U.S. Society

The Fat Kid, the Slippery Slope, and the Cliff

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

"Bill! They're putting me in foster care! How will you make THAT funny?"

Several recent ethics issues have raised the slippery slope question, which is itself a slippery slope. The rationale for any reasonable principle or act can usually be ratcheted forward in degrees until it becomes malevolent, dangerous or repugnant, including freedom, trust, loyalty, charity and honesty. Thus the easiest argument, at least for the mentally dexterous, that anything is unethical is the dreaded slippery slope.

The simple rebuttal to this is usually “let’s wait and see.” To claim that conduct is unethical for what it might lead to rather than for what it actually does is often, perhaps even usually, based on an unwarranted assumption, or a worst case scenario specifically concocted to foil otherwise unobjectionable conduct. When it is not based on an unwarranted assumption, however, is when proposed conduct or a new policy permitting it shatters a social norm or cultural standard that had previously been considered sacrosanct. In these cases, the slope isn’t merely slippery—which suggests “Be careful where you step next!”—but greased, meaning there is no longer any traction at all to stop a rapid slide to the bottom. A better cliché to use in such cases is “opening the floodgates.” Or perhaps “off a cliff.”

The recent post about the Dartmouth researchers who suggested that all manipulations of graphic images of celebrities be labeled as such is, I would argue, more floodgates than slippery slope. There is no obvious delineation point to stop the principle behind this oppressive constraint on illusion from spreading far beyond its origin. Similarly, the argument being made by the family of the mother with Stage 4 cancer that US Air is ethically obligated to refund the non-refundable tickets they could not use because of her terminal illness has no clear limits or coherent application. Are the refunds required because the mother is terminal? If she goes into remission, would the family be obligated to give the money back? What if she was only paralyzed? If the whole family was squashed by a boulder, would the airline be obligated to refund the money to their next of kin? What if the mother wounded herself terminally in a suicide attempt—would that change US Air’s supposed obligation of compassion? If so, would that mean that if the mother’s Stage 4 breast cancer occurred because she neglected to follow a physician’s recommended treatment, US Air could then refuse to refund the money without being pilloried for it? Sometimes that greased slope carries us into a swamp.

Now from Cleveland comes the story of the 200 lbs. + 8-year-old Cleveland Heights boy who has been taken from his family and placed in foster care because county case workers decided that his mother wasn’t doing enough to control his weight.  Continue reading →

Ethical Quote of the Week: Will Wilkinson

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

After the headlines and the drama, the real grunt work of democracy begins...or not.

“…now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns — rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage — Occupiers and their allies now ought to pull up stakes, give up their whimsically undemocratic semi-privatization of public spaces, and endeavor to reform public policy through the democratic institutions established to make the collective determination of binding public rules legitimate. Moving on to seek reform through established democratic channels would require giving up the insolent and frankly disrespectful presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them. It would require Occupiers to square up to the fact that their movement’s implicit ideology is an ideology, and a minority ideology at that — just one among our society’s many rival moral and political worldviews. The intransigence of the Occupy movement suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism, and the corollary impossibility of consensus, which makes majoritarian democratic procedures necessary in the first place.”

—Blogger Will Wilkinson, in his essay, “The Occupy Movement’s Enthusiasm and Contempt For Democracy” on bigthink.com (Think Big).

You can read the entire essay by Wilkinson, who is much more supportive of the Occupy movement than I am, here.

Good thinking, good work.

The Compassion Bullies Strike Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

(I know everyone is going to hate this.)

"Be compassionate, damn you!!! This thing is loaded"

Having a terminal illness does not justify bullying corporations into waiving fair and valid contracts, and using the media and public opinion to extort money out of companies that they have no obligation to surrender is unethical.

Sorry. But it’s true.

US Air has capitulated to a classic example of compassion bullying and agreed to refund the non-refundable airline ticket Lynn McKain purchased as part of a family vacation to Belize. This occurred after the McKain family sicced the media on the airline when a recurrence of breast cancer caused Lynn to cancel the trip on doctor’s orders. She requested a refund based on her misfortune, although there was nothing in the deal that suggested that there were exceptions to the ticket’s non-refundable features. Then, after the airline politely declined to waive the terms the McKain’s had agreed to in order to pay discounted ticket fees, the family alerted the media, with predictable results. There were heart-wrenching stories about McKain’s cancer treatment, making out the airline as an avaricious, mean-spirited cabal of inhuman monsters.

Finally, the airline gave in. It had no choice; the media and the McKain’s would keep the pressure on, making the episode a full-fledged public relations catastrophe, unless it did. The Compassion Bullies won, as they almost always do. Don’t think for a moment that this is good triumphing over wrongdoing, however. It is the opposite. Continue reading →

Now Here’s A Terrible Idea: Mandated Disclosures for Photoshopped Images of Celebrities!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

And if you look real closely at the lower left corner, you'll read, "The model for Venus was a short, middle-aged bald man named Gino. His appearance was altered by the painter in the creation of this painting."

Here is another candidate for enshrinement in the Pantheon of Well- Intentioned But Terrible Ideas.

In an article published Monday in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” Dartmouth researchers Hany Farid, a professor of computer science, and Eric Kee, a doctoral student, propose a rating system of publicly displayed photographs of models, actors and celebrities to let viewers know exactly how and how much an image has been altered by photoshopping, airbrushing or other means.

“Impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models are routinely splashed onto billboards, advertisements and magazine covers,” the two write. “The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body-image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children.” In the interest of limiting the damage caused by unrealistic images of human beauty, the researchers argue that graphic images should include labels that disclose  “geometric adjustments” such as slimming legs, hips and arms, as well as adjusting facial symmetry—reducing a nose in size, or slightly enlarging eyes.  Users of such photos should also flag photometric adjustments that change the appearance of skin tone, blemishes and texture, such as wrinkles, dark circles under the eyes or cellulite, say the researchers.

Please, for the love of God, nobody introduce these guys to Sarah Deming and her lawyer, who are suing the distributers of the film “Drive” because the trailer was more exciting than the movie. And let us all remember this proposal when we are tempted to pooh-pooh accusations that the government is regulating creativity, commerce, art and enterprise right out of existence, and with them, individual liberty as well.The tea parties should use Farid and Kee’s article for recruitment. Continue reading →

A Inconvenient Question About the Death of Walter Vance

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

"He's everywhere! He's everywhere!"

I have little to add to the tragedy of Walter Vance that can’t be found in the list of 15 Ethics Alarms about failures to rescue that I posted during the recent Penn State discussions. Vance was the shopper who collapsed in a South Charleston, West Virginia Target store during the Black Friday rush and was ignored by dozens of other shoppers, some of whom stepped over his body to seek more bargains. Vance later died.

I do have one little question, though.

I wonder how many of those shoppers who callously reacted to Vance’s peril with indifference told everyone who would listen earlier this month that had they witnessed Jerry Sandusky’s sexual assault on a child in the Penn State showers like Mike McQueary, they would have rushed to the rescue, even if it meant battling Sandusky.

My guess?

Every single one of them.

[More thanks to Rick Jones, who writes about the Vance episode here, and nudged me to comment on it too.]

The SAT Cheating Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Over at Curmudgeon Central, Rick Jones appropriately eviscerates the Educational Testing Service for its role—the role being negligent facilitator–in an unfolding scandal involving students cheating on their SATs by having surrogates take their tests. 20 people have been arrested thus far as either the fake test-taker of the fraudulent scholar paying for said test-taker, and Rick’s guess that there must be a hundred times the ETS’s estimate of 150 incidents of cheating on the SATs  is extremely conservative. The problem is that the SATs are taken under incredibly lax  security, and Rick reveals something I never would have suspected: if someone is caught cheating after the SAT service investigates, he or she is given a refund and allowed to take the test again—and no college is ever notified! Rick writes…

“…in a just universe, the cretinous yahoos at the CB/ETS who decided on this policy would lose their jobs, have “unethical moron” branded into their foreheads, and be publicly pilloried. Preferably literally.” Continue reading →

A Protest Code of Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I began work on a protest code of ethics a decade ago, periodically putting it aside, then adding to it, subtracting from it, and refining it. I regard the current version as a work in progress still, but the discussion here regarding the “Occupy” movement prompted me to complete this initial final draft, at least. This is the first time it has been published.

It has been a source of continuing amazement to me that there was no such Code had been proposed previously, or none that I could locate. When an activity such as organized protesting, activity that is obviously rich with ethical dangers and the potential for excess, does not have  proposed or established ethical standards of conduct, the reason is usually that nobody wants to be limited by ethical considerations or to be held accountable for misconduct.  I strongly suspect that is the case here. Well, too bad. Now we have proposed standards with which to measure the ethical nature of protests. Whether these 25 principles are the first or the last, or just begin the discussion and inspire something better, is of no import. They open the discussion. It’s time.

The Protest Code of Ethics

A. Guiding principles

All participants in protests and demonstrations should recognize and respect the important role lawful assemblies for the purpose of airing grievances and advocating change and reform have played in the history of the nation and civilization, must strive to uphold the best of that tradition by upholding these ethical principles. A protest without leadership and objectives is only a mob, and a protest without discipline and respect for others is a riot.

B. Public protests
Any protest involving demonstrations or other public conduct… Continue reading →

Abuse of Government Power+ School Administrator Cowardice = Student Persecution

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Enemy of the State.

Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old high school senior at Fairway, Kansas’s Shawnee Mission East High School,  went with her class on a field trip to the Capitol and heard Gov. Sam Brownback speak. She tweeted her reactions to her Twitter followers, writing, “just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”.

The part about making mean comments to the Governor was a lie, but on a scale of believability and damage done, not an especially momentous one. It was adults who turned this unremarkable student tweet into an ethics train wreck in three neat, unforgivable steps.

1. First, some over-zealous hack on the Brownback’s staff saw the tweet and complained to an administrator in the school district. This is a First Degree Ethics Foul. Nothing in Sullivan’s tweet brings it within his, the governor’s or the government’s legitimate concerns. For the staffer to complain was petty, vindictive and mean-spirited. Every second he spent on his vendetta was a waste of taxpayer dollars. Worst of all, he was bringing the power of the government to bear on a teenager for doing nothing more than expressing her opinion, which is that Governor Brownback sucks. I’m sure there have been foreign dictators who would punish a teen for doing no more than telling friends that she doesn’t like him, but I would have thought that someone who works in one of the United States governments would instinctively know that this kind of bullying mind-control isn’t allowed here. I was wrong. Brownback does suck, at least at picking staff. Continue reading →

The Tattoo Artist’s Revenge: Funny! But Wrong.

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

She wanted something like this to decorate her back, but the artist had something more appropriate in mind….

UPDATE HERE!

It is not unethical to be entertained by the revenge schemes put into action by others, as long as we understand that revenge is unethical in a civilized society. A culture that embraces revenge as a norm will be a violent and unforgiving one. Because the perfect act of vengeance is viscerally indistinguishable from justice, it has the power to make us feel vicariously satisfied, and that should be taken as a warning. Revenge feels good, which is why revenge fantasies have been a popular genre from “The Odyssey” to “Kill Bill”…and also why revenge can easily expand from a guilty pleasure to a bad habit.

This tale of revenge from a trailer park in Dayton, Ohio, for example, makes me want to chuckle and tip my metaphorical hat to the avenger.
Rossie Brovent asked her boyfriend, tattoo artist Ryan L. Fitzjerald, to ink a large and lovely panorama from “The Chronicles of Narnia” on her back. Little did she suspect that Fitzjerald’s insistence that she sign a consent form agreeing to accept his “artistic discretion” was but the first step in a diabolical plan. Rossie also didn’t realize that her boyfriend was on to her secret infidelity: he had just learned that she had been cheating on him with one of his close friends. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “Occupy Black Friday” Facebook Page

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

The  intellectual, logical and ethical deficiencies of the tiresome “Occupy” movement are on full outrageous display on “Occupy Black Friday,” a Facebook page that is part of the effort to harm large retailers by interfering with holiday shopping. Naturally, as with segments of the “Occupy” groups that have advocated or engaged in violence, used anti-Semitic rhetoric, broken laws and made ridiculous statements, defenders of the movement will dismiss this as an aberration, not representative of the principles of the “Occupiers” as a whole. This is the group’s genius, or something: by being infuriatingly vague, it avoids accountability.

But an organization is accountable for the events it sets in motion, and the harm that its pretensions wreak. The idea promoted by the group’s Facebook page is for mobs of Occupiers to swarm stores during their deep discount sales today, interfering with shoppers and bringing commerce to a halt:

“The idea is simple, hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits. Black Friday is the one day where the mega-corporations blatantly dictate our actions, they say “shop” and we shop! Pushing their ledgers from red to black. This Black Friday, we will boycott all of the corporations that corrupt our government, and put profits before people.”

The idea is simple minded. Continue reading →