A recent Wall Street Journal blog post included this surprising statement:
“Amid a rise in office gossip, researchers are disagreeing over whether it is fundamentally good or bad.”
Pardon? Dictionaries are unanimous in defining gossip as “idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others.” That’s pretty clearly unethical, wouldn’t you say? Continue reading
To someone passionately devoted to the belief in God and Christianity, the thought of having one’s city governed by non-believers may be repulsive. Unfortunately for the sensitivities of those facing this dilemma, the founders of the United States of America were quite specific about the irrelevance of religious belief to civic participation and the rights of citizenship. That may not stop some self-righteous political opponents of Ashville, N.C. City Councilman Cecil Bothwell, who says he doesn’t believe in God but who was duly elected in November, from trying to sue the city for its failure to abide by an archaic, and undeniably unconstitutional, state law forbidding atheists from holding office. Continue reading
The fact that a story is tabloid fodder doesn’t mean it can’t carry ethical wisdom along with its titillation content. As the number of alleged Woods mistresses continues to climb ( fifteen, the last I checked, but that was three hours ago), the Woods saga is casting light on more ethics issues than most. Such as… Continue reading
From Randy Cohen, “The Ethicist” of the New York Times’ Magazine, comes an ethics question that I would think has an obvious answer. The fact that it isn’t obvious to many people is worrisome.
It was obvious to Cohen. A lawyer evaluating resumes for applicants to join his firm asked if he could ethically reject a qualified applicant solely because the applicant was a member of the Federalist Society, an organization much in favor during the Bush Administration, dedicated to studying and promoting conservative ideology. The potential associate’s duties had nothing to do with politics. Cohen, a good liberal if there never was one, was emphatic about whether the reviewing partner could ding the applicant for liking Justice Scalia and agreeing with George Will: Continue reading
Yesterday, The New York Times informed us that a small drug company called Allos is charging $30,000 a month for a cancer drug, Folotyn, that treats a rare and usually fatal form of cancer that strikes fewer that 6,000 American a year. It doesn’t cure the cancer, but merely slows it down; even with that, victims seldom survive more than a few months. “This drug is not a home run. It’s not even a double. It’s a single,” the Times quotes Dr. Brad S. Kahl, a lymphoma specialist at the University of Wisconsin, as saying. Continue reading
According to the annual Gallup poll on the public’s perceptions of ethical conduct among professionals, the following is the ranking, best to worst, of those most trusted by the American public. The percentage is the proportion of poll respondents who ranked each profession “very high” or “high” in ethical standards. Continue reading
I didn’t watch Al Gore when he appeared on the Tonight Show a couple weeks ago. What he said then while hobnobbing with Conan should be old news, but in fact it was no news at all, because virtually no news media gave it more than a passing mention. Then, by purest accident, I heard a talk-radio host ranting about a shocking statement Gore had made on the show, and I checked to see if he could possibly be quoting the former Vice-President correctly.
He was. Here is the exchange: Continue reading
A silly e-mail is circulating again, as it has this time of year since 2005, encouraging recipients to engage in a pointless and ignorant protest against the American Civil Liberties Union.
It reads: Continue reading
For about 20 years, the consensus has been building in the legal profession that a lawyer sleeping with his clients is not only a bad idea, but also should be prohibited by the formal ethics rules. States like California, Oregon and New York quickly adopted such a rule while other bars resisted; when the ABA added the “no sex with clients” provision to is Model Rule 1.8 in 2003, more states followed suit. Now Virginia, one of the most respected bars in the country, is considering its first pronouncement on the subject, in the form of a formal ethics opinion. Continue reading
There are two main strains among the culturally corrosive arguments in support of Tiger Woods. One, discussed in Part I, is the “great athletes don’t need to be great human beings,” a contention that chooses to ignore the inescapable fact that they are paid to behave like great human beings, whether they are or not. While this argument is mostly obtuse, the second strain is the more ethically offensive. Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon embraced it with both arms in his defense of Woods entitled, “Some context on Tiger.” Its thesis: virtually all big-time athletes cheat on their wives, and if you had the opportunities and temptations they do, you’d cheat too. Translation: “It’s no big deal”: Continue reading
