U.S. Society

Unethical Blog Post of the Day

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Darren Rovell writes a sports business blog for CNBC, and maybe he was under a deadline, but it’s no excuse. In his blog today, Rovell writes an essay entitled, “Marathon’s Headline Win Is Empty.” His theme: everyone was excited that, for once, an American runner won the New York Marathon. But Rovell throws cold water on that bit of misguided national pride…

“Unfortunately, it’s not as good as it sounds. Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he’s not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.”

It constantly amazes me that after over 200 years proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that an American whose parents came over on the Mayflower is no more American than one who became a citizen yesterday, some people still fail to respect the wonder of this nation, a community of immigrants and the  descendants of immigrants, bound together by ideals and aspirations, not national origin.  Keflezighi has been a U.S. for eleven years, but he’s still not American enough for Rovell.

If anything, the fact that Keflezighi is a naturalized citizen—like Einstein, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, like Charles Steinmetz and Cary Grant, like Samuel Gompers and Madeleine Albright, like Bob Hope and Ayn Rand—gives us more reason to be proud of America, and that our system works, making us stronger, smarter, and faster because we can attract the best and boldest from around the globe.

It’s just a business sports blog,  and I suspect Rovell will soon be getting beaten up in media venues with a lot more visibility than this one. And I suspect, or hope,  that he didn’t think through what he wrote very carefully, and will soon be issuing a “I didn’t mean to offend anyone” apology. Still,  the attitude that his words convey, even if he didn’t intend it, is at the heart of the racism, bigotry, and xenophobia that still warps our political discourse and divides our communities.  The core ethical value being neglected here is respect: respect for fellow citizens, respect for the immigrants who have the determination to become Americans, and respect for what being an American means.

Meb Keflezighi is as American as I am, or Darren Rovell. It was sure great to have an American finally win the New York Marathon.

[Hat tip to James Taranto]

Cocoa Krispies and the Curse of the Transparent Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I have always been bothered by public lies that nobody could possibly believe. It is widely believed that such lies are harmless, since nobody could possibly be deceived by them. They are harmful, however, because their use suggests that lying doesn’t matter— it’s trivial, something everybody does, and nobody should expect truthfulness when a lie will serve.  The culture is already far too accepting of transparent lies. Politics is the most prominent example. Because the public expects candidates for high office to lie about their intent, they are amazingly forgiving when campaign lies become apparent. And because we  knowingly vote for well-meaning liars (or so we think), some  really dangerous, corrupt liars not only get elected, but can survive public exposure as liars. After all, say their supporters, enablers and henchmen, it is only a matter of degree.

Transparent lies, therefore, numb us to the hard stuff. They make us cynical, and the make us tolerant of liars. Then there is the possibility that the spokesperson who utters an obvious whopper really does think we’ll believe it. That’s an insult, profoundly disrespectful, and we should resent it.

The Ethics Scoreboard had a  feature called “The David Manning Trivial Liar of the Month” to highlight the public lies nobody could possibly believe. It was named for Sony’s “defense” when it was revealed that the movie critic, “David Manning,”  who they advertised as raving about lousy Sony films like “The Animal” (Starring Rob Schneider as a guy who accidentally has animal DNA grafted…oh, never mind.) was a fake invented by their marketing division. Sony said, in essence, that it was no big deal because everyone knows those critical raves in movie ads are mostly lies anyway. I didn’t carry the feature over to Ethics Alarms, because the kind of transparent, shameless, “I’m going to say this anyway even though it will have America rolling its eyes” lie the feature was designed to condemn didn’t come around every month. Naturally, the minute  Ethics Alarms debuts, here comes the Kellogg people with a classic.

Suddenly, boxes of Kellogg’s breakfast cereals like Cocoa Krispies have a huge yellow label across the front proclaiming “Now Helps Your Child’s IMMUNITY.”   Next to the banner is an announcement that the cereal is soaked with antioxidants, upping the daily vitamin requirement provided by a serving from 10% to 25%.  This has attracted the attention of the FDA , consumer advocates, and nutritionists, who say that the claim that a bowl of Cocoa Krispies that have been sprayed with extra vitamins can improve any child’s immunity to disease is either “dubious” or “ridiculous,” depending on whether you want to be nice about it.  USA Today quoted Marion Nestle, nutrition professor at New York University, as fuming, “The idea that eating Cocoa Krispies will keep a kid from getting swine flu, or from catching a cold, doesn’t make sense. Yes, these nutrients are involved in immunity, but I can’t think of a nutrient that isn’t involved in the immune system.”

The immunity claim isn’t  Kellogg’s obvious lie, however, as hard as that may be to believe. This is, also quoted in the USA Today story:

“It was not created to capitalize on the current H1N1 flu situation,” spokeswoman Susanne Norwitz says. “Kellogg developed this product in response to consumers expressing a need for more positive nutrition.”

Right. It is just a coincidence that in the middle of a swine flu epidemic, with dire predictions of world plague and the Dustin Hoffman movie “Outbreak” playing on every cable system, with parents sending their kids to the doctor as soon as they sneeze, scared silly by news reports of perfectly healthy children catching the H1N1 flu and dropping dead in days, Cocoa Crispies suddenly takes up a third of its box with claims that the cereal boosts immunity.

To be fair, it is obvious that Norwitz was trying to be deceitful, which is usually the antithesis of an obvious lie, since deceit depends on using the truth to deceive. She said the product wasn’t “developed” to exploit the H1N1 scare—no, no, it was “developed” because consumers wanted more nutrition. But nobody asked her why the product was developed. They asked her why Kellogg’s was making the dubious  immunity claim, and her answer that Kellogg’s wasn’t intentionally capitalizing on H1N1 fears, and that assertion, despite her attempt to qualify it, insults our intelligence.

What should she have said? She should have said this: “We know parents are concerned,with the current flu outbreak and all the publicity it is receiving, about their children’s heath and their vulnerability to the virus. Since we had recently increased the antioxidants added to our cereals, it seemed to be responsible to make sure parents knew about it, so we provided the banner. Antioxidents do contribute to immunity against disease. Did we think this would sell more cereal? Sure. We’re in the cereal business.”

But no. She and her employers didn’t have the integrity, honesty, brains, or respect for us to say that. They chose instead to play word games, and ended up with a foolish misrepresentation that even the most gullible couldn’t believe.

The Acceptable Slur

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Reason Magazine’s website has an article today by Steve Chapman describing New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s tactic of ridiculing his opponent Chris Christie’s weight (among other barbs, Corzine has used an ad showing Christie looking unusually large with a voice-over about him “throwing his weight around.” Har Har.) as politically maladroit. He’s right, but Chapman neglects to discuss the ethical issue involved. Attacking someone for his or her physical attributes is unethical: rude, mean-spirited, unkind and uncivil, a pure violation of the Golden Rule. Suggesting that a person’s worth can be discerned from his or her physical attributes is, quite simply, bigotry. Corzine, a proud liberal, would never dream of attacking an opponent for his race, or a physical disability like a missing leg. But calling an opponent fat in a manner designed to appeal to the bigotry of others is acceptable to him, indeed, acceptable to many. Why is that?

This is an oddly popular form of bigotry for liberals, journalists (I know I’m approaching redundancy here) and media commentators. The most popular target of fat attacks is conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Despite the fact that  Limbaugh has been in one of his svelte periods for some time, many newspapers and websites continue to accompany stories about his latest rants with an especially unflattering photo showing him roughly 100 pounds heavier.  John Kerry and other Limbaugh critics routinely include physical insults as they respond to his critiques. (They also frequently reference his problems with prescription pill addiction, an AMA-decreed medical malady. Their excuse for this is that Limbaugh has been unsympathetic to drug abusers in the past, an example of the unethical rationalization known here as the Tit for Tat excuse)  The junior U.S. senator from Minnesota got his job in part by making liberals giggle with his book entitled  “Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat, Idiot.”   But Limbaugh is just one target of many. The late, liberal Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block always drew the characters he didn’t like—Republicans, conservatives, bankers, “corporate interests,” “industrialists”—as human beach balls, to contrast with his poor, downtrodden, attractively thin liberal archetypes. Conservatives are guilty of fat-baiting too, of course; when they weren’t  using Mary Jo Kopechne to ridicule the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, they called him a tub of lard. Conservatives often have a more difficult time getting away with it, because liberals will rise in indignation to condemn such a tactic on the Right, especially if the target is a woman, as when conservative radio talk show Laura Ingraham was pilloried for referring to John McCain’s daughter Meaghan as “plus-sized.” Liberals appear to understand that using physical characteristics to deride and diminish someone is unethical, but believe there is an exception when the fat person in question is “bad,” as in “disagrees with them.”

Here is the sad truth. Many people, liberals and conservatives, are bigoted against fat people, and even those who are repulsed by bigotry based on race, religion or physical malady manage to rationalize regarding excessive weight as a sign of bad character, greed, gluttony, laziness, or, in the most recent trend, having too large a carbon footprint. Good, responsible people jog and exercise, like Jon Corzine. True, Corzine is a millionaire, and studies show that the higher correlation is not between wealth and fat, but rather poverty and fat, but never mind.  Though the culture now strongly reinforces the message that it is wrong for a white man to feel superior to a black man, it has yet assimilate the concept that a thin, fit, attractive American isn’t inherently preferable to a fat one, no matter what else the corpulent individual has to offer.

It’s time; indeed, it is past time. I think there is even  a case to be made that a fat individual may be overweight for ethical reasons. You can spend a couple hours a day jogging and pumping iron—14 hours a week, 56 hours a month, 672 hours a year—or you can spend the same time on pursuits that benefit people other than yourself, like your family, the poor, or society. Extra weight may be a form of sacrifice, a badge of honor.  What justification does Al Franken or Laura Ingraham, or a Hollywood actor who gets paid to be fit, have to question that choice or feel superior? If Oprah Winfrey wants to call herself fat, fine, but who can criticize how she uses her time? She cares about other things more than the scale and the mirror. Good for her.

But that’s just an argument that fat bigotry is unjustified. The primary point is that it is wrong, as wrong as any other form of bigotry. I don’t think Jon Corzine should necessarily lose the governorship because of it, because American culture, so far, has told him that fat bigotry is still tolerated. Still, if Corzine did lose, and lost in part because of his bigoted campaign, it would send an important  message—the message is that the “acceptable slur”  isn’t acceptable any more, no matter who the target is.

UNICEF and the Saint’s Excuse

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Halloween’s editorial in the New York Times sings the praises of Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF, the initiative born in 1950 to help the  work of UNICEF by having children solicit donations in their All Hallow’s Eve’s journeys, instead of traditional candy. UNICEF, as the Times points out, does important things, and Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF raises millions of dollars annually for the organization’s agenda of saving  children overseas with medicine, food, clean water and vaccinations. Who can complain? Well, I can, and we all should. Good intentions and even good results do not justify coercion and abuse of power, and that is what Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF has always represented. Halloween is a tradition of childhood, and charity has nothing to do with it. It is about fun and fantasy, adventure and imagination. It is about conjuring a spooky atmosphere and dressing up in scary or whimsical costumes, ringing strange doorbells and miraculously receiving candy and sweets in return. Redeeming social value? Fond memories have social value. Community rituals and tradition have social value. Halloween is a good thing, for its own sake. According to the Times,  a minister named Clyde Allison and his wife, Mary Emma Allison, created Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF because they wanted to support the  United Nations charity in its efforts to combat child mortality. They also , the Editorial says approvingly, felt that “Halloween was a chance to inspire children to help other children, not just rake in candy.” Translation: they saw a clever way way to get children to work for their admittedly worthwhile adult objectives rather the children’s own trivial, childish ones. Halloween has as much to do with children helping children as Arbor Day does. But having small children, many of whom know nothing about UNICEF, become irresistible door-to-door solicitors for cash within a tradition where it is virtually impossible for the solicited to refuse to give..brilliant! Brilliant, but wrong. The children are shamed into forgoing candy—for their satisfaction—to acquire donations, for the plans and aspirations of adults. Instead of a night of innocent, liberating, childish fun, the children get the pleasure of becoming unpaid fundraisers for UNICEF. Instead of being part of the Halloween ritual, the homeowners find themselves pressured by pint-size shakedowns that are near resistance-proof. Has anyone, confronted with a goblin collecting for UNICEF, mustered the courage to say, “Sorry, I give out candy on Halloween.” Or, “I give to the charity of my choice, thank-you”?  I haven’t. Meanwhile, the adults perpetrating this bait-and switch use rationalizations to justify what is a really an exercise in arm-twisting. “The candy is bad for the kids,” they say. “The kids get more satisfaction from this.” Most of all, they say, “It’s for a good cause”—the classic rationalization known as “The Saint’s Excuse.” It is the self-serving philosophy that principles of ethics can be broken as long as the goal is lofty enough. As examples of  the Saint’s Excuse, the UNICEF caper is pretty mild; after all, it was also the rationalization for the Spanish Inquisition.  Still, children are being coerced to do the job of adults. Their fun is being altered to meet the charitable goals of someone else. And the rules are being changed on the people answering the door, so they virtually have to give. It doesn’t matter if it’s only spare change. It is coercive, unfair and deceptive. Some communities have Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF in addition to Halloween, on the day before or after. I’m still not fond of making kids ring doorbells for charities; I would suggest that the adults go door to door on UNICEF nights, if they are concerned about poor children overseas. Still, at least the two-night formula lets kids enjoy Halloween without being saturated with guilt. They’ll have plenty of time for that. The fact that adults like the saintly Allisons and the editors of the Grey Lady don’t care very much about the values of childhood, which include fantasy and pointless fun, doesn’t make it right. Let adults do their own work, which includes raising money for poor and endangered children. They should let children, in turn, do the job they need to do. Be kids.

Forgetting What We Know

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics evolves. It isn’t that what is right and wrong actually changes, but that human beings gradually learn, sometimes so slowly it can hardly be detected. For example, slavery was always wrong, but for centuries very few people who weren’t slaves understood that fact. There was never anything immoral about being born gay and living accordingly, but it has taken all of the collected experience of civilization to make this dawn on most of society. While we are learning, and even after we have learned, there are always those who not only lag behind but who work actively to undo the ethical progress we have made. We assume these individuals will come from the ranks of ideological conservatives, misapplying valid concepts like respect for tradition, suspicion of change for change’s sake, and a reliance on consistent standards, making them slow to accept new wisdom . Sometimes, however, the people who try to make us forget what we know come from the left side of the political spectrum, misusing values such as tolerance, freedom, empathy and fairness in the process. This is especially true when it comes to the topic of sex. Liberals fought so long and well to break down the long-established taboos about sex that many of them lost the ability to comprehend that unethical conduct can  involve sex in any way.

The most striking recent example is the bizarre defense of Roman Polanski, best known as the director of the horror classic, “Rosemary’s Baby.”

Polanski has been a fugitive from American justice since 1978. In 1977,  he was charged with raping a 13-year old girl, who told a grand jury that the director had plied her with champagne and drugs, taken nude pictures of her in a hot tub, and then had sexual intercourse with her despite her pleas to be taken home. His lawyers negotiated a plea agreement that dropped the rape charge in exchange for Polanski pleading guilty to the lesser charge of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.” ( Polanski was 44 when he had sex with the young teen.) When it appeared that the judge in the case might not accept the plea deal and force him to face the rape charge, Polanski fled the U.S. Since that time, he has directed in Europe, staying out of countries that could extradite him, and traveling primarily between France, where he was protected by that nation’s limited extradition practice, and Poland. He got careless this year, and on September 26, 2009, was arrested at the Zurich airport when he arrived to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Zurich Film Festival. Swiss authorities are preparing to send him back to the U.S.

This is not a complicated situation. Statutory rape. A rape under circumstances—drugging—that would be rape with an adult victim, with the drugs rendering consent meaningless. Fleeing from justice. By what logic could someone argue that Polanski is a victim, and that law enforcement officials are the wrongdoers? There is none. Logic will never lead us to such a conclusion. Despite this undeniable fact, many individuals with respect and following in the entertainment industry as well as some journalists, argued that Polanski was being mistreated.

Some arguments were offensive: on “The View,” Whoopie Goldberg argued that drugging and having sex with a 13-tear-old wasn’t “rape-rape,”  implying that statutory rape is an archaic crime rooted in outdated concepts of sex, rather than the real crime of forcing a woman to have sex in an alley at the point of a knife. Some were ignorant: the eminent legal scholar Debra Winger pronounced Polanski the victim of “technicalities,” and suggested that the case should be “dead” because it was three decades old. Winger is apparently unaware that major crimes like rape are not subject to any statute of limitations, and that’s no technicality. She and others also claimed that Polanski had a right to flee because the judge  “reneged” on the absurdly lenient plea deal agreed to by the prosecutor at the time. Wrong: judges are not bound by plea agreements that they feel are inappropriate; watching any TV lawyer show would teach them that. Some of the arguments for Polanski were just jaw-droppingly stupid, such as the claim by some of his fellow directors that international film festivals should be respected as sanctuaries from arrest, like a church.

Even more legitimate commentators lost their bearings. In a stunning Op-ed called “The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski,” Washington Post columnist Ann Applebaum argued that it was wrong to arrest Polanski because:

  • Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz and his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was butchered by the Manson clan. This is a non-sequitur. Personal tragedies and hardship never can justify or mitigate harm done to another.
  • Polanski has suffered for his crime “in notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.” An astounding statement. He has lived well in Europe and continued to work as a film director. The justice system does not acknowledge lawyer fees as punishment, and rightly so. If fees, notoriety, and professional stigma are sufficient punishment for child-rape, surely Bernie Madoff, currently in prison for the remainder of his life, should go free for the lesser crime of defrauding investors out of billions of dollars.
  • His victim, now in her forties, says she forgives him. Victims do not, should not and can not waive the criminal laws. Forgiveness is an excellent ethical value, but there is understandable self-interest in Polanski’s victim’s attitude: she has moved on in her life and has no desire to revisit this traumatic experience. She is not the only stake-holder here, however. Society has a legitimate interest in prohibiting rape and sexual violence against children, and that means that rapists must not evade punishment, no matter what the preference of their victims may be.
  • Polanski is 75. The fact that Polanski is facing his just punishment for a crime he committed now, in his Golden Years, rather than when he younger is 100% his own fault. Applebaum made the equivalent of the apocryphal plea by the defendant who murdered his parents that he deserved leniency because he was an orphan.
  • If Polanski wasn’t famous, “no one would bother with him.” I think she’s wrong about this, but even assuming she is correct, famous fugitive rapists advertise to the world that if you are rich and powerful, you can get away with rape. There are excellent, practical, societally valuable reasons to take special care that famous criminals are brought to justice.

The real, and true conclusion, is that if Polanski’s crime didn’t involve sex, neither Applebaum nor his other defenders would lift a finger to support him. It took liberals and women’s rights advocates decades and decades to get across the concept that rape, sexual domination, sexual discrimination and harassment were not about sex, but about misuse of power, abuse of trust, and the disrespect and unfair treatment of women. Yet all it takes is a popular and artistically respected director to make some forget that lesson.

Or a popular TV talk show host. David Letterman, forced by an extortion scheme to admit on the air to a series of sexual affairs with staffers, was able to cast himself as the victim and avoid professional consequences. Yet he was essentially no different from the infamous male corporate executives of the pre-sexual harassment era, using their female subordinates as company-paid harems. Gloria Steinem and other feminists fought to hammer into American culture the concept that when an individual has power over one’s livelihood, there can be no true “consent” to sexual relationships initiated by the boss. I would have written “successfully hammered,”  but the lesson vanished when the boss was funny old Dave.

Talk show host (and Letterman employee) Craig Ferguson tut-tutted against “holding late-night talk-show hosts to the same moral accountability as we hold politicians or clergymen.” The code word here is “moral”: Ferguson and others were suggesting that objections to Letterman’s conduct were rooted in moral rectitude, the idea that sex—recreational sex, older man/younger woman sex, adulterous sex— was wrong. But Letterman is accountable, exactly as any supervisor (including a politician or clergyman) is accountable when he abuses his position and influence to turn the workplace into a personal sexual hunting ground. His escapades weren’t “personal conduct”—another of the bogus defenses raised on Letterman’s behalf—because they occurred in and affected the workplace. Letterman’s predatory sex was thus workplace conduct, and legally prohibited conduct at that. This was classic third-party sexual harassment under Title IX, a “hostile work environment” created when other female employees receive the message that they are required to be sexually accessible in order to succeed. Letterman’s conquests’ “consent,” invalid anyway because of his position, couldn’t mitigate the toxic and inherently unfair culture the illicit relationships created.

It should have been no surprise when former Letterman writer Nell Scovell, writing on Vanity Fair’s website, recently revealed that the sexually-charged atmosphere on Letterman’s show caused her to feel demeaned as a woman and led to her resignation. All those “consenting personal relationships,” in other words, caused her professional hardship. Yet even Scovell, good industry liberal that she is, has forgotten the lesson. “I don’t want compensation. I don’t want revenge. I don’t want Dave to go down (oh, grow up, people). I just want Dave to hire some qualified female writers and then treat them with respect,” she wrote.
“Oh, grow up people.” Grow up: don’t require accountability or consequences when unethical, harmful workplace conduct involves sex…because sex is good, remember?  Remember the pill, abortion rights, Woodstock? Except that sex, like many good things, can be involved in very unethical, harmful conduct. Until individuals like David Letterman and Roman Polanski “go down” for such conduct, it will continue, and innocent people will continue to be hurt.
We should have learned that by now.