Finally “The Ethicist” Has Found A Legitimate Topic Again: The Dementia Victim’s Spouse

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In fact, I’ll make this one an Ethics Quiz.

I don’t need to extensively quote the letter inspiring the column. A woman whose much older husband is now consumed with dementia and unable to function or recognize her asks if it would be ethical for her to seek an intimate relationship while remaining married to her husband and serving as his caretaker. “I have a lot of working years and child-rearing years ahead of me…and I find myself desiring physical and emotional intimacy with a partner,” “Name Withheld” writes.

No, it wasn’t Jill Biden. At least, I don’t think so…

If you have been reading my periodic posts involving Kwame Anthony Appiah’s ethics advice in the Times “The Ethicist” column, I’m sure you can guess his response. Hey girl, go for it! No harm no foul! Your man is a veg, and you’re stuck with him: why not live a little in the meantime?

Ok, that framing may be a bit unfair, but it’s still where Kwame comes out. Without saying he’s necessarily wrong, I have several problems with that knee-jerk response.

If that’s the verdict with one serious debilitating illness, why not others, like cancer or ALS…or, to reference something I’m very familiar with, alcoholism? Is the distinction that the demented spouse doesn’t know his or her spouse is having affairs? Hey Ethicist Man, what happened to “Ethics is what you do when no one’s looking”?

I do know that my wife frequently said that if I cheated on her if she became seriously ill, she would come back from the grave and haunt me like Tevye’s grandmother in “Fiddler on the Roof.” And she wasn’t kidding.

Then we have the reverse situation famously experienced by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She stepped down from SCOTUS in 2005 to care for her husband, John Jay O’Connor, after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. His condition progressed to the point that he required full-time care and he was moved into an assisted living facility in Phoenix. There his mind deteriorated to the point where he no longer remembered or recognized his wife, and he fell in love with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient. Justice O’Connor was supportive of the relationship, saying, at least in public, that she was thrilled and relieved that her husband was relaxed, happy, and comfortable in his new reality. Later, he became engaged to an ottoman.

(Okay, I was kidding about that last part. )

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Do you agree with “The Ethicist” that stepping out on your demented spouse is ethical?

Unwritten Rules Ethics: R.I.P. “No Running Up The Score”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Last night the Milwaukee Brewers tied the MLB record for the most lopsided shutout in modern history with a 22-0 rout of the Seattle Mariners. Once upon a time and not so long ago, the Brewers would have been shamed for “running up the score” because a very old unwritten rule of the game held that doing so was unethical: unprofessional, cruel, pointless, sadistic, and a Golden Rule breach. When the Texas Rangers defeated the Baltimore Orioles 30–3 on August 22, 2007, the most one-sided wipe-out in professional baseball since the 19th century, the Rangers were widely condemned for inflicting such a humiliation on another team and its fans. I think, with the Brewers win yesterday, we can officially pronounce the silly unwritten rule repealed. It never was ethical. Good riddance.

The unwritten rule probably dates back before professional baseball. Running up the score in Little League and pick-up games is cruel, pointless and, yes, a Golden Rule breach, but carrying it into games where spectators pay money and the players are compensated for their performance never made sense. It is a violation of integrity for professional athletes not to exert maximum effort. The score won’t stop, or shouldn’t stop, a player from making a spectacular fielding play, or hitting the ball into orbit. Real baseball fans love the game, not just a team. For a winning team to stop trying to score runs is unethical. Fans are being cheated.

A game with so many runs scored is long? Hey, nobody’s forcing a spectator to stay. If I pay to see a game, I pay to see the whole game. Moreover, one of baseball’s inimitable charms is that weird and wonderful things happen that have never happened before all the time, even though there have been roughly 243,700 baseball games played over the entire history of the sport since 1876. Just this week, a rookie hit three home runs in his first three trips to the plate in his first game ever, something that is unprecedented.

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“When They Go Low, We Go High…” Suuure, Democrats: You Can’t Go Much Lower Than This

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Several of my Trump Deranged, “Knee-Jerk-Democrats-To-The-Death-Even-If-Their-Party- Started-Sending-Dissenters-To-Gulags” friends tell me that they are all exited about flavor-of-the-week Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga) ending up as the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee in 2028. Morons. Desperate morons. In addition to the fact that Democrats have painted themselves into a “must-have-a-DEI-President-or-bust” corner (I’m going to see how many of these I can have in a single post: that’s three), Ossoff has already proven that he is an irredeemable asshole. The latest smoking gun evidence was his snide innuendo that President Trump’s ever-present aide, Natalie Harp, is some kind of POTUS comfort woman.

Sen. Ossoff slimed the President this week by saying, “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” The Axis loved it because its members are contemptible and have no ethical values left; Joseph Welch’s kill shot to Senator Joe McCarthy would be appropriate here if directed at “the resistance,” Democrats, progressives and the news media: “Have you no sense of decency?” No, in fact they don’t. The Axis cheers because Ossoff proved he could “troll” Trump. What he really proved is that he’s such an asshole that he would cast aspersions on a hard-working, patriotic young woman’s morals and rectitude, which in former, more ethical times would guarantee a law suit and maybe a duel.

Nevertheless, the Axis news media, disgusting and unethical to its core and getting worse by the second, pounced. “With All My Heart, Natalie.’ Trump’s Most Devoted Aide Emerges: President Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly, does she do?” snickered the New York Times. (Why look! Permanent Times Trump-slimer Maggie Haberman co-authored the piece! I’m shocked! Shocked!). Then we have similar “Riiight-she’s-his-“aide”-and you-know-what-she’s-aiding” (that’s four) stories from the The Independent, NBC News, The Guardian, MS NOW, The Hill, CBS News, Daily Mail, Bloomberg, Yahoo News, Washington Post, Daily Kos, and more. “Meet Natalie Harp, the aide so close to Trump she once rode in an SUV trunk to accompany him” slobbers CNN.  “Yes, We Absolutely Should Talk About Natalie Harp”  writes Media Matters’ (Talk about “Have you no decency?”) Paul Waldman.

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Censure Rashida Tlaib. (And Spit On NPR)

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

3.8 thousand “hearts.”

NPR, in an abominable piece of deceitful journalism two years ago about Ferguson, Mo. ten years after a young black thug there got himself shot in self-defense by a police officer, and his buddy’s lies were immediately accepted as truth by a biased, corrupt news media, wrote in part…

Right. “Many” maintain that justice was never served because of lying, divisive, race-huckster, police-vilifying ethics villains like Rep. Tlaib, who deliberately and repeatedly maintain that facts don’t matter. It isn’t an opinion that Mike Brown was murdered. It is a destructive false narrative designed to keep racial distrust and anger perpetually high. She is a member of Congress. For a House member to make a public statement so irresponsible, dishonest, and corrosive to society isn’t just grounds for censure, it demands censure.

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So This Is What It Takes To Get A Bipartisan Condemnation Of A Political Candidate! Good to Know…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Color me unimpressed.

GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic Party Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a bi-partisan rebuke of Florida Republican Dan Bilzerian, one of several Republican candidates in Florida’s 6th Congressional District running in the primary today. Bilzerian, a veteran, has run a bare-knuckles campaign to put it mildly, and his latest campaign ad crossed more ethics red lines than any such production in memory. In the process of attacking incumbent Rep. Randy Fine, one of his opponents in the primary, the ad uses AI-generated images (the one on the left accompanies the ad hominem slur “fat Jew”) and such blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric as “Shylock,” “Jewish supremacist” and “satanic whore” while suggesting that Adolf Hitler’s “opinions” many have some validity after all.

Nice. Stay classy, Republicans.

Rep. Fine is among the most vocal and determined supporters of Israel in its war with Hamas and Gaza. Jeffries and Johnson both condemned Bilzerian. “The hateful campaign being run by Daniel Bilzerian in Florida is blatantly antisemitic and shocks the conscience,” Jeffries said. “People of goodwill regardless of political affiliation must reject his vile attacks on the Jewish community. This cannot and will not stand.” “The vile attack ads against Congressman Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th District are disgusting and should be condemned by all political leaders on the Right and Left,” Speaker Johnson said in a statement the same day. “Antisemitism and outward hatred of Jewish communities have no place in our politics or in America.”

There’s no argument that Bilzerian deserves those rebukes and more, but I see no actual principles involved in the decisions of Jefferies and Johnson to attack him. It’s easy for Jeffries to condemn an outlier and rogue GOP candidate for vile attacks on the Jewish community, and it is also hypocritical. His party has extolled and supported plenty of anti-Semites who managed not to be as brazen as Bilzerian, but their statements and transparent attitudes have been “vile” nonetheless. Indeed, Jeffries’s whole party is increasingly sliding into routine Jew-hate, notably on college campuses.

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More Ethics Observations On Nancy Mace’s “Sleeves”…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is a rare case of EA using the same graphic two days running, but there is a good reason.

In yesterday’s morning post, I wrote, concerning Rep. Nancy Mace’s extensive tattoo “sleeves” which she revealed in public for the first time this week, that voters and parties needed to stop letting people with serious emotional or mental issues from getting at the levers of power. I also mentioned that an associate of mine, also fully sleeved, a veteran and a Camp Lejeune victim who suffers from Complex PTSD, once told me that excessive, visible tattoos like Mace’s (and his) are often, even usually, a form of self-harm to cope with serious emotional damage.

I need to pay more attention to his observations in the future. I had missed a story in the New York Post earlier this year in which Mace explained her reasons for getting the tattoos:

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has gotten nine tattoos as a member of Congress because getting inked provides “the pain that I need to feel,” the congresswoman said in a revealing profile released on Friday. The 48-year-old congresswoman got the tattoos in “rapid succession” between a period in late 2023 and early 2024, marked by the breakup with her fiancé and an exodus of staffers from her office, some of whom viewed working for Mace as “toxic,” according to Politico.

Aside from a need to feel “pain,” Mace described getting tattoos as a way to “reclaim” her body and identity. One of her nine tattoos is the opening line of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf, as Politico pointed out, committed suicide in 1941 over fears “she was going mad.”

“So my story is I am totally broken,” the congresswoman and South Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate is quoted as saying in the profile. Mace details the strained relationship she has with her father, her struggles in becoming the first female graduate at The Citadel and alleged instances of sexual molestation and rape that she’s been the victim of throughout the piece.

“I have PTSD over what I’ve been through,” she said.

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It’s Beginning To Look Like The University of Cambridge Is Just Plain Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The doctrine of subsequent remedial measures holds that evidence of safety improvements, fixes, or changes made after an accident cannot be used in court to prove that a defendant was negligent. However, when a miscreant reacts to an incident of negligence or wrongdoing by taking measures that make it look more guilty without fixing anything, what do you call that? I vote for “really stupid.”

In the wake of its worldwide humiliation in the Jason Arday scandal and its craven, mealy-mouthed public declarations as the mess reached its climax with the fraudulent professor’s death, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education decided to hide its faculty. The staff list is now offline. When one tries to access it, the screen above appears.

A double-secret faculty! Cool!

Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice promised that the investigation of how an emotionally disturbed fantasist who fabricated credentials, his biography and his scholarship yet nonetheless was passed into the faculty of one of the most prestigious universities in the world would be “thorough and transparent.”

That’s nice, but forgive me for being skeptical: how transparent is Cambridge likely to be when it won’t reveal who’s on its faculty? I suppose it’s possible that the professors are so embarrassed to be associated with Cambridge now that they will enter the Professor Protection Program and are only going out in public wearing Groucho glasses.

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On Plagiarism…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Guest Column by Michael R.

[Introduction: This comment by Michael R, in response to the Jason Arday post, “On The Left’s Horrifying Lack Of Integrity In The Wake of The Arday Scandal: I’m Sorry I Was So Right, And How I Wish I Were Wrong. Now What?” is sufficiently extensive and covers such an umortant ethics issue that I deem it worthy of a Guest Column. He begins by referencing the “Everybody Does It” attempted exoneration of the late Cambridge fraudster Facebook post that was favored on the platform by my old friend, a history professor who should know better but who is apparently completely woke-blinded…]

To your long-time Georgetown history professor, you can reply that all he has done is demonstrate why the left has lost all credibility. He thinks he is showing how it is fine to plagiarize. All the has shown is that those institutions no longer care about academic rigor and have no credibility.

Now about the plagiarism. There are different grades of plagiarism. Let me explain why the current round of plagiarism is so devastatingly bad.

When I was in grad school, many of us were asked to carefully check the introduction chapters of foreign students’ dissertations. Because of the difficulty of writing in a foreign language and the differing intellectual property standards in different cultures, there was a lot of plagiarism and the advisors were very careful to detect it and get it corrected before the defense. This is a mockup of a typical Asian student’s introduction.

“Poorly worded original sentence. Sentence directly copied from source 1. Two sentences directly copied from source 2. Poorly worded original sentence tying the thoughts together.Four sentences from source 3. One sentence from source 1. One sentence from source 4. A poorly worded original sentence tying them together. Rinse and repeat.”

You can see what is going on. They lack the English language skills to really blend the thoughts from the different sources together, so they just copy whole sentences (occasionally paragraphs) from many sources and tie them together with some original sentences. This is plagiarism, but this is pretty easy to fix. They are writing a typical intro, they just aren’t doing the paraphrasing and integration of the ideas needed. We would work with the students to get this fixed so that there weren’t any problems. There are probably a lot of programs that didn’t do this, resulting in a massive amount of plagiarism. I am fairly sure this is pretty common in dissertations, especially the Introduction chapters (which are typically reviews of the literature and not original research).

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The Legal Profession’s Corrupting Partisan Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

That chart represents the relative number of employees, including lawyers, in the largest U.S. firms to contribute to Republicans. I have written several posts about the “ideological capture” of major U.S. professions and institution, and opined that the extreme progressive bias in the legal profession is among the most threatening to U.S. society and democracy itself. Two examples are here and here.

Right now the D.C. Bar is fighting with the Justice Department over the Trump administration requiring some major law firms to demonstrate that they are not biased against the President and his policies, an effort the Axis (and the D.C. Bar’s staff) calls making them “bend a knee.” The major law firms are biased against this President and his administration, and are increasingly willing to show it. The civil justice system will not work if the legal profession is politicized. Increasingly, it is.

The reason is pretty clear: the vast majority of law schools have almost no conservatives or Republican on their faculties, and my alma mater, Georgetown University Law Center, is typical of the top tier law schools. You can peruse GULC’s disturbing EA dossier here.

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/17/24: Going Crazy Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I won’t decide what the subtitle of this collection post will be until I finish it, but the photo above has me tempted to use “Going Crazy Edition.” [Update: finished, and yes, that seems like the appropriate heading]

Congresswoman Nancy Mace, Republican, conservative, a military veteran and one of the “hot,” frequently embarrassing GOP women in Congress, just revealed her full arm tattoo “sleeves.” I have an associate, also fully sleeved, who is a veteran, a Camp Lejeune victim, suffers from Complex PTSD, and is a survivor of a chaotic upbringing, the death of a child, and other personal tragedies. He has explained to me that excessive, visible tattoos like Mace’s (and his) are often, even usually, a form of self-harm to cope with serious emotional damage.

Mace is notable for various rogue positions as well as conduct that Ethics Alarms had criticized as being inappropriate for members of Congress, most recently here. Last year, Mace delivered a 50 minute diatribe accusing her ex-fiancé and three other men of rape, sex trafficking and other sex crimes against her and other female victims, and accused South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson of failing to prosecute the men after, she said, she presented his office with evidence.   Mace is not stable (she is a lame duck, having failed to run in the primary for her seat to run for the Republican governor nomination, failing badly), and is one more example of how the parties and voters need to stop letting such troubled people reach national leadership position. To be fair, I have determined that being a little (or a lot) nuts is a common trait among our elected Presidents, as is having a traumatic life. Those driven with a passion to lead are by definition abnormal. A congresswoman who feels compelled to say “Look at me! I’m a mess!” by getting “sleeves,” however, should start ethics alarms ringing.

Meanwhile…

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