Tuesday Morning Ethics Warm-Up. 7/19/2022: Harvard, Redheads, Uvalde, Bad House Guests And More

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A lot of people find images like this, and the motto, offensive, presumably because of the association with Ronald Reagan, who brilliantly appropriated optimistic patriotism as a conservative value in response to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” vision of the nation. Being negatively triggered by one’s own flag and expressions of pride and enthusiasm regarding the nation it represents is not a healthy state of mind, and therefore it is unethical conduct to actively promote such an attitude…which we now see being done every day.

1. It may be unethical, but Harvard at least has gall…In April, Harvard University set out to exceed its previous record for virtue signaling, committing $100 million to “redress its ties to slavery” after a report concluded that slavery played an “integral” role in shaping the University. This is the Cambridge version of reparations, and the flagrant act of misusing donated non-profit funds wasn’t even controversial. The whole board signed on without dissent, which shows how Borg-like the Harvard leadership is. “Diversity” of thought when wokeness is at issue is not welcome. In this month’s alumni magazine, amusingly, Harvard begs for contributions to keep the magazine operating at a high level (it is an excellent alumni magazine), as if  tossing away 100 million dollars on non-educational matters didn’t make the appeal ridiculous. As one contrarian alum noted in a letter to the editor, if Harvard can give away all that money to assuage its conscience about supporting and benefiting long ago from a legal and predominant practice that had gone on for centuries, “it doesn’t need mine.”

In other damning news from Old Ivy, the Harvard  web site calls Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard,  currently pending before the Supreme Court, as a “politically motivated lawsuit.”  That’s the case in which Asian-American students allege that Harvard discriminates against them (like it discriminates against whites) in its admissions policies.  The web site states, “Harvard College does not discriminate against applicants from any group in its admission processes.” This is pure “it isn’t what it is” gaslighting. One can argue that affirmative action, which is the real issue  in the case, should continue and that it passes ethical standards via utilitarian balancing, but it cannot be denied that  the practice isn’t discrimination. The statement is a lie. Continue reading →

Founders’ Are Denigrated In Their Own Homes …And An Organized Protest Is Required

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Apparently the Mad Left’s historical air-brushing mania that began with toppling statues of important American figures from the Confederacy such as Robert E. Lee, moved on to removing statues of Teddy Roosevelt and banning benign college mascots that evoked the Revolutionary era (like George Washington U’s “Colonial”), and generally has sought to “cancel” any American patriot or President who owned slaves, is now turning tours of Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s homes in Virginia into attacks on the two essential figures in our democracy.

At Monticello, Jefferson’s self-designed home that is a tourist attraction in Charlottesville, Virginia, the non-profit operating the site is using its progressive political agenda to make a visit less a pilgrimage of respect than indoctrination into anti-Jeffersonism. A recent visitor described the experience as “depressing and demoralizing and truly upsetting,” with Jefferson-hostile tour guides claiming that his reputation is “wildly overblown.” Of course, this is all because Jefferson was a slave-holder, in direct contradiction of the values and rights he espoused in the Declaration of Independence. Arguably, Jefferson’s slave-holding was more revolting than that of other men of his time, as it included treating one of his slaves, Sally Hemings (and his dead wife’s half-sister) as his concubine. Ick. But Jefferson was a weak and conflicted man with a brilliant and perceptive mind; his slave-holding and other personal flaws, and there were many, are not why he must be celebrated and honored as one of those most responsible for the nation’s existence.

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Leadership Ethics: The First Lady’s Ignorant Whine

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Dr. Jill is having a difficult month. I almost put her latest post-breakfast taco remarks under the “Unethical Quote” heading, but her infuriating comments during a private Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Nantucket, Massachusetts qualify as more ignorant and incompetent than anything else.

Attempting to defend her husband’s miserable performance as President over the past 18 months and to rebut the public’s overwhelmingly negative assessment of his Presidency so far, the First Lady whined—and yes, that is a fair characterization—

“[The President] had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment…He’s just had so many things thrown his way. Who would have ever thought about what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but still we didn’t believe it. The gun violence in this country is absolutely appalling. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.” 

Awww, poor Joe! He’s had to deal with the same challenge as every other President since the beginning of the Republic! Damn! It’s just one thing after another! Who could have predicted it?

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Ethics Observations On Gallup’s U.S. “Moral Values” Poll

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Gallup released a depressing poll last week that it headlined, “Record-High 50% of Americans Rate U.S. Moral Values as ‘Poor.'” Like many Gallup polls, but perhaps more than most, this one suffered badly from a failure a define terms and to ensure that respondents were basing their judgments on the same understanding of “values.” Using the term “moral” rather than “ethical” to define values is a crippling error: it automatically directs attention to religion. This, in turn, probably explains this chart…

…in which twice as many Republicans as Democrats rate the state of “moral values” as “poor.” About twice as many Republicans and Democrats are religious: the result was preordained. Morality involves behavioral codes, notably the Ten Commandments. Republicans are more likely to believe that such codes should guide conduct, although the whole point of moral codes is that one doesn’t have to think: just follow the code, and you’ll be “good.” Democrats have increasingly embraced the idea of subjective values and personal codes, “pursuing one’s truth.” Their idea of poor values are values that seem contrary to their objectives.

The poll does not rank values, or even require respondents to identify what values they think are being violated or ignored. Thus the figures given for various measurements in the poll are by definition apples, oranges and eggplants mash-ups. For example, a core ethical value is fairness, but progressives increasingly believe what is fair is for everyone to achieve the same level of success, security, comfort and power regardless of effort, ability, or contributions to society. Conservatives believe  fairness means that every individual should be allowed to achieve according to his or her aspirations and best efforts given the resources, talents and opportunities distributed by the vicissitudes of life and luck, and keep and use the rewards of those efforts, if any. Asking whether a group believes that life in the U.S. is fair when the group holds diametrically opposed definitions of the word is useless.

Similarly, an increasing component of the American Left believes that the U.S. Constitution embodies the wrong values. They believe it would be more “moral” to censor speech so as not to “harm” vulnerable populations; to keep “dangerous” ideas and “misinformation” advocated by Bad People from being heard or read. They believe that a right to self-defense is “immoral” because the tools of self-defense can be used to kill. They also believe, as we have seen in recent weeks, that it is “moral” to allow the mass killing of the unborn, because otherwise women are hindered in their opportunities and life choices by “unfair” biology. Most conservatives view those positions as opposition to American values.

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Sunday Ethics Picnic Ants, 7/17/22: Why We Can’t Have Nice Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Let me just say  it really annoys me that I still tear up every time I watch “E.T,” especially when Spielberg stoops to that icky rainbow trail for the spaceship at the end…

And what has happened to Disneyland is also worth choking up over. Walt’s culture-changing theme park opened on this date in 1955. After years of growing up with Walt, the “Disneyland” TV show, the “Mickey Mouse Club,” and the “Wonderful World of Color,” I looked forward to finally visiting the “happiest place on Earth” like Christmas morning, but as a college sophomore, I was certain that the reality would be a let down. But it wasn’t! Disneyland was every bit as magical as I imagined, and the full day I spent at the park was just about perfect. Today, that’s impossible, because Disney’s successors have allowed political and social agendas to make a carefree, innocent visit impossible.

1. Tucker Carlson’s unethical accusation. Last night, Fox News’ habitually unreliable star made the following claim:

“How did he manage to get through the campaign? Well, it turned out, we learned later his staff, supervised by Dr. Jill, his wife, was giving him pills before every public appearance–checking the time and at a certain hour giving him a dose of something. Now it’s not a guess, we’re not making that up. We’ve spoken directly to someone who was there and saw it happen multiple times. Now, before taking the medications this person said, Biden was quote ‘Like a small child. You could not communicate with him, he changed completely because he was on drugs and he clearly still is on drugs.’ Someone’s pushing, we don’t know what those drugs are. We should know.”

Making an allegation like that on television without citing a source or evidence is indefensible, but that’s how Tucker rolls. He should “put up” or apologize, and quick. Continue reading →

Another Nomination For The Double Standards And Hypocrisy Hall of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The nomination isn’t for the actress above, exactly, but for the progressive, race-obsessed, anti-white Hollywood culture that she is part of. That’s Ana de Armas, and she’s Cuban, not that there’s anything wrong with that. She’s been cast as Marilyn Monroe in a new Netflix movie, not that there should be anything wrong with that, either.

“I do want to play Latina. But I don’t want to put a basket of fruit on my head every single time,” she told the media. “So that’s my hope, that I can show that we can do anything if we’re given the time to prepare, and if we’re given just the chance, just the chance,’ she added. ‘You can do any film — Blonde — you can do anything.”

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Comment Of The Day On The Unethical Political Squeeze On Non-Profits And Foundations [Open Forum]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Veteran commenter Humble Talent contributed a needed post on an important issue that Ethics Alarms has negligently ignored: the efforts by ideologically drive governments to control the charitable activities of non-profit organizations. The phenomenon extends well beyond the aspect HT discusses: I encountered it with my non-profit theater company. We stubbornly refused to allow grant money to determine our artistic choices, but most theaters were not so resolute. Companies that choose trendy progressive ideology-advancing plays and that cast according to thinly disguised minority group quotas get the money, and letting money drive are leads to bad art: it’s one of many reasons I decided to close the American Century Theater’s doors.

Humble’s Comment of the Day, from this Open Forum, is a cautionary tale. Here it is:

***

I’m on the board of a Community Foundation associated with The Community Foundations of Canada (CFC). The CFC recently had a change in leadership after a wave of retirements, and the new leadership is, not to put too fine a point on it, insufferably woke. Every meeting is predicated by a litany of talk about personal privilege and land declarations. Every new initiative includes language about anti-racism or the importance of DIE. It’s creating issues.

Community foundations operate endowment funds. We take in dollars from our donors, invest them wisely, steward the money, and disburse the proceeds net our expenses into our community. We are non-profits, so we’re tax exempt, and that’s wonderful, but it comes with some requirements: Regardless of how well the market does, we are required by law to disburse at least 3.5% of our funds back into the market on an annual basis. That’s referred to as the “Disbursement Quota” or DQ. We’ve always done better than that. Our positions are public, and we disburse on average 4.5% going back to the community (it varies a little) and budget a .75% management fee for overhead (mostly staff), which we’re never over. Depending on by how much we beat budget, we treat the difference as a kind of emergency fund for out-of-cycle disbursements (we recently hired a translator for the middle school from that pool). We fund investments to the local hospital, the schools, the golf course, the local theatre, the museum, kids sports, social groups, the Salvation Army… The list goes on. In an average year we’ll have maybe 50 requests and depending on the specific asks and our capacity, about 2/3 of them will get at least partially funded.

This, we are told, is not enough. We are hoarding treasure, we are told. We are underserving our communities, we are told. Regardless of how the donors directed their funds, we should ignore their wishes and find some brown people to give money to, we are told… Perhaps not so directly, but I shit you not, that’s the spirit of that has been said. Last year, the government of Canada bandied the idea about of raising the DQ from 3.5% to 5%, or even 10%. In response, the CFC, who is supposed to represent us, said: “Yes please Mr. Government, please pillage our funds. Please fund your short term political aspirations out of our funds and destroy what community-minded people have spent a lifetime building.”

I kid, of course, they didn’t say that. What they said was, and I quote:

“The disbursement quota was created to make sure charities were moving resources to address societal needs. Many conversations around the disbursement quota have been debating percentages. Should it be 3.5%? 5%? 10%?

These conversations tend to be reductive and risk being a distraction at a moment when the federal government can play a critical role in better enabling philanthropic organizations to meet the needs of their communities now and into the future.” Continue reading →

Even More Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid! WaPo Publishes A Peak Stupid Op-Ed, Then Censors Readers Who Say It’s Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I really do wonder at what point the vast majority of Americans who have not become irreversibly deranged by the confluence of the Trump Freakout, the George Floyd Freakout, the Trans Freakout ,the Wuhan Virus Freakout and the Roe Reversal Freakout sharply slap their foreheads “I could have had a V8!” style and ask, “Why are we letting these unstable, untrustworthy people dominate our discourse and manipulate our culture?”

For the provocation keep escalating. The Washington Post’s editors actually thought that a Poe’s Law evoking piece headlined “My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it” was worthy of publication. In an orgy of narcissism, U.S. history-hatred and virtue-signalling, a writer named Bayard Woods saluted his ridiculous habit of crossing out his own name, which he says, “had stood as a Confederate monument over every story I had ever written.” See, the Bayards and the Woodses had owned slaves. By this brilliant logic, I should cross out my name too, since Chief Justice John Marshall was a slaveholder and “Jack” honors Jack the Ripper.

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Saturday Afternoon Ethics Amusements, 7/16/2022: The Snotty Professor, Don Lemon’s Defiance, Obama Being Obama…Plus Dog Name Games

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Speaking of amusements…the big sports news in my neck of the swamp is that the Washington Nationals have announced that they will be seeking to trade Juan Soto, their 23 year-old superstar. Why? Well, Soto is a free agent after the 2024 season, and if teams with young stars want to avoid the free agency auction uncertainty, they need to sign them up to long-term contracts before the Sirens start singing. The offer to Soto was for a guaranteed 15 years, at $440 million for the package. Soto is one of the three or four top talents in the game. A franchise that can’t hold on to such a cornerstone has to ask itself whether it has any business selling tickets. The Nats are arguably the worst team in the National League after last season’s tear-down that saw them trading every other good player except Soto. Washington’s baseball fan support is tenuous: it has lost two previous teams after the fan base got disgusted. This isn’t Boston, LA, New York, St. Louis, Chicago or Philadelphia, whose fans will keep coming to games no matter what. On the other side of the fairness issue, many will ask how a contract for nearly a half-billion dollars isn’t enough for a 23-year old. It could be mad greed; it could be the fact that his agent is Scott Boras, who routinely seeks the highest imaginable payday among for his clients regardless of other less green considerations because it means the most money for him, and it could be that Soto doesn’t feel like ending up as Mike Trout has, playing out a long contract with a team (the Angels in Trout’s case) that is perpetually lousy. Moreover, the Nats offer, while the largest in MLB history in total cash, would only give Soto one of the top 15 current contracts in yearly salary. It’s only for about $29 million a year.

Only.

1. On more high-falutin’ matters…Social Psychology Quarterly has a much praised (by its rarefied readers) study out called “When a Name Gives You Pause: Racialized Names and Time to Adoption in a County Dog Shelter.” It is another academic effort to show how racist America is. The thesis: dogs with names identified with white culture are adopted more quickly than dogs with names with connections to black or Hispanic culture. Of course the study claims that the research proves the thesis. Continue reading →

Icky Or Unethical? Alexa Is Learning A New Trick

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

From Ars Technica:

Amazon is figuring out how to make its Alexa voice assistant deepfake the voice of anyone, dead or alive, with just a short recording. The company demoed the feature at its re:Mars conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, using the emotional trauma of the ongoing pandemic and grief to sell interest.

Amazon’s re:Mars focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and other emerging technologies, with technical experts and industry leaders taking the stage. During the second-day keynote, Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist of Alexa AI at Amazon, showed off a feature being developed for Alexa.

After noting the large amount of lives lost during the pandemic, Prasad played a video demo, where a child asks Alexa, “Can grandma finish reading me Wizard of Oz?” Alexa responds, “Okay,” in her typical effeminate, robotic voice. But next, the voice of the child’s grandma comes out of the speaker to read L. Frank Baum’s tale.

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