Justice Paul Wooten of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan just ruled that Juliet Breitman, accused of running down an elderly woman while racing a bicycle with training wheels on a Manhattan sidewalk two years ago, can be sued for negligence. She was four years old at the time.
Four.
4.
IV.
F-O-U-R. Continue reading
Bob and Ray, the great deadpan comedy team that mastered the form of the comedy interview on radio, recordings and TV, once has a routine about a longshoreman without a high school diploma who had written a voluminous “History of the United States.”
“But the book is riddled with errors!” protested Bob Elliott, playing the interviewer. “For example, here on page 214, it says that Abraham Lincoln was born in 1926 in Bailey’s Mistake, Maine!”
“Well, it’s a big book with a lot of pages,” shrugged Ray Goulding, as the longshoreman-historian. “I’m sure I missed some typos. You can’t catch everything!”
I was reminded of the Bob and Ray skit when I learned that a history book used in 4th Grade in Virginia elementary schools, Our Virginia: Past and Present, teaches that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War, a discredited claim often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause of the South’s rebellion. Continue reading
There are times when obvious exaggeration is nothing worse than politeness, nothing more than an expression of admiration and affection. “You’re the best boss anyone ever had,” is in this category, especially when the boss is retiring or dying. But when one is speaking in public about controversial and historical matters involving well-known public figures, the margin between excusable hyperbole and unethical dishonesty or worse is much smaller. Al Gore learned this when he played loyal Vice-President on the day his President was impeached by vote of the House of Representatives. Gore’s statement that Bill Clinton was “a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest Presidents” was intended as supportive, but interpreted as a toadying endorsement of Clinton’s unsavory and dishonest conduct, impeachable or not. It probably cost Gore the Presidency.
Worse yet was Trent Lott’s clumsy effort to praise the ancient, infirm and mentally failing Sen. Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party. Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have all these problems over all these years, either.” Thurmond, running on the Dixiecrat ticket, had opposed segregation, and Lott’s comment, less fact than flattery, made him sound like he longed for the days of Jim Crow and “white only”rest rooms. The lessons of these hyperbolic gaffes are similar: if the well-intentioned compliment concerns a public figure in historical context, historical exaggerations either appear to be unjust to history or its important figures, seem to make inappropriate value judgments, or come off as a blatant effort to mislead the public.
Rahm Emanuel hit the Trifecta with his fawning farewell to President Obama, as he left the White House to run for Mayor of Chicago. Obama, he said, is “the toughest leader any country could ask for, in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”
Wow. Continue reading
Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, a military expert who appears as an analyst on Fox News, has submitted an affidavit in support of Army Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Lakin, who is refusing to deploy to Afghanistan because of his belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Lakin faces a court-martial for his refusal. Thus has General McInerney officially admitted to being a “birther,” one of the legion of conspiracy theorists who deny Constitutional eligibility for the White House.
From McInerney’s affidavit: Continue reading
Thanks to the popularity of Malcolm Gladwell’s airport book store best-sellers and many of those who cashed in on his formula, like behavioral economist Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), psychological experiments are increasingly referenced in the media and the blogosphere, not to mention at the dinner table, more than ever before. Call me an alarmist if you like, but this makes me worry about the reckless, harmful and even diabolical experiments being dreamed up by the next wave of aspiring authors and the researchers who give them their best material. Continue reading
[TV is full of reruns these days, and sometimes I am grateful for them, for it gives me a chance to see episodes of favorite shows I had missed for some reason or another. Back in early March, I posted the following essay about the origins of America’s current crisis of trust in our government, and how it might be cured by our elected leaders. Since then, the crisis has deepened, and as I was doing some routine site maintenance, I reread the post. It is still very timely (unfortunately), and since far fewer people were visiting Ethics Alarms in March, I decided to re-post it today, with just a few minor edits. I promise not to make this a habit. Still, trust is the reason why ethics is so important in America: if there is a single post of the more than 700 I have written here since October 2009 that I would like people to read, this is it.] Continue reading
Stories with ethical implications are popping up everywhere, in many fields. I’m running hard to keep up; if you want to join the race, here are some recent developments and notes:
Predictably, Judge Walker’s decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger striking down California’s voter approved Proposition 8 has infuriated foes of gay marriage, who have condemned his opinion as judicial activism, a rejection of democratic process, and an agenda-driven farce. Walker himself is being attacked for having a conflict of interest, because he is widely believed to be gay himself. (The belief that a gay judge cannot rule objectively on the issue of gay marriage while a straight judge can is itself an expression of bias.) This is not surprising. What is surprising, at least to me, is that the only substantial argument critics of the opinion can articulate is based on the exact proposition Walker rejected in his opinion: that laws should be able to prohibit conduct based on morality and tradition alone, without quantifiable and verifiable reasons relating to the best interests of society. By insisting that a California law that would withhold a fundamental right—marriage—from a class of Americans must justify itself with reason rather than tradition, Judge Walker ruled that it is ethics, not morality, that should govern American law and justice. Continue reading
The Gallup poll has released its survey of the public’s trust in various institutions, and also shows whether the public’s trust has increased and decreased over the past year. No surprises: virtually every institution has lost public trust, with only the medical system and big business (which hit a historic low in 2009) improving more than a percentage point.
The bottom of the barrel? Why Congress, naturally. You had to ask?
And the biggest drop in trust since last year, by far, goes to the institution of the Presidency, down 15%. No other institution declined half as much.
For a system of government uniquely dependent on mutual trust, this poll is more than bad news. It is a warning. Continue reading
Everybody, or almost everybody, hates to report friends and colleagues for misconduct. This is the anti-snitch reflex, a strongly programmed response from childhood. Telling authorities about the misconduct of others sets off internal alarms that have been installed by parents and peer groups, ensuring that we feel terrible if we “tattletale.” This is betrayal, a violation of loyalty, and most of all, a breach of the Golden Rule: we’d never want anyone to snitch on us.
For professionals, however, this reflex is false, mistaken and even deadly. The duty to report dishonest public employees, crooked cops, unethical lawyers, conflicted accountants, self-dealing business executives, fraudulent researchers and others in the workplace—even if they are colleagues and friends—trumps childhood codes, personal loyalty and general discomfort. There is nothing noble or admirable about allowing innocent people to entrust their life and livelihood with untrustworthy professionals. Nevertheless, a disturbing large proportion of all professionals can’t bring themselves to do the right thing when it comes to the core ethical duty of stopping workplace dishonesty, incompetence or corruption when it involves a colleague.
A recent survey of doctors is not comforting, but it confirms the problem. Continue reading
