Update: Recent Law and Ethics Matters….

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wow, Colbert, that was hilarious! What a great satirical take-down of ignorant and biased Democrats who somehow can’t perceive how abnormal it is—well, not in Russia— for an entire party to seek to eliminate the primary threat to its power by searching for ways to send him to jail! Brilliant! He even perfectly evokes their disdain for due process: “everybody” knows Trump is guilty, so what are the courts waiting for? Wait, what? Colbert wasn’t trying to be funny? But I thought he was a comedian!

Meanwhile, in other ethics news involving law, courts, judges and lawyers—

1. Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “How someone reacts to the Fani Willis testimony yesterday is a litmus test for if they’re a complete partisan hack. Anyone who denies that she clearly lied, could not respond to basic questions, acted inappropriately, and corrupted this prosecution is a mindless Dem partisan.” Almost my entire legal ethics listserv basically reacted to the Fani Willis hearing by concluding that nothing she did was relevant to the prosecution of Donald Trump. The few bold souls among the legal ethics experts who are inclined to dissent are doing so timidly at best. The anti-Trump bias in my sector is shocking, and the rationalizations being grabbed onto to defend Willis are embarrassing. One very prominent legal ethics specialist wrote that he believes the Fulton County DA hiring her lover was innocent because “she couldn’t find any qualified lawyer”—David Wade is not qualified— to take the job.

2. Meanwhile, both ABC and the New York Times adopted Willis’s insulting “This is only happening because I’m a black woman!” defense.

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From India, the Case of the Ethical Burglars

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I am at a loss as to how to categorize this strange story, as Mallory’s outburst above suggests.

Thieves broke into the opulent home of celebrated Bollywood film director M. Manikandan, escaping with gold, silver and cash. A few days later, however, someone left a small plastic bag outside the mansion’s gates. It was carefully fastened shut, and contained an object wrapped in a white handkerchief. Upon unwrapping it, the director discovered a medal he had won in 2021 for one of his acclaimed films. Accompanying the prestigious award was a handwritten note from the burglars (in Tamil, one of India’s many regional languages). “Sir, please forgive us,” the note read. “Your hard work belongs to you alone.”

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FIRE’s Annual Censorship Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

FIRE released its annual “Top Ten Worst Censors” list. They are…

As you see by the EA links, I batted just .500 in covering this topic, and some of the incidents described in FIRE’s report are clearly major ethics breaches that should have been discussed here. Personally, I blame Donald Trump for being a catalyst for so much unethical conduct by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (AUC)—the “resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media—as well as his own usual forays into the Ethics Twilight Zone that I missed other important matters. Or, as Joni Mitchell might have croaked, “So many things I might have done, but Trump got in my way….”

OK, I’m kidding. Sort of.

The most horrible story that I missed is a tie between the Mayo Clinic outrage and the Marion County Police Dept.’s gestapo act. In that one, FIRE explains,

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“It Wasn’t Our Fault! That Bad Robot Did It!”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Hey, Canada Air! Can you say, “accountability?” How about “responsibility”? Sure you can.

Jake Moffat needed to fly from Vancouver to Toronto to deal with the death of his grandmother. Before he bought the tickets for his flights, he checked to se whether Air Canada had a bereavement policy, and the company’s website AI assistant told him he was in luck (after telling him it was sorry for his loss, of course.) Those little mechanical devils are so lifelike!

The virtual employee explained that if he purchased a regular priced ticket, he would have up to 90 days to claim the bereavement discount. Its exact words were:”If you need to travel immediately or have already traveled and would like to submit your ticket for a reduced bereavement rate, kindly do so within 90 days of the date your ticket was issued by completing our Ticket Refund Application form.” So Moffatt booked a one-way ticket to Toronto to attend the funeral, and after the family’s activities a full-price passage back to Vancouver. Somewhere along the line he also spoke to a human being who is an Air Canada representative—at least she claimed to be a human being— confirmed that Air Canada had a bereavement discount. He felt secure, between the facts he had obtained from the helpful bot and the non-bot, that he would eventually pay only $380 for the round trip after he got the substantial refund on the $1600 non-bereavement tickets he had purchased.

After Granny was safely sent to her reward, Jake submitted documentation for the refund. Surprise! Air Canada doesn’t have a reimbursement policy for bereavement flights. You either buy the discounted tickets to begin with, or you pay the regular fare. The chatbot invented the discount policy, just like these things make up court cases. A small claims adjudicator in British Columbia then enters the story, because the annoyed and grieving traveler sought the promised discount from the airline.

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This Question to the Ethicist Sends Me to the Wood-chipper

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

[That would be my foot sticking out. I’m sure my good neighbor Ted would be willing to get me through…or any one of the thousands of people I’ve infuriated over the years.]

You can read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s answer to the most discouraging question he’s ever been asked (my description, not his) if you like. Essentially “The Ethicist” says (I’m counting here), “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no!” As usual the New York Times “Ethicist ” is thorough, but he could have written his response in his sleep, as I could have, and if you’re reading an ethics blog, so could you.

Here’s the question, and hold on to your heads…

A close friend of many years whom I’ve always thought of as an extremely honest, ethical person recently confided in me that she shoplifts on a regular basis. She explained that she never steals from small or independently owned businesses, only from large companies, and only when no small business nearby carries the items she needs. She targets companies that are known to treat their employees badly, or that knowingly source their products from places where human rights are violated, or whose owners/C.E.O.s donate to ultraconservative, authoritarian-leaning candidates, etc.

My friend volunteers in her community and has worked her entire life for nonprofit antipoverty and human rights organizations. While she isn’t wealthy, she is able to afford the items she steals and believes that she is redistributing wealth; she says she keeps track of the value of what she’s stolen and donates an equal amount to charity. She thinks of her actions as civil disobedience and says she will accept the consequences if she’s caught.

When she told me, I thought, Stealing is wrong. But as we discussed it, I realized I was oversimplifying a complex moral issue. Is it wrong to steal food to feed your starving children? What if I stole a legally purchased gun from a person I knew was about to commit a mass shooting? Are those who bring office supplies home from their workplace also thieves? I find myself struggling with the question of whether an individual’s actions are morally defensible if they do more good than harm. — Name Withheld

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When JFK Called Ike: Will We Ever See the Like Again?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

For some reason the Kennedy family waited a long time to release this recording; strange, because it reflects well on the sainted JFK. I just encountered it recently.

In the midst of the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, President Kennedy called former President Eisenhower to brief him on the situation and extract any wisdom he could from his predecessor.

This is how our system is supposed to work, with leaders, officials and politicians interacting with each other respectfully and in the best interests of the nation. Ike and JFK were hardly pals: after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, White House staff reported hearing Eisenhower reaming out Kennedy from behind a closed door.

Nonetheless, this phone call shows two Presidents from opposing parties working together and showing each other the kind of courtesy and civility essential for productive cooperation. Our republic and our culture were healthier then, even as World War III loomed.

Now, Both Sides of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” Performance at the Grammys

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I had decided, after exchanging views with EA columnist Curmie, that I would let this one go, but alas, I cannot. I have waited a long while to try to talk myself out of posting, but I won the argument with myself. Or lost.

There are few TV productions that interest me less than the Grammys, even in the narrow category of awards shows, which I abandoned for good after the quality of Broadway fare approached rock bottom (no more Tonys for me) and the Academy Awards decided to prioritize infantile politics over movies (Bye-bye Oscars!). The Emmys were always boring and terrible, and the Grammys interested me not one bit, ever. After the fact, however, two events at this year’s Grammys broadcast two weeks ago pinged my ethics alarms. First was the spectacle of a triple winner being arrested at the ceremony and hauled off in cuffs: silly me, I thought the police only set out to arrest people in the most embarrassing manner possible on “Law and Order.” The second was superannuated stroke victim singer/song-writer Joni Mitchell singing at the Grammys for the first time and getting an ovation for staggering through a mournful rendition of her most famous composition, “Both Sides Now.”

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Ethics Hero: Lya Battle, “Our Lady of the Strays”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

John Hammond, as every fan of Michael Crichton, “Jurassic Park” and dinosaurs knows, built an aspirational cloned dinosaur park on a Costa Rican island, and thanks to chaos theory and “Newman,” it turned out to be a deadly disaster. But the InGen founder wasn’t too far off; he just chose the wrong species. In Costa Rica’s Central Valley and its surrounding highlands, a woman named Lya Battle has been presiding over a farm inherited from her dog-loving father (who shot her mother, but that’s another story) known locally as Territorio de Zaguates (“kingdom of strays”). She and her staff take care of, feed and love nearly 1000 stray dogs, which Costa Rica, like most non-affluent countries has far more of than it does pet dogs. (There are an estimated one million strays.) Lya boasts that she knows the name of every one of them on her farm. Here’s another photo:

Netflix featured the Lya and the Territorio in the second episode of its series “Dogs;” National Geographic has featured her story, and I learned about the amazing dog haven from an old episode of Jack Hanna’s nature series.

Lya’s Territorio takes responsibility for spaying and neutering every new dog arrival. It operates like a typical shelter, providing food and medical attention, except that the dogs run free. The most stunning scene is when all 900-plus dogs “go for a walk,” with staff leading them into the hills and forests in a noisy, barking pack.

You can get a sense of what this is like from this video…

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Sound (or Were Never Installed): Comedian Paul Currie Emulates Michael Richards

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

What was this guy thinking?

It is decidedly strange for any stand-up comic to decide to emulate Michael Richards, the talented physical comic who played “Kramer” on “Seinfeld.” Richards inexplicably blew up his career and reputation during a stand-up appearance on November 17, 2006, at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. Richards was annoyed by some heckling from a group of black and Hispanic audience members, and lost his mind, screaming “Nigger!” several times and making other racist references as the audience sat stunned and unamused. His career never recovered, nor should it have. Richards has never adequately explained the incident.

Australian comedian Paul Currie, however, must have been impressed, or something. For his finale to a stand-up show at London’s Soho Theatre, the comedian placed a Ukrainian and a Palestinian flag on the stage and invited audience members to stand and applaud. Hilarious! Wait, no, it had to be a set-up for a gag, right?

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Comment of the Day: “Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal)”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Posting today has been a real chore, because I began it with a funeral and a Catholic Mass, both of which always exhaust me, and the old friends I saw there (most of them, anyway) looked so much older than the last time I saw them that I am afraid to look in the mirror.

That makes two reasons I’m grateful for Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal).” I’m exhausted, and the ethics issue he raises is a crucial one without an obvious solution.

Here it is:

***

The horrible thing about this conversation is that people like Lee have this nugget of truth, uncleverly hidden inside the fragrant package of their bullshit proposals, and that is that we need a plan going forward for labor. Workplace participation is going down, wages have been stagnant, cost of living is increasing, food back participation and foreclosure rates are rising… “Stock line goes up” be damned, the bottom seems to be falling out.

I don’t know what you realistically do about this. A “$50 minimum wage” seems like the kind of toddler thinking Democrats are good at: Address the problem by treating the most surface level of symptoms, realities of the market be damned.

Because the reality is that automation is already stealing jobs, and increasing the cost of labor just makes automation investment that much more appealing. That spirals into a situation where I think the average person is going to be unemployed.

And I don’t have the answer. This is a topic that keeps me up at night.

Frankly, I think that the decent into a laborless economy is unavoidable, it’s just a matter of time, regardless of whether or not we speed up the process with stupid policy. Right now, “Truck Driver” is the most common job in 29 out of the 50 states. As technology gets cheaper and as labor gets more expensive, eventually, I don’t think it’s impossible that in 20 years, self-driving vehicles will have made that job obsolete. What do you think that does to the market?

I think the fight that’s coming up is going to be whether we purposefully throttle innovation in order to preserve jobs, or we accept that the majority of people aren’t going to labor physically, and we start to conceptualize what that looks like. And again… Thoughts that keep me up: Even if we throttle our technology our adversaries won’t, so I don’t think that choice is viable, and I think the alternative is a deeply taxed, deeply controlled form of socialism. Which is obviously undesirable, but what else does capitalism look like when your average person owns nothing, and has no prospect to move forward with?