U.S. Society

Ethics Hero Emeritus: James Q. Wilson (1931-2012)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Denmark or Luxembourg can afford to exhibit domestic anguish and uncertainty over military policy; the United States cannot. A divided America encourages our enemies, disheartens our allies, and saps our resolve—potentially to fatal effect. What General Giap of North Vietnam once said of us is even truer today: America cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but it can be defeated at home. Polarization is a force that can defeat us.”

James Q. Wilson wrote that, in an essay on America’s polarization. The scholar, author, philosopher and social scientist who died yesterday at the age of 80 was a passionate conservative who believed in winning arguments, influencing policy and changing conduct with the power of ideas, facts, studies and analysis. That the media, especially the conservative media, treated the death of Andrew Breitbart as a thunderclap and the death of Wilson as a footnote tells us as much as we need to know about our culture, values and intellect. I watched GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum respond to the news of Breitbart’s death as if the culture warrior was the equivalent of Martin Luther King. Breitbart died too young, at 43; he had a family, and reputedly was a nice guy. But his contribution to the American scene was to use his various websites to increase the intensity of partisan warfare, and to help banish fairness, compromise, civility and mutual trust from public discourse. One of the last videos of Brietbart showed him screaming insults at Occupy protesters.

I had stopped using Breitbart’s sites for source material: I couldn’t trust them. The editing of James O’Keefe’s ACORN sting was one strike; the misleadingly truncated Shirley Sherrod speech was another. I wasn’t going to wait for a third. It tells me something alarming about conservatives in this country that such an unethical new media figure could be so lionized upon his death, when his methods were so frequently aimed at destruction rather than elightenment.

Wilson, in contrast, got substantive and wide-ranging results.His 1981 essay “Broken Windows” argued that community policing, rather than mere law enforcement, was the secret to changing urban culture. He wrote (with co-author George Kelling): Continue reading →

The NFL, Battling Its Own Sick Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

"OK, it's a deal then: we put this guy in the hospital, and split the bounty 50-50..."

The last Super Bowl was phenomenally successful, as its audience size shattered previous records. Yet for many years, I have not been able to enjoy the sport, because of the unethical conflict at its core. Pro football’s appeal and swagger is based on violence, and we now know that the violence damages its players to an unacceptable extent. The players are paid both to accept the crippling and often-life shortening abuse, as well as administer it. For this former fan, that makes football too close to boxing from an ethical perspective. If the NFL is paying  players to do permanent harm to each other, then so are the fans that pay the NFL.  Sorry: there are too many other forms of entertainment that don’t require me to endorse and subsidize brutality. Thus I was not surprised to read this, in the New York Times:

“During the past three seasons, while the National Football League has been changing rules and levying fines in an effort to improve player safety, members of the New Orleans Saints’ defense maintained a lucrative bounty system that paid players for injuring opponents, according to an extensive investigation by the N.F.L. The bounty system was financed mostly by players — as many as 27 of them — and was administered by the former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, who also contributed money to the pool. The N.F.L. said that neither Coach Sean Payton nor General Manager Mickey Loomis did anything to stop the bounties when they were made aware of them or when they learned of the league’s investigation.  According to the league, Loomis did not even stop the bounties when ordered to by the team’s owner. “

This practice is not only unethical and against NFL rules, it is criminal.  Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Journalist Harris Meyer

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Harris Meyer is an Ethics Hero because he won’t let a bad lesson go unchallenged.

Meyer is an award-winning  freelance journalist and a former editor at the Yakima (Wash.) Herald Republic. That was the paper that first broke the story of Gaby Rodriguez last year, which I wrote about here. With the encouragement of her high school principal, Rodriguez, a senior, embarked on some amateur social science research that involved deceiving everyone in her life except her mother, one (of seven) siblings, her boyfriend, and the principal. She pretended that she was pregnant, suing padding. She faked the pregnancy for months, finally announcing the sham in a student assembly. This extended hoax was supposedly designed to expose how pregnant teenagers are treated by their peers and others. It was, by any rational standard, a despicable thing to do—a betrayal and exploitation of her friends,  her boyfriend’s family, her siblings and teachers. Deception on such a scale must be justified, if at all, by both need and necessity. Were there other, less destructive ways to investigate the treatment of pregnant teens? Sure there were; interviews come to mind. Collecting published journals and other accounts. But Gaby’s unethical stunt was in spiritual synchronicity with a reality show-obsessed culture, where fake is entertaining and collateral damage is of no concern.  I wrote: Continue reading →

Social Science, Group Research and Bigotry: The Most Slippery Slope

/ Jack Marshall / 92 Comments

Typical...

Decades ago, Arthur Jensen became a target of critics and a pariah in his field by publishing a controversial study that indicated that differences in racial performance on intelligence tests probably had a genetic component. He was, and is, called a racist, though Jensen has continued to produce respected research. Since the publication of the 1969 Harvard Educational Review article that made him infamous, Jensen has won the prestigious Kistler Prize in 2003 for original contributions to the understanding of the connection between the human genome and human society.

The problem with Jensen’s research results, whatever the legitimacy of the data and his methods, was this: What do you do with it? Like other studies that show women, as a group, with less aptitude for the sciences, or those that show superior traits in other races and ethnic groups, this information just serves as a catalyst for bigotry. Whatever the trends within a large group may be, they tells us nothing about any individual in that group. Yet the existence of a study creates a natural tendency to apply the claimed group characteristics to every group member. Most people think like that, always have and always will. This is similar to the problem with stereotypes. Many, perhaps most, stereotypes have some truth in them. I was raised in a Greek family, and Greeks are reputed to be clannish, cheap, bigoted, and gifted in the kitchen. Well, that would describe a large proportion of my relatives, too, but not all of them. My Aunt Bea is fanatically liberal. My Mom couldn’t cook a lick.  All right, they all were cheap, but the point is that it would be foolish and unfair to assume what any of them would be like without knowing them.

Knowledge is an absolute good, but perversely, some knowledge also guarantees abuse, and thus results in more bad than good. Jensen’s study, as far as I can see, has no good use in a democracy where every individual has the right to be assessed according to his or her conduct and character. Nor do any studies that “prove” character or ability differences in broadly defined groups.

This is all a prelude to my conclusion that the now widely publicized National Academy of Science study that has this conclusion-— “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior”—is just throwing gasoline on a fire, and has no useful or benign purpose at all. 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 →

Comment of the Day: “Charles M. Blow’s Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Michael, who is now the Ethics Alarms all-time leader in the Comment of the Day category, scores another with a thought-provoking post inspired by the New York Times’ stunning disinterest in its columnist tweeting a religious slur about Mitt Romney. I’ll have some added reflections at the end. Here is his Comment of the Day on “Charles M. Blow’s Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2…”:

“I remember an article about this when I was in college. In analyzing how the news media treated different races, they came up with the PC Hierarchy. Anyone higher on the hierarchy can criticize or be insensitive to anyone below them. If there is a conflict between two groups, the one higher on the PC scale is assumed to be right”

PC Hierarchy of Races… Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: The Washington Post Editors

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“In their anti-abortion fervor, they thought that requiring ultrasounds, even transvaginal ones, was justified if it would change the minds of some women who’d considered ending their pregnancies”

—The Washington Post, in an editorial condemning the efforts of Virginia’s Republicans to pass a measure requiring an ultrasound scan of the fetus before a woman could get an abortion. The bill, which had been poised for passage, evaporated after it was revealed that women in the earliest stages of pregnancy would be required to suffer an invasive procedure, and Republican Governor Bob McDonnell announced that he would not sign it in its current form.

Seldom has an editorial managed to be so frighteningly dismissive of human life while being entirely correct on the issue it was discussing. Continue reading →

Albert Pujols, Stan the Man, and the Shameless Jeremy Lin Censors

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

THIS is "El Hombre." Stan's Polish, by the way. Do you care? Does the Asian American Journalists Association?

If you don’t know who Albert Pujols is, you should: he’s probably the best hitter in baseball, a slugging first baseman whose career so far has already guaranteed him a spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame. Over the winter he left his original team and the city that worshiped him, St. Louis and its Cardinals, because, though the team he professed to “owe everything” offered him a deal that would guarantee that his great-grand children could be beach bums all their lives, a team in Southern California, the Angels, offered him even more, so he can light his cigars with C-notes and pave his driveway with gold.. I think elevating money over every other value to that extent is an unethical and culturally corrupting choice, and said so at the time.

Now Albert has re-endeared himself to me  by publicly objecting to the Angels’ pre-season promotional campaign calling him “El Hombre.” “What?” you say. “I thought you have been condemning political correctness in the discussion of athletes with ethnic identities! Don’t you think it’s ridiculous for Pujols, who is of Hispanic descent, to object to a nickname that plays on his heritage?” Indeed I have been condemning such political correctness and over-sentivity, and still do. But that isn’t why Albert is objecting.

Back in St. Louis, you see, they also tried to call Pujols “El Hombre,” in a deliberate evocation of the city’s most famous and celebrated slugger, the great Stan “The Man” Musial, one of the best and most admirable players in baseball history. Pujols put a stop to it. There was only one player in the city who could carry the title “The Man”, he said, and that was Musial, who is alive and in his 90’s. Just saying “the Man” in a different language didn’t change the fact that the honor was Musial’s, and shouldn’t be taken  away. Stan Musial was and is “the Man;” Pujols respected that, and defended it Continue reading →

Facebook’s Weird Ethical Standards

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I know, they're too small to read. Never mind; they also don't make any sense

The idea of Gawker, a website that shares the ethical standards of the seamier denizens of “Rick’s” in “Casablanca,” doing a legitimate ethics expose gives me a brain cramp, but the gossip site has given a platform to a Facebook whistleblower, sort of.

I say “sort of,” because knowing Gawker, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was paid to rat out his former employers-once-removed (he was hired by  Facebook’s outsourcing firm that handled his training—oDesk), making him ethically less of a whistleblower than a candidate for Gawker’s editorial board. The argument, I suppose, would be that a dollar an hour, which is what Gawker’s source says was his princely reward for doing Facebook’s dirty work, shouldn’t buy much loyalty and confidentiality, if any. Ethically, that’s false: you are obligated to abide by the terms of bad deals if you voluntarily agree to them. Practically speaking, it is true. A worker a company exploits is likely to harbor more animus than good will, and it isn’t the happy workers who blow whistles. Fine: neither Gawker’s source nor Gawker are ethically admirable. On to Facebook.

The whistleblower is Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan who was recruited by an outsourcing firm to screen illicit Facebook content. This is what he was paid a dollar an hour for, which, when one considers the news reports flying around recently about how rich Mark Zuckerberg is, and after the company filed its record $100 billion IPO, seems unequivocally exploitive. His real exposé, however, involves what he was paid to do, which was to be Facebook’s censor. Derkaoui supplied Gawker with a bootleg copy of part of Facebook’s abuse standards, which lays out what the company believes is appropriate and what it believes should be banned from the web. Thus it is Facebook’s morality, revealing the ethical standards that the company embraces. Continue reading →