Science & Technology

“Titanic” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

This is Titanic week, as all of you who don’t live in tunnels like prairie dogs must know. It has been a century since the sinking of the Great Unsinkable, with the deaths of 1500 souls including some of the great artistic, financial and industrial greats of the era. James Cameron’s 1997 film is also returning this week in 3-D, which means that the misconceptions, false accounts and outright misrepresentations the film drove into the public consciousness and popular culture will be strengthened once again. I think it would be ethical, on this centennial of the tragedy, for those in a position to do so to make a concerted effort to honor the victims and their families by honoring the truth. Thanks to Cameron, this is impossible. Continue reading →

The Pink Slime Debacle: Is Anyone To Blame?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

YUM!!!!

The maker of so-called “pink slime” filed for bankruptcy last week as the direct result of a public furor and public relations disaster related to “finely textured beef.” As a result, upwards of 650 people are losing their jobs, perhaps many more. Ground beef and other beef-based food will be more expensive, and quite possibly less healthy. Who, if anyone, is at fault?

The “pink slime” controversy was launched by cable TV chef Jamie Oliver, a healthy eating advocate who urged his viewers to reject ground beef that included the commonly-used filler. It is all meat, you know. In fact, it is virtually fat-free beef that begins as slaughterhouse trimmings, is then heated and spun in a centrifuge to separate tiny particles of meat from fat, and subjected to a puff of ammonium hydroxide gas to kill bacteria. Then it was mixed with ground beef. The process sounded unappetizing, and the nickname, coined in an e-mail by a USDA official, made it seem especially disgusting. The internet and social media got a hold of it, and the next thing you know, there were petitions and outrage. And the net result…jobs lost, beef made more expensive, no improvement in taste or health…a complete loss.

Good job everybody!

And almost everybody’s to blame too.

In rough order of culpability:

  1. The meat industry, for using unnatural, treated meat as filler and hiding it with the deceitful label “100% beef.” Consumers should have known what was being added and how it was produced, and it should have been on the labels.
  2. The clever USDA official. His cute name was a food slur, and in these days of viral tweets, YouTube videos and emails, coming up with a disgusting name for a safe food was reckless and irresponsible.
  3. The news media and websites, for not adequately defusing the controversy by explaining exactly what the substance was, indulging the anti-meat agenda of certain writers and reporters.
  4. Consumers, for being naive, emotional, irrational, and too easily stampeded. Most processed food can be made to seem disgusting,  especially anything to do with meat. So is a lot of food preparation. The public won’t take the time to distinguish between genuinely unhealthy foods and those that just involve processing that isn’t suitable for the squeamish, so they go overboard on the random targets of attention-seeking, half-cocked activists, and often the government and regulators follow the hysteria. This is the tragedy of DDT; this is Alar; this is cyclamates. Industries are destroyed that don’t deserve to be; lives are ruined, and the public health isn’t improved.

Was Jaime Oliver’s conduct wrong? I don’t think so. He’s a natural foods advocate; he has philosophical objections to processed food, and he  performed a public service by letting the public know something about its food that it should have been told about sooner. The story of “pink slime” could and should have been explained truthfully by someone who approved of it; it’s not Oliver’s fault that the job fell to an opponent.

Why Does American Public Education Stink? The Answer: Incompetence, Stupidity, and Fear. The Proof: THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ah, that look that only a dedicated New York public school teacher can spark!!!

Over at Popehat, Ken has been on another roll, and his latest effort, as depressing and enraging as it is, is a real contribution to our understanding of the kind of entrenched foolishness, cowardice and incompetence in our nation’s public school administration that is gradually rendering the schools useless and our children uneducated.

Spurred by a New York Post story that seemed too horrible to be true, Ken set out to research the claim that the New York School system has compiled a long list of topics that are banned on student tests for a variety of reasons, prime among them that someone, somewhere, will be offended by them.  After some digging on the New York City Department of Education’s websites, what he found  was worse than how the Post had described it.

In an Appendix, he discovered a list of  test question topics “that would probably cause a selection to be deemed unacceptable by the New York City Department of Education… In general, a topic might be unacceptable for any of the following reasons:

  •   The topic could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students that might hamper their ability to take the remainder of the test in the optimal frame of mind.
  •     The topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation.
  •     The topic has been ―done to death in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students.
  •     The topic will appear biased against (or toward) some group of people.

Using those criteria, and undoubtedly using astounding numbers of hours and taxpayer dollars, the Department came up with the following jaw-dropping list of banned test subjects. I’ll flag with red the taboos that are especially outrageous or idiotic, though perhaps I should note the two or three that might be appropriate. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Mike Daisey

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.”

—Actor, writer, activist Mike Daisey, in an interview with NPR’s Ira Glass, exploring how Daisey was able to justify fabricating facts and accounts for the earlier aired—and just retracted—“American Life” installment called “Mr. Daisy  Goes To The Apple Factory.” NPR checked the particulars of Daisey’s first hand account of the human rights and labor violations he claimed to witness at Apple’s factory in China, and found that the writer had embellished, exaggerated,  and misrepresented much of what he reported. What NPR had broadcast as journalistic reporting was an excerpt from Daisey’s acclaimed touring one-man stage show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

Mike Daisey, lying to us for our own enlightenment

Daisey’s quote, which is both illuminating and chilling, argues that using made-up stories and personal accounts in a theatrical context qualifies as truth, even if the same misrepresentations in a journalistic context are inappropriately false. The problem with his argument, and the flawed ethical theory behind it, is that both the NPR audience and his theater audience believe that Daisey is telling the truth. Daisey’s solution to the problem is simple: his one-man show does tell the truth…it just uses lies to do it. Continue reading →

The Ethics Verdict on the Homeless Hotspot Project

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

BBH Labs, the innovation unit of the international marketing agency BBH, hired members of the Austin, Texas homeless population to walk around carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices, offering high-speed Internet access in exchange for donations. Thirteen volunteers from a homeless shelter were hooked up to the devices, given business cards and put in shirts with messages that designated them as human connections. “I’m Rudolph, a 4G Hotspot” read the label on the homeless man on the New York Post’s front page with the lead, “HOT BUMS!”

The Walking Hotspots—now there’s a new horror series for AMC when they run out of zombies— were told to go to the most densely packed areas of the South by Southwest high-tech festival in Austin, Texas, where the technology trend-devouring conventioners often overwhelm the cellular networks with their smart phones. Attendees were told they could go up to a Homeless Hotspot and log on to his 4G network using the number on his T-shirt. A two-dollar contribution to the homeless man was the suggested payment for 15 minutes of service. BBH Labs paid  the wired-up homeless $20 a day, and they were also able to keep whatever customers donated.

What BBH called its “charitable  experiment” ended yesterday with the conference, and with all participants seemingly thrilled. The “Homeless Hotspot” gimmick got nationwide publicity, thirteen homeless men made some money, and conference participants got great connectivity…so why were so many people upset? 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 →

Unethical Headline of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

From the Scientific American website:

“Should Global-Warming Activists Lie to Defend Their Cause?”

"Hmmm... that's a real brain-teaser!"

The fact that this question can even be asked in seriousness, or be deemed worthy of debate in scientific circles, tells us all we need to know about why climatologist Peter Gleick decided to use deception and theft to try to discredit the Heartland Institute, a vocal critic of global warming research. It also makes it impossible to know who to trust and when, in the global warming debate and others.

Great.

Nice job, everybody.

Matrix Chicken Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Yum-yum!

Architecture Student and artist André Ford has sparked an ethics debate after proposing that chickens be raised for meat in vertical racks after  their frontal cortexes have been severed, rendering them brain-dead and essentially growing meat. The question is, would this practice be more ethical than current factory farming, less ethical, or does it make no difference?

Ford’s system would have the chickens suspended and immobile, with their feet removed. Tubes would supply water and nutrients directly into them while other tubes would carry away their waste. The chickens, of course, wouldn’t feel a thing, which one could argue is a superior state to the well-documented stress and misery they would experience in traditional chicken farms. Meanwhile, the costs of raising chickens would be (theoretically) reduced, in part because far less space would be required, and the process would also be cleaner—again, theoretically. 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.