Romance and Relationships

Ethics Quiz: Peter’s Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments
40 years from now, would you book Kaitlyn Hunt for your Congressional campaign fundraiser? Should you...if she's become a famous and beloved singer?

40 years from now, would you book Kaitlyn Hunt for your Congressional campaign fundraiser? Should you…if she’s become a famous and beloved singer?

Shelly Stow, an occasional commenter here who blogs provocatively at With Justice For All about the harassment and persecution of former sex offenders, raised the topic of today’s Ethics Quiz. She  posted about the plight of Peter Yarrow, the Peter in Peter, Paul and Mary, now, thanks to cruel mortality, just Peter and Paul. I was not aware of this, but in 1970, when he was 30 and a rather significant star, he had sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl. Shelly is wrong to call this “consensual,” for 14 is statutory rape territory. The law declares that a 14-year girl is a child and not capable of meaningful consent, and fans of  Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Kaitlyn Hunt notwithstanding, it is quite right. He pled guilty to something less than rape, and served a three-month sentence; he is also, as a result, a registered sex offender. President Jimmy Carter pardoned him in 1981.

Yarrow, as Sixties folk singers tend to be, is a social activist, and is politically active as well. Not for the first time, his child molesting past became an issue recently when he  agreed to sing at a campaign event for Martha Robertson, a Democrat running for Congress in New York against incumbent Republican Tom Reed. A spokesman for the RNC told the media,

“It is absolutely deplorable that Martha Robertson would kick off her congressional campaign by having a convicted sex offender headline her fundraiser. If Robertson’s judgment is so bad that she would even entertain the idea of raising money with a man who molested a 14-year-old girl, she has no business representing the people of the 23rd District of New York in Congress.”

He also said Robertson should cancel the fundraiser and return any money she raised with Yarrow’s support.

Shelly writes,

“What is wrong with this scenario? Our criminal justice system is comprised of one part punishment and one part rehabilitation. The purpose of the punishment is to bring about rehabilitation. Sometimes it works like it is supposed to. Mr. Yarrow committed a crime in 1969. That is over 40 years ago. He served his court ordered punishment, and in light of the fact that there has been no re-offense in over 40 years, I think we are safe in declaring him rehabilitated. Everything worked just like it is supposed to. What then is the problem? Is rehabilitation not good enough for some? Is there some other standard of measure needed?”

This launches the Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for this weekend, which I will phrase this way:

Is it unfair for Peter Yarrow to still face criticism, suspicion and condemnation based on his crime of 40 years ago, for which he has been both punished and pardoned?

For this one, I am not at all certain of the answer, and will be very interested in your responses, not that I am not always.

Here are some of the considerations that have me, to paraphrase the title of one of the hit pop songs Mr. Yarrow helped to write, “Torn Between Two Answers.” Continue reading →

Congratulations To Hank Steuver For An Ethically Offensive Sitcom Review….No Small Feat!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
"They won't consider aborting their child? That's ridiculous!"

“They won’t consider aborting their child? That’s ridiculous!”

It’s rare to find an ethically offensive TV review, and doubtlessly difficult to write one, but the Washington Post’s Hank Steuver is obviously equal to the task. Wow. My review of his review of the new NBC sitcom, “Welcome to the Family”:

“Yechhh. How Do people end up thinking like this?”

Here is the relevant section of his review:

“My nominee for quickest and most punitive cancellation goes to this facile dramedy about two 40-something couples who must learn to get along because their teenage children — a boy who is a Stanford-bound valedictorian and a girl who is an unfortunate iteration of the clueless blonde stereotype — are suddenly expecting a baby and have decided to keep it. Or perhaps they’re being forced to keep it, because they live in some parallel America in which Roe v. Wade has been fully reversed, thus reducing at least one obvious solution to the dilemma. (Which would, of course, cut the premise off right there; I understand that the point of the show is the pregnancy.) The truth is, these kids do live in a parallel America, the imaginary land of network television, which hasn’t found a way to talk frankly about abortion in the half-hour comedy format since, I don’t know, “Maude”? I’m not at all opposed to the personal choices made by the characters in “Welcome to the Family,” I just wish they’d had the choice to make. The foregone conclusion in the pilot is galling, especially in the scene where the teenagers’ combative fathers are seen chasing after the girl, believing she’s about to get on a rollercoaster.The metaphor is quite blunt: Save the fetus at all costs! (And forget Stanford!)” Continue reading →

Rationalization # 35: Victim Blindness, or “They/He/She/ You should have seen it coming.”

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments
"Yup, should have seen THIS coming..."

“Yup, should have seen THIS coming…”

Mark Draughn, who blogs at Windypundit, proposed this latest addition to the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations list,  after I forgot to add it to the list in December 2012, when it was first proposed by reader Dwayne Zechman. It is an excellent one, and both Dwayne and Mark deserve the credit for it.

Asserting the rationalization of Victim Blindness attempts to shift responsibility for wrongdoing to the victims of it, who, the theory goes, should have known that their actions would inspire the conduct that caused them harm, and thus they should have either avoided doing what sparked the unethical response, or by not doing so waived their right to object to it. This is closely related to a sub-category of #7, The Tit-For-Tat Excuse, which holds that one party’s unethical conduct justifies similar unethical conduct in return. The sub-category is “They asked for it.” Victim Blindness is similar, but it applies even greater responsibility to victims: whether they asked for it or not, they should have known their actions would be met with this unethical response, and their ignorance,  carelessness or stupidity constitutes a waiver of ethics. Continue reading →

“Mild Pedophilia” and Richard Dawkins’ Ethical Blind Spot

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments
"Bobby, do you thinkthere's anything wrong with mild pedophilia?"

“Bobby, do you think there’s anything wrong with mild pedophilia?”

When you are a public intellectual and your primary mission is using reason and scholarship to enlighten the public, you have an obligation to guard scrupulously against making careless,  irresponsible or easily misunderstood statements that will be accepted as inspired wisdom by the less analytically able. Or to be more direct, if you are Richard Dawkins and because of some serious neural malfunction you really think that there is such a thing as “mild pedophilia,” you want to ever to be taken seriously again, shut up about it.

Dawkins, for reasons only known to himself, used a wide-ranging  interview to airily wax on about what he regards as his contact with a harmless child-molester.  Reminiscing about his  days at a boarding school,  he recounted how one of his schoolmasters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.” Noting that other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher, he concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”
The world’s most famous atheist explained, “I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

What (in the name of Holy Hell) is “mild pedophilia”? Dawkins went on to say that the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

“Mild pedophilia”? “Just mild touching up’? This from one of the most respected minds in the cosmos? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: RFK Jr.’s Despicable, Private Journal

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
RFK Jr

News value? We already knew that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree—did we need to read RFK, Jr.s diary to prove it?

This is a straightforward one. Apparently a New York Post reporter somehow came into possession of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s personal journal for 2001. It is, as I imagine President John F. Kennedy’s journal for, say, 1962 would have been, largely a diary about sex, chronicling RFK Jr.’s battles with and evident enjoyment of the family malady, at least on the male side, sex addiction.

The journal is juicy, to say the least, and it also has a tragic side: allegedly Kennedy’s wife Mary discovered and read it shortly before committing suicide last year. RFK Jr. is a radio talk show host, an author, and something of a conspiracy theorist; he also has participated in the shameful and deadly practice of scaremongering regarding vaccines. He is also a Kennedy with a famous father, so in a small bore, minor way, he is sort of a public figure, on the same scale as, oh, let me think…Joey Buttafucco, of Long Island Lolita infamy? Patrick Wayne, the Duke’s B-movie star son? That’s not quite it…something less than Jon Gosselin, Kate’s abused ex-hubby, and more than Daniel Baldwin, the least of the four Baldwin bros.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is this:

Is it ethical for the news media to acquire and publicize the details of a private journal belonging to a minor celebrity with no  relevance to current events? Continue reading →

Sugardaddies, Pregnancy Tests and Nigeria, or “If U.S. Culture Is More Ethical Than The Rest Of The World, The Rest Of The World Is In Big Trouble”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Our surprisingly ethical U.S. culture on display...

Our surprisingly ethical U.S. culture on display…

Aniruddh Khachaturi an is from Mumbai, India, and has been in the U.S. for the past two years, studying  computer science at Carnegie Mellon. For some reason his observations about what surprises him about American culture are newsworthy, according to Investors Daily, as opposed to, say, anyone else. They are thought-provoking, however, especially this : he is impressed with the nation’s “strong ethics”:

“…everyone has a lot of integrity. If someone cannot submit their completed assignment in time, they will turn in the assignment incomplete rather than asking for answers at the last minute. People take pride in their hard work and usually do not cheat. This is different from students from India and China as well as back home in India, where everyone collaborates to the extent that it can be categorized as cheating.”

I happen to think he is right, and that this is probably the reaction of most foreigners who spend much time here. Compared to almost everywhere else on the planet, the population of the U.S. is more ethical, and the U.S. culture is more concerned with ethical values, as one should expect in the only nation expressly founded as the expression of ethical ideals.

Nonetheless, our culture has shown alarming signs of growing more tolerant and even accepting of unethical conduct, and that is worthy of more than merely academic concern. Continue reading →

Advice Column Ethics: Amy Dickinson Sounds An Ethics Alarm

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
"DANGER, Other Woman...DANGER!!!"

“DANGER, Other Woman…DANGER!!!”

Today, syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson (“Ask Amy”) answered a query with admirable directness, properly defining the proper  use of ethics alarms for a woman who was puzzled about what to do when the answer should have been obvious. Unfortunately, Amy adopted the letter-writer’s incorrect terminology for an ethics alarm, based on the help-seeking “other woman” in an adulterous relationship writing that her relationship was beginning to feel “icky.”

As we have discussed here many times, “ick” and unethical conduct are not necessarily the same thing.  Humans naturally assume that what is strange or instinctively repugnant is wrong, but that assumption always needs to be tested by sound and objective ethical analysis. The best current example: to heterosexuals, gay sex is “icky,” but that doesn’t make it unethical or wrong. When Amy uses the term “ick-o-meter,’ what she means is “ethics alarm.” Continue reading →

Ethical Quote Of The Month: Justice Richard Bossun of The New Mexico Supreme Court

/ Jack Marshall / 80 Comments

First-Amendment-on-scroll1

[The quote that follows is from the concurring opinion in the just-decided case of  Elaine Photography v. Willock, which challenged the proposition, discussed and endorsed on Ethics Alarms in several posts, that a business could not and ethically should not refuse service to same-sex couples.]

“On a larger scale, this case provokes reflection on what this nation is all about, its promise of fairness, liberty, equality of opportunity, and justice. At its heart, this case teaches that at some point in our lives all of us must compromise, if only a little, to accommodate the contrasting values of others. A multicultural, pluralistic society, one of our nation’s strengths, demands no less. The Huguenins are free to think, to say, to believe, as they wish; they may pray to the God of their choice and follow those commandments in their personal lives wherever they lead. The Constitution protects the Huguenins in that respect and much more. But there is a price, one that we all have to pay somewhere in our civic life.

“In the smaller, more focused world of the marketplace, of commerce, of public accommodation, the Huguenins have to channel their conduct, not their beliefs, so as to leave space for other Americans who believe something different. That compromise is part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people. That sense of respect we owe others, whether or not we believe as they do, illuminates this country, setting it apart from the discord that afflicts much of the rest of the world.”

——- New Mexico Supreme Court Justice Bossun, concurring with opinion in Elaine Photography v. Willock, which rejected the claim that legally requiring a photography shop to take photographs of a same-sex marriage was a violation of the First Amendment.

You can read the Volokh Conspiracy take on the case here, and here; Ken White has his usual trenchant observations at Popehat.

From an ethics perspective, however, Justice Bossuns’s words need no enhancement. I could not agree more, nor say it better.

______________________________

Graphic: Illinois Family

 

Ethics Verdict On Dr. Phil’s Media Mugging

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
You're in the clear, Phil...this time.

You’re in the clear, Phil…this time.

If a brilliant scholar like Richard Dawkins can get himself in hot water trying to be provocative in 140 characters, you can imagine the scalding a phony expert like Dr. Phil can attract with his tweets. Sure enough, the Oprah Winfrey-spawned arbiter of troubled relationships is now being ground up in the maw of the blogosphere and news media for tweeting this question to his inexplicably large mass of Twitter followers:

 “If a girl is drunk, is it okay to have sex with her? Reply yes or no to @drphil #teensaccused.”

He did not ask “If a girl is passed out drunk, is it okay to have sex with her?” Nor did he ask “If a girl is drunk, is it okay for me to have sex with her?” (The answers to both of these questions, obviously to me, you, and Dr. Phil, is emphatically  no. But then, he didn’t ask either of them.) He also didn’t suggest that he doesn’t know the answer to the question he did ask. He posed a question for his followers, which it is reasonable to assume was done to get a sense of the majority response.

There was nothing wrong, unethical, “tone deaf,” insensitive, sinister, off-putting, icky, misogynistic or otherwise inappropriate about the tweet or its wording, whether it was sent by Dr. Phil or anyone else.

And yet (from the Washington Post)... Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz (And a Poll!) : The Fan, The Girl, and The Grope

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I wrestled with whether it was ethical to show this video or  just link to it on another website instead. I have, as you might have surmised by now, an ethical objection to the practice of taking videos, photographs or recordings of people without their knowledge or permission and publicizing them, and that objection is intensified when it is done for the purpose of embarrassing them or shaming them, unless the conduct is illegal or so unquestionably vile that society is obligated to issue an objection in the strongest terms possible. I think that the borderline episodes of this are  important to discuss and yet it is difficult to do that without aiding and abetting what may be unethical conduct, as I help publicize what perhaps should have been left private.

I haven’t resolved this dilemma. When a video has gone viral, as this one has (as well as another I show here), I think that the impact of my embedding the clip in order to discuss it is minimal, and that the value of presenting the actual video for readers to see outbalances the harm to the victim/victims, if that’s what they are, of posting it on one more site on the web among many. I invite opinions to the contrary. (In the instant case, I should note, the episode was inadvertently captured by a TV cameraman—he shot what he thought was a sleeping fan, and then the copping and feeling began—and broadcast live. Someone else then put the touching moment online.)

With that introduction, here is the video, YouTubed and picked up by Gawker (naturally) as well as many other sites. It shows a male fan at a Yankee game with a sleeping or otherwise unconscious young woman resting her head on his chest. While she sleeps, he appears to fondle her breast, thus spawning endless leering references, since it was at a ballgame, of “stealing second.” We do not know whether the young woman was a stranger who collapsed his way (this actually happened to me once, and at a ballgame, so it’s not that far-fetched), a friend, his wife, his girlfriend, or, as some disturbed individual on one site suggested, his sister.

For the sake of this quiz, we will assume they are a couple. YouTube pulled the video I had embedded, so to see the action, go here.

All set?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz today is…

Assuming this was the fan’s wife or girlfriend, was it unethical for him to cop a feel, in public, while she was unconscious? Continue reading →