U.S. Society

Extending Job Benefits: Irresponsible, Unfair and Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

Last week, Republicans blocked yet another extension of unemployment benefits, and we can only hope they have the integrity and courage to do it again, in the face of predictable cries that they are cruel and heartless. The correct term is “fair and responsible.”

Well over a decade ago, President Clinton and a Republican Congress instituted welfare reform over similar accusations that it would spark tragedy and starvation. What it did was help end cycles of poverty and dependency. Hardly anyone except die-hard socialists argues that limiting welfare was a mistake today.

The serial extensions of unemployment benefits we have seen for two years, however, have become indistinguishable from welfare, and are now blatant political pandering to a large unemployed voter bloc in distress. The government is broke and in debt, and in no position to add an open-ended entitlement that pays Americans not to get jobs. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Asra Nomani

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Asra Q. Nomani is a Muslim. She is also is an American, an author, a women’s rights activist, and co-director of the Pearl Project. Today, in a column for the Daily Beast, she broke ranks with her religion and the absolutist foes of profiling as an anti-terrorist tool with a profoundly ethical act: she argued for new policies that may be against her own interests, but also may be in the best interest of her country and the public— because she believes it is the right thing to do.

The title of her essay: “Let’s Profile Muslims.”

Some excerpts… Continue reading →

When The Occupation Of A Criminal Makes The Offense Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In Texas, a Roman Catholic priest named John Fala has been arrested on charges that he solicited a hit man to kill a teenager who had accused him of sexual abuse. He had negotiated a price of $5000 for the murder before he was arrested.

Who do we trust, America? Who can we trust?

 

Allied Against Consumers and Ethics: Google and the Sociopathic Businessman

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Today the New York Times extensively documents the unethical business strategy used by the owner of a web-based eyewear business.

After making the discovery that Google does not distinguish between positive and negative mentions of a business on the Internet, he resolved to treat complaining customers as badly as possible to encourage complaints about his company on consumer sites. I do mean “as badly as possible”: the Times relates the accounts of customers who received insulting phone calls, threatening mail, and other harassing and bullying communications from the entrepreneur, who uses multiple aliases. The method works well: since on-line diatribes, complaints and bad reviews have piled up over his poor service, outrageous conduct and often shoddy merchandise, the man’s business is booming. Its name consistently nears the top of Google’s search results when a potential customer types the name of his or her favorite eyewear designer and “eyeglasses,” sometimes placing higher than the designer itself. Continue reading →

Another Unethical TV Commercial: Twix Trivializes Lies, Infidelity

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Twix’s successful “Need a moment?” campaign has long based its humor on encouraging people to lie themselves out of various embarrassing predicaments. Though almost all of them portray men as stereotypical sexist creeps, they have generally been within acceptable limits of exaggeration for the sake of humor. Its recent ad, however, crosses ethical  lines by seeming to trivialize and even encourage infidelity, while claiming that the product can facilitate it. Continue reading →

More on the Feel-Up Searches and Other TSA Indignities, For Those Who Haven’t Closed Their Minds, Abandoned Empathy, or Determined That The Government Always Knows Best

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

For the A.C.L.U.’s collection of nightmare travel stories, go here.

For Reason’s collection of editorials chastising critics of the search procedures, go here and here.

To read a new blog that will be tracking this issue and other TSA matters, go to the new TSA Abuse Blog, here. I’ll also put it with the Ethics Alarms links, under “Of Interest.”

Kudos to Popehat for the links….and for doing a superb job keeping the pressure on.

Easy Call: Wikileaks Is Naive, Unethical, and Dangerous

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

All one has to know is the degree to which nuclear war was averted through diplomatic back-channels and secret communications during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 in order to begin to understand how dangerous, stupid and wrong the entire concept of Wikileaks is. The latest dump of secret, near-secret and supposedly secure government messages on a wide range of topics has the  same general effect as a group of small, noisy children running amuck, screaming and banging pots and pans, while adults are trying to address urgent issues of war, commerce, human rights, and terrorism in the same small room. Continue reading →

Heeding the Christmas Season Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, it has come to this. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas season is a pre-unethical condition, getting worse every year. (Pre-unethical conditions are situations that experience teaches us deserve early ethics alarms, since the stage is set for habitual bad conduct.) The financial stresses on the public and the business community in 2010 will only fuel the creeping tendency to ignore the moral and ethical values that are supposed to underlie the winter holidays—charity, gratitude, generosity, kindness, love, forgiveness, peace and hope—for the non-ethical considerations that traditionally battle them for supremacy: avarice, selfishness, greed, self-pity, and cynicism. Combine this with the ideological and political polarization in today’s America and the deterioration of mutual respect and civility, and the days approaching Christmas are likely to become an ethical nightmare…unless we work collectively to stop that from happening. Continue reading →

Self-Restraint in Congress: Great Idea, Little Hope

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Is Congress capable of exercising discipline and self-restraint? It will have to, in everything from avoiding partisan bickering and pay-back to cutting dispensable programs with loud constituencies, if the government is to have any chance of reducing the deficit and putting the nation back on the road to fiscal responsibility. We can hope, but the signs are not encouraging.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the incoming G.O.P majority is going to try to take the symbolic step of banning honorific proclamations, on the theory that Congress passing hundreds of bills each session saluting the American pickle industry, noting the retirement of Georgia Tech’s rugby coach, or lauding the memory of actress Delores Del Rio wastes time that needs to be spent doing the real work of governing. Continue reading →

Ethics and Freeing the Unjustly Convicted: A Utilitarian Controversy in Illinois

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess and his student reporters have been carrying out a heroic and aggressive project aimed at rescuing innocent residents of Illinois’s death row. It was Protess’s Medill Innocence Project that played a major role in influencing former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s decision to halt all executions. Now, however, the Innocence Project’s methods are now under attack by its own university and Cook County prosecutors, who say the students crossed legal and ethical lines while investigating a decades-old murder.

Prosecutors claim that some of Protess’s students used surreptitious taping in an investigation, secretly recording a suspect in violation of Illinois law. Continue reading →