U.S. Society

Really? The Baby Mop?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

No.

One of the Kantian categorical imperatives is that no human being should ever use another for his or her own selfish objectives. Another ethical principle that is close to absolute is that one should never  exploit children. A third is not to treat human beings as objects, or to denigrate, diminish or humiliate them without their informed consent. A fourth principle is that forced child labor is inherently unethical, and a fifth is that making individuals do work that benefits you without compensation is theft.

HEY! I’ve got a brilliant idea! Let’s help parents turn their babies into living, breathing, drooling mops! Continue reading →

To The Un-American Secessionists

/ Jack Marshall / 170 Comments

Led by Texans, the White House is being deluged with petitions from all around the nation asking that various states be allowed to secede from the U.S. because the prospect of another four years of President Obama is so heinous. My immediate reaction is that this proves that conservatives are lazier than progressives, whose solution to a similar disappointment with parties reversed in 2004 was to pack up and move to Canada, or at least to make noises about it.  Conservatives apparently want to stay at home and leave the U.S.too. How convenient.

In 2004, when liberals and Democrats were acting like spoiled brats, I posted the following essay entitled “Escape to Canada and the Ethics of Democracy.” I think it is instructive to re-publish this post unedited to clarify what is wrong with the conservative tantrum of 2012. Oh, I could have changed “left” to “right,” Canada to Texas and Bush to Obama and Alec Baldwin to Ted Nugent, but it hardly seemed necessary, for my diagnosis and conclusions are exactly the same, just with a different group. It also seems prudent to leave the essay in its original form to remind smug liberals like Jon Stewart, now having a ball mocking Republicans, that Democrats disgraced themselves in a similar manner not that long ago. Being a hysteric, an alarmist, a bad citizen and a poor loser isn’t confined to members of one partisan group—it just seems that way at the moment. Now the conservatives are the silly people who are rejecting the principles of self-government that they were fervently  lecturing us about, because, you see, those principles didn’t work out their way…this time.

Here is “Escape to Canada and the Ethics of Democracy,” from The Ethics Scoreboard on November 17, 2004: Continue reading →

Are Employers Ethically Obligated Not To Take Advantage of Women’s Negotiation Choices?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 

Yet another career for Shatner—coaching female job-seekers.

A recent study of 2500 job seekers indicated that men are far more likely to negotiate salary and benefits in job situations where it has no been stated that the salary is negotiable.

I am not surprised. Running non-profit organizations with limited resources, I always ended up with primarily female staffs because women would accept a lower offer than men with similar qualifications. This meant that the women got the jobs for salaries their male competition turned down. This, in turn, may have effected their salaries for a long time to come, in subsequent jobs. Is this bias?

Clearly not. The negotiations between an employer and potential employee are ethical and the conditions are known. A skilled negotiator (I am personally incompetent at negotiating my own fee; in ProEthics, my partner handles all of that) will get a better deal; a poor or reluctant negotiator will get terms more advantageous to the employer. It is not bias if the most aggressive and effective negotiators happen to be men.  Continue reading →

Porn and the NFL: In Search of A Biased Referee

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

With condoms, what, 2.5 X’s?

55% of California voters decided yesterday to make porn stars wear condoms on the job—good for their health, bad for the health of the state’s booming XXX film industry. It is a reasonable guess that injecting condoms into the proceedings will put California’s porn products at a significant competitive disadvantage, and also a reasonable guess that the voters who enacted the measure couldn’t care less. So legal enterprises may go bust, their employees may lose their careers, and consumers may lose a form of entertainment they crave because of the policy priorities of those who hold all three in low regard, and who are unlikely to apply any kind of balancing standard. It’s safer for all concerned to require condoms, that’s all. Porn companies, porn careers, porn lovers—who cares about what they want? Continue reading →

Relax, Americans: The President Will Be A Good Man…Whoever He Is.

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

The good guys.

The degree of anxiety over today’s Presidential election—perhaps more accurate than anxiety is hysteria—is palpable. It is also unnecessary and foolish. I have read the fevered rantings of Andrew Sullivan, who fears Mitt Romney like the Germans feared the invading Russian army at the end of World War II, and the apocalyptic monologues of conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin, who is prone to statements like, “It’s over, that’s all! Do you understand? If Obama wins, this country is never coming back!” I have watched both parties exploit and encourage this kind of irrational fear, and its by-products, predictably, are hate, division and anger. There was a time in America when political adversaries referred to each other as “my honorable opponent.” The candidates were not more honorable then. We were more sensible.

The history of the United States has shown that very few truly bad men have the opportunity to run for President. It makes sense, if you give it a modicum of thought. A Presidential contender must negotiate the perils of life for at least four decades without accumulating damning evidence of disqualifying character traits and malign intent. The candidate must have shown sufficient ability and character to impress those he worked with and owed duties to. Most of all, a potential President must have been able to engender a sufficient amount of trust over more than half of his natural life.

We should not judge political leaders by the same standards as other professionals, because the nature of politics, by definition, is ethically ambiguous. Politics knows only one ethical system: utilitarianism. The practice of governing and making human progress advance in the civic arena rules out absolute principles, and requires delicate calculations of ends and means. This often appears, to non-practitioners, as corruption, and it certainly can become that. Effective, trustworthy leaders are able to avoid the occupational hazard of believing that the ends necessarily justify the means. If they cannot, they will not have the opportunity to be President. Continue reading →

Why Nate Silver Is Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 156 Comments

Funny, Nate, I don’t see “leadership” anywhere in here…

I have wrestled with whether to write this post for about a month now. I am not in the election predicting business, which is a fool’s game, and this is tangential to ethics at best. On the other hand, leadership and American culture are among the subjects frequently explored here. Nate Silver’s analysis of the Presidential election on his New York Times blog has been at once fascinating and aggravating for me, though it has been a godsend to my nervous friends on the ideological left. Silver has insisted that his statistical analysis of the polls fortells an Obama victory with increasing certainty. Last I looked, his model was showing the election to be all but in the bag for the President, with, Silver calculates, an 86% chance that Romney goes down to defeat.

I don’t question Silver’s figures or formula. He’s a statistics whiz. His mistake is trying to use the tools he has used to great success on the poker table and in the world of sabermetrics to analyze the election of a President of the United States, without acknowledging or understanding the core of the process, or the culture and context in which it occurs. In many elections, most perhaps, his model would work perfectly. This time, it is going to fail. Silver won’t see his failure coming because as brilliant as he is in his chosen field, his demonstrated expertise is in economics and statistics. He really believes, apparently, that American history doesn’t matter, that what Americans think about when they choose a President is irrelevant, and that numbers purify the discussion and remove all the bias and static. He couldn’t be more wrong. Continue reading →

Hyundai: Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

As we try to build an ethical culture, it doesn’t help to have amoral corporations employing ethics-challenged advertising flacks to send America toxic messages about honesty and trust. Hyundai, in its campaign for the 2013 Santa Fe, represents family members keeping secrets from each other and parents enlisting their children as accomplices in lies as funny, normal and cute. “Don’t tell mom,” a father orders, in the midst of a movie that will give his young children nightmares, and other misadventures (including one incident of father-led vandalism.). “Don’t tell Dad,” says Mom, after taking her son parasailing. I’m presuming she’ll have to tell him when her son breaks his neck on their next flight. Continue reading →

An Easy Ethics Call: The Flasher In The Girl’s Locker Room (UPDATED)

/ Jack Marshall / 100 Comments

Proudly defending the right to freak out little girls.

How society should treat individuals with one gender’s genitalia but who identify with the opposite gender is a question that involves much more than ethical considerations. At this point, I haven’t been able to devote sufficient thought and research to the problem to propose an answer. The current controversy of Colleen Francis, however, inspires no such hesitancy on my part, because the correct solution to that problem is purely a matter of ethics. I’ll stipulate, for the time being, that it is right, legal and proper for Colleen, a transgendered student at Olympia College in Evergreen, Washington, to use the women’s locker rooms there, despite the fact that the 45-year-old still has a complete set of male genitalia, since she identifies as a woman, and as far as the school is concerned, a woman she is. Sold. I buy it.

However, Colleen apparently likes to display her alien genitalia with abandon in the ladies locker room, despite the fact that she often is surrounded by members of a high school swim club and a children’s swimming academy, many of whom are high school age or younger, and some of whom are as young as six.

Unethical. Inconsiderate. Offensive.

Disrespectful. Irresponsible.

Wrong. Continue reading →

Mark Cuban and the Ethical Tit For Tat.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

No thank-you.

“Tit for tat” is unethical always—almost. Few ethics rules are absolute, and this isn’t one of them Sometimes tit for tat, that is, doing something unethical to someone who has done the same unethical act to you or someone else, can be justifiable, if it causes no real harm, and does some good as well. Spreading the rumor that Harry Reid is a pederast because he falsely suggested that Mitt Romney was a tax evader doesn’t qualify.  But Mark Cuban offering to donate $1 million to charity if Donald Trump shaves what is allegedly the hair on his head?

Perfect. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Single Mother Tip-Stiffer

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

According to a poster on Reddit, a woman allegedly left the message above on her receipt after eating a pricey meal at a restaurant. “Single mom, sorry,” she wrote, in the space left for a tip. “Thank you—it was great!” The furious waiter’s colleague scanned and posted  the receipt, with appropriate invective that has been matched and exceeded by others on the site.

As usual, there are denials that the story is genuine, and claims that some single mother-hating trouble-maker created this miserable ethics smoking gun. “I think this bill is a fraud because I’ve met very few single mothers who expected to get special treatment for their status. They’re just hoping no one holds their situation against them,” wrote one skeptic. This is the “No True Scotsman” fallacy in Technicolor. The fact, if it is a fact, that few single mothers expect special treatment doesn’t prove that this one didn’t or doesn’t. Continue reading →