Almost everything has been reminding me of the “Ground Zero Mosque” lately. It is driving me crazy, perhaps because the rhetoric of the pro-Cordoba House “You’re a bigot if you don’t think this is the best idea since Disney World” crowd is increasingly unfair and absurd, and getting worse by the minute. Or perhaps it is that the inconsistent reasoning and blindness to embarrassing analogies exhibited by just about everyone who comments on this issue has reached the detonation point. Continue reading
common sense
ER Ethics: “Oh…should I not have done that? Was that wrong?”
Most Unethical Facebook Conduct of the Week: Staff members at a Long Beach, California hospital took pictures of a gruesomely wounded man in the emergency ward (his throat was cut) and posted them on Facebook. Yes, they really did they did. Continue reading
Nettleton Middle School, Embracing Racism in 2010
Help me out here: which category does this story fall under:
- School administrator incompetence?
- Warped community ethical standards?
- Racial quotas run amuck?
- Evidence of human devolution?
- Proof that time travel is real?
I’m not sure. I do know that when a memo like this one is issued by a school principal, indicating that class officers for the sixth, seventh and eighth grades are restricted by race, there had better be a lot of firing going on, really soon, up and down the entire school system and maybe the town government as well, because the people in charge must not be trusted for one more second to have anything to do with educating American children. Continue reading
Note to the EEOC: “Fairness” Must Not Require The Suspension of Common Sense
In the rich and annoying category of “Official Statements and Actions That Guarantee The Death Of Affirmative Action,” we have the recent warning by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that companies using criminal records to screen out job applicants might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws and be illegal because such a policy would have the effect of disproportionately disqualifying blacks and Hispanics. Continue reading
When An Ethical Parent Must Veto a Child’s Dream
It looked grim for a while yesterday, when the media was reporting that the sailboat carryingAbby Sunderland, the 16-year old seeking to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo by sea, had been lost. Now it looks like she may be safe after all, as a rescue of her crippled craft is underway in the Indian Ocean. That a tragedy may have been averted, however, doesn’t mitigate that unethical abdication of responsible parenting and trust by Abby’s parents that set the stage for a calamity.
Had the ill-conceived adventure ended fatally, it is certain that we would have heard her heart-broken parents eulogize their daughter as intrepid, courageous and mature beyond her appearance, who lived a full life in her sixteen years, and perished “living her dream.” All true, but those aren’t the facts that matter. What matters is that she is a dependent, trusting, sixteen-year old child who desperately needed her older and supposedly wiser parents to say “No. Being the youngest woman to sail around the world is good, living long enough to go to college, have a family, have a career and experience the joys of life over many decades is better. Sorry. It’s too dangerous. When you understand a little bit more about life, you may be capable of deciding when to risk it.”
They failed her, and the fact that she isn’t dead as a result is only luck. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: Rand Paul
The demise of the Tea Party movement may well come when it actually has to put individual candidates before the electorate and the media to carry its message. At least, that is what the ascendancy of Rand Paul, now the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky after his primary victory this week, portends. Paul, before his first week as the nominee is up, has managed to expose himself as unacceptably challenged by the task of reconciling the deceptively simplistic philosophy of libertarians with real world ethics. Specifically, he has declared that he does not support the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s requirement that private businesses serve all members of the public, irrespective of race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation. This position Rand haltingly clung to despite withering interviews on National Public Radio and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show. You can see the latter, in two parts, here and here. Continue reading
San Jose State, Blood, and Misguided Ethical Absolutism
The Food and Drug Administration will not permit you to donate blood if you have engaged in certain high risk activities associated with a greater likelihood of contracting the HIV virus. This includes same-sex intimate relations between men. “FDA’s policies on donor deferral for history of male sex with males date back to 1983, when the risk of AIDS from transfusion was first recognized,” says the agency’s website. “A history of male-to-male sex is associated with an increased risk for the presence of and transmission of certain infectious diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”
Officials at San Jose State University regard this as invidious discrimination against gays. For that reason, the University has banned blood drives at the school in protest of the F.D.A. policy since 2008, and has announced that the ban will continue. The school’s logic is simple, or perhaps simple-minded. Banning men who have sex with men from donating blood constitutes discrimination, and discrimination is always bad. Thus San Jose State, a good school that abhors discrimination, will maintain its virtue by refusing to participate in a discriminatory practice. Continue reading
Worst No-Tolerance Drug Policy Ever
The idiotic story you are about to read is true.
Rachael Greer, a seventh grade student in Jeffersonville, Indiana, explains that a girl walked into the school locker room with a bag of pills during Rachel’s gym class.
“She was talking to another girl and me about them and she put one in my hand and I was like, ‘I don’t want this,’ so I put it back in the bag and I went to gym class,” said Rachael. The pills were the prescription ADHD drug, Adderall. During the next period, an assistant principal took Rachael out of class. The girl who offered her the pills and a few other students had been apprehended, and to her surprise, Rachel was to join them in their punishment. Continue reading
Ethics Quote of the Week
“Based on what we’ve seen so far, this shouldn’t have happened. Even when we’re asked to make an arrest, common sense should prevail, and discretion used in deciding whether an arrest or handcuffs are really necessary.”—-New York Police spokesman Paul Browne, admitting that it was a mistake it was a mistake to arrest a 12-year-old junior high school student and taking her out of school in handcuffs for doodling her name on her desk in erasable marker. Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling on her desk Monday while waiting for her teacher to pass out homework, and the teacher summoned the police to report a 657…a doodle in progress. The Men in Blue led Alexa out of school in cuffs to a police station across the street, where she was detained for several hours. Continue reading
Bizarro World Ethics in Denver and San Francisco
Compassion and kindness don’t always lead to ethical decisions. Sometimes they cause decisions that are irresponsible, unfair, and misguided, not to mention dim-witted. An example presented itself last night, as voters overwhelmingly defeated a Denver City Council initiative that would require police to impound cars driven by unlicensed drivers. The key reason for the measure’s defeat, apparently, other than the fact that all the unlicensed drivers and their families voted against it, was widespread acceptance of the criticism that the measure would disproportionately affect illegal immigrants.
Actually, the same argument could be made about the law against driving without a license. Arresting those guilty of beating their spouses bloody will disproportionately affect men. Seems discriminatory, doesn’t it? Crimes of violence are overwhelmingly committed by those who are poor and uneducated; it is discriminatory to enforce those laws, right, Denver? Arresting drunk drivers is unduly burdensome on alcoholics and their families, too, and alcoholism is a disease. How barbaric!
The logic of Denver voters is ethically backwards, a Bizarro World version of fairness where core public interests—safety, law enforcement, citizenship— are seen as less important than empathy for the non-citizens who break laws.
548 people died in Colorado traffic accidents in 2008. Drivers without valid licenses were involved in crashes that killed 130 of them. That’s 24 percent; not surprisingly, unlicensed drivers are also lousy drivers. They are also uninsured drivers. And they don’t worry so much about things like drinking while driving, because nobody is going to take away licenses they don’t have. Impounding the vehicles of drivers without licenses is an obvious, effective and sensible method of getting unlicensed drivers off the road, and will stop some people from dying. It is true that illegal immigrants are more likely to be on the road without licenses, because illegal immigrants can’t get licenses. That is completely their own responsibility, however. They were not forced to break the immigration laws, and nobody is making them drive illegally, either. Impounding vehicles doesn’t discriminate against illegal aliens; it discriminates against law-breakers, which is exactly what laws are supposed to do.
Empathy and compassion are important ethical values. We should be compassionate to everyone, even criminals. Clarence Darrow, the great criminal defense lawyer, believed that being a criminal, no matter how vile, was always the result of accidents of birth and bad luck: wrong genes, wrong parents, no chance at education, wrong friends, wrong neighborhood, and a lack of good options. His perspective is worth remembering, but even Darrow didn’t argue that we should allow law-breakers to go on breaking the law. Yes: “There but for the Grace of God go I.” If I had been born poor in Mexico instead of Boston, I might be an illegal alien in Denver today. I might even have decided that I have to drive without a license, because it was the only way I could work. And if I did that, and was stopped on the road, I absolutely would deserve to have my car impounded. Whatever the solution to the illegal immigration problem is, forbidding enforcement of the laws illegal immigrants tend to break on the basis that it would pose a special hardship on them is not it. It is, instead, a prescription for anarchy, bad policy, harm to innocent citizens, and public anger.
Denver isn’t the only city getting its ethical priorities confused. Urged by its incorrigible, ethically-muddled mayor, Gavin Newsome, San Francisco police are easing up on a policy that requires officers to impound the vehicles of drivers caught without licenses, and based on the same logic as Denver’s compassionate voters. Taking away their cars will be really burdensome on illegal immigrants…
…who are in the state and city illegally in the first place…
…who have no right to drive or use the roads…
…but whose welfare should take precedence over the safety of legal citizens, in the Bizarro World ethical calculations of San Francisco officials and Denver voters, because punishing criminals unfairly discriminates against…criminals.
Ethics has to have a firm foundation in common sense and logic, or it becomes emotion and slogan-driven nonsense.
Ethics Alarms 