You wouldn’t think that a South Korean baseball player could have much in common with John Wayne, but a slugging first baseman for the Cleveland Indians named Shin-Soo Choo now faces an ethical dilemma strikingly similar to the one “the Duke” encountered in 1942. Continue reading
Sports
Ethics Hero: ESPN
It almost brings a tear to the eye to see a media giant take a stand for the values of loyalty, civility, and respect, even when it means slapping down one of its stars. That’s what cable sports network ESPN has done in response to Tony Kornheiser using his radio show to insult the dress and appearance of Espy colleague Hannah Storm for cheap laughs. The network suspended its co-star of the popular “Pardon This Inturruption” for two weeks, saying, Continue reading
Lindsay Vonn and the Fairness Obsession
Ethicist Rushworth Kidder has challenged the fairness of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, specifically the Ladies’ Super-G skiing event. U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn, the gold medal winner in the Ladies’ Downhill Alpine Skiing event, only won the bronze despite finishing the course in one minute and 20.88 seconds, because Austria’s Andrea Fischbacher at 1:20.14, and Slovenia’s Tina Maze at 1:20.63 were less than a second faster. Italy’s Johanna Schnarf, the fourth place finisher, got no prize at all, because she was a miniscule 11 hundredths of a second behind Vonn.
Dr. Kidder is crying foul. Continue reading
Tiger Woods’ Mother in the Ethics Rough
“You know what? I’m so proud to be his mother. Period. This thing, it teaches him, just like golf. When he changes a swing… he wants to get better… He will start getting better… it’s just like that. Golf is just like life, when you make a mistake, you learn from your mistake and move on stronger. That’s the way he is. As a human being everyone has faults, makes mistakes and sins. We all do. But, we move on when we make a mistake and learn from it. I am upset the way media treated him like he’s a criminal…he didn’t kill anybody, he didn’t do anything illegal… They’ve being carrying on from thanksgiving until now, that’s not right! People don’t understand that Tiger has a very good heart and soul. Sometimes I think there is a complete double standard… He tried to improve himself. The tabloids and newspapers just killed him, held him back.. To me it looked like a double standard…When you make a mistake you learn from it and move on, that’s the way life is, that’s a human being. We’re not God, and he never claimed he was God. If anyone tells me to condemn him, I say look at yourself first.. .. I would … look in their eyes and tell them you’re not God! This thing is a family matter… It’s not easy to be him. … (People) go to work 8 to 5 and go home to have a life with the family. Tiger can’t do that.”
—————Katilda Woods, Tiger’s mother, in remarks to the press following Woods’ statement and apology today, his first public appearance since a series of revelations about his multiple affairs.
Where to begin? I’m glad Mrs. Woods is proud of her son. That’s what mothers are for, in times like these. If only she had stopped there, before she plunged deep into the ethics rough. For example, I think Tiger’s been swinging enough, don’t you?
But Mrs. Woods decided to promote three of my least favorite rationalizations for terrible conduct, and then added one I had neglected. Now that she mentions it, however, I hate that one too. Continue reading
Futile Ethics Lessons From the Luge
Long before Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili of the Republic of Georgia crashed and died on a training run there, Vancouver’s Whistler Sliding Centre, now the site of the Olympics luge, bobsled and skeleton competitions, had been the target of complaints, warnings and controversy regarding its safety. After the first international training event at Whistler in November 2008, the president of the luge governing body openly expressed worries over the speed of the track. Since then, there have been sufficient accidents on the track, not only in the luge, but also bobsled and skeleton races, that the fatal accident there could not fairly be called “a surprise.” Just a day before the Georgian was killed, United States luger Mark Grimmette was quoted as being concerned about the course’s speed, saying, “I think we’re probably getting close, too close, to the edge.” Later the same day, a Romanian luge racer was knocked unconscious during his training run. The frequency of crashes during the training runs last week were far above the norm.
Nevertheless, Olympic and luge officials chose not to make changes to the course that would limit the speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour that luge, bobsled and skeleton competitors were reaching, speeds beyond what they were used to, or had trained to handle.
And yet… Continue reading
Unethical Website, the Sequel
The Special Olympics, now in the business of censoring the English language, has applied technology to the task with a new website, http://www.rwordcounter.org. The site allows one to enter a URL and have the site immediately searched for the offending words “retard,” and “retarded,” sort of like little teeny versions of Big Brother’s thought-police rifling through your closets and under your mattresses for bootleg copies of The Bible or Paradise Lost. Then, once the website under surveillance passes the Special Olympics Appropriate Senstitivity and Inoffensive Expression Test, it can proudly display a banner that proclaims it Clean.
Too bad the website itself is unethical, for two reasons:
1. Its purpose violates the ethical values of autonomy, fairness, tolerance, equity, openness, process, respect, and American citizenship, and
2. It is incompetent and a fraud: the damn thing doesn’t work, or at least didn’t the two times I tried it on Ethics Alarms. Apparently I could make a terrible joke here about who must have designed the site, and it would still tell me that my site was “r-word free.” I am thinking the joke, however, and hope that when the folks at the Special Olympics devise a way to detect that, as I’m certain they would love to do, their R-Word Brain Purging Unit works just as well.
Ethics Hero: England World Cup Team Coach Fabio Capello
Just when I find myself staring disconsolately at the vast expanse of snow, thinking about how futile it is to try to sweep back the ethical apathy and self-serving tolerance for bad conduct that is burying our values as a blizzard buries a garden, along comes Fabio Capello, from the unlikely world of soccer, to give me hope.
Capello gets it. Mere days from his team’s embarking on the annual World Cup quest, he sacked his star Defender, John Terry, as team captain. Continue reading
More Tebow Ad Ethics: Allred’s Complaint
The much-anticipated Super Bowl ad telling the story of how quarterback Tim Tebow was born because his mother rejected a doctor’s advice to have him aborted for medical reasons is spinning off ethical issues at a dizzying rate.
Some are easily settled, as Ethics Alarms has already noted. There is nothing wrong with a Super Bowl ad raising substantive issues in the middle of beer commercials and tackles, as some have (incredibly) argued. There is nothing unethical about CBS changing its policy regarding issue-oriented commercials. The fact that the network rejected such ads in the past does not make it hypocritical now. CBS, having ended a blanket prohibition, must now be fair and reasonable in deciding which issue ads to accept. Let’s see how it goes before we cry foul.
And there is nothing “anti-choice” about a woman’s story of how she chose not to abort her son, and is glad she did. It is not even an anti-abortion ad, unless the pro-abortion movement literally believes that it is wrong not to have an abortion. She had a choice, and she made it. The message of the ad does encourage thought about the consequences of having the procedure, which is unequivocally good.
Now, however, Hollywood lawyer and woman’s rights advocate Gloria Allred has suggested that Tebow and his mother are spinning a tale that is inspiring, powerful, and full of baloney, and she has sent CBS a letter of protest. Continue reading
Of Cheating, Loopholes, Fairness and Golf
One of the problems with assessing fairness in sports is that the definition of “cheating” varies according to what game is involved. In some sports, anything not specifically outlawed is fair. In other sports, the “spirit of sportsmanship” takes precedence over mere rules. Golf is one of the latter, a sport that still regards itself as refined and gentlemanly. Now a controversy has erupted that requires an assessment of whether one can cheat in professional golf while obeying the rules. Continue reading
Agent Scott Boras’s Conflicts Surface Again
Last year, almost to the day, I posted an article on “The Hardball Times” site arguing that baseball super-agent Scott Boras, an attorney, frequently has client conflicts of interest that violate the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct. You can read it here. Now the issue has surfaced again, in relation to the problems Boras has had finding a satisfactory contract for Johnny Damon, a left-fielder, while he also represents other left-fielders competing with Damon for the same job.
I believe he has serious conflicts of interest as both an agent and as a lawyer. The two articles lay it all out; maybe my small cry in the wilderness is beginning to have some effect.
Stay tuned.
Ethics Alarms 