Why does Ethics Alarms rate Professor Goodwin an Ethics Villain rather than the more common, and usually forgivable, status of Ethics Dunce? It is because in her op-ed for the New York Times,“I Was Raped by My Father. An Abortion Saved My Life,” she deliberately misrepresents the law and ethics of the abortion issue while using her status as a law professor to mislead readers. She also presents an argument that is purely an appeal to emotion, though as a scholar and teacher she is professionally obligated not to advance a position without basing it in reason and fact.
There is nothing unethical or inappropriate about Goodwin advancing a pro-abortion position if she does so honestly. She is obviously committed on the issue as the founding director of the U.C.I. Law Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and its Reproductive Justice Initiative, and the author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.” Terrific: make your case, Professor! I have an open mind; I look forward to reading it. You obviously have the skill, background, experience and erudition to be enlightening and persuasive on the topic.
But Goodwin doesn’t make a legal case, an ethical case, a moral case or even a logical one in her op-ed. Doing any of those require acknowledging counter arguments and rebutting them with facts and analysis. Instead, her essay goes straight for the heartstrings and viscera, bypassing the brain entirely.
Goodwin was raped by her father when she was 12, you see. How horrible. She courts our sympathy, and, not inappropriately, receives it. However, she never makes the case that a young woman’s (or girl’s) misfortunes, however severe, justify taking the life of another human being.
Marcus Lamb, the evangelical founder of the Texas-based Christian television network Daystar, died on November 30. In an example of extreme cosmic irony/justice/retribution/satire, the cause was a virulent case of infection from the Wuhan virus. The previously healthy (though he had diabetes) 64-year-old was unvaccinated, and indeed was a vocal antivaxxer. Lamb, his wife (they were a Jim and Tammy-style team) and other Daystar broadcasters have been opposing the pandemic vaccines, presumably influencing many of the more than 108 million households the network reaches via cable TV providers to do likelwise On May 10, for example, the Lambs claimed that the vaccines “killed your immune system.”
“We want to warn you, we want to help you, we want to give you an alternative,” Lamb said. The alternatives he recommended were ivermectin, budesonide and hydroxychloroquine, all drugs that have not been proven to be effective or safe in the treatment of the virus, and, naturally, prayer.
Well, as Old Lodgeskins memorably says in “Little Big Man,” “Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
The previous open forum, in the midst of Thanksgiving weekend, was a bit of a dud (though EA applauds those intrepid, dieting readers who posted), so I’m hoping for a rebound. This is especially true because I’m swamped all of a sudden with more ethics stories than I can cover with the thoroughness they deserve. And this morning’s paper added to the crisis with six new issues or revealed angles on old ones that need coverage.
Yes, December 2 is the day Enron, one of the great corporate scams of all time, declared bankruptcy. On this date in 2001, the saga of the Enron Corporation began to unfold, and what an ugly story it was.
Formed in 1985 as the merger of two gas companies, Enron prospered under chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay to rise as high as number seven on Fortune’s Top 500 U.S. companies. By 2000, the company was employing 21,000 people and claimed revenue of $111 billion. But rumors of shady dealings caused Enron’s stock price to plummet, and by November 30, 2001, it was worth 26 cents a share. Lay sold off his Enron stock, while encouraging Enron employees to buy more shares, ssuring them that the company was on the rebound. Nice. Employees’ retirement savings accounts were wiped out, and by the end of the year, Enron’s collapse had cost investors billions of dollars, put 5,600 out of and rendered almost $2.1 billion in pension plans worthless.
Somewhere in my office I have a copy of an Enron employee ethics handbook with a touching introduction by Ken Lay about the company’s commitment to integrity, honesty, and transparency.
1. Bye! I was just in Shirlington Center in Arlington faced with time to kill as a service station fixed a tire. I was about to wander into a new establishment called “Damn Good Burgers,” but there was a prominent “Black Lives Matter” sticker on the door, so I went elsewhere. I don’t care about the politics of businesses or their owners, as long as they deliver what they advertise at reasonably good quality and prices. But if they require me to tacitly endorse a racist, violent, anti-American movement led by Marxists, they can bite me. If your business is going to engage in cheap virtue signaling, it better be actual virtue.
2.’This is the tragedy of Woke Hysteria. Won’t you help with a tax deductible to help people like this?‘ “The Ethicist” (in the New York Times Magazine) got a tortured inquiry from a young woman called “Name Withheld By Request.”
When my father died, I inherited a large trust fund and sole ownership of a family business. I was young and woefully unprepared, so I put my inheritance on the back burner and lived my life as if I was financially “normal.” However, since the pandemic, my portfolio has hit a new high. I am utterly distraught. I feel that I should have never gotten so wealthy when people are suffering so much.
I’ve been seriously considering giving a large portion away, but the more I talk to people, the more I realize that to give away large sums of money responsibly and ethically turns my life into a job that I never wanted. I don’t want my father’s money to become my life, my career or the most significant thing about me, even though I know that I benefit from it. I have privileges with it, it gives me options and frankly I could not afford to live in a big city without it.
My questions are these: How much money is it ethical to keep, and how much would it be ethical to give away? What is the best way to decide who should receive the money? And how much time and responsibility and rewriting of my life do I owe this gift that often feels like a burden?
I’m still working on the Ethics Alarms prescription for an ethical national policy regarding abortion. The briefs and oral arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case now before the U.S. Supreme Court are useful, but I received a special assist this morning from Times columnist Ross Douthat, who presented a full page, marvelously thorough and ethically spot-on analysis of the issue in an essay titled, “The Case Against Abortion.”
I wish I had written it, but I am grateful that he did. He deserves to have it read thoroughly by all, but some especially apt sections shout out for special mention:
“At the core of our legal system, you will find a promise that human beings should be protected from lethal violence. That promise is made in different ways by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; it’s there in English common law, the Ten Commandments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We dispute how the promise should be enforced, what penalties should be involved if it is broken and what crimes might deprive someone of the right to life. But the existence of the basic right, and a fundamental duty not to kill, is pretty close to bedrock.
“There is no way to seriously deny that abortion is a form of killing.”
And that must be the starting point for any policy debate.
Extradimensional Cephalopod, as is his (it’s?) wont, chose to approach the question of what to call the pandemic virus (I am unalterably devoted to calling it what it is, as a deadly pathogen that developed in China and allowed to infect the world BY China “the Wuhan virus” in order to ensure that accountability, blame, and, if possible, liability attaches now and forever) by seeking an ethical process that has applications in other contexts. Below is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Is It Too Late To Call It “The Wuhan Virus” Or Better Yet, “The China Virus”?
Recent news has reinforced the unavoidable conclusion that China is a corrupting influence on the world and it culture. Disney, which like so many, indeed most—all?—major corporations has no ethical principles it is willing to lose profits from hewing to if at all possible, censored an episode of “The Simpsons” that satirized the nation and its government. Disney eliminated the episode from the package it sold to Chinese media. Let’s be clear: this means that Disney is assisting China in government censorship of creative expression arising in Disney’s own nation, and also assisting China’s totalitarians in controlling the minds of its population. I regard the “Covid” cover word being used to avoid connecting this regime with the disaster its habits created to be a similar form of complicity.
Now here’s “the Squid”: I’ll be back ever so briefly when he’s finished:
Chris’s scandal may be more embarrassing, but Andrew’s latest problem may be more expensive.
In July 2020, then-New York Governor Cuomo, riding high in the public eye, asked the state ethics panel for permission to write a book about his leadership during the pandemic.
I must interject here that such books are virtually always unethical, often in multiple ways. I say “virtually” because there really may be some instance, buried deeply in the sands of time, when a book written while a popular elected official (or a First Lady) was in office and published with that official’s name as the author was really written by the official in his or her spare time, wasn’t just a government-funded campaign and propaganda tool, and also didn’t provide a way for supporters both individual and corporate to launder contributions. Maybe, but I doubt it.
For one thing, if an elected official spends any time at all writing a book during his or her work day, he or she is getting paid by taxpayers to do work that primarily benefits the official. Books are hard. Books take time. Trust me on this, I’ve co-written one, and would have five more (I have the titles and outlines!) out there if I could get out of my own way. But my time is my own: I don’t bill clients for writing this blog, and any time I spend writing a book is time I don’t get paid for. Governors, like Presidents, are paid to be on-duty every waking hour.
Yikes. There are several items below—in fact, all of them— that I would like to devote whole posts to, but far more in my In-Box that I have to devote whole posts to. For some reason, the ethics issues dam has burst in the last few days.
1. There should be no controversy over this: it is wrong, unfair, and absurd for Lia, formerly “Will,” Thomas to compete as a female swimmer in collegiate competitions. Here is the transitioned, now female, former University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swim team star (for three years). His “after” photo is on the left. Oddly, his various treatments and operations have left him a better swimmer as a side effect! Well, that’s not quite right, but she’s dominating the women’s meets, as against Columbia University last month when she won a pair of gold medals in the 200 free and 100 free with margins of 5.4 seconds and 1.3 seconds.
That photo on the left is virtually the only shot of Lia now: I can’t find any full body shots since she transitioned into a championship competitor. Hmmmmm...
If female swimmers who haven’t had the boost of going through male puberty don’t have the guts to protest this, then they deserve what happens. That goes for the female athletes in every other sport as well, and their parents, and their coaches, and the feminist weenies who are allowing women’s sports to be destroyed by their unwillingness to appear “unwoke.”
No question, excluding trans, ex-males from gender-segregated sporting events is a hardship for the new women. I’m sympathetic. I am. But it makes no sense ethically or logically to allow the special problems of a tiny minority to harm the vast majority of female athletes.
Ethics Alarms has honored some unlikely people as Ethics Heroes—Bill Clinton, Bill Maher, and Terry McAuliffe, for example. Twitter nabbing the distinction may be a record for cognitive dissonance, though. It is an unethical company, with a platform that does more damage than good. And yet…
Twitter announced that it was expanding its private information policy to forbid posting the ” media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.“
Good.
Not that this policy is remotely possible to enforce; it isn’t. “When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it,” Twitter explains. “This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.”
Yes, the policy goes well beyond any legal restrictions: that’s what makes it ethical rather than compliant. What is ethically admirable about the rule is that it calls attention to an ethical violation so common that few think it is a violation at all. When I allow a friend to take a photo of me, that is consent for that friend to make and have a copy of my likeness. It is not consent for my likeness to be circulated to the world on social media, included in facial recognition databases, be manipulated digitally to embarrass or humiliate me, or any other purpose. No law will help me claim that I did not consent to circulation of my likeness, which is why Naked Teachers have a problem. The law assumes that such use can and should be anticipated when I let myself be photographed. That, however, is a legal fiction. I have seen, online, photos of me when I wasn’t aware that I was in the picture. I hate photos of me.
There is going to be a new film version of “West Side Story,” apparently to have one that doesn’t involve casting Russian-Americans (Natalie Wood) and Greek-Americans (George Chakiris) as Puerto Ricans. Of course, it’s OK for a white character to undergo a gender and nationality change because shut-up. This is, I believe, a doomed project, much as the remakes of “Ben-Hur” and “The Ten Commandments” were doomed. Remaking a film that won ten Oscars is a fool’s errand. So is making any movie musical in an era when the genre is seen as silly and nerdy by a large proportion of the movie-going audience, especially one that requires watching ballet-dancing street gangs without giggling. Steven Spielberg, who accepted this challenge, must have lost his mind.
Ah, but apparently wokeness, not art or profit, is the main goal.
I am so glad that, based partially on this, I turned down an invitation to do a lecture right about now for the Smithsonian on the evolution of “West Side Story” through the years. For here comes the news that Stephen Spielberg, who has never directed a musical in his life on stage or screen, has completed his “improved” version with this considerate feature:
[T]o lend the movie an extra touch of authenticity, Spielberg, and screenwriter Tony Kushner, made the choice not to subtitle any of the Spanish dialogue that’s regularly heard throughout the film. Instead, multiple scenes in West Side Story take place entirely in Spanish — or with a pronounced mixture of English and Spanish — and there’s no onscreen text to fill in the gaps for non-Spanish speaking viewers.
“Extra touch of authenticity”?!! Characters are singing their feelings in the film! I assume that, as in the first film version, they are also doing ballet in the streets. Musicals have no “authenticity.” But aside from that asinine statement from Yahoo! reporter Ethan Alter, the decision to frustrate non-Spanish speaking audience members by making dialogue from the book incomprehensible cannot be defended logically or artistically. What is the objection to sub-titles? It is not only beneficial to the movie to make certain all of the audience knows what’s being said, it is basic courtesy to the original author of the book (Arthur Laurents). What is the objective of this choice?
Divisiveness and to stick it to English-speaking Americans, it seems.
Here’s one contemptuous tweeter: “Steven Spielberg a king for not including subtitles in the Spanish dialogue for his West Side Story…very bold and non-compromising. Make these losers try and decipher what the boricuas are saying along with the rest of the Latinx.” Here’s another: “”Much to love about the new West Side Story, but Steven Spielberg’s deliberate choice not to subtitle any Spanish dialogue was his most brilliant decision. Cops and Jets gang members screaming, “speak English!” The real-world parallels to the American experience of today run deep.”
One choose not to speak English, or not to learn to speak it intelligibly. And then has chosen not to be hired for any job requiring clear and effective communication with the majority of Americans. “Speak English”? Damn right. If the new film’s objective is to discredit that basic obligation of citizenship, it doesn’t just deserve to fail, it deserves to be condemned.
Yet another tweet: “Also I like there are not subtitles when they spoke Spanish. The back and fourth between English and Spanish was so familiar ( in my house Portuguese) but you get the idea. That’s how it should be.”
