Workplace

Unethical Quote of the Week: Actress Reese Witherspoon

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Him: "AchOO!" Her: "You disgust me!"

“He had a very runny nose. It wasn’t appealing. It wasn’t pleasant.”

Actress Reese Witherspoon, describing to MTV in decidedly negative terms her sex scenes with “Twilight” hearthrob  Robert Pattinson in the soon-to-be-released film “Watter for Elephants.”

I’ve always liked Witherspoon, but it just doesn’t get much meaner and unprofessional than this.  Love scenes and sex scenes are potentially embarrassing for any actor or actress, and film and stage professionals recognize this and scrupulously apply the Golden Rule. If “kissing and telling” is bad, “fake sex and telling” is worse, not merely a breach of trust and confidence, not simply unfair and disrespectful, but a stunning  violation of professional standards. It is also irresponsible for an actress to attempt to shatter a film’s premise before it even opens.

I don’t know what Pattinson did or said during the shoot that provoked the actress to go out of her way to publicly embarrass him, but good luck to Witherspoon the next time she has to play a love scene with an actor. The ironic part is that Pattinson was being thoroughly professional by gamely sticking to the shooting schedule that required him to portray passion when he was suffering from a bad cold….and this is the thanks he gets.Wow.

Reese Witherspoon’s stock in trade has been playing spunky, nice girls. It seems she’s a better actress than we ever realized.

Kobe Bryant’s Two-Word Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

"Fucking" + "faggot"= ?

In the heat of an NBA game, Los Angeles Laker star Kobe Bryant shouted a two-word epithet at a NBA ref, estimated to be the 9,675,987, 555, 321,005, 349,674, 021st time a player has insulted a ref in hoops since they started keeping count in 1973. Unfortunately, the two words were “fucking faggot.”

And it was picked up by the TV microphones.

In rapid succession, the Gay Lesbian Transgendered advocates were all over the NBA,  calling a foul; Bryant was apologizing, and the NBA was fining Bryant $100,000.

Ethics train wreck. It’s a train wreck because whatever happens at this point, the result has ethical problems, and the lesson is ethically muddled. There is no question at all that if the remark by Bryant hadn’t been picked up by the mics, there would be no issue, no controversy. But it was, which means that a comment intended for one individual (if that) became a national display of incivility (or worse.) Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There is hope for Arizona yet...

Earlier, I wrote about a bill passed by the Arizona legislature that would broadly allow religious practices and beliefs to trump professional obligations, ethics codes and discipline. The bill, SB 1288, directed in part:

A. Government shall not deny, suspend or revoke a professional or occupational license, certificate or registration based on a person’s exercise of religion.

B. Government shall not deny, suspend or revoke a professional or occupational license, certificate or registration based on a person’s refusal to affirm a statement that is contrary to the person’s sincerely held moral or religious beliefs, regardless of whether those beliefs are specifically espoused by a recognized church or religious body…

C. A person’s exercise of religion is not unprofessional conduct.

It was widely assumed, including by me, that Republican governor Jan Brewer would sign this stunningly awful bill into a law which would allow any practice that could be called “religious” to be immune from community, cultural and professional norms of right and wrong unless they were explicitly illegal. She did not. She vetoed it, an act of responsible leadership and political courage.

You can read her veto letter here.

Here’s An Idea: How About Making Teachers Actually Read Their Code of Ethics?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Read the Code, Miss Umbridge!

I don’t believe that the outrageous stories I read almost every day about incompetent, abusive, irresponsible teachers necessarily prove that there is a higher percentage of teachers who got their credentials straight from Hell today than in past generations, though I strongly suspect that is the case. In the days before the internet, horror stories stayed local, and seldom even made the paper. Thus we didn’t hear about the kind of student-terrorizing episodes that have turned up over the last few days, such as….

…..The fourth grade teacher whose brilliant idea to explain the Civil War was to have a slave auction in class, with the white students bidding on the non-white students.

…..The kindergarten teacher who reportedly told students to encircle a classmate, call him a pig and make pig noises because the boy was “messy.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Buzz Bissinger

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

It took about an hour after the  Barry Bonds verdict for the first ethics-challenged national sports writer to write something outrageous about it. Not surprisingly, it was Buzz Bissinger, a the member in good standing of the Daily Beast’s stable of annoyingly hypocritical, biased or appallingly cynical writers, Bissinger belonging to the last category.

His post, which pronounced the Barry Bonds conviction “a travesty” in the title, contained one ethics howler after another, any of one of which would have justified an Ethics Dunce prize.

Here they are:

“It is true that the case of Barry Bonds does hit a new low, a new low in the waste of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, a new low in the witch hunt of a player who, because he was considered surly and arrogant and unlikable, is now having intimate details of his life revealed (such as testicle shrinkage), a new low in outrageous abuse of government power.” Continue reading →

The Bonds Verdict: Fair Enough

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The results of the Barry Bonds trial, which today concluded with the jury finding baseball’s all-time home run champion guilty of obstructing justice by misleading a grand jury investigating the distribution of illegal and banned steroid to professional athletes but unable to agree on the perjury charges, helps to balance the ethical scales. It should silence the shameless Bonds defenders who misused the “innocent until proven guilty” standard to maintain poor Bonds was being unfairly suspected of inflating his biceps, head, statistics and income through the marvels of chemistry, though it was blatant and obvious in dozens of ways. Now he has been proven guilty—not of everything, but for celebrity justice, in a trial where much of the most damaging evidence was withheld from the jury, enough—, so the claims of racism and unfair prosecution will ring even hollower now. Continue reading →

April 12: Celebrating A Statistical Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Some background, relevant to this topic:

I have mentored women executives. I have reported wage discrimination based on gender to an employer. I have called out a supervisor on sexual harassment, and, inspired by a younger sister who is twice the lawyer I could ever be but who had to work twice as hard to get the recognition I have, I continue to be active in opposing sexual discrimination and continue to help companies develop harassment-free cultures, which I view as an ethics issue. I mention this to try to demonstrate up front that I am no apologist for gender discrimination in wages or in anything else, as I note that today perpetrates a dishonest statistic that has been circulated by advocacy groups and uncritically accepted by the media and elected officials for decades, and ending the misinformation is wildly overdue. I repeat: I want women to be hired and paid on merit, fairly and on the same basis as men. But the lies have got to stop, and April 12th is the perfect day to stop it. Continue reading →

Arizona’s Anti-Ethical Free Exercise of Religion Bill

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

While I was worrying about the unethical nature of so-called “conscience clauses,” which allow certain professionals, like pharmacists, withhold their services when they clash with the professional’s religious convictions, the Arizona legislature was cooking up something unimaginably worse. Last week the Arizona House of Representatives passed and sent to the Governor Brewer to sign into law SB 1288, a mind-blowing bill prohibiting the denial of occupational licenses or positions on public bodies because of an individual’s exercise of religion.

The soon-to-be-law states:

A. Government shall not deny, suspend or revoke a professional or occupational license, certificate or registration based on a person’s exercise of religion.

B. Government shall not deny, suspend or revoke a professional or occupational license, certificate or registration based on a person’s refusal to affirm a statement that is contrary to the person’s sincerely held moral or religious beliefs, regardless of whether those beliefs are specifically espoused by a recognized church or religious body… Continue reading →

Silly Job Interview Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

What does a silly interview tell you about your prospective employer?

A website called Glassceiling.com has been collecting strange job interview questions, and Fortune has reprinted some of them, offering guidance to job interviewees who might panic when asked such questions as this one, apparently part of the Goldman Sachs interview process:

“If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?”

The trick, say the experts, is not to lose your cool. Such questions are asked, the experts explain, not to elicit a correct answer, but rather to gauge an applicant’s poise, grace, reaction to stress, creativity and humor. Continue reading →

Manny Post Script: The Signature of a Jerk

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Manny Ramirez, the now-retired ex-baseball slugger, provoked the predictable responses from the media and fellow players in the wake of his sudden retirement after being notified that he would be the first major league player to face a 100 game suspension for failing a mandated PED test (that’s “performance enhancing drugs” for all of you who don’t know who Barry Bonds is), because no player had ever been caught TWICE before.

Everyone was in agreement that this meant: Continue reading →