ethics

The Ethics of Silencing Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Good and just people are not just bothered by the bad things people do, but also by the bad things they may be thinking while they do it.  This is reasonable, on its face, because a lot of  the time (though far from always), misconduct arises from ideas, emotions, motives and intentions that are not very admirable and sometimes despicable. The indisputable connection between what we think and what we do increasingly is fueling the idea that we can and should try to control people’s thoughts—not by encouraging good ones through education, culture, philosophy, role models and positive reinforcement, but by preventing bad thoughts through punishment, enforced conformity, censorship, and linguistic controls.

The civil rights movement, once dedicated to wiping out discrimination, which is a kind of conduct, now focuses on eliminating bigotry and bias, a form of thought. Hate crime legislation extends penalties for criminal acts beyond the act itself to what the criminal was thinking while he committed it.  The term “hate speech” is frequently used to describe any intense negative opinion as a way of both suppressing and de-legitimizing political opinion. The label effectively argues that an opinion, even a reasonable opinion by itself, should be shunned and even suppressed based on the “illegitimacy” of the thought process used to arrive at it.

As many predicted, this device or tendency (which you call it depends in part on how cynical you are) has intensified with the election of our first African American president, allowing the kind of intense opposition rhetoric, satire, condemnation, hyperbole and ridicule that has been directed at virtually every president before him to now be characterized as hate speech, or proof of racial prejudice. People, of course, have a right to engage in this tactic, but it is wrong.

Over on Facebook, over a million people have joined a fan page called “DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN”, inspired by a joke that is a lot older than Barack Obama, and probably older than Millard Fillmore. Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” and Helping Illegal Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Randy Cohen’s first response in this week’s installment of “The Ethicist” (in the Sunday New York Times Magazine) isn’t exactly unethical, but it isn’t exactly ethical, either, if little things like obeying laws still matter to you. The real value of Cohen’s column this time is to remind those who blithely condemn Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement statute as “cruel,” “racist” or “un-American” the extent to which the Federal Government’s failure to control our boarders and enforce the immigration laws has corrupted and confused us all.

Stuart Gold, from Brooklyn (and I respect Stuart for making his name public) queries Randy about how he should deal with knowledge that a local supermarket is exploiting some illegal immigrants working there by not meeting the legal requirements for minimum wages and working conditions. Stuart is friendly with the workers and wants to help them, but he doesn’t want to get them fired or deported. Cohen tells him to advise them of their rights if they don’t know them, but to leave any proactive steps to them.

This is reasonable advice, but look at what we have: Continue reading →

CBS: Nostalgia Spoilsport

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

For many years, I’ve been trying to track down a recording of the theme song from the wonderful 1963-64 TV anthology “The Great Adventure.” A critically praised, largely forgotten dramatic series that portrayed stories from American history, “The Great Adventure” began with a spirited march written by composer Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.

Now I can play the show’s intro on my computer any time I feel like being inspired, thanks to a wonderful web resource, televisiontunes.com. The site has collected over 15,000 songs and instrumental pieces from the entire expanse of television history, and it is a magic doorway to instant nostalgia, not to mention some fun and excellent music, like the Rodgers composition, that is difficult to find anywhere else. Want to hear, for example, “Interjections!”, the cleverest and catchiest of all ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” creations? It’s there…or rather, here.

But if you want to listen to the “Twilight Zone” theme, or the iconic intro to “Perry Mason,” or, most tragically of all, the opening strains of “Hawaii Five-O,” perhaps the best TV theme ever, you are out of luck. You are out of luck because CBS, alone among the networks, has had its lawyers start pulling off the best-known themes from the CBS shows, as is CBS’s right as the owners of them. Continue reading →

Drug War Ethics: THIS Is Excessive Force…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Radley Balko, a senior editor at Reason Magazine, has been following the law enforcement tactic of paramilitary raids on American homes, some of which go horrible wrong, and many of which raise questions of propriety and proportion. One of the worst of these, a February raid on a family’s home in Missouri that featured the invading authorities shooting the family dog in front of a young child, is immortalized on this frightening video. The father was charged with marijuana possession and child endangerment, presumably because he used drugs in the presence of his.

Balko, who, like everyone at Reason, is a libertarian, uses the incident to press his opposition to the illegal status of recreational drugs. “This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years,” he writes… Continue reading →

San Jose State, Blood, and Misguided Ethical Absolutism

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Food and Drug Administration will not permit you to donate blood if you have engaged in certain high risk activities associated with a greater likelihood of contracting the HIV virus.  This includes same-sex intimate relations between men. “FDA’s policies on donor deferral for history of male sex with males date back to 1983, when the risk of AIDS from transfusion was first recognized,” says the agency’s website. “A history of male-to-male sex is associated with an increased risk for the presence of and transmission of certain infectious diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

Officials at San Jose State University regard this as invidious discrimination against gays.  For that reason, the University has banned blood drives at the school in protest of the F.D.A. policy since 2008, and has announced that the ban will continue. The school’s logic is simple, or perhaps simple-minded. Banning men who have sex with men from donating blood constitutes discrimination, and discrimination is always bad. Thus San Jose State, a good school that abhors discrimination, will maintain its virtue by refusing to participate in a discriminatory practice. Continue reading →

The Amazing Segregated Field Trip

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Dicken Elementary School in Ann Arbor decided to take only its African American students on a field trip to meet and listen to a rocket scientist, leaving all the white students behind. When the parents of some of the white students excluded from the trip complained, the school’s principal replied, in part:

“The intent of our field trip was not to segregate or exclude students as has been reported, but rather to address the societal issues, roadblocks and challenges that our African American children will face as they pursue a successful academic education here in our community.” Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: New York Met Jason Bay

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Sometimes all it takes to be an Ethics Hero is being nice, especially if it’s in a way that most people like you have abandoned.

New Mets left fielder Jason Bay has moved to Larchmont, New York, where his presence is causing something of a buzz among the residents, especially the younger baseball fans. Gabriel Tugendstein, who is 11, was especially excited, and here we defer to his mother, writing in the New York Times… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Roman Polanski

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I know, this is akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Still, Roman Polanski’s self-righteous protest of what he sees as victimization and injustice, recently published in the French magazine La Règle du Jeu, is worth noting if only as a useful case study of how privilege and rationalizations can lead to ethical delusion.

Polanski, proclaiming, “I can now remain silent no longer!”—which I doubt will take its place next to Dreyfus’s “I am innocent!” in the annals of memorable prisoner quotes—makes it clear in his statement that he has no remorse and admits no serious wrongdoing for drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13-year old girl, the 33-year-old crime that began his legal problems. Oh, he accuses authorities of being unfeeling to the now-grown victim, who has repeatedly said she would like to see the entire issue disposed of and forgotten so she can get on with her life, conveniently forgetting that his brutality and subsequent refusal to be accountable to U.S. justice are the sole reasons she is suffering. Continue reading →

What Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax Can Teach America

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The one with the premium-grade ethics alarms bled to death on the sidewalk. The people who never had them installed at all took pictures. Is this the way it’s going to be?

Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was a Guatemalan immigrant who lived in Queens, New York. His life was a mess; he was destitute, ill, and had no job or likelihood of getting one. When he saw a knife-wielding man apparently assaulting a woman on the street two weeks ago, however, he knew what his ethical obligations were. He rescued her by intervening in the struggle, and got stabbed, badly, for his actions. The attacker ran off, and so did the woman, who didn’t check on Hugo after he fell, and  never contacted the police. She also neglected to say, “Thanks for saving my life.” Continue reading →

“Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

The “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” mess is a wonderful example of how ethics train wrecks begin to engulf anyone who get near them. It also an example of an idea that is clever, funny, well-intentioned, and wrong. Continue reading →