In the wake of Jared Loughner’s attack, the “barn door fllacy” is in full operation as intensely, and foolishly as I’ve ever seen it. Everyone from social reformers to yellow-bellied Congress members are proposing changes and suggesting “dialogues” aimed at stopping Jared Loughner’s completely unpredictable conduct, which, they seem to forget, has already occurred. Almost always, when everyone rushes to lock the metaphorical barn door after the horse is gone, they make the barn and everything around it uglier, less useful, more expensive, and less respectful of basic human dignity and freedom: witness the TSA’s outrageous new pat-down procedures, designed to stop 2009’s exploding underpants terrorist, who was unsuccessful. Continue reading
Research and Scholarship
Who Is Setting The Stage For The Next Fatal Shooting? (Hint: It’s Not Sarah Palin)
Irony of ironies: even as the news media is trying hard to blame the inflammatory words of conservatives for the Tucson massacre, its own conduct is increasing the likelihood of more carnage in the future. Continue reading
Do Economists Need A Code of Conduct?
We can learn a lot about the discipline of economics, the thinking of its practitioners and the limitations of ethics codes by reading the various reactions of economist to the question, “Do economists need a Code of Conduct?” The responses range from “yes” to “sure, but it won’t do any good” to “no.”
You can read all about it here.
Mr. Madison, Meet Mr. Twain
Whitewashing America’s past doesn’t honor it, burnish it, or repair it. All it accomplishes is making present-day Americans ignorant, naive, cocky and shallow. American society deserves respect for recognizing its ethical and moral errors and misconceptions, debating them, and remarkably often, fixing them. This is another reason why the new volume of Mark Twain masterpieces omitting his pointed use of the word “nigger” does damage to history and culture. It is also the reason why the Republican-led reading of the Constitution should have included all of the Constitution, including the document’s initial support of slavery.
The Second Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2010 (Part 2)
The final categories in the Worst of Ethics 2010. Coming up: The Best of Ethics, 2010.
(If you missed Part 1 of the Worst, go here.)
Worst Ethics Presentation: “Ethics in Politics: An evening with Former Governor Rod Blagojevich” (Presented to its students by Northwestern University) Continue reading
“Million Dollar Drop” Ethics: Not So Fast, Fox— Fork Over Some Money!
It’s one thing for Fox to post misleading headlines on its website and for Fox hosts to slander an international philanthropist but now its game show ethics have crashed and burned. An ethicist can only stand so much, dammit!
In the very first episode of the latest Fox effort to attract a prime time audience without adding anything of value to the culture or American thought—a combination quiz and gambling show called “Million Dollar Drop”—a couple bet $800,000 that they knew whether Post-It notes or the Sony Walkman was “sold in stores” first. As the audience held its collective,breath, rooting for Gabe Okoye and his girlfriend, Brittany Mayti to win big money in advance of their approaching wedding, game show host Kevin Pollack revealed that they were—awwwww!— wrong. The Walkman hit the stores first. Shortly thereafter, the couple lost the rest of their money (the show “gives” its constestants a million dollars that they have to risk on a series of questions) and went home poorer and dumber. Why dumber? Because the show’s researchers had arrived at the wrong answer, not Okoye and Mayti. Post-Its were sold first, though only regionally. Continue reading
Ethics and Altzheimer’s Testing: An Easy Call
Sometimes I think bioethicists spend too much of their time looking for new ethical dilemmas rather than giving thoughtful guidance on the dilemmas we already have. A recent example: the New York Times wrote about a supposed ethical dilemma appearing in the wake of new tests that reveal the likelihood of whether an individual will get Alzheimer’s at some point in the future. As the article put it:
“Since there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s, is it a good thing to tell people, years earlier, that they have this progressive degenerative brain disease or have a good chance of getting it?…It is a quandary that is emblematic of major changes in the practice of medicine, affecting not just Alzheimer’s patients. Modern medicine has produced new diagnostic tools, from scanners to genetic tests, that can find diseases or predict disease risk decades before people would notice any symptoms. At the same time, many of those diseases have no effective treatments. Does it help to know you are likely to get a disease if there is nothing you can do?”
My question is: “What’s the dilemma?” Continue reading
America’s Ignorant Public: What’s Worth Reporting?
John Avlon’s dubious conversion from the author of a best-selling book labeling politicians who disagreed with John Avlon as “wingnuts” to a “No Labels” champion reminded me that he was one of many commentators to draw great significance from a Harris poll last spring that revealed what he called “scary” beliefs held by Republicans. There were several such polls this year about Republicans, conservatives and Tea Partiers; expressing alarm at how ignorant right-leaning Americans are became something of a media fad. For a news media largely dominated by reporters, producers and editors desperate to stave off the erosion of support for Barack Obama, the polls were perfect ammunition: they were genuinely newsworthy; reporting them undermined the credibility of those “scary” Tea Party rallies; they created an opportunity for the news media to bolster its own credibility by explaining why, for instance, the President was not the Anti-Christ, and perhaps best of all, it reinforced the conviction of the majority of newsmedia reporters who self-identify as liberals that they belong to the smart side.
Perhaps it isn’t so strange, then, that only a few news outlets and even fewer commentators chose to feature the results of a recent Harris poll showing that 40% of the U.S. public thinks that Karl Marx’s signature phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” originates from one of the America’s founding documents. Continue reading
As Winter Strikes, Inconvenient Truths…Again
In the midst of what is being called the coldest winter in Great Britain since records began being kept, some wags have been unkind enough to tweak the “you’re all idiots for not agreeing that only world government can save us” climate change zealots by circulating a 2000 article that ran in the Independent, the nation’s most enthusiastic pro-global warming newspaper. Some excerpts: Continue reading
Ethics Alarm: Are You A Potential Jerk?
Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside, posted an essay on his terrific blog, “The Splintered Mind,”in which he speculates on the phenomenology of being a jerk, giving all of us some tools to determine whether we are jerks, or in imminent danger of jerkhood.
His method centers on two key features of a jerk mindset, both of which lead to the rationalization of unethical behavior: Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 