dignity

Selfie Ethics: Yes, Big Papi Exploited The President

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Ortiz-Obama-Selfie.jpg

I wrote about this ethical breach when Ellen DeGeneris did it at the Oscars. The short version is this:

“It’s unethical to pretend that a selfie is a spontaneous  gesture of fun and friendship when you have a commercial agreement in place to use the photograph in a way that promotes the cell phone manufacturer.”

This is exploitation for commercial gain, and it’s wrong. It’s wrong when the victims are movie stars, and it’s wrong when the exploited party is President of the United States. Continue reading →

Clever! But Wrong: “Hoodies For Hobos”

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Homeless advertisng

“Team ADD -A-BALL is proud to announce our new outreach program ‘Hoodies for Hobo’s’. All profits from sweatshirt and t-shirt sales go towards outfitting Seattle’s street people with some fresh gear. I will post a pic of every new bum we spruce up. Thanks everyone.”

—-Add-a-Ball owner Brad Johnsen, on his company’s Facebook page.

Yes, Brad, who casually refers to his walking billboards as “bums,” has what he sees as a perfect plan. Profits profits from all  T-shirt and apparel sales at Johnsen’s Seattle arcade will be used to outfit the city’s homeless “with some fresh gear,” all sporting the arcade’s name and logo. Everybody wins! He gets publicity and good will for this—wink, wink—“charity,” the homeless get spiffy new clothes, and he gets really cheap advertising.

So what if he robs the objects of his charity of their dignity, exploits them, and dehumanizes them into the equivalents of car bumpers? Hey, no plan is perfect! To his credit, sort of, Johnsen’s comments don’t exactly leave much room for doubts about his compassion and motives. “If it also encourages people to go play pinball and get drunk—all the better,” he says.

If he was interested in anything other than the cheap publicity…like, say, the welfare of the homeless, Johnsen would hand out clothes without the logo. I’m sure he wouldn’t understand why I say that. Or why paying the “bums’ who choose to wear the ones that advertise his business would be the ethical course, since it would compensate the homeless for their service and give them a sense of self-worth, rather than making them, in effect, unpaid sandwich-board wearers for the privilege of wearing a lousy hoodie.

I wonder how many people see nothing unethical Johnsen’s scheme. I’m a little afraid to find out.

[Addendum (4 PM 4/10/14): I should have mentioned in the original post that Kant would have agreed with me. This is a Categorical Imperative situation, using human beings as a means rather than an end: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”  The fact that the cynical ploy can be represented as a one that aims at clothing the homeless makes the label a little shaky, and I admit that the “Ick Factor” looms large here.]

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Pointer:  Drudge

Facts: Vocative

 

 

 

Ethics Quiz: Trust and the Vampire Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 85 Comments

jake-rushConservative Republican candidate Jacob A. Rush, a 35-year-old attorney, has begun a campaign in Florida’s 3rd Congressional District to win the primary against incumbent U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho, a Tea Party stalwart seeking a second term. Rush’s campaign website portrays  him  as a “conservative straight shooter,”and he may indeed be that. A Florida blog uncovered the fact that Rush is also, however, a long-time member of the Mind’s Eye Society,  “a nationwide community of gothic-punk role-players who take on the personas of vampires and other supernatural beings” for fantasy battles “against their own bestial natures, hunters, and each other.”

It’s all fun and games with improvisational theater tossed in, though with a decidedly adult set of themes. Rush liked ( likes?) to play a character named “van de Winst”, a lusty vampire, and photos of the lawyer were found on the web showing him and/or members of his club, playing vampire,  burning books, aiming shotguns at dogs, pretending to be demons, displaying Satanic symbols, being chained and gagged…you know, that kind of thing. Fun stuff.

After this all came out—how could he think it would not?—Rush explained in a press release:

“All my life, I’ve been blessed with a vivid imagination from playing George Washington in elementary school to dressing up as a super hero last Halloween for trick or treaters. Any cursory review of the Internet will show that I have played heroes and villains…. I have never hid nor shied away from disclosing my hobby activities. When I was hired at the Sheriff’s office, I fully disclosed my gaming and theatre background on the application, and these hobbies posed absolutely no problem or raised any flags. In fact, when applying for undercover work, these hobbies were considered an advantage, so much so my shift lieutenant nicknamed me ‘Shakespeare.'”

And he included this photo of him and his wife…

Rush and wife

…wisely choosing not to send this one:

Rush vanpire

WOW.

And thus your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for today is….

Is it  Jacob Rush’s unusual personal hobby relevant to his ability to serve in Congress?

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The President’s “Funny or Die” Appearance.

/ Jack Marshall / 110 Comments

You should watch the entire “Funny or Die” bit here.

1. As has been obvious from the beginning of his administration, President Obama has retained the most incompetent, tone-deaf, leadership-ignorant and inept advisors in recent history, and those advising his predecessors were nothing to be proud of. This means that President Obama has tolerated, and worse, followed the advice of such incompetent advisors. He also selected them. He is accountable.

2. For the President of the United States, in the middle of an international crisis in which his authority, power and stature is central, to submit himself as a prop in a comedy video is irresponsible, reckless, and shows abysmal priorities and judgment. Continue reading →

Lawyer Daniel Muessig’s Clever, Effective, Legally Ethical And Thoroughly Despicable Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Just as I’ve been desperately trying to explain that lawyers do not represent bad people because they like them or want to loose them upon the world,  here comes innovative Pittsburgh lawyer Daniel Muessig, whose clever TV ad proclaims that this is exactly what he wants to do. Here it is:

Is this an ethical ad? According to the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct, it is within the conduct permitted by the state’s legal ethics rules. The ad isn’t misleading. It doesn’t make promises the lawyer cannot keep. It doesn’t represent dramatic recreations as fact, or use broad metaphors and exaggerations. (Lawyer ads are held to a standard of literalness that presumes the public has never see any other kinds of advertising in their entire lives.) Once upon a time the various state bar advertising regulations included prohibitions on “undignified” communications, or those that undermined public trust in the profession, but those days are long past: the standards were necessarily vague, and breached free speech principles.

So we have this: a lawyer who appeals to his future criminal clients by saying that he thinks like a criminal, believes laws are arbitrary, that other lawyers will “blow them off” and that he visits jails frequently because that’s where his friends are. He attacks his own colleagues and profession, denigrates the rule of law he is sworn to uphold, and seeks the trust of criminals not because of his duty as a professional, but because he’s just like them. Muessig is willing to undermine the law-abiding public’s belief in the justice system and the reputation of his profession and his colleagues in order to acquire clients. I’m sure his strategy will work, too. Continue reading →

Racism, Abuse of Power, And Grosse Pointe Abu Graib

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
This story is so upsetting, I recommend periodically checking this picture to get you through it. It helped me.

This story is so upsetting, I recommend periodically checking this picture of a Jack Russell puppy to get you through it. It helped me, anyway.

This, I think, should be a crime, and perhaps it is, a civil rights law violation. The police officers who perpetrated this outrage on African-Americans—I really don’t care what the victims did, from petty theft to mass murder, it doesn’t matter–need to be jailed, and for a long, long time. I wish they could be deported. They aren’t Americans. They are viruses.

In Grosse Pointe Park, the ritzy section of Detroit—which sounds like an oxymoron, I know—police forced African-American citizens to sing, dance, and make noises “like a chimp.” Then, like idiots everywhere, these cops posted the videos of this racist cruelty online. They were proud of it, you see.

The racism alone is sufficient cause to fire these villains, but bigotry alone isn’t a crime. Using police power to humiliate another human being, strip him of dignity and attack the essence of his humanity is a crime, whether it happens to fit the specifics of any statute or not. What the Detroit police did was the domestic, racist equivilent to what was done to the Abu Ghraib Muslim prisoners, which Rush Limbaugh, to his permanent shame, called “just fooling around.” Treating another human being as a toy, a prop, and a puppet isn’t fooling around, it is dastardly. Showing such contempt and disrespect for American citizens based on color, creed, or on any basis smacks of a domestic Kristallnacht. When the military or the police do it in our name, it implicates all of us, undermines trust in government, impugns the honor of good and professional police officers and soldiers, and divides communities, races, and civilizations.

It has to be a crime. And every second those officers are allowed to keep their badges disgraces Detroit, Michigan, and the United States of America.

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Facts: New York Daily News

Ethics And Civility 101: Rep. Joe (“You Lie!”) Wilson Has NOT Been Vindicated

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
Shut up, Joe.

Shut up, Joe.

Sometimes really incompetent and corrupting ethical verdicts run through the media and the culture like a bad flu, sickening our values and weakening our comprehension of what “good” is. These come with equal frequency from the Right and the Left—right now, they are flying in from both directions, which means that the United States is likely to get even sicker that it already is from an ethical perspective, and it is perilously ill already. From the Left, we have choruses proclaiming that the President apologized for lying to the public about how the Affordable Care Act would work, when he did nothing of the sort by any reasonable and honest analysis based on what an apology is. (I’ll discuss that in an upcoming post.)

From the Right, we are now hearing that because it is past denying that the President in fact did lie about Obamacare, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) is owed an apology (as long as he gets as much of an apology as the faux example the President offered on Wednesday, I might not object too much) for the criticism he received after shouting out “You lie!”  as President Obama was giving his 2009 address touting his health care legislation to Congress.  Wilson is not owed any apology, nor has he been “vindicated,” as thousands of commenters on websites and bloggers have been claiming for weeks. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: “How You Gonna Keep Her Teaching The Class After It’s Seen Paree?”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

horrified students

…..or “It May Not Be The Naked Teacher Principle, But It May Still Be A Problem.”

In the wake of the most recent post here about the Naked Teacher Principle, Ethics Alarms received many inquiries from readers who cited the news item about the hapless teaching assistant at the University of Iowa who somehow managed to send her class not merely sexually provocative photos of herself, not merely nude photos of herself, but something much more kinky. Attached to a message that read “Hi Class, I attach the solutions for number 76 and 78 in this email” were a series of images showing the young woman sans clothes and sans inhibitions having a lively cyber-sexting chat with a partner in which the two were pleasuring themselves in front of video equipment while streaming to each other.

Hmmm. That didn’t come out quite right.

Anyway, the question was: Does this conduct, which goes well beyond the conditions of the Naked Teacher Principle but which occurred at a university rather than a high school or middle school, trigger said principle, regardless of intent?

The answer is no, not regardless of intent. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The SpongeBob Headstones

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

SpongeBob Gravestone Removed

You can’t make stuff like this up.

Apparently I was last one in the nation to learn about the surreal dispute between the parents of the late Kimberly Walker, a 28-year-old Iraq War vet who was  found murdered in a Colorado hotel room eight months ago, and the owners of Cincinnati’s historic  Spring Grove Cemetery, concerning the headstones erected over her grave on October 10.

The cemetery reversed its official approval of the twin monuments, apparently bestowed by someone who had momentarily been possessed by the spirit of Chuck Jones, saying that it would be inappropriate for a traditional and historic 19th Century pastoral cemetery that serves as the final resting place of Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, several Civil War generals including “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who lost the Battle of Chancellorsville, the Hall of Fame manager of the 1927 Yankees, Miller Huggins, and many others, to sport not one but two hideous 6-foot-high, 4-foot-wide, 7,000 pound slabs of granite lovingly carved to depict SpongeBob Squarepants in military gear, one of which displays Kimberly’s name on his uniform. (For those of you who are hopelessly estranged from popular culture, SpongeBob is a fictional deep sea yellow sponge who stars in a popular Nickelodeon cable TV children’s cartoon show. Kimberly, we are told, loved the show. SpongeBob is an idiot, by the way.)

The family is outraged, and feels abused. “I feel like, and we all feel like, SpongeBob should stay there. We bought the plots, all six of them. We put the monuments there, we did what we had to do and they said they could provide that service to us,’ said Walker’s twin sister Kara, who was looking forward to eventually being buried under the second headstone. “I thought it was the greatest thing in the cemetery. I even told the people there that I think this is the best monument I’ve ever seen. It’s the best headstone in the cemetery and they all agreed. It came out really nice.”

Yyyyyyyeah.

Still, putting considerations of taste aside—-and what American these days doesn’t do that daily?—the Walkers duly purchased the plots (they have four more…and just think of what might end up on them) and properly cleared the monuments.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for this lovely Fall day is this:

Does fairness dictate that the Walkers be allowed to erect whatever monuments they choose, including giant, garish sculptures of a cartoon character, to honor the memory of their daughter? Continue reading →

The Unprofessional Cause Of Unprofessional Lawyer Brian Zulberti

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Brian ZYoung Brian Zulberti may be nice guy. He may even be a competent lawyer, though the chances of his being able to demonstrate that are diminishing daily. Nevertheless, his quixotic and misguided, and dare I say it, really stupid, quest to show that professionalism, judgment and character are not properly relevant to the practice of law is an exercise in hubris that must fail, deserves to fail, and of course, will fail, leaving him to pick up the pieces of fifteen minutes of media fame purchased at the price of a reputation. It looks like he’s having fun, and that’s something, I guess. Ten years from now, I doubt that he’ll think it was worth it.

Shortly after passing the Delaware Bar, Zulberti, a 2009 law school grad,  emailed the entire Bar membership asking for a job. In lieu of his résumé;  he attached a photo of himself in a Villanova Law muscle shirt that would be more at home on a dating site for the shallow. The web also contained his half-naked selfies, and various websites with varying motives picked up the story. Interviewed on YouTube, Zulberti proclaimed that being true to himself was more important to him than getting hired, and that he wasn’t about to change his Facebook privacy settings to portray himself as a traditional, dignified, applicant for legal work.

Let me pause here to say that in many ways I sympathize with Zulberti. Continue reading →