culture

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quiz: Holder’s ‘Brainwash’ Comment”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

"You want 'consensus'? I'll give you consensus, Pilgrim..."

Penn, who has been on a roll lately, has another Comment of the Day regarding the prospects of a cultural shift in public attitudes toward guns in America. I’ll have some thoughts afterwards, but right now, here is Penn COTD on the post, Ethics Quiz: Holder’s “Brainwash” Comment:

“I’m seeing a problem here that’s as insoluble as “what to do with the homeless.”  It comes up again and again: defending the right to bear arms against teaching non-violence — okay, that’s simplistic, but I think you know what I mean. Since arguments on both sides have been validated, their proponents feel duty-bound to reiterate them.

“Granted, consensus is a no-go in our culture. You win or you lose: compromise is a dirty word, and a win/win situation, while given lip service as a goal (e.g. good sportsmanship), is not an acceptable outcome.  Thus neither argument, in theory or in practice, takes a step further in solving in the short-term the problem of what to do with an increasingly violent society (schools, families, criminals, celebrities, etc.), a society embedded in an ever-shrinking, increasingly threatening world. Thinking that these guns/no guns arguments have some pragmatic use keeps us, so to speak, backward. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Today the National Football League announced the following response to the results of its investigation of bounties being offered and paid by the New Orleans Saints to its players for injuring key opposition players in games. From the NFL press release:

“Commissioner Roger Goodell notified the New Orleans Saints today of the discipline that will be imposed on team management for violations of the NFL’s long-standing “bounty” rule that endangered player safety over a three-year period.

“Discipline for individual players involved in the Saints’ prohibited program continues to be under review with the NFL Players Association and will be addressed by Commissioner Goodell at a later date. The program included “bounty” payments for “knock-outs” and “cart-offs,” plays on which an opposing player was forced to leave the game. At times, the bounties even targeted specific players by name.

“The NFL’s extensive investigation established the existence of an active bounty program on the Saints during the 2009, 2010, and 2011 seasons in violation of league rules, a deliberate effort to conceal the program’s existence from league investigators, and a clear determination to maintain the program despite express direction from Saints ownership that it stop as well as ongoing inquiries from the league office.

“We are all accountable and responsible for player health and safety and the integrity of the game,” Commissioner Goodell said. “We will not tolerate conduct or a culture that undermines those priorities. No one is above the game or the rules that govern it. Respect for the game and the people who participate in it will not be compromised.”

“A combination of elements made this matter particularly unusual and egregious,” Commissioner Goodell continued. “When there is targeting of players for injury and cash rewards over a three-year period, the involvement of the coaching staff, and three years of denials and willful disrespect of the rules, a strong and lasting message must be sent that such conduct is totally unacceptable and has no place in the game.”

…Based on the record, Commissioner Goodell has imposed the following discipline on Saints management: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Holder’s “Brainwash” Comment

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

"You WILL feel differently about guns!"

The death of founder Andrew Breitbart hasn’t slowed down his website’s ability to dig up provocative and embarrassing videos one bit. Its latest is a bit of off-putting rhetoric from Eric Holder, when he was the Clinton Administration U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., telling a D.C. audience that the long-term solution to gun control is to “brainwash” the  public into opposing firearms. Holder said…

“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”

He went on to outline steps that could be taken to “really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”

Seeing this as a major “gotcha” for the embattled Attorney General, who is already facing growing criticism both for his oversight (or lack of it) of the Fast and Furious gun-smuggling fiasco and his evasive testimony about it before Congress, conservative critics are jumping on the 1995 statement to bolster calls for Holder’s resignation.

Your Ethics Quiz today: Is it fair to criticize a U.S. Attorney General’s statement that he wants to “brainwash” the  public into rejecting a core Constitutional right, when the statement is more than 15 years old, and was made while he was in a different job? Continue reading →

Greg Smith’s Urgent Ethics Alarm

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it”

This, says Greg Smith, is how the leadership of Goldman Sachs sees its clients.

With that, Goldman Sach’s executive Greg Smith began his remarkable op-ed in the New York Times, sending his former employers into crisis mode, panicking investors, and setting the financial, political and journalistic worlds buzzing. Obviously, it was an exposé about ethics as much as anything else.  Smith described a corporation-wide breach of trust with clients, a culture in which leadership openly derided those the company pledged to serve as “muppets,” and apparently, sheep to be sheared:

“It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off… I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.”

Smith cites a breakdown in leadership, resulting in a corruption of values: Continue reading →

The Process Can Be Ugly, And Sure Was This Time, But This Is How Cultural Ethics Standards Change

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Greta was the tipping point.

The Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke Ethics Train Wreck is over at last, but unlike with many such debacles, something positive occurred. I believe that an emphatic cultural standard was established that calling a woman—any woman, famous or not, liberal or conservative—a derogatory term designed purely to denigrate her by denigrating her gender will not be considered acceptable in political, quasi-political or arguably-political commentary henceforward. If such rhetoric occurs in a comic or entertainment context, no politician or elected official can appear to endorse the individual who utters the offensive words.

I’m not arguing right now whether this is a good or a bad development, but merely that it happened, and that it is a real change. For this to happen, a conservative radio talk show host had to use the terms “slut’ and “prostitute” to make the botched satirical point that a feminist law student activist who argued that free contraceptives were a woman’s right was the equivalent of women who wanted to be “paid for sex.” If pundits and bloggers had merely declared this statement uncivil and cruel, nothing more would have happened, and the incident would have been quickly forgotten. But sensing political points to be scored in an election year, and with the added incentive of being handed what was seen as powerful ammunition to attempt a frontal attack against a detested partisan critic, Democrats,  progressives, feminists, activists, Obama strategists and left-biased journalists decided to cast the Limbaugh’s poor judgment in extreme terms. Continue reading →

Self-Promotion Department

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Fortunately, you won't have to look at me...

I’ll be “appearing” on NPR’s “Tell Me More” tomorrow with Michel Martin, discussing the NFL’s bounty scandal and maybe another issue or two. Check local times in your area, or just plan on rearranging your sock drawer.

The NFL, Battling Its Own Sick Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

"OK, it's a deal then: we put this guy in the hospital, and split the bounty 50-50..."

The last Super Bowl was phenomenally successful, as its audience size shattered previous records. Yet for many years, I have not been able to enjoy the sport, because of the unethical conflict at its core. Pro football’s appeal and swagger is based on violence, and we now know that the violence damages its players to an unacceptable extent. The players are paid both to accept the crippling and often-life shortening abuse, as well as administer it. For this former fan, that makes football too close to boxing from an ethical perspective. If the NFL is paying  players to do permanent harm to each other, then so are the fans that pay the NFL.  Sorry: there are too many other forms of entertainment that don’t require me to endorse and subsidize brutality. Thus I was not surprised to read this, in the New York Times:

“During the past three seasons, while the National Football League has been changing rules and levying fines in an effort to improve player safety, members of the New Orleans Saints’ defense maintained a lucrative bounty system that paid players for injuring opponents, according to an extensive investigation by the N.F.L. The bounty system was financed mostly by players — as many as 27 of them — and was administered by the former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, who also contributed money to the pool. The N.F.L. said that neither Coach Sean Payton nor General Manager Mickey Loomis did anything to stop the bounties when they were made aware of them or when they learned of the league’s investigation.  According to the league, Loomis did not even stop the bounties when ordered to by the team’s owner. “

This practice is not only unethical and against NFL rules, it is criminal.  Continue reading →

Facebook’s Weird Ethical Standards

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I know, they're too small to read. Never mind; they also don't make any sense

The idea of Gawker, a website that shares the ethical standards of the seamier denizens of “Rick’s” in “Casablanca,” doing a legitimate ethics expose gives me a brain cramp, but the gossip site has given a platform to a Facebook whistleblower, sort of.

I say “sort of,” because knowing Gawker, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was paid to rat out his former employers-once-removed (he was hired by  Facebook’s outsourcing firm that handled his training—oDesk), making him ethically less of a whistleblower than a candidate for Gawker’s editorial board. The argument, I suppose, would be that a dollar an hour, which is what Gawker’s source says was his princely reward for doing Facebook’s dirty work, shouldn’t buy much loyalty and confidentiality, if any. Ethically, that’s false: you are obligated to abide by the terms of bad deals if you voluntarily agree to them. Practically speaking, it is true. A worker a company exploits is likely to harbor more animus than good will, and it isn’t the happy workers who blow whistles. Fine: neither Gawker’s source nor Gawker are ethically admirable. On to Facebook.

The whistleblower is Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan who was recruited by an outsourcing firm to screen illicit Facebook content. This is what he was paid a dollar an hour for, which, when one considers the news reports flying around recently about how rich Mark Zuckerberg is, and after the company filed its record $100 billion IPO, seems unequivocally exploitive. His real exposé, however, involves what he was paid to do, which was to be Facebook’s censor. Derkaoui supplied Gawker with a bootleg copy of part of Facebook’s abuse standards, which lays out what the company believes is appropriate and what it believes should be banned from the web. Thus it is Facebook’s morality, revealing the ethical standards that the company embraces. Continue reading →

Ethics Incoherence From Sir Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

"Obladi oblada."

I thought about a lot of possible headlines for this post. “Most Muddled Ethics Statement of the Century” was a real contender. I thought about making it an Ethics Alarms quiz, with the plaintive query,“Can anyone please tell me what the heck Paul McCartney thinks he is saying?” And, yes, I thought about skipping the story completely, as I am not eager to rattle the cages of the zealous pot enthusiasts, several of whom bombarded me, my business and my wife with vicious and threatening e-mails last week.

But this cannot pass without comment. Paul McCartney has given an interview to Rolling Stone in which, among other things, he announces that he is giving up smoking pot as a responsible father of an eight-year-old girl.

“I did a lot, and it was enough,” the co-writer of “With a Little Help From My Friends” (“I get high with a little help from my friends…”) and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” tells the interviewer. “I smoked my share. When you’re bringing up a youngster, your sense of responsibility does kick in, if you’re lucky, at some point. Enough’s enough – you just don’t seem to think it’s necessary.”

This is completely bewildering. Is Paul saying he’s had his fill, and now that he has, come to think of it, it’s irresponsible to smoke pot? Is he expressing regret? Continue reading →

The Flag and Whitney Houston

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

If Ol' Blue Eyes was worthy, why not Whitney?

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie  ordered New Jersey’s flags flown at half-staff in official mourning for Whitney Houston, and a lot of people are outraged. The critics of the honor fall into two categories: those who believe that the honor should be reserved for military heroes and high government officials, and those who believe that Houston is especially unworthy because of her well-documented substance abuse problems.

For his part, Governor Christie defiantly declares that Houston, as a daughter of New Jersey, deserves the state honor because of her contributions to the culture.

Technically and officially, Christie is out of line. Federal law is very specific about the proper treatment of the flag, including when it can be flown at half-staff. Simply put, celebrities don’t qualify, no matter who they are. A state governor can proclaim that the flag be flown at half-staff in his or her state for fallen soldiers, but not for non-military individuals. But governors ignore the law routinely, and have for decades. Tennessee’s governor lowered the flag when Elvis died. Massachusetts did the same for Red Sox great Ted Williams, though he was also a war hero, so no one was going to object. The law, in terms of custom and enforcement, is a dead letter, and probably should be.

True, some governors have abused the spirit of the law, including Christie, when he lowered the flag for Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band—a great musician, but hardly a figure of transcendent national significance. If 4 USC Section 7 isn’t going to be followed or enforced, then we need some new standards, or before we know it they’ll be lowering the flag for Joan Rivers. Continue reading →