[TV is full of reruns these days, and sometimes I am grateful for them, for it gives me a chance to see episodes of favorite shows I had missed for some reason or another. Back in early March, I posted the following essay about the origins of America’s current crisis of trust in our government, and how it might be cured by our elected leaders. Since then, the crisis has deepened, and as I was doing some routine site maintenance, I reread the post. It is still very timely (unfortunately), and since far fewer people were visiting Ethics Alarms in March, I decided to re-post it today, with just a few minor edits. I promise not to make this a habit. Still, trust is the reason why ethics is so important in America: if there is a single post of the more than 700 I have written here since October 2009 that I would like people to read, this is it.] Continue reading
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Worst Ethics Question of the Week
“Would it be unethical or offensive to get a bunch of fake teeth, paint it to resemble fake gold, and mail it off to “Cash 4 Gold” or other places similar to it and include a card that says “Do you guys take Nazi gold?” to get back at them for all their advertisements?”
(Yes.)
Loyalty and Trust: The Difference Between Generals and Pirogies
I don’t know how you could have missed it, but General McChrystal’s wasn’t the only high-profile firing of an employee for criticizing his superiors. Andrew Kurtz, a young man paid by the Pittsburgh Pirates to put on a giant pirogie suit and compete in The Great Pirogie Race around Pittsburgh’s PNC park in the fifth inning of home games, broke the cardinal rule of employee loyalty by disparaging the team in a post on his blog. The Pirates, who understandably refused to countenance a disloyal pirogie, fired Kurtz and turned his job over to one of the 17 other part-timers who get a $25 check each time they masquerade as a walking, semi-circular, boiled turnover made of unleavened dough. Continue reading
Web Ethics, Due Diligence, and the Happy Maxi-Pad
There is no denying it any more. It is per se unethical to pass along information discovered on the web to anyone, much less to put it on a blog or in an e-mail, until you have performed due diligence and determined with reasonable certainty that it is accurate and true.
All the more reason, then, to praise the Snopes “urban legends” website, which does a superb job tracking down and clarifying web hoaxes, rumors and other misinformation. A lot of the latter isn’t even intentional, but the consequences of not checking the facts can still be significant and harmful,
I thought about this after encountering an amusing bit of web lore that many of you may have already seen, on aan old blog post that introduced the piece like this: Continue reading
Ethics Dunces: Prof. Peter Tague and Chief Justice John Roberts
In today’s world of text-messaging, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, intentionally throwing a rumor into a crowded room is only marginally better than falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowed theater. Thus Ethics Alarms regretfully has to pronounce Georgetown Law Center professor Peter Tague’s puckish stunt of last week irresponsible and unethical.
Demonstrating how unreliable it was to accept media accounts from un-named sources, Prof. Tague told his first year law class that he had learned from a “reliable source” that Chief Justice John Roberts was about to announce his retirement. Some nimble-fingered Twitter-user (or many) promptly sent the rumor into cyberspace, where it rapidly found its way onto scoop-hungry websites, especially those made giddy by the prospect of President Obama having the chance to replace one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative judges with a progressive one. By the time Tague announced to the class that his “scoop” was a fraud, just thirty minutes later, the fake story was multiplying like a virus. Continue reading
From Tweet to Blog to Lie: Palin’s Laughs
Sadly, this is how the web works.
Sarah Palin was guest on Jay Leno’s return to NBC’s “Tonight Show,” and inexplicably did something of a stand-up comic routine. One of the audience members was a non-admirer of Palin named Michael Stinson, who didn’t think she was funny. After the taping he sent out a “tweet” on his Twitter account that read, “Listen for me laughing, no one else is.” Stinson says he was shocked when he saw the broadcast, as Palin’s jokes seemed to be getting big laughs. He sent out another Tweet that read, “I know sound. And it’s my opinion that audio portions of Sarah Palin’s March 2nd appearance on Jay Leno’s Tonight show were added or amplified, edited before broadcast to make it appear that Sarah Palin was more welcome than she was.” Continue reading
Essay: Ending the Bi-Partisan Effort to Destroy Trust in America
Both the Pentagon shooter and the Texas I.R.S. attacker were motivated by a virulent distrust of the U.S. government, the distrust mutating into desperation and violence with the assistance of personal problems and emotional instability. We would be foolish, however, to dismiss the two as mere “wingnuts,” the current term of choice to describe political extremists who have gone around the bend. They are a vivid warning of America’s future, for the media, partisan commentators, the two political parties and our elected officials are doing their worst to convert all of us into wingnuts, and the results could be even more disastrous than the fanciful horrors the Left and the Right tell us that the other has planned for us. Continue reading
Correction: S.C. Law Still Ridiculous, But Not Brilliant
It appears that South Carolina’s mandated registration of “subversive agents” is far from new, as erroneously reported here. The law dates from 1951—when Joe McCarthy was in full flower—so it is clearly not aimed at terrorists, but at “Commies,” being a relic of the Red Scare at the dawn of the Cold War. Apparently the legislature has attempted to repeal it in recent years and failed, but that doesn’t make the law any less archaic.
<Sigh!>
Blogs like this one rely on secondary sources, and when one of them jumps the gun or gets its facts wrong, the result is that we end up aiding and abetting negligent misinformation. True: Ethics Alarms is in the business of adding ethics perspective to news stories and current events as it understands them, so the analysis can sometimes still be useful even if the facts are wrong. That is insufficient justification for contributing to misinformation, however. The key, as usual, is trust. I will do the best I can to get the facts right, hope that my readers correct me when they are wrong, and be ready to correct the record.
As for South Carolina’s silly law, perhaps the revived publicity of its 1951 paranoia will embarrass it into finally getting this dinosaur off the books. That will constitute a good result from a botched story, I suppose.
Many thanks to Sherrif Ray Nash, who tracked down the truth for Ethics Alarms.
Save Lindsay Lohan
It’s interesting, isn’t it? People who would never think of ridiculing the sick or mentally ill, who would never dream of condemning emotionally crippled individuals broken by dysfunctional families, will gleefully heap public abuse on a celebrity with the same problems. Why is this? A human being in trouble is a human being in trouble. It seems, however, that with the exception of little girls who fall down wells, the more people who know you are in crisis, the less sympathy you are likely to get.
Take, for example, the sad case of actress Lindsay Lohan, a talented young woman cursed with two narcissistic and exploitive parents. Continue reading
The Blog-Poster’s Code of Ethics
My esteemed colleague Rushworth M. Kidder, who is the founder and guiding light of the Institute for Global Ethics, has drafted a Blog-Poster’s Code of Ethics. I like it, but Dr. Kidder has asked for feedback before making it final; Rush is suggesting that blogs post the Code as a statement of principles. Continue reading
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