Duncan Roy is a director, producer and writer whom I had never heard of, and I didn’t watch his exploits as a patient/reality show performer on VH1’s “Celebrity Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew .” The reason for the latter was a mixture of ethics and taste: feeding the fame addiction of celebrities while supposedly treating their other addictions seemed wrong to me, and inducing sex-addicted female porn stars, beauty queens and models to go into therapy with similarly attractive and sexually obsessive men is ridiculous, like setting “The Biggest Loser” at a 24 hour, all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. Continue reading
deception
Ethics Dunce: Sen. Charles Shumer
It’s a minor news event with a couple of ethics lesson, but as usual, the media’s focus is on the wrong one.
New York’s U.S. Senators, Gillibrand and Shumer, were talking away on their cell phones before take-off. The flight attendants announced, as they have been doing on flights since before Cher’s first retirement tour, that it was time to ditch the electronic devices and turn off the cell phones. The senators ignored the instructions, and kept talking anyway, because, you know, their work is So Very Important. Continue reading
Strange But True: Judge Rules That a Defendant’s FACE is Prejudicial
And now, from Reuters, an instance of the American justice system violating principles of honesty, logic and common sense in order to be “fair.”
As a neo-Nazi gang member prepared to go on trial for murder, he got himself some new tattoos: a swastika, barbed wire, and an obscene word. On his face! Continue reading
The Ethics of Ghost-blogging and Ghost-tweeting
A year ago, the term “ghost-tweeting” would have been nonsense. Today, it’s an occupation.
Susan Esparza has posted an opinion that while ghost-writing articles and books for traditional publications is ethical, having someone author one’s blog posts and tweets is deceptive and wrong. Continue reading
Student Booze, the Police, and the Facebook Mole
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
Painted Donkeys
The question is: Are fake zebras better than no zebras at all? Continue reading
Finally, a Backlash Against Lip-syncing
Audiences at Britney Spears’ “Circus” concert are complaining that the singer is lip-syncing all of her songs, and not dancing energetically or well enough to justify it.
Good!
Tax Refund Deception
From Wall Street Journal blogger-extraordinaire James Taranto:
“Tax refunds are evil, because they fool people into thinking they’re “getting” something from the government, when in fact all they’re receiving is their own money, months late. If the private sector tried this–say, your insurance or power company “borrowed” money by tacking $20 on to your monthly bill and refunded it, without interest, the following year–it would be a pretty clear case of fraud.”
Beyond the obvious hyperbole of “evil”—on this blog we would say “unethical”—is there any good argument against Taranto’s analysis?
UNICEF and the Saint’s Excuse
Halloween’s editorial in the New York Times sings the praises of Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF, the initiative born in 1950 to help the work of UNICEF by having children solicit donations in their All Hallow’s Eve’s journeys, instead of traditional candy. UNICEF, as the Times points out, does important things, and Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF raises millions of dollars annually for the organization’s agenda of saving children overseas with medicine, food, clean water and vaccinations. Who can complain? Well, I can, and we all should. Good intentions and even good results do not justify coercion and abuse of power, and that is what Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF has always represented. Halloween is a tradition of childhood, and charity has nothing to do with it. It is about fun and fantasy, adventure and imagination. It is about conjuring a spooky atmosphere and dressing up in scary or whimsical costumes, ringing strange doorbells and miraculously receiving candy and sweets in return. Redeeming social value? Fond memories have social value. Community rituals and tradition have social value. Halloween is a good thing, for its own sake. According to the Times, a minister named Clyde Allison and his wife, Mary Emma Allison, created Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF because they wanted to support the United Nations charity in its efforts to combat child mortality. They also , the Editorial says approvingly, felt that “Halloween was a chance to inspire children to help other children, not just rake in candy.” Translation: they saw a clever way way to get children to work for their admittedly worthwhile adult objectives rather the children’s own trivial, childish ones. Halloween has as much to do with children helping children as Arbor Day does. But having small children, many of whom know nothing about UNICEF, become irresistible door-to-door solicitors for cash within a tradition where it is virtually impossible for the solicited to refuse to give..brilliant! Brilliant, but wrong. The children are shamed into forgoing candy—for their satisfaction—to acquire donations, for the plans and aspirations of adults. Instead of a night of innocent, liberating, childish fun, the children get the pleasure of becoming unpaid fundraisers for UNICEF. Instead of being part of the Halloween ritual, the homeowners find themselves pressured by pint-size shakedowns that are near resistance-proof. Has anyone, confronted with a goblin collecting for UNICEF, mustered the courage to say, “Sorry, I give out candy on Halloween.” Or, “I give to the charity of my choice, thank-you”? I haven’t. Meanwhile, the adults perpetrating this bait-and switch use rationalizations to justify what is a really an exercise in arm-twisting. “The candy is bad for the kids,” they say. “The kids get more satisfaction from this.” Most of all, they say, “It’s for a good cause”—the classic rationalization known as “The Saint’s Excuse.” It is the self-serving philosophy that principles of ethics can be broken as long as the goal is lofty enough. As examples of the Saint’s Excuse, the UNICEF caper is pretty mild; after all, it was also the rationalization for the Spanish Inquisition. Still, children are being coerced to do the job of adults. Their fun is being altered to meet the charitable goals of someone else. And the rules are being changed on the people answering the door, so they virtually have to give. It doesn’t matter if it’s only spare change. It is coercive, unfair and deceptive. Some communities have Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF in addition to Halloween, on the day before or after. I’m still not fond of making kids ring doorbells for charities; I would suggest that the adults go door to door on UNICEF nights, if they are concerned about poor children overseas. Still, at least the two-night formula lets kids enjoy Halloween without being saturated with guilt. They’ll have plenty of time for that. The fact that adults like the saintly Allisons and the editors of the Grey Lady don’t care very much about the values of childhood, which include fantasy and pointless fun, doesn’t make it right. Let adults do their own work, which includes raising money for poor and endangered children. They should let children, in turn, do the job they need to do. Be kids.
Ethics Alarms 