empathy

Comment of the Day: “Two Mothers, Young Love and Deception”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Lianne Best, who writes a weekly newspaper column about the challenges of a working wife and mother, weighs in with the alternative point of view regarding my post about a friend’s handling of her daughter’s boyfriend’s deception. I was afraid someone was going to write this, because I find the argument persuasive and it makes me doubt the wisdom of my advice. Still, I think I support my friend’s decision not to blow the whistle on the boyfriend, primarily because he’s 17, not 15. By 17, a child is engaged in an ongoing controversy about autonomy, trust and boundaries; the boyfriend is accountable for defying his mother, but it is his life and I would grant him the right to make his own mistakes, if mistakes they are, without my active interference. Lianne is persuasive, however…and she has a teenage daughter and son of her own:

“I like the advice … but because the horse has already left the barn far behind.

“I am actually pretty horrified that Julia is actively participating in and abetting the subterfuge. Even if she doesn’t agree with Ishmael’s mother’s rules (and let’s note they could be his father’s rules too; and maybe his church’s rules, and his culture’s rules), that doesn’t mean she should be actively plotting to subvert them.

“In this instance were it my own daughter, I would NOT take the decisive action of contacting Ishmael’s mother, but NEITHER would I allow him to spend the night there, and help my daughter make up stories and situations to enable the relationship. She’s happy? Please. Teenage female happiness is tenuous and temporary at best. (Has anyone on here LIVED with a 16-year-old girl??) It’s one year, probably less, until Ishmael is 18. So much can (and will) change in that year! Until then, group get-togethers (movie dates and parties) should be fine. Continue reading →

Ethics Challenge: Two Mothers, Young Love and Deception

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A good friend—call her Julia— with a teenage daughter (she’s 16) recently  asked me for help with an ethical dilemma.

Julia’s daughter is quiet, seemingly conservative, and socially restrained. She has never had a boyfriend, and has been on few dates, until now. She has been seeing a young man—call him Ishmael— her own age (well, he’s 17) who seems to match her to perfection in every respect. He’s sensitive, polite, and witty,  and on top of everything, he’s really cute, the object of every one of her friends’ and rivals’ awe.

Of course, there is a problem. Ishmael’s mother is fanatically protective: he is not supposed to date until he is 18, and has to check in with her every hour when he is out of the house. The relationship with my friend’s daughter only exists through an elaborate subterfuge, involving complicit friends and relayed phone messages. Once, in order to facilitate a special date to go to a concert, Julia allowed the boy to sleep overnight (in the guest room), when he was supposedly staying a male friend’s house.

My friend wanted to know if she should tell the boy’s mother about his web of lies. A parent has a right to have his or her own rules respected, and not undermined by other parents. The Golden Rule, applied to Ishmael’s mother, yields a demand that she be told; Julia would want to be told if her child was systematically defying her.

On the other hand, she firmly believes that the mother’s restriction on her son are excessive, and she has never known her daughter to be so happy.  She is worried that informing the mother will cause a serious rift with her daughter, and perhaps worse. “What is the ethical course?” she asked me. “What should I do?” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Atheist, the Graduation, and the Prayer”

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Tgt, the Ethics Alarms resident atheist, backs graduating high school senior Damon Fowler, voting for “hero” rather than the jerk-in-training assessment of my original posts on the topic, to be found here and here.

“I think impeding the encroachment of religion into schools is important, especially when it is unpopular to do so. While Damon is not actually hurt from school backed prayer, some of the other listeners will be: anyone who gets the impression that the school and government back Christianity, anyone who feels they must believe to fit in.

“The danger in this prayer isn’t that Damon will be hurt or his rights violated. The danger is to the weaker people unwilling or unable to stand up against this behavior. The danger is to the children not yet graduated, that they will learn in an environment that sees a place for superstition and pandering at a ceremony that should be celebratory.”

More on “The Atheist, the Graduation, and the Prayer”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Damon Fowler, School Adminstrator-In-Training?

Either by design, bias, or because I was not sufficiently clear (always a distinct possibility), a lot of readers seem to have misunderstood the central principle in my post about Damon Fowler, the Louisiana high school senior who singled-handedly bluffed his school out of including a prayer in his graduation ceremonies. Let me clarify.

The post is only incidentally about atheism vs. religion. The ethical issue arose in that context, but it just as easily could have been raised in other circumstances. The ethical values involved here were prudence, tolerance, self-restraint, proportionality, consideration, generosity, and empathy. Fowler’s actions assumed that preventing what he believed was a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on the government favoring one religious belief over another justified ignoring all of these. They don’t, and the same conclusion applies whether we are discussing a technical legal violation, a breaching of organizational rules, or personal misconduct.

Anyone who reads Ethics Alarms knows that I believe that the culture only becomes and stays ethical if all its participants accept the responsibility of flagging and, when necessary, condemning and stopping harmful societal conduct, as well as unethical personal conduct that will be toxic to society if it becomes the norm. Nevertheless, society becomes oppressive and intolerable if every single misstep, offense, violation, possible violation, arguable violation or mistaken judgment is cause for confrontation, conflict and policing, without regard for context and consequences. Indeed, much of the challenge in ethical analysis involves deciding what kind of misconduct matters, even once the question of whether something is misconduct has been settled. Continue reading →

The Giordano Decision, Sympathy and Malfunctioning Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sympathy and empathy are wonderful and admirable qualities, but they can mess up ethics alarms but good, causing them to ring out with gusto when perhaps they shouldn’t be set off at all.

This, I’m sorry to say, is what seems to be going on with the public and the media in the wake of a North Carolina judge denying Alaina Giordano primary custody of her two children,  in part because Giordano has Stage IV breast cancer, and in part because she is unemployed. Giordano is upset and nobody can blame her for that. She has also started a website exhorting readers to “Say NO! to CANCER discrimination!” There is a Facebook page (of course) rallying support for her, and it already has over 14,000 fans. An online petition to the governor called “Do Not Allow NC Judge To Take Alaina Giordano’s Children Just Because She Has Cancer ” has more than 75,000 signers.

Yet there is nothing inherently unethical, illogical or unfair about family law Judge Nancy E. Gordon awarding custody of 11-year-old Sofia and 5-year-old Bud to their father, who lives and works in Chicago, rather than to their mother, who lives in Durham, and has breast cancer that is most likely terminal. Continue reading →

The Conclusion to “Texas Cheerleading Ethics: Cheer Your Rapist” (And You’re Not Going To Like It)

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

"Give me an R! A! P! I! S! T!---RAPIST!!!"

Back in November, Ethics Alarms reported the awful story of the Silsbee, Texas High school cheerleader, identified only as “H.S.”,who was kicked off her cheerleading squad for violating “the Cheerleader Code of Ethics” after she refused to cheer at a game for the player who, it was later determined, had sexually assaulted her. She stood silent in mute protest, and when her parents sued the school, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that H.S.’s silent protest was not protected speech under the First Amendment, meaning that she could be disciplined for violating the cheerleading conduct code.

Now the Supreme Court has turned down the case, refusing to review it, meaning not only that H.S. loses, but also that her parents have to pay court costs and legal defenses to the tune of $45,000.

This is a perfect example of the distinction between the law, justice, and ethics. Continue reading →

“Lethal Advocacy”: Not Ethical, and Not Protected Speech, Either

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

"Go ahead! Jump! You know you want to!"

William Melchert-Dinkel, aged 48, posed as a female nurse in internet chat rooms and preyed on depressed people by talking them into killing themselves.  A misguided mission? A perverted hobby? A salesmanship challenge? Who knows. But occasionally, he was successful.

Melchert-Dinkel was charged with assisting suicides after he encouraged IT technician Mark Drybrough, of Hillfields, Minnesota, to kill himself. Drybrough, who was recovering from a nervous breakdown, received e-mails from Melchert-Dinkel, found on his computer, containing detailed advice on how Drybrough could hang himself. He used that advice to commit suicide in 2005. Melchert-Dinkel also provided encouragement and guidance to Canadian Nadia Kajouji,  18, who drowned herself by leaping into an icy river in 2008. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day:”Yes Julea,You Have A Right To Your Beliefs; You Just Don’t Have A Right…”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

An Ethics Alarms heartfelt thank you and “I owe you one!” to Ethics Sage, for cutting to the other core ethical point about what was wrong with Julea Ward’s refusal to counsel a gay student, and why she should have been dismissed from the university course as a consequence. It wasn’t just failure of responsibility, which my post was fixated on, but also failure of caring, compassion, and our shared duty as human beings to help each other even if our religion encourages us to regard those human beings as immoral.

Ethics Sage shows his handle ain’t just horn-blowin’ with this Comment of the Day, on the post “Yes Julea,You Have A Right To Your Beliefs; You Just Don’t Have A Right…”

“Julea Ward’s refusal to counsel a gay student is despicable on many levels. What if the student’s life had been threatened and he went to counseling to get some advice? How can anyone not act to help a person in that kind of situation or others we can think of that may or may not have anything to do with being gay? By refusing to counsel the gay student, Ward failed miserably not only to meet the requirements of the course but to act as a human being with compassion for another.”

Comment of the Day: “The Tears of Keith Ellison”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Less to do with the original post and more concerned with weightier matters is this thoughtful comment by blameblakeart, the Comment of the Day:

“This event in Japan has crystalized for me Jack – we as Humanity, as Earthlings – are all in this together, side of the aisle being probably the least of our worries. We need to use our smarts and our will to manifest a better, more abundant, more perfect world, all together, not just for a chosen few.

“10000+ years ago there were hundreds of species that basically cease to exist. What the 8.9 Japanese earthquake tells at least me is that life is tremendously fleeting, but intensely beautiful, magic, and precious, of all things, Human and Of this Earth. I don’t know why there are those out there trying to distract us from these simple truths with all these bogus, hateful, incendiary tactics.”

Read This To Your Mother…or Somebody’s Mother

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Nigerian Prince wants to meet your mother.

As my sister and I try to unravel the details and records of my mother’s nearly 90 years, we both have concluded that she would have been an easy mark for scammers and frauds if she didn’t have two lawyer offspring reviewing her decisions. The number of elderly, mentally-failing Americans who lose their life’s savings to these predators is a national tragedy. They are particularly prominent on the internet. I was very frustrated with my mother’s resistance to e-mail and the Web…now I’m not sure it wasn’t too dangerous for her to navigate.

The F.B.I. has an excellent and informative web page that should be shown, read to, and explained to every senior in your life. From the introduction:

“Senior citizens are most likely to have a “nest egg,” to own their home, and/or to have excellent credit—all of which make them attractive to con artists...People who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were generally raised to be polite and trusting. Con artists exploit these traits, knowing that it is difficult or impossible for these individuals to say “no” or just hang up the telephone. Older Americans are less likely to report a fraud because they don’t know who to report it to, are too ashamed at having been scammed, or don’t know they have been scammed. Elderly victims may not report crimes, for example, because they are concerned that relatives may think the victims no longer have the mental capacity to take care of their own financial affairs.”

The site goes on to describe how various scams work and how to spot them; indeed, you don’t need to be a senior to be vulnerable. The list is daunting: Continue reading →