I guess you can figure out what my mood is like this morning…
Pass along some Christmas season cheer by providing brilliant, trenchant and timely ethics analysis. I’ll be here, reading and poisoning eggnog…
U.S. Society
From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:
The New York Post reports that wanted posters targeting CEOs of insurance and other health care companies are appearing in Manhattan. Some say “HEALTH CARE CEOS SHOULD NOT FEEL SAFE” and include the words “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE,” which are the same words that the cute assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO wrote on his bullets. The posters also feature each executive’s salary, and some have appeared with the photos of CEOs of non-health care companies, like Goldman Sachs. ABC reports some posters say “UnitedHealthcare killed everyday people for the sake of profit. As a result Brian Thompson was denied his claim to life. Who will be denied next?”
‘Supporting Terrorism, Hating Jews and Filing Dumb Lawsuits Is No Way to Get Hired by a Law Firm, Kid…’
What an idiot.
2023 Georgetown Law School grad Jinan Chehade had been offered a job as an associate at the prominent law firm Foley & Lardner. The firm’s Director of Diversity and Inclusion told her they “valued and supported” her Arab Muslim heritage, and she took that to mean, “Go ahead and publicly support Hamas,murder,rape and hostage-taking, and it’s fine if you also proclaim your hatred of Jews and your inability to interpret world history too.
Chehade worked as a summer clerk at Foley in 2023 and was slated to join the firm as a full-time associate at its Chicago office two months ago. But following last year’s October 7th terrorist attacks attacks on Israel by Hamas, she began speaking out against Israel on her social media accounts and at a public Chicago City Hall meeting. Chehade appeared at the meeting wrapped in a keffiyeh and spoke out against a resolution condemning the Hamas massacre that started the current Gazan war. Though “the Western Zionist-controlled media machine would have you believe” it was an unprovoked attack, she said, the attack was just because it was the “legal right” of Palestinians to strike back for “75 years of occupation” by Israel’s “apartheid regime.”
Look! “The Ethicist” Has A Real Ethics Question That Doesn’t Involve Trump Derangement!
The New York Times Sunday advice column “The Ethicist” has been indulging itself by joining in the mass Times mourning over the election of Donald Trump and the failure of the paper’s years long propaganda campaign against him. The past four featured questions have been “Is It Fair to Judge a Friend by the Way She Voted?”, “Can Voters Be Held Accountable for Their Candidate’s Behavior?”, “Am I a Hypocrite for Calling Donald Trump a Liar?”, and my personal favorite, “My Mom Voted for Trump. Can We Let It Go?” It has taken a month to get back to genuine ethics dilemmas and conflicts, but at last Prof. Appiah is where he is supposed to be all the time.
This weeks query was “A Guy I Know Had a Liver Transplant. Now He’s Boozing Again.” [Gift link! Merry Christmas!]It raises more than one ethics question worthy of discussion, including:
1. Should alcoholics who have destroyed their livers be eligible for liver transplants?
2. Is the recipient of a liver transplant behaving unethically if he or she returns to the same lifestyle that ruined the first one?
3. Do the friends of the now boozing liver transplant recipient “have an obligation to tell this man’s wife that he’s still drinking?”
The first one came up for debate nationwide when Mickey Mantle, the hard-drinking baseball great, strangely came up at the top of a liver transplant list despite being predominantly responsible for his first liver’s demise. Organ transplant waiting lists are created using several formulas and weighted values, which makes sense when distributing rare commodities. On the other hand, this is a slippery slope that slides directly into punishing people for not exercising enough, eating too much pizza, smoking or favoring dangerous hobbies, like motorcycle racing, and withholding medical care or insurance coverage of the adverse results. Alcoholism, as I learned the hard way, is not volitional though alcohol abuse is, and good luck telling the two apart.
2. The second question is also squarely in an ethics gray area. Once the liver is in an individual’s body, he or she should have complete autonomy. Sure, it’s irresponsible for someone with obligations to others to take unnecessary risks with his or her life, but that’s true with or without a new liver. I can’t define a special obligation to those who did not receive a particular liver that should affect the recipient’s decisions going forward. What happens to the new liver won’t help or harm those who didn’t get it.
3. The third question is the easy one, and Golden Rule 101. Would you want to be told if your loved one was secretly endangering his or her health? Sure you would. However, if the wife in this case has been paying attention to her alcoholic husband, I doubt very much that anyone needs to tell her that he’s drinking again.
But did he vote for Donald Trump????
On “Blanket Pardons” and “Preemptive Pardons”
President Trump says he will pardon the January 6 rioters. President Biden just pardoned his son for crimes we may not even know about yet. “The Nation”—yes, the far Left crypto-Commie rag is nuts, but still—argued this week that Biden should issue a blanket pardon to all illegal immigrants.
What’s going on here?
Ethics Dunce (And Ethics Corrupter): John Pavlovitz
Quotes by his guy, a defrocked Methodist pastor known for his social and political activism and “writings from a liberal Christian perspective,” (I’m quoting Wikipedia there) always start popping up on social media this time of year. He’s been quoted a lot on Facebook especially lately because he is a vocal advocate of the idiotic “Mary and Joseph were immigrants too” analogy used by nice, deluded people to justify open borders and illegal immigrants.
These memes are notable because their emotion-based, legally and ethically bonkers argument is even more absurd than the one that claims the U.S. should let everybody in because the Statue of Liberty says so. I think I banned a commenter this year for using that one, invoking the Ethics Alarms “Stupidity Rule.” I will do the same if someone makes the “we should let illegals in because all they want is better lives for their children just like Mary and Joseph” argument. The same logic justifies theft. This is how shoplifting became legal in California.
Pavolovitz, who has about 374,000 followers on Twitter/X, every one of them dumber than when they first encountered him, was at it again this holiday season, posting after the election last month, “It’s good the Christians excited about the mass deportation of immigrants weren’t in Egypt when Jesus’s family fled there, or we’d have a much shorter Bible.”
It’s unethical to use one’s influence and reputation to make people ignorant and stupid: that fatuous statement (and his many like it) marks Pavolovitz as an Ethics Corrupter. I’m assuming readers here don’t have to have explained to them the reasons why analogies between public policies today in the United States and those in the Middle East 2,000 years ago are completely invalid and useless.
When one X-user pointed out to Pavolovitz that his argument was flawed, this modern follower of Jesus replied, “You’re a Trump lapdog. Your opinion of me is irrelevant. Shove it.”
To be fair, that last part is a rough translation of what Jesus said to the Romans…
Ethics Quiz: (This Is A Strange One…)
Last night I attended a performance of a band and singers at a restaurant’s live music night. The material was mostly, though not all, covers of late Sixties and early Seventies hits by bands like Chicago and Spiral Staircase. The instrumentalists were professional (I missed the drums) and the vocalists as well; it was a veteran group of artists, and the audience was about the same age—I’d guess an average of 65 or more.
Almost from the beginning, one of the patrons at a table up front, stood and danced to whatever song was being played or sung. From my vantage point, you couldn’t watch the band or the vocalists without seeing her. Let me be clear: she was amazing, if repetitious. She danced hard: I wondered if she might have been a cage dancer when she was younger. I’d estimate that she was in her sixties, but she could have been younger. Her endurance was amazing. The band played for three hours, and she was up and doing her Joey Heatherton impression almost the entire time.
She made herself part of the show. I asked some of the singers if they knew the woman, and they did not, but expressed their admiration and said they were pleased that she “was having a good time.”
Fact: If I had been the director of the show or the manager of the restaurant, I would have told the woman to sit down or, if she had to dance, to do it at the back of the room rather than in front of the band.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Was it ethical for the woman to impose herself on the performance regardless of how impressive her own performance was?
The Ethics Conflict In The Daniel Penny Case
With yesterday’s developments in the Daniel Penny trial, it is appropriate to ponder the various ethical issues involved.
Below I have reposted the 2023 essay titled “Ethics Quote Of The Month: Heather MacDonald.” Its main thrust was to highlight MacDonald’s excellent article about how his arrest and prosecution reflected another outbreak of the “Black Lives Matter” bias of presumed racism. Penny is white, the violent lunatic who was menacing NYC subway riders when Penny stepped in and, the prosecution claimed, murdered him in an act of vigilantism, was black. It is highly doubtful that any prosecution would have followed the incident if the races were reversed. For example, the colors were reversed in the Ashli Babbitt shooting by a Capitol cop on January 6, 2021, and the black officer was not only exonerated but given a promotion.
Yesterday, Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed the second-degree manslaughter charge against ex-Marine Penny in the death of Jordan Neely at the request of prosecutors after jurors said they were deadlocked on the primary charge. He then told the jury to continue deliberating on the lesser charge of whether Penny committed criminally negligent homicide when he put the black, disturbed, homeless man in a choke-hold resulting in his death. The dismissed second-degree manslaughter charge carried a maximum 15-year sentence; criminally negligent homicide carries a four-year maximum sentence. While this was happening, Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) told reporters that he was planning to introduce a resolution to award Daniel Penny the Congressional Gold Medal. “Daniel Penny’s actions exemplify what it means to stand against the grain to do right in a world that rewards moral cowardice,” said Crane, a retired Navy SEAL. “Our system of ‘justice’ is fiercely corrupt, allowing degenerates to steamroll our laws and our sense of security, while punishing the righteous. Mr. Penny bravely stood in the gap to defy this corrupt system and protect his fellow Americans. I’m immensely proud to introduce this resolution to award him with the Congressional Gold Medal to recognize his heroism.”
You can hardly highlight an ethics conflict in brighter colors than that. Penny could be found guilty of a crime, and at the same time be officially recognized as a hero. An ethics conflict is when two equally valid ethical principles oppose each other and dictate a different result. That’s the situation here, and the answer to the starting point for ethical analysis, “What’s going on here?“
The racially biased motivation for charging Penny may be another example of authorities doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If you listen to Fox News regarding the trial, you will hear laments that the prosecution sends the wrong message to Americans. One commentator cited the 60-year-old Kitty Genovese incident, which Ethics Alarms has frequently referenced. A woman was murdered as many residents of a nearby apartment complex heard her screams, but none of them called the police or sought to intervene. The prosecution of Penny validates their non-action, the commentator said. It encourages passive citizenship and rejects the duty to rescue.
No, that’s an analogy too far: the man threatening passengers on the subway was right in front of Penny; the people who ignored Genovese’s screams only had to pick up a phone. Nobody held them to blame for not running out to rescue the woman and fight off her attacker. They didn’t perform the minimum acts of good citizenship required in such a situation. Penny’s trial raises the legitimate question of when maximum intervention is justified, and what the consequences should be if something goes wrong.
Does society want to encourage and reward vigilantes? The “Death Wish” movies explored that issue, albeit at an infantile level. At very least, shouldn’t part of the message sent to citizens be that if you choose to intervene in a situation that would normally be handled by law enforcement, you had better be careful, prudent and effective or else you will be accountable for what goes wrong as a result of your initiative? After all, isn’t it certain that a police officer whose choke-hold killed Neely under the same circumstances would probably be tried, or at very least sued for damages (as Penny will be, if he is ultimately acquitted)? Indeed, based on the George Floyd fiasco, Neely’s death at the hands of an over-zealous cop might have sparked a new round of mostly peaceful protests and Neely’s elevation to martyr status.
As a society and one that encourages courage, compassion, and civic involvement, we should encourage citizens to intervene and “fix the problem” if they are in a position to do so and have the skills and judgment to do it effectively. Yet a society that encourages vigilantes is courting chaos and the collapse of the rule of law. I absolutely regard Penny as a hero, but even heroes must be accountable for their actions. What is the most ethical message to send society about citizen rescuers?
I don’t think it is as easy a question as Penny’s supporters claim.
Now here’s the article from past year:
***
“When government abdicates its responsibility to maintain public safety, a few citizens, for now at least, will step into the breach. Penny was one of them. He restrained Neely not out of racism or malice but to protect his fellow passengers. He was showing classically male virtues: chivalry, courage and initiative. Male heroism threatens the entitlement state by providing an example of self-reliance apart from the professional helper class. And for that reason, he must be taken down.”
—Heather Mac Donald, in her scorching essay, “Daniel Penny is a scapegoat for a failed system”
That paragraph continues,
A homicide charge is the most efficient way to discourage such initiative in the future. Stigma is another. The mainstream media has characterized the millions of dollars in donations that have poured into Daniel Penny’s legal defense fund as the mark of ignorant bigots who support militaristic white vigilantes.
There is no way law enforcement can or should avoid at least exploring a manslaughter charge when an unarmed citizen is killed after a good Samaritan intervenes in a situation that he or she sees as potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, what appears to be the planned vilification of ex-Marine Daniel Penny by Democrats and the news media to put desperately-needed wind back in the metaphorical sails of Black Lives Matter and to goose racial division as the 2024 elections approach graphically illustrates just how unethical and ruthless the 21st Century American Left has become. (I know, I know, we don’t need any more evidence…). Mac Donald’s essay is superb, as many of hers often are. Do read it all, and them make your Facebook friends’ heads explode by sharing it.
Here are some other juicy and spot-on excerpts:
Impressed With The Incompetence Of Ana Navarro’s False “He Did It Too!” Defense Of Biden’s Hunter Pardon? Esquire Says “Hold My Beer!”
True, Navarro’s statement on “The View” that Woodrow Wilson pardoned an imaginary son-in-law named “Hunter de Butts” was funnier than Charles P. Pierce’s declaration in Esquire that President George H.W. Bush pardoned his son Neil. But Navarro’s made-up precedent for Hunter Biden’s sweeping pardon by his father was only stated by a member of “The View’s” panel of opinionated dolts who has no credibility with anyone whose IQ tops that of the average sea sponge. “Esquire” is supposed to be at least somewhat more reliable and professional.
Pierce, a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of 2009’s “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free,” rushed to Papa Biden’s defense with a Esquire essay titled, “A President Shouldn’t Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?” The subhead read, “Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by the fact that he pardoned his progeny. The moral: Shut the fuck up about Hunter Biden, please.”
The problem is that Neil Bush was never charged, indicted or implicated in any crimes that might require a pardon or clemency by his POTUS dad, and indeed never received either. Pierce’s obnoxious, insulting and smug essay was based on completely false information that he probably got from the same unreliable source that spat out the “Hunter de Butts” fiction to Ana: a chatbot. It didn’t take long for many to point this fake history out to “Esquire,” so the online piece was slapped with this disclaimer:
“Editor’s Note: This story has been updated. An earlier version stated incorrectly that George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.”
However, the corrected article made no sense after its cornerstone, the lie that Bush I did what Biden did, was removed. So in short order, down came Pierce’s article, replaced by, “This Column Is No Longer Available” and “Editor’s Note: This column has been removed due to an error. The original article stated incorrectly that President George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the mistake.”
Does Esquire also regret giving a platform to a partisan hack who wrote an entire article based on an A.I. hallucination that he didn’t bother to check, and having editors so lazy that they don’t require authors to provide citations when they make such assertions in Esquire’s pages?
Maybe Esquire should tell Charles Pierce to apply to join “The View.”
Friday Open Forum!
Last week’s forum was a dud, but it was a holiday week, so I have hopes that this one will be more lively. I’m counting on you, since the previous post was written with great difficulty after my head exploded from reading that Barack Obama told an audience that using the criminal justice system against political foes was “crossing a line.”
I’m still wiping blood, bits of skull and brain off my computer screen and keyboard…
Ethics Alarms 