street Journal. “You can say this is what you value as a company, but your compensation system may not really reflect that, especially if you leave compensation decisions to individual managers.”

Oh brother. Continue reading →

Major League Baseball, Forgivability, and List Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Unforgivable?*

Bleacher Reports is an enjoyable sports website, and it gives opportunities to aspiring writers and bloggers, some of whom are quite talented.  In addition to typical opinion pieces and reporting, the site has a fondness for lists, often trivial to the extreme, like “The 50 Ugliest Athletes of All Time.” The titles are all misnomers, because there is almost never any criteria given for the choices or their relative ranking. An accurate title would be, “The Fifty Athletes I Think Are The Ugliest.”  And of course, who cares? (Don Mossi, by the way, was the ugliest athlete ever, no matter what anybody says.)

A recent list, however did bother me. It is called “The Fifty Most Unforgivable Acts in Baseball History,“ and much of the problem with it lies in the title itself. If you are going to write about history, there is a duty perform diligent research, even for a silly online list. Misrepresentations online have a large probability of misleading people.  The title is a misrepresentation, like “The 50 Ugliest Athletes,” but unlike that list, there is some harm done. The list isn’t close to complete; it isn’t consistent; it isn’t well-researched. I’d bet that the author, Robert Knapel, wrote it off the top of his head.  Anyone who looked at the list and assumed, as the author represents, that these are truly the low points—“the dark side,” as the author puts it—of major league baseball would be seriously misinformed.

There are unequivocally, probably universally recognized incidents and events that are infinitely worse that most of the items on the list.  Just a  few samples: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Is It Ethical to Confess to a Murder You Were Acquitted of Committing, or Merely Annoying?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

 

Come on, O.J! If he can do it, so can you!

Isaac Turnbaugh of Randolph, Vermont recently confessed to the 2002 shooting murder of a co-worker, using a rifle to kill the victim as he was at work in the American Flatbread Co, stirring a pot of  sauce.  A jury acquitted Turnbaugh of the charges in 2004. In July, Turnbaugh contacted police and said, jury verdict notwithstanding, he indeed shot Declan Lyons in the head with the rifle and wished to surrender to authorities. Too bad, they told him. In the eyes of the law, you are “not guilty,” and have to stay that way. Double jeopardy and all that.

Your ethics quiz for today:

If you have been acquitted of a murder and have a guilty conscience about it, what is your most ethical course of action? Continue reading →