apathy

Of Black Lungs and Concussions: How Can An Ethical Person Be A Football Fan?

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments
So now you know. And,,,?

So now you know. And…?

The worst thing about pro football is not its wife-beating, gun-toting, child-beating players, or that the league happily has been willing to ignore these little flaws while promoting such flawed men as heroes to America’s young. Nor is the worst thing about pro football the fact that one of its teams has a politically incorrect nickname. No, the worst thing about pro football is that it makes billions from inducing young men to cripple their cognition long before nature would even consider doing it to them, and corrupts its huge national audience by inducing it to not only cheer this process, but pay for it.

Sally Jenkins, in a frank, stark column for the Washington Post, compared the NFL to the coal industry of yore, when minors were dying of black lung and terrible working conditions, and the government had to step in:

Since the NFL insists on behaving like the coal industry circa 1969, the only solution to its problems is for Congress to step in and regulate the business of these 32 billionaire plunderers. This week, the Department of Veterans Affairs brain bank announced that 76 out of 79 deceased NFL players had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease. The price for owning a team just went up. Jerry Jones, Bob Kraft, Dan Snyder, Steve Bisciotti and all the rest, if you want to enrich yourselves at the expense of the ravaged health of others, be prepared to pay for it. Your future is endless litigation and government interference.

The CTE thunderbolt follows closely on the league’s callous handling of domestic violence cases. A new raft of medical investigations and lawsuits say that CTE caused some of these devastating domestic explosions, such as Jovan Belcher’s 2013 murder-suicide. CTE leads to aggression, paranoia, impaired judgment and depression….Here’s the deal: Concussions are the black lung of the NFL. And the league knows it.

Sure it does, but my problem is, so do its fans. The nation needed coal, still needs it in fact, so regulating that industry was reasonable, imperative, and practical. The country doesn’t need to have a deadly sport to watch every Sunday (Thursday, Monday…). Once it could claim that it was innocent, that helmeted players were protected, and that the tragically crippled were aberrations. Not any more. Continue reading →

The Blackstone Horror And The Duty To Care

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
"You know your house is really messy when..."

“You know your house is really messy when…”

We have been discussing, of late, the ethical duty of strangers to intervene when they get the sense that something may not be right and an individual, especially a child, may be at risk of harm. Doing this involves its own risk: being wrong. Causing embarrassment to yourself and others. Being accused of being racist, or a busybody, or a meddler.

This is what can happen when no body cares enough to take that risk.

I am in Rhode Island, having come from Boston, where a nightmarish story is obsessing the radio talk shows:

Police were setting the record straight as to how many times they’ve responded over the years to the Blackstone, Massachusetts, house of squalor, where three dead infants were discovered among piles of trash, dead animals, feces and vermin last week, as clean-up at the condemned house finally finished up Tuesday.Four children who lived in the house – a 5-month-old baby, a 3-year-old toddler, a 10-year-old boy and 13-year-old girl – have all since been removed by Massachusetts Department of Children and Families.

Their mother, 31-year-old Erika Murray, is behind bars. She’s pleaded not guilty to charges of child endangerment and fetal death concealment. Her boyfriend, and alleged father of the children, Raymond Rivera, claims he stayed in the basement. He’s only been charged with marijuana offenses at this point.

I’ll have plenty of links at the end so you can read the details of this disgusting story, if you have the stomach for it. Obviously it’s not ethical to have your children living in a home with dirty diapers are piled two feet high and dead pets are stuffed in corners. Obviously it’s not ethical to father kids, live in the basement, and ignore the squalor your children are being raised in. Obviously the parents in this case are mentally ill, or approaching evil. From the perspective of this blog, the parents’ conduct has nothing to teach anyone who isn’t demented. I am interested in the neighbors’ conduct, or rather their lack of it. Continue reading →

Unethical Website Of The Month: OKCupid…The First Corporate Fick!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

cupid5af

The ignominy of mere Ethics Dunce status is too good for OKCupid CEO Christian Rudder and his online dating service, and Unethical Website of the Month doesn’t do it justice either. The online dating website has revealed itself as an ethics outlaw, and a smug one. It is lying to its customers,  toying with the lives of vulnerable people who trust it, and doesn’t see anything wrong with its conduct.

That qualifies OKCupid as a Corporate Fick, the first ever so-identified here. As stated in the blog glossary of terms and concepts, a fick is someone who openly and blatantly violates social norms of responsibility, honesty or fairness without shame or remorse. That description fits OKCupid to a fare-thee-well.

In case you missed the story, the website revealed—proudly, in fact—that it intentionally set up users with bad dates, or mismatched by its own compatibility formulas, to see how people would behave. The uproar over Facebook’s undisclosed manipulation of users’ moods prompted the disclosure.Facebook’s experiment violated research ethics standards, and the company was misrepresenting both law and ethics when it claimed that they had Facebook user’s consent to use them as cyber lab rats. That was bad. This is infinitely worse. Continue reading →

Ethics Strike Three And Four Against Facebook In Its Creepy Mood Manipulation Study

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Facebook is so out.

"Meh. Look at this neat picture of my dog!"

“Meh. Look at this neat picture of my dog!”

Ethics Strike One was the research itself, using its own, trusting users as guinea pigs in a mad scientist experiment to determine whether their moods could be manipulated by secretly managing the kind of posts they read from Facebook friends.

Ethics Strike Two was the lack of its subjects informed consent for the study, violating the basic standards of human subject research. A boilerplate user agreement that makes a vague reference to using data for “research” in no way meets the requirements of informed consent for this kind of study.

This brings us to Ethics Strike Three.  In justifying the legality and ethics of the research, Facebook’s researchers explained that leave to perform such experiments was consistent with the user agreement (See Strike Two):  “[the experiment] was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.” As I pointed out above and in my previous post on this topic, this isn’t informed consent as the research field and various ethics codes define it. But even if it was, this statement is a lie. Continue reading →

Five Ethics Observations On House Majority Leader Eric Canter’s Upset Primary Loss

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

CantorYesterday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost the GOP primary in Virginia’s 7th District to virtually unknown economics professor Dave Brat, conservative hard-liner who was backed by the Tea Party wing of the Virginia Republican Party, and the some influential voices on local conservative talk radio. You can get political analysis, though precious little of it objective, almost anywhere you look. Here are some ethics observations:

1. The turnout for the primary was less than 15%. Here is what that means: citizens who give a damn get their way. That is as it should be. An eligible voter who can watch the mess in our national government and sit out any opportunity to make his or her voice heard and vote count is a lazy and irresponsible citizen. This means that in the Virgina 7th District, more than 8 out of 10 voters are lazy and irresponsible. To them I say: I don’t care what you think. You have shirked the sacred responsibility of self-government. Go find a king somewhere. You don’t understand or appreciate democracy, and you don’t deserve one. Continue reading →

Hope Lives! D.C. Votes For Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
Time for a new fish head in the District of Columbia.

Time for a new fish head in the District of Columbia.

A continuing battle on Ethics Alarms, one that bursts into flame when elections loom, is whether it is responsible to vote for an unethical candidate for office because he or she supports policies the voter favors. I resolutely vote “no” on that proposition, believing that in the long run, government and society are better served by plodding but trustworthy public servants than wily and corrupt ones. The ideal, of course, is to find candidates who are competent, trustworthy, dedicated and who pursue effective policies. Good luck.

Few cities have embraced the opposite of the Ethics Alarms approach more consistently than the District of Columbia. The nation’s most liberal region has traditionally chosen to ignore corrupt city officials, and has paid a high price. A culture of corruption has been festering in the District for decades, spear-headed by the smug, machine-politics reign of Marion Barry, elected both before and after a prison sentence for possessing crack (in the midst of an anti-drug campaign for schoolchildren, naturally). Barry still pollutes D.C. government as a city councilman, but his legacy is complete: the whole government is an ethics sewer.

In 2013, more than thirty D.C. employees were arrested, indicted, pleaded guilty or were sent to jail from  such diverse cesspools as the D.C. Department of Employment Services, the Department of Human Services, the Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp., a city-owned hospital, the Office of Campaign Finance, D.C. Medicaid, the Corrections Department, a charter school and Medicare. The tally of money embezzled, accepted in bribes, defrauded or spent on illegal political campaign contributions was about $19 million. Former D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. pleaded guilty to stealing $350,000 in taxpayer money meant to benefit children. Former council chairman Kwame Brown pleaded guilty to a felony bank fraud charge; and former council member Michael A. Brown confessed to an illegal bribery scheme. Colbert King, the Washington Post’s city beat columnist who tirelessly urges the city to clean up its act cataloged the extent of D.C.’s corruption last year. He pointed out:

Continue reading →

50 Years After Kitty Genovese, Inhumans On A Bus

/ Jack Marshall / 67 Comments

The title describes the public transit riders who watched this disturbing scene unfold on a Philadelphia bus, and did nothing:

2014 is the 50th anniversary of the infamous Kitty Genovese case, and dueling books on the incident either recount the accepted version that 38 people in an apartment building heard the 28 year-old woman’s screams as she was being stabbed to death but “didn’t want to be involved” and let her die, or adopt the revisionist theory that the apathy of bystanders was unfairly and inaccurately hyped by the news media. The incident on the Philadelphia bus tells me that the revisionists have a burden of proof that will be hard to meet. There was plenty of evidence already, like here, or here, or here, or here, or more recently here, that Kitty Genovese might not fare any better today. Continue reading →

Reagan Building Security Follies: We Are Incompetent Too.

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Ronald_Reagan_Building_-_Washington,_DC

Once a month I give an ethics seminar at the Reagan building in Washington D.C. This is a massive, confusing, and absurdly expensive government edifice that serves as a center for events, conferences and exhibits, also houses some agencies. Any terrorist who got inside with out a map and a Segue would rsik wandering around lost for a week, but there are also usually elected officials, judges or VIPs in the vast expanse,  along with a Boy Scout troop or two.

Usually I am dropped off, and go in through a main entrance off of 14th Street. So I have to go through a metal detector, have my brief case x-rayed, and, for extra measure, get wanded, because my metal hip joint sets off the alarm. (50% of the time, I may add, the process is executed by surly, rude security officers.)

Yesterday, though, I drove myself into the city. The security officers stopped my car at the garage entrance, asked for ID, and checked my car’s trunk (not the back seat), and allowed me to park. Then I took the elevator to the floor where my lecture venue was, and proceeded to the seminar, where I easily slaughtered all 320 people in the room by detonating the bomb under my suit. OK, that’s not true. But it could have been.Nobody checked my brief case: the bomb could have been there too. There is no screening if you drive into the garage, beyond the trunk search. This has been the system for years, and both Bush administration and Obama administration officials must have been made aware of it years ago. Either the ritual at the front entrance is for show, wasting our time and submitting us to indignities for reasons of public perception only, or the lax security at the parking garage is a blatant and dangerous security flaw that should have been fixed. Continue reading →

Déjà Vu: In D.C., It’s The Brooklyn EMTs All Over Again. How Can This Happen Even Once?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
"Hey, I'm ready! Just go through the proper channels, and I'm On it! You can count on me!"

“Hey, I’m ready! Just go through the proper channels, and I’m On it! You can count on me!”

I guess it’s a sign of longevity that some ethics stories are recurring so exactly that I can handle them with previous posts. I never wanted to see this one repeat, however.

In 2004, two EMT’s let a pregnant woman die in front of them without offering aid, because they were on a break and wouldn’t abandon their coffee and bagels to save a mother and her unborn child. (They were suspended and yet kept their jobs.) Over the weekend, in Washington, D.C., a 77-year-old man, Medric Cecil Mills, collapsed across the street from a fire station. The man’s daughter ran across the street to seek help, and the firefighter she spoke to explained that he couldn’t respond until being dispatched and instructed her to call 911. The man died.

[A black humor note: when 911 was called and a rescue vehicle dispatched, it went to the wrong address.] Continue reading →

New Year, New Rationalizations! Meet #38-40: “The Pioneer’s Lament,” “The Desperation Dodge,” And “The Evasive Tautology”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

rationalizations 38-40

Let’s begin the new year with some additions to The Rationalizations List, shall we? Remember, any time you detect thoughts that echo these (or any of their 37 companions on the current Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List) you are either lying to yourself to justify unethical conduct, or adapting unethical reasoning habits that will lead you astray sooner or later.

38. The Pioneer’s Lament, or “Why should I be the first?”  Continue reading →