envy

Comment Of The Day: “Megyn Kelly, William Saroyan, Ethics, Me, And Us: A Rueful Essay” (#1)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

My post over the weekend, one long in germination, regarding the personal and societal dilemma of balancing one’s duty to oneself, one’s duty to be useful  and the infuriating hard-wired human tendency to always seek something different and better, received a gratifying response and at least two Comments of the Day.

This is the first, by frequent COTD auteur Extradimensional Cephalopod, is a marvelous supplement to my post, and I wish I had written it myself, except I couldn’t have.

Here is EC’s Comment of the Day on the post, Megyn Kelly, William Saroyan, Ethics, Me, And Us: A Rueful Essay:

One of the central principles of Buddhism is “life is suffering”. Clarified, it means that conscious beings inherently have some concept of how they want the world to be that is different from how it actually is. Alternatively, if the world is already how they want it to be, either the chaos in the world will bring it out of alignment with their desires, or they will eventually become dissatisfied as their minds develop further. This is what the bartender in Saroyan’s story is referring to. It’s the existential condition; “condemned to be free”, as Sartre put it.

Having studied desire and motivation from an existential point of view, I’ve codified eight motivations that lead people to form goals. They are based on three dichotomies: experience versus control, greater and lesser quantity, and order versus chaos.

Greed/ambition: the desire for more control or more accomplishment (acquiring more possessions or becoming more important).
Gluttony/celebration: the desire for more of an experience (greater intensities or more constant access).
Wrath/boldness: the desire to break through limits by exerting control (disregarding rules or doing the impossible).
Lust/curiosity: the desire to remove limits on one’s experiences (experiencing the unknown).
Hubris/scrupulousness: the desire to impose limits through one’s control (absolute, perfect control over something).
Envy/dedication: the desire to impose limits on one’s experiences (obsession or tunnel vision).
Sloth/contentment: the desire to have less control (having responsibility or having to pay less attention).
Cowardice/prudence: the desire to have less of an experience (avoiding pain or discomfort). Continue reading →

Sixth Grader Lauren Arrington Is No Plagiarist—This Science Fair Ethics Train Wreck Is Adult-Engineered

/ Jack Marshall / 92 Comments
You know, it's really all YOUR fault!

You know, it’s really all YOUR fault!

Florida sixth grader Lauren Arrington found herself a sudden media star when her science fair project was featured on NPR, CBS, and other media outlets for allegedly breaking new ground.  Rather than rub hormones on chicks or build models of volcanos, Lauren’s project focused on the Indo-Pacific lionfish, a troublesome invasive species that is causing ecological havoc in ocean waters along the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean. The NPR story, “Sixth Grader’s Science Fair Finding Shocks Ecologists,” was typical: it quoted Lauren’s “Eureka!” thusly…

“Scientists were doing plenty of tests on them, but they just always assumed they were in the ocean. So I was like, ‘Well, hey guys, what about the river?’ “

Gee, I wonder why a 12 year-old girl was thinking about that? Well, it seems that her father, Dr. Albrey Arrington is the executive director of the Loxahatchee River District, and has been involved in lionfish research. Not that there is anything necessarily unethical or unusual about a parent suggesting a science fair project to his child that is in that parent’s own area of expertise, or even providing access to resources for the child to accomplish the project, but as we will see, Dr. Arrington set his daughter up for trouble she couldn’t possibly understand. Continue reading →

The Ethics Of Demanding Charity

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments
Joanna Leigh

Joanna Leigh

I can not imagine much more heartbreaking plights than that of Boston Marathon bombing victim Joanna Leigh.

By April 14, 2013, Leigh, 39, had a newly minted doctorate in international development, and a promising career as a consultant. On April 15, she was at the finish line of the marathon, waiting for a friend to cross it, when the second of two bombs exploded ten feet from her. She was shielded from the deadly flying metal by other spectators, but still knocked unconscious. When she awoke, there was chaos around her, people screaming, maimed, covered with blood. She helped some injured find help, and then, dazed, walked home. For various reasons, she did not get herself checked out at a hospital until more than a week had passed.

Gradually, however, the symptoms of her injuries began appearing. Soon, it became obvious that the closed head injuries she suffered in the explosion have caused devastating long-term damage to her brain, and it is doubtful that her life will ever be normal again. Today, she says, she has to sleep most of the day. She cannot work or drive, and is easily disoriented, even getting lost on her own block. She has blurred vision, her hearing is impaired and she cannot avoid the constant ringing in her ears. Concentration has become difficult, and the simplest everyday tasks are overwhelming.   Continue reading →

Unethical Feature: “Top 10 People Who Don’t Deserve To Be Millionaires”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

And leave Bubbles alone.

I know: it’s a feature, it’s a gag, it’s not meant to be taken seriously. I don’t care: the underlying attitude behind The Daily Caller’s recent slideshow, “Top 10 People Who Don’t Deserve To Be Millionaires” is too common these days to be emulated, even in half or whole jest. The belief that citizens of the U.S. “don’t deserve” to have the money they do is at the root of toxic politics, bad economic policy, class resentment and self-excused jealousy, and it shouldn’t be encouraged. If there is a genuine and persuasive argument to be made that people don’t deserve the money they earn, then make it, and you have to do better than “you didn’t build that!”

Taylor Bigler, the Caller’s entertainment editor who compiled the list, doesn’t. She just appeals to jealousy, as if nobody really really does resent people who have made more money than they have so its fine to pretend they do. “Now, some people are millionaires because they are ambitious and kept their noses to the grindstone,” she says. “Those people certainly deserve their hard-earned success. But honestly, there are many other people who are millionaires that simply don’t deserve to be.” Like? Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

“Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world. Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.”

—-Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, a retired professor from Cal State East Bay, addressing a rally this weekend of the Occupy Oakland  group, which fought police in a pitched battle that ended with 400 arrests.

I said that the Occupy movement would end badly, and it is, not that it should have taken advanced psi-powers to divine that a protest based on ignorance, envy and anarchy with no practical and constructive proposals to offer would eventually end in violence, anger and ugliness. Hate is what it has come down to now, and the party and supporters of the President who came to office promising hope are now pinning their hopes on a sad movement fueled by hate. To say that the protests are also unethical is to flog the obvious. They have cost communities millions of dollars that will be made up in cut services; they have soiled parks and public places, they have provided a meeting place for thugs, vagrants, criminals, and worse ( an Occupier was arrested over the weekend for strangling his parents), and they have embodied a cultural rejection of personal responsibility.

Not to mention an escape from reality.“The fact that everyone now talks about the 99 percent, the 1 percent – that shows Occupy’s won,”  Carter Lavin, 23, of Oakland told the press. “The debate was about debt, not jobs. Now it’s about jobs.”

Sure, Carter. Continue reading →

Obligation or Charity: Retired Baseball Player Pensions and Fairness

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is an old ethical problem: what is “fair”?  If you help someone, are you obligated to help everyone? Does charity have to be consistent to be fair? Does a potential beneficiary of generosity have a right to demand it? It is obviously good for those who are fortunate and successful to share the benefits of their success with the unfortunate and less successful, but is it unethical if they choose not to?

These are some of the ethics issues being raised in a controversy launched by the major league baseball veterans, now retired, who played  between 1947-1979. In those days, when free agency was just beginning and top players made six-figure salaries rather than seven or eight as they do now, a player needed four full years of  time on a big league roster to qualify for  medical benefits and an annuity. In 1980, however, new rules put in place by the Major League Baseball Players Association  granted health insurance benefits to those with just one day of service, and a pension after merely six weeks. The new benefits were not retroactive. Continue reading →

Staten Island Ethics Quote of the Week: Hate—Bad; Greed, Disrespect and Envy—Meh

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“I don’t think it’s a hate crime, it’s just a recession out there.”

—A Staten Island neighbor of 17-year-old Yashua Plair, who has been arrested and charged with a hate crime for shouting anti-Latino epithets while attacking a 15-year-old Mexican boy to take his i-Pod.

Oh. Well, I guess it’s OK then. Continue reading →