ethics

Allied Against Consumers and Ethics: Google and the Sociopathic Businessman

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Today the New York Times extensively documents the unethical business strategy used by the owner of a web-based eyewear business.

After making the discovery that Google does not distinguish between positive and negative mentions of a business on the Internet, he resolved to treat complaining customers as badly as possible to encourage complaints about his company on consumer sites. I do mean “as badly as possible”: the Times relates the accounts of customers who received insulting phone calls, threatening mail, and other harassing and bullying communications from the entrepreneur, who uses multiple aliases. The method works well: since on-line diatribes, complaints and bad reviews have piled up over his poor service, outrageous conduct and often shoddy merchandise, the man’s business is booming. Its name consistently nears the top of Google’s search results when a potential customer types the name of his or her favorite eyewear designer and “eyeglasses,” sometimes placing higher than the designer itself. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Buffalo Bills Wide Receiver Steve Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Buffalo Bills wide receiver Steve Johnson dropped what would have been a game-winning touchdown pass in Sunday’s game against the Steelers, who eventually won. Rather than accepting responsibility and accountability for his failure, Johnson took to Twitter to blame…God.

His tweet shouted in indignation…

“I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!! AND THIS IS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW??? I’LL NEVER FORGET THIS!!!! EVER!!! THX THO…” Continue reading →

Another Unethical TV Commercial: Twix Trivializes Lies, Infidelity

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Twix’s successful “Need a moment?” campaign has long based its humor on encouraging people to lie themselves out of various embarrassing predicaments. Though almost all of them portray men as stereotypical sexist creeps, they have generally been within acceptable limits of exaggeration for the sake of humor. Its recent ad, however, crosses ethical  lines by seeming to trivialize and even encourage infidelity, while claiming that the product can facilitate it. Continue reading →

Easy Call: Wikileaks Is Naive, Unethical, and Dangerous

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

All one has to know is the degree to which nuclear war was averted through diplomatic back-channels and secret communications during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 in order to begin to understand how dangerous, stupid and wrong the entire concept of Wikileaks is. The latest dump of secret, near-secret and supposedly secure government messages on a wide range of topics has the  same general effect as a group of small, noisy children running amuck, screaming and banging pots and pans, while adults are trying to address urgent issues of war, commerce, human rights, and terrorism in the same small room. Continue reading →

Heeding the Christmas Season Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, it has come to this. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas season is a pre-unethical condition, getting worse every year. (Pre-unethical conditions are situations that experience teaches us deserve early ethics alarms, since the stage is set for habitual bad conduct.) The financial stresses on the public and the business community in 2010 will only fuel the creeping tendency to ignore the moral and ethical values that are supposed to underlie the winter holidays—charity, gratitude, generosity, kindness, love, forgiveness, peace and hope—for the non-ethical considerations that traditionally battle them for supremacy: avarice, selfishness, greed, self-pity, and cynicism. Combine this with the ideological and political polarization in today’s America and the deterioration of mutual respect and civility, and the days approaching Christmas are likely to become an ethical nightmare…unless we work collectively to stop that from happening. Continue reading →

Self-Restraint in Congress: Great Idea, Little Hope

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Is Congress capable of exercising discipline and self-restraint? It will have to, in everything from avoiding partisan bickering and pay-back to cutting dispensable programs with loud constituencies, if the government is to have any chance of reducing the deficit and putting the nation back on the road to fiscal responsibility. We can hope, but the signs are not encouraging.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the incoming G.O.P majority is going to try to take the symbolic step of banning honorific proclamations, on the theory that Congress passing hundreds of bills each session saluting the American pickle industry, noting the retirement of Georgia Tech’s rugby coach, or lauding the memory of actress Delores Del Rio wastes time that needs to be spent doing the real work of governing. Continue reading →

Ethics and Freeing the Unjustly Convicted: A Utilitarian Controversy in Illinois

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess and his student reporters have been carrying out a heroic and aggressive project aimed at rescuing innocent residents of Illinois’s death row. It was Protess’s Medill Innocence Project that played a major role in influencing former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s decision to halt all executions. Now, however, the Innocence Project’s methods are now under attack by its own university and Cook County prosecutors, who say the students crossed legal and ethical lines while investigating a decades-old murder.

Prosecutors claim that some of Protess’s students used surreptitious taping in an investigation, secretly recording a suspect in violation of Illinois law. Continue reading →

The Kardashian Kard Saga: Proof That We Are Doomed?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In “Terminator II,” there is  a scene in which young John Connor–desperately trying, along with his mother and the android killing machine sent from the future to protect the boy, to prevent the apocalyptic future that waits for him—sees young children gleefully pretending to murder each other with toy guns.  “We’re not going to make it, are we?” he asks the Terminator. “People, I mean.” The fact that a bank has chosen the Trashy Kardashian Sisters to promote a credit card aimed at teenagers prompts approximately the same sense of futility. At a time of crisis in which our culture that desperately needs to encourage responsible fiscal conduct led by financial institutions we can trust, this is what we get.

We’re doomed. Continue reading →

When the “Everybody Does It” Excuse Works: Police Dog Cruelty in North Carolina

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In January, Ethics Alarms named the North Carolina State Personnel Commission an Ethics Dunce for reinstating North Carolina State Trooper Sgt. Charles Jones, who had been fired for abusing one of his police dogs. He had been videoed as he hung the dog, Ricoh, and kicked him for not releasing a chew toy on command. The Commission heard testimony from officers regarding the brutal training methods routinely used by the police, and ruled that by practice and law, what Jones did was not what they call “abuse” in North Carolina, at least when it is done to police dogs.  “Though disturbing, the treatment of Jones’ animal does not rise to the level of ‘abuse,'” the ruling reads, and even if it did, the Commission noted that the Wake County, N.C., animal ordinance specifically exempts police dogs.” In other words, abusing police dogs is acceptable conduct for K-9 trainers.

The ruling came after the testimony of other dog handlers had prompted the Highway Patrol to suspend all use of dogs, anticipating public outrage. Governor Easley also pushed for Jones’s dismissal after the video surfaced, and he made certain that the Commission’s reinstatement of Jones was appealed.

You’re not going to like the result. Continue reading →

Be Thankful Tom DeLay Is Going To Jail

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“As for DeLay, his time will probably come. He has ethical blind spots galore, and is only getting bolder with time. The more the Republicans move to protect “The Hammer,” the more damaging DeLay’s inevitable fall will be to the party. As the old newspaper columnists used to say, “You read it here first!”

I posted that almost exactly six years ago. In the years I have been doing ethics commentary, no figure inspired (or perhaps depressed) me more than Tom DeLay when he was G.O.P. Majority leader in the House. Now he has finally been convicted of the legal violations that his contempt for ethics virtually guaranteed.  From “Too Dumb to be Ethics Dunces,” posted in 2005: Continue reading →