civil disobedience

Chicken Suit Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ahh—perhaps this is how we lose our freedoms: absurdity. It’s damn hard to get indignant when you’re laughing.

Nevada has banned the wearing of chicken suits at polling places, a clear infringement of political speech. Republicans were alarmed because the front-runner in their June primary to decide who will challenge the vulnerable Harry Reid for the U.S. Senate, Sue Lowden, inspired a wave of giant chicken sightings after she opined that perhaps citizens should be able to barter for medical care, paying doctors, for example, with chickens. Now wags in chicken suits are clogging her rallies to mock her, and Democrats have launched a “Chickens for Check-ups” website. Continue reading →

King Downloading Backlash: Randy and the Rationalizations

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ethics Alarms wasn’t the only one to challenge Randy Cohen’s embrace of illegal downloading in his “The Ethicist column last week. It caused a great deal of debate elsewhere, and , as usual, most of the tech heads sided with Cohen. Two of the most common arguments were endorsed by the excellent blog Tech Dirt. The first is the most popular, and the easiest to discard. The second is equally wrong, but explaining why takes longer. Continue reading →

Student Booze, the Police, and the Facebook Mole

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The battle to define what is right and wrong regarding social networking sites continues. The Philadelphia Bar Association has decided that it is an ethics violation for a lawyer to recruit someone to make a Facebook “friend request” to a witness to pass on to  the lawyer  the contents of  the witness’s Facebook page. The ethics committee wrote that this was dishonest conduct by the lawyer even though the witness willingly accepted the fake “friend” and would have accepted almost anyone who asked. The same tactic was pulled on University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer, who has over 400 Facebook friends and who accepted a friend request by an attractive young woman he didn’t know because, well, she was an attractive young woman. She was working for the police, however, and found photos on the site of Adam and a friend, Tyrell Luebker, with adult beverages in hand. They both were ticketed for underage drinking, and ended up paying a fine. Continue reading →