competence

No-Tolerance Idiocy of the Year: Southern Lee High School in Sanford, N.C.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ethics Alarms has not yet completed its annual Best and Worst of Ethics lists for 2010, but I’ll hand out this title right now.  The persecution of student Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, N.C., has all the elements that make no-tolerance enforcement of school rules ethically offensive: a lack of common sense, absence of proportion, dismissal of empathy, rejection of fairness and justice, disregard for the welfare of an innocent child, and most of all, incompetent, cowardly, utterly stupid school administrators.

Yes, I think we have a winner. Continue reading →

“Million Dollar Drop” Ethics: Not So Fast, Fox— Fork Over Some Money!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s one thing for Fox to post misleading headlines on its website and for Fox hosts to slander an international philanthropist but now its game show ethics have crashed and burned. An ethicist can only stand so much, dammit!

In the very first episode of the latest Fox effort to attract a prime time audience without adding anything of value to the culture or American thought—a combination quiz and gambling show called “Million Dollar Drop”—a couple bet $800,000 that they knew whether Post-It notes or the Sony Walkman  was “sold in stores” first. As the audience held its collective,breath, rooting for Gabe Okoye and his girlfriend, Brittany Mayti  to win big money in advance of their approaching wedding, game show host Kevin Pollack revealed that they were—awwwww!— wrong. The Walkman hit the stores first. Shortly thereafter, the couple lost the rest of their money (the show “gives” its constestants a million dollars that they have to risk on a series of questions) and went home poorer and dumber. Why dumber? Because the show’s researchers had arrived at the wrong answer, not Okoye and Mayti. Post-Its were sold first, though only regionally. Continue reading →

Ten Useful Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

It occurred to me, after more than a year, that I’ve never actually posted the basic ethics alarms we all should have installed and in working order, ready to sound when we are in, or about to be placed in, situations that are rife with ethics peril. Here are ten basic ones; there are lots of other useful ethics alarms to have, but these will serve you well. When one starts buzzing, it’s time to step back, thinks, and perhaps most useful of all, talk to someone whose ethical standards and reasoning you trust: Continue reading →

Incompetent Advice from “The Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Randy Cohen,”The Ethicist,” really doesn’t apply ethics to the intriguing questions sent to him in his long-running column in the New York Times Magazine. What he applies is Randy’s customized social justice agenda, which has a strong class bias (Rich people deserve to be brought down a peg whenever feasible), endorses redistribution of income (stealing from rich people is different from stealing from poor people) and a belief that if a rationalization can provide a green light to allow a deserving person to stick it to a company or wealthy citizen, by all means, embrace it. Because Cohen is a smart and instinctively ethical guy, he still get the answers right the vast majority of the time, as he has done for quite a few weeks now. Eventually, however he’ll reveal the Real Randy in a column like today’s, in which “The Ethicist” endorses vigilante justice. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarm Triggering, Child Molester Cheering Quote of the Week: TSA Director James Marchand

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“You try to make it as best you can for that child to come through. If you can come up with some kind of a game to play with a child, it makes it a lot easier.”

—Transportation Security Administration chief James Marchand, explaining the TSA’s new approach to calming children who are subjected to the full-hand, feel-up pat-downs during airport security screening.

Yes, the TSA is now training its agents to present their touching of children in private places as a game—-you know, because this method has proven so effective for child-molesters. Continue reading →

Ethics Lessons From a Missing “at”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

An embarrassing story from Fairfax,Virginia yields several ethical truths.

A Virginia man facing a fine or worse for not stopping properly behind an unloading school bus got off scot free after it was discovered that he hadn’t broken any law—at least the way the law is printed in the statute books.

The law reads:

“A person is guilty of reckless driving who fails to stop, when approaching from any direction, any school bus which is stopped on any highway, private road or school driveway for the purpose of taking on or discharging children.”

Got that? You break the law by not stopping a school bus that is already stopped. Continue reading →

Ten Ethics Questions for the Pat-Down Defenders

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I, like you, have been reading and listening to my various “My Obama, may he always be right, but my Obama, right or wrong” friends try to argue that having TSA agents sexually assault non-consenting adults is a perfectly reasonable and benign exercise of government power. I, like you, am tired of the posturing and excuse making. Their arguments, in essence, all boil down to: a) they have no choice b) they have our best interests at heart c) it’s no big deal, and 4) trust them, they know what they are doing.

I suggest that you, as I will, pose the following questions to your trusting friends, perhaps beginning with a preliminary query regarding whether they themselves have undergone the humiliating and invasive pat-down procedure that they so willingly approve of for others.

Then ask them these: Continue reading →

Texas Cheerleading Ethics: Cheer Your Rapist!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In the current issue of Sports Illustrated, Selena Roberts relates the tale of an ethical outrage, one that will makes your heart sink at the realization that there is so much incompetence, lack of common sense, cruelty and irresponsibility in the world…and that so much of it resides in high school administration.

A Silsbee (Texas) High School cheerleader, identified in the story only as “H.S.”,  had told police that she had been cornered in a room by three school athletes during a party, and sexually assaulted. Her screams were heard by others at the party, and charges were filed.  Roberts writes, “In a town whose population is 7,341 and whose high school football stadium seats 7,000…the alleged assault prompted two questions: How would it affect the girl? And how would it affect the team?” Continue reading →

Incompetence Follies: Fractured History For Virginia’s Fourth Graders

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Bob and Ray, the great deadpan comedy team that mastered the form of the comedy interview on radio, recordings and TV, once has a routine about a longshoreman without a high school diploma who had written a voluminous “History of the United States.”

“But the book is riddled with errors!” protested Bob Elliott, playing the interviewer. “For example, here on page 214, it says that Abraham Lincoln was born in 1926 in Bailey’s Mistake, Maine!”

“Well, it’s a big book with a lot of pages,” shrugged Ray Goulding, as the longshoreman-historian. “I’m sure I missed some typos. You can’t catch everything!”

I was reminded of the Bob and Ray skit when I learned that a history book used in 4th Grade in Virginia elementary schools, Our Virginia: Past and Present, teaches that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War, a discredited claim  often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause of the South’s rebellion. Continue reading →

Christine O’Donnell’s Insult to Democracy

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

[NOTE: For reasons having to do with  brain synapses and carelessness, the earlier version of this post had Ms. O’Donnell identified as  Christine Whitman, who is not insulting democracy, at least not yet. I apologize to Ethics Alarms readers and the GOP candidate for governor of California for the error.]

As there is no defined “duty not to make the entire theory of representative government look like a terrible mistake” we’re just going to have to settle for applying the ethical duties of diligence, competence, and a few others in assessing Republican Senate nominee (in Delaware, which is collectively cringing in embarrassment) Christine O’Donnell’s disqualifying performance during her recent debate with opponent Chris Coons.  Continue reading →