Ethics Culture Notes

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Warning: the following range from depressing to disturbing…

1. I just listened to a slice of an old comedy routine from the early 60’s. The comic was Jack Carter (yechh!) and he was appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was considered must-watch Sunday evening family fare for decades. Carter began by riffing on how much traveling stone-faced Ed did, and said, “Ed even did a special show in Africa, but you’ll never see it. They ate the camera man!” And this was in the middle of the civil rights movement, live, coast-to-coast. I think it’s fair to say that there has been quite a bit of progress in racial attitudes in the past 60 years, no matter what the race-hucksters would have America believe.

2. Wait…how did the Left manage to get so completely turned around on women’s rights? That was fast. After the Wisconsin Assembly passed transgender girls high school sports ban—almost certainly headed for a veto by the state’s woke governor—Democratic Assemblyman Dave Considine argued that parents concerned that their daughters could lose scholarships or a place on a sports team in college because of competition from biological males are being “selfish.” His message for the girls: If the transitioning males who are bigger, taller and stronger than you are winning, you just “need to work harder.” Other Democratic colleagues of this idiot compared banning biological males from girls’ sports to racial segregation.

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Ethics Hero Edward Blum Exposes BigLaw Ethics Dunces [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

[I had a major mix-up with this post, with a discarded draft going live by accident. My fault: I was rushing. It’s right now, I think…]

The American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) is the group founded and run by conservative activist Edward Blum, now reviled by fans of “good discrimination”—you know, the kind that targets whites and Assians—because its efforts helped spark the Supreme Court to (finally) overturn affirmative action policies at colleges and universities. In August the group filed lawsuits against Perkins Coie and Morrison & Foerster, both major law firms, alleging that the law firms’ minority fellowships, which disqualify candidates who don’t have the right skin color, infringe on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 provision that forbids racial discrimination in contracts

“Excluding students from these esteemed fellowships because they are the wrong race is unfair, polarizing and illegal,” Blum told the news media. “Law firms that have racially exclusive programs should immediately make them available to all applicants, regardless of their race.”

Seattle-based Perkins Coie, with more than 1,200 attorneys in the United States and Asia, funded fellowships for first- and second-year law students who must be “of color,” LGBTQ+ in sexual orientation, or disabled. The first-year student program dated from 1991, and was supposed to create “legal communities that accurately reflect the rich diversity of our communities,” according to the firm’s website. Perkins added the second-year student fellowship program in 2020. The complaint argued, “Between two heterosexual, non-disabled applicants — one Black and one white — the latter cannot apply based solely on his race,” which violates Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

Sure sounds like discrimination to me!

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ProPublica (aka. Progressives) Believe That Foster Parents Should Not Be Able To Legally Intervene To Stop Birth Parents From Regaining Custody Of Children Removed From Their Care. I Don’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’ll go farther than that. I don’t believe that parents who have had children removed from their care for neglect and being unfit parents should ever be allowed to regain custody, if the original removal was justified.

To consider and discuss the ethical issue, read this article, ProPublica’s “When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby: In many states, adoption lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.” It’s too long and detailed for me to summarize fairly, and make no mistake, it’s an excellent overview of the ethical dilemmas and conflicts involved even if the author’s bias is clear.

The author focuses on a particular conflict between birth parents and foster parents in Colorado while also revealing the different approaches taken by various states. I learned a lot: for example, having adopted our son Grant as an infant in Russia in 1995, I exhaled a long “whew!” after reading this:

“…It has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from 23,000 in 2004 to 1,500 last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.”

The article attempts to focus on what the author apparently believes is an especially sympathetic couple (above) trying to regain custody of a child placed in a foster home:

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Comment Of The Day: “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This story, which I was hoping would spark more discussion here than it has so far, would be an excellent starting point for a question in a presidential candidates debate, or indeed any debate regarding the proper status of abortion in the law and our societal ethics. Right now, the negligent killing of two fertilized eggs that a married couple regarded, with considerable justification, as “their babies” is treated with less seriousness than if someone had murdered the family’s puppy. What is a fertilized egg, a zygote, a fetus, an embryo, and a newborn baby? It can’t possibly be that their true nature as human beings (or not) with the right to be protected (or not) under the law is magically altered according to what the mother chooses to believe, or what a legislature decrees…can it?

Here is James Hodgson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”:

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Negligent homicide by the staff, and strict financial liability for the corporation, are evident here, in my view. I know this sounds harsh to some, but so is the killing of an unborn child.

Over the past decade, my wife and I caught several errors in prescription fulfillment in our own meager regimes of pharmaceuticals. This happened at three of our previous insurance-preferred pharmacies. It is also reported anecdotally by a number of people I know.

Fortunately for us, we detected the errors before taking any wrongly prescribed drugs, and we learned to double-check everything, every time. (These errors also gave us more motivation to improve our nutrition and fitness in order to escape prescription drugs altogether.)

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Quinn Mitchell, The Teenage Human Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Let’s not bury the ethics lede: If it is irresponsible to treat a teenage climate change fanatic as a serious authority on international policy, and it is, it is similarly irresponsible to bestow the status of a journalist on a 15-year-old.

Yet the New Hampshire Republican Party, reminding us that the GOP isn’t called “the Stupid Party” for nothing, invited 15-year-old Quinn Mitchell to a June 27 town hall in Hollis, N.H. for fading presidential aspirant Ron DeSantis, and gave the boy press credentials. Morons, and Ethics Foul #1. The justification was (officially) that the kid has a political commentary blog, and a podcast, and says he’s attended more than 80 presidential campaign events since he was 10. That’s nice (but weird), and Quinn is evidently precocious and might be a real journalist some day (which the way things are going, is like saying he might be a real Stegosaurus some day), but that does not make him a journalist now. Some flack had the brilliant idea that inviting and credentialing a young conservative would be cute and show Generation Whatever that Republicans are cool. That flack needs to be fired.

Of course Quinn doesn’t think he’s a fake journalist and not qualified to inject himself into the proceedings, so when DeSantis foolishly called on him (“Aw, isn’t that cute, let’s see what the little feller wants to know…”), Mitchell asked a “gotcha!” question: Did the Florida governor believe that former President Trump had violated the law on Jan. 6, 2021? Naturally, the unprepared DeSantis huminahumina-ed his way through dodging it, and the video “went viral.”

That question was Ethics Foul #2, but you can’t blame Mitchell. Asking questions with an underlying agenda is a standard unethical journalism habit now, and the teen has no reason to think this isn’t what journalists are supposed to do. That’s what they have been doing his entire life.

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A Ruthless CEO Explains What To Do “When Life Hands You Lemons”

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Mike Flannagan (not the old Orioles pitcher) is a rising star director/screenwriter in the horror genre. His brilliant and complex mash-up of “The Haunting of Hill House” was as good as any horror movie or series I’ve ever seen, and his two follow-ups, one a re-thinking of “The Turn of the Screw,” are also smart, original and excellent. Now his mash-up of Edgar Alan Poe tales in a modern day horror story evoking the Sackler family and the opioid scandal is on Netflix. As with the previous three, “The Fall of the House of Usher”—the Ushers are the Sacklers— is cast substantially with his “rep company” including E.T.’s Henry Thomas and Annabeth Gish.

Last night I saw the episode in which the Faux Sackler family head and chief villain, played by Bruce Greenwood, gives a spontaneous speech about what smart businesses do when “Life hands them lemons,” and boy, it sure isn’t “make lemonade.” The second I heard it, when I had stopped applauding, I decided that the speech was an instant classic, much cleverer and better than Oliver Stone’s celebrated “Greed is good” speech that he wrote for Michael Douglas in “Wall Street.” It should be appearing soon in business school lectures across the country, and maybe laws schools too. I’m going to use it in an ethics seminar.

Flannagan’s speech for the bitter Usher family head is at once funny, chilling, revealing and true, perfectly encapsulating the ruthless logic of 21st Century capitalism as well as the soul of entrepreneurism.

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Consequences For Endorsing Terrorism”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I am way, WAY behind in posting deserving Comments of the Day, and I apologize to all, both the authors of these excellent posts and EA readers who have not had the opportunity to read them. I’m going to try to post them in chronological order, oldest first, but don’t hold me to that: I have a sinking feeling that this COTD by Sarah B. came after one or more that I intended to post last week. Her comment (I hope I’m not misgendering her!) is actually one of many superb ones on this Ethics Quiz, including those by Michael R, Curmie, and Chris Marschner, among others. I highly recommend reading the entire exchange.

Now here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Consequences For Endorsing Terrorism”:

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Actions have consequences. Speech has consequences. We can talk all we like about the Freedom of Speech (or Religion or Right to Assemble, etc), but while the government cannot punish us for our speech, our fellow citizens can and will make judgements about us despite that.

There needs to be some determination of how to decide what to do with adults who proclaim stupid things in an institute of learning while respecting the value of free speech. I propose that for professors, lecturers, administrators, and those in positions of power,they required to give a two hour session on their position, open to all. The first 45 or so minutes would be reserved for what they have to say, with the remaining time being devoted to questions A moderator (or perhaps two of opposing positions) should be present to step in when the speaker does not answer a question. Ex. “Why do you believe that is is fair to intentionally target and behead young children and the elderly non-combatants?” “Well, Israel doesn’t belong there so it doesn’t matter.” Moderators can point out that this is not an answer and require a real answer to the tough questions before continuing. On the other hand, “Does this mean you deny the Moon Landing?” would be thrown out by the moderator as completely stupid. Of course, anyone, teacher or student, who tries the heckler’s veto or shouts down another person should be immediately escorted out. Professors who support the heckler’s veto should be immediately terminated.

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Baseball Ethics: Is It Time To Stop Booing The Houston Astros? Hell No…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Tonight, the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros, from the same American League Division and with the same regular season record (a modest 90-72), will begin playing the American League Championship Series to decide which team will represent the league in the World Series. If you’re a baseball fan or an ethics fan, you will root for the Rangers. The Astros are ethics villains, and among the worst ethics corrupting teams in all of professional sports history. They do not deserve to be forgiven, for the multiple blights they inflicted on the game are still causing tangible damage, and despite the exposure of the team’s rotten culture in 2019 ( exhaustively discussed on Ethics Alarms) they were never sufficiently punished, and the main perps in the team’s scheme have never adequately acknowledged that they did anything wrong.

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Leon Panetta, Poster Boy For “My Mind’s Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me With Facts”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I had a couple of rapid thoughts when I saw this revolting story. The first was remembering how that line in the title above was one of my father’s favorite mordantly humorous slogans, along with “He was right, dead right, as he sped along, but he’s just as dead as if he were wrong!” and the tale about feeling sad and hopeless, hearing a little voice saying, “Cheer up, things could be worse!” and then, sure enough, things got worse. The second was realizing that I occasionally, very rarely but still occasionally, miss important information by refusing to watch Fox News. A third was deciding that I had mistakenly judged Leon Panetta to be an honorable and trustworthy public servant.

In an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, Panetta, who was Bill Clinton’s Swiss Army knife aide and Cabinet member notably as head of the CIA, was asked by Baier if he had any regrets about signing the infamous open letter from 51 former intelligence officials using their influence and presumed expertise to advance the cover-up scheme declaring the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation.

In a head-exploding display of chutzpah, Panetta announced that he had no regrets at all, and that he has seen no evidence that would make him change his mind. Gobsmacked, Baier said, “You don’t think it was real?” Panetta responded “I think disinformation is involved here.”

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