U.S. Society

Late Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/22/2021 (But It’s Morning In Hawaii!)

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

An exhausting day yesterday that extended several hours into the evening thanks to having a legal ethics seminar to run, so I am late to the office as well as feeling less than smurfy. I’m sorry. One more example of how the lockdown as well as other questionable pandemic responses will have unanticipated and negative impacts going forward: my Zoom versions of what were designed as live, interactive, dynamic in-person seminars tend to devolve into lectures, as I can neither see, interact with or prod participants into Socratic dialogues. I have to talk and improvise the whole three hours, and the results are decidedly inferior to what I can achieve in person. Lawyers are going to have less-effective ethics alarms in the days to come…

1. Ethics Quote of the Day: Times critic Lindsay Zoladz, in her essay about the current rush to recast past events, art, culture and personalities according to current sensibilities:

The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past…The past was imperfect, yes, but so is the present. Inevitably, the future will be too. The lesson to be taken from all these reconsiderations is not necessarily how much wiser we are now, but how difficult it is to see the biases of the present moment. If anything, these looks back should be reminders to stay vigilant against presentism, conventional wisdom and the numbing orthodoxy of groupthink. 

Bingo.

2. Now who’s ready to do the same to anti-free speech, thought-controlling colleges and universities? Jeff T. Green, an advertising-technology billionaire, formally resigned his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and publicly rebuked the faith over social issues and LGBTQ rights.

“I believe the Mormon church has hindered global progress in women’s rights, civil rights and racial equality, and LGBTQ+ rights,” he wrote in a resignation letter to Mormon church President Russell Nelson. Eleven family members and a friend formally resigned along with him. Now Green’s  estimated $5 billion assets will be donated elsewhere, starting with a $600,000 donation to the LGBTQ-rights group Equality Utah.

Wealthy donors and philanthropists too often continue to fund other institutions that pursue values and objectives that the donors do not support, being satisfied as long as their names remain in marble somewhere on campus. This is not only a foolish use of charitable funds, it’s an unethical one. Continue reading →

‘Twas The Monday Before Christmas Ethics Warm-Up, 12/20/21: “You Better Be Good For Goodness Sake!” [Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Oops. I always thought “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was another Gene Autry Christmas song, but it wasn’t, though Gene recorded it. It was written by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, and banjoist Harry Reser and his band performed it on Eddie Cantor’s radio show in November of 1934. That version sold  500,000 copies of sheet music and more than 30,000 records within 24 hours. It wasn’t one of Autry’s big hits, but Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters reached the Billboard charts with it in 1947. In 1970, Rankin-Bass did its animated “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” TV special with a Fred Astaire puppetoon narrating. But it was Bruce Springsteen, of all people, who made the biggest success out of the song way back in 1975.

The creepy and unethical implication that Santa is spying on all children year long has been carried on by the disturbing “Elf on the Shelf,” which Ethics Alarms deplored here.

1. So…How long has this D.C. teacher been doing things like this? Has anyone asked for Terry McAuliffe’s reaction? At the Watkins Elementary School in the US capital, the Washington Post reported, a teacher has been suspended after making third-grade children reenact scenes from the Holocaust, including having them pretend to dig mass graves and shoot victims. She explained that this happened because “because the Jews ruined Christmas.” Some children were given specific roles. One Jewish child was told to portray  Adolf Hitler and then to pretend to commit suicide, according to the parent of the child. The instructor  told the children not to tell anyone about the activity, but someone squealed.

In an email, the school’s principal called this “a poor instructional decision.”

Ya think? Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Mistletoe,12/19/2021: The Kiss-Off Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Lots of ethics stories to kiss-off, so let’s get right to it…

1. Now THAT might dissuade corporate execs from engaging in sexual harassment! Former McDonald’s chief executive Steve Easterbrook was fired by the company in 2019 for having an “inappropriate relationship” with a subordinate. As part of his settlement, he has agreed to return $105 million to McDonald’s: the company sued him for lying to investigators at the time of his dismissal. In a message to employees, Enrique Hernandez Jr., the McDonald’s Chairman of the Board, said that it was crucial to hold Easterbrook “accountable for his lies and misconduct, including the way in which he exploited his position as CEO.” It was an allegedly consensual relationship Esaterbrook engaged in with an employee in violation of company policy, but as we all know, I hope, when the boss wants a sexual relationship, it can’t be truly “consensual.” Just as a wild example, imagine, say, a President of the United States having such a relationship with a young intern….

2. More evidence of NFL culture rot…The Jacksonville Jaguars fired their head coach Urban Meyer after just 13 games, because the team was losing and Meyer’s conduct on and off the field had been unacceptable. Among other issues, the team’s former kicker Josh Lambo revealed that Meyer kicked him at an August practice. Meyer won three college national titles as the coach for Florida and Ohio State, but he also had scandals at both schools. Thirty-one of his players were arrested when he was coaching at Florida; at Ohio State, he protected a longtime assistant with a history of domestic abuse.

Why would a team hire someone with that kind of history? Such episodes suggest serious character deficits, after all. But Meyer won titles and that’s all that matters in the NFL. I wonder if he would have been fired if his team had been 11-2 instead of 2-11. No I don’t….

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NYT Letters To The Editor On Abortion vs. Adoption Continue An Revealing Unethical Pattern

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

adoption

Perhaps no comment during the recent oral argument before SCOTUS regarding Mississippi’s Roe-defying 15 week abortion limit received more attention than Justice Amy Coney Barrett statement that a mother’s option to give a baby up for adoption at birth rendered abortion was unnecessary in most cases. Numerous abortion defenders have attempted to discredit her assertion, and, like all of the pro-abortion arguments I have seen and heard so far, fell short in logic, honesty and ethics

Today’s Sunday Times letters section exemplified the disconnect among reality, self-interest and fairness that continue to plague abortion fans, no matter how passionately they argue their position. The Times dedicated the section to rebuttals of Comey’s assertion. That the editors deemed these the cream of the crop is telling. Also telling: no letter selected by the editors supported Comey. Here are the key quotes from each:

Anne Matlack Evans, of Napa, California writes in part,

In 1954, my mother, a single mother of three young children, had no other option than to do just what Justice Barrett proposes. After losing her job because of the pregnancy, she took refuge with her mother and, several months later, gave birth to a child whom she gave up that very day….

The consequences of my mother’s pregnancy and the baby’s adoption profoundly affected my mother and us children. She was traumatized by the pregnancy and the necessity of abandoning a child — especially so after caring for us. She felt ashamed, stigmatized and less able to protect her existing children.

Ethics Alarms Comment: Why did a single mother have three children? Why did she get pregnant again? She felt ashamed and stigmatized about giving up a live infant for abortion that she couldn’t care for, but apparently would have flt no stigma or shame if she ended the nascent human being’s life before it could be born. That’s exactly the confused attitude that our culture needs to change. Her unborn child “existed” before it was born.

David Leonard of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania writes in part, Continue reading →

More “West Side Story” Ethics Weirdness: “The Jet Song”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

If you read Ethics Alarms often, you know about my objections to euphemisms, which I also call “cover words” since their intent is to deceive readers and listeners about the real nature of what is being discussed. My ethical objections to using “cover words” for words that are considered taboo in various settings follows similar lines, except those cover words don’t fool anyone, and thus are not just efforts to deceive, but silly and insulting efforts. If “f-word means “fuck” and everyone knows it means “fuck,” then it’s ridiculous not to just say “fuck.” The same, of course, goes for “n-word.” When we discuss that word here, we use the word. There are no “banned words” under the First Amendment, and I don’t grant anyone the right to tell me what words I can use to express what I want to express when those are the best words to express them..

Civility is, as a cornerstone of the ethical value of respect, important to societal comity. In dramatic works and literature, however, civility isn’t the issue: ideas, emotion and expression are. The bleeping out of “bad words” or shoving mild substitutes into the actors’ mouths on television constitute artistic vandalism; it’s less common now, but still happens too often. The archaic practice is offensive and insults the audience’s intelligence: the first time I hear a character in a film say “Forget you!,” I turn the channel.

Movies, we all know, stopped worrying about such delicate matters decades ago, and let TV stations worry about their language (and sex scenes, and graphic violence) later. Imagine my surprise, then, to hear Steven Spielberg’s redo of the 1961 “West Side Story” movie begin with the same version of “The Jets Song” that was required by the prevailing stage language requirements of the 1950s. The new, updated, woke-minded, spruced up musical with re-written dialogue still starts with the teen-aged, switchblade-carrying gang of punks singing,

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Ethics Shopping, 12/18/21: Thoughts And Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

No, it wasn’t Bing who introduced this Christmas song into the playlist…it was Bob Hope!

I’m having holiday guilt pangs over friends that I have lost touch with and know are struggling and unhappy. Some of them I consciously cut off because they became an oppressive burden, never offering companionship or contact without accompanying it with a plea for assistance, usually money. One such friend, and I do consider him a friend, and care about him, accepted several thousand dollars as desperation “loans.” I didn’t expect to ever see the money again, but I couldn’t deal with the never-ending appeals in the midst of new emergencies. How many such friends can one maintain, even if you are wealthy? What do you do with such people? Then there are the friends who are perpetually miserable, have never been willing to be pro-active and try to change what they hate about their lives, and have developed the habit of treating you with a constant “oh, you’re so lucky, and I’m not” guilt trip. What a joy they are at the holidays.

One unsentimental, cold realist friend analogizes trying to help such friends as “feeding squirrels”…they gradually expect more and more from you, become dependent, and finally aggressive. Is the ethical approach to try to brighten their Christmas at the expense of darkening mine and my family’s?

1. Good. The Florida Supreme Court just reaffirmed its decision earlier this year that bans Florida lawyers from receiving continuing legal education credit for programs that require “diversity” among panelists. This was aimed particularly at the American Bar Association’s CLE programs, because the ABA’s diversity policy imposes quotas on CLE panels which the court said “smacks of stereotyping or naked balancing.”

“We reject the notion that quotas like these cause no harm,” the Florida Supreme Court said in the Dec. 16 decision. “Quotas depart from the American ideal of treating people as unique individuals, rather than as members of groups. Quotas are based on and foster stereotypes. And quotas are divisive.”

2. And welcome to my world...the vast majority of the legal ethicists and ethics-specializing lawyers and law professors on the legal ethics listserv i pay to participate in were aghast at the decision. One well-respected authority in the field wrote,

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The Project Veritas Ethics Train Wreck (So Far)…[Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Train-Wreck air

This was certainly inevitable. Project Veritas is an unethical journalism organization with a one-way bias (that’s to the Right, in case you have been studying loftier matters), meaning that it is not interested in truth or informing the public, but only the truth (maybe) that benefits a particular political agenda. But unethical people and organizations where the ends justify the means is a motto provoke unethical responses in the other direction—it is the ethics version of Newton’s Third Law—and that is where ethics train wrecks come from.

The ends of Project Veritas’s various unethical means have been revealing and valuable in many cases. A corrupt community organizing group, ACORN, was exposed, as it deserved to be. Planned Parenthood’s ghoulish lack of respect for human life was also exposed, with fewer consequences. It wasn’t really necessary for Corporation for Public Broadcasting executives to be gulled into saying for posterity that the taxpayer-funded company is progressive and biased because that should be screamingly obvious to anyone who isn’t biased themselves. But progressives (and those brainwashed by the progressive media) continue to gaslight critics with the Jumbo-esque “Bias? What bias?” defense of the indefensible, so this Project Veritas hit was satisfying, if not ethical.

Now, as we knew it would, those embarrassed or exposed by Project Veritas are striking back. The focus is President Biden’s troubled daughter Ashley’s diary, in which, among other things, she suggests that her father showered with her when she was a child. The diary found its way into the clutches of Project Veritas before the election, though it did not publish any of it. (Its explanation for this choice, that O’Keefe felt doing so would be seen as a “cheap shot,” defies belief coming from the King of Cheap Shots, but never mind.) Apparently, the New York Times’ investigation found, Ashley left her diary behind when she moved out of the home of a friend, and it was found by a woman named Aimee Harris, who moved in after Ashley left. {The Times feels it necessary to detail Harris’s personal and financial problems, which is completely irrelevant to the diary. That’s a real cheap shot. Her conduct is what matters in the report, not her problems.)

Harris, whom the Times makes sure we know “was a fan of Mr. Trump,” meaning she was by definition evil, learned that Ashley had stayed there previously and had left some things behind. Harris apparently found the diary.

Subsequent debates center on whether the diary was lost or abandoned. I don’t care about the legal haggling: Harris was ethically obligated to contact Ms. Biden and ask what she wanted done with it. The options for responses were a) “Sent it back to me”; b) “Destroy it,”and c) “I don’t care what you do with it.” Only c) would have entitled Harris to read Biden’s private entrees, or to give it to anyone but Biden.

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Evening Ethics, 12/16/2021: The Holidays Ethics Avalanche Continues…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Predictably, just when I have the least time, the most ethics issues, and important ones, are flying by. I know I’m going to miss some; I’m missed some already. Yesterday, for example, I neglected to note the anniversary of the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, though plenty of readers reminded me. A more ethical historical document does not exist, and the Bill of Rights continues to bolster American values as well as delineate them. I should do a full post on the status of the document and its contents, which have seldom been so besieged. A “Bill of Rights Day” holiday would make much more sense than “Juneteenth,” other than its unfortunate placement so close to Christmas.

What else did I miss? On the 15th in 1998 we saw what might well be the last legitimate impeachment in U.S. history, since the Democrats so thoroughly abused and weakened the standards for the process in their quest to bring down Donald Trump. Whether Clinton should have been convicted in the Senate is a close call for me; he certainly should have had a real trial, which he did not. On balance, I believe his obstruction of the investigation, and especially his dishonesty before the grand jury, tilts the scale to conviction.

Today, the 16th of December, marks the 248th anniversary of The Boston Tea Party, when 60 allies of Samuel Adams’ radical resistance group dumped dumped 342 chests of tea worth about $18,000 (nearly $600,000 today) into the Boston Harbor to protest British taxes. The targeted economic riot was a catalyst: Parliament retaliated against the colonies by enacting the so-called Intolerable Acts, in 1774, closing Boston to merchant shipping, establishing formal British military rule in Massachusetts, declaring British officials immune to criminal prosecution in the Colonies, and requiring the colonists to quarter British troops (hence the Third Amendment in the Bill of Rights). The colonies responded with the first Continental Congress, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Just so you know what kind of public school teacher I would be, I’d assign students to compare and contrast the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol to Sam Adams’ little uprising.

1. What are schools for? The always provocative City-Journal reveals that a recent survey by YouGov and American Compass, asked 1,000 American parents with a child between the ages of 12 and 30 about what the priority for the public education system should be, phrased thusly: “Which is more important, helping students maximize their academic potential and gain admission to colleges and universities with the best possible reputations, or “helping them develop the skills and values to build decent lives in the communities where they live?” The latter prevailed by approximately a 2 to 1 margin.

As it should have…

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/15/21: Denial, Deception, Devolution, Discipline And Delusion

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I would feel much better about the future of the country if Democrats and progressives would at least admit that the “anyone but Trump” President installed by the media with the assistance of some highly questionable voting procedures, along with the extreme pipe-dream policies that came along with Biden have been an unmitigated disaster. But they won’t; it’s amazing. Today’s New York Times letters section has a section called “Is Biden’s Presidency a Disappointment?” I would have answered, “No., because it was obvious that he would be terrible,” but that’s not what the Times readers think, no indeed. One wrote that he’s playing the hand he was dealt, and is “inspiring people to fight.” (“Inspiring people to fight” is what the Democrats in the House claimed justified impeaching him for causing “an insurrection”…) The next letter, which doesn’t appear to be from a madhouse, says “This has been an astonishingly successful 2021 so far.” It really does, and the Times printed it. The third letter says the writer is only disappointed that the Democrats under Biden haven’t “come together” sufficiently to prevent Republicans from “doing terrible damage to our country” because the GOP is clearly “bent on destroying democracy.” The responses end with a note of sanity, as J. Matthew McClone of Tyson Md. writes that a Times op-ed stating that there was a “growing fear” that the Republicans will gain power and “slam the doors of democracy behind them” confirms that “many on the left have lost perspective.”

Ya think?

1. Schadenfreude test! New York’s top ethics panel has ordered former Governor Andrew Cuomo to pay the state the $5.1 million in profits he made on a book celebrating his management of the Wuhan virus in New York. The book was a crock, since thousands of elderly New Yorkers died in nursing homes after Cuomo ordered them to accept contagious seniors. Over 9,000 coronavirus patients were sent into New York nursing homes by the “Luv Guv,”, and over 15,000 long-term care residents in New York’s nursing homes died, though Cuomo’s henchpeople did their best to cover it up. Yet none of that is why he has to pay back the money: the 12-to-1 vote by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics yesterday was based on its conclusion that Cuomo used state resources and government staff to write the book. Cuomo must pay the money to the state by next month.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy…

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