From the You Find Ethical Controversies in the Strangest Places Dept., this post from “About the Occult”:
“There are many people (about 0.5%) who use PSI [psychic abilities, to you non-X Files fans] to do evil. Are there laws concerning that? Using ESP AT ALL should be ILLEGAL!!! It is UNETHICAL!!!”
The ethical analysis is certainly sound, even if the assumptions are flawed.
A strange tale in the New York Times, told by reporter Adam Liptak, raises a persistent problem of executive ethics. Is it unethical for a state governor to reject a recommendation of clemency based on strong evidence?
As Liptak tells it, it had been 28 years since Ronald Kempfert had seen his father, imprisoned in an Arizona prison in 1975 for a 1962 double murder, when a lawyer contacted Kempfert and told him that his father had been framed—by his mother. Nearly the entire case against the father, William Macumber, had been based on his wife’s testimony that he had confessed the murders to her. Kempfert, knowing his mother, and knowing the toxic state of their marital discord at the time of her testimony, agreed that she was quite capable of doing such a thing, and after doing some digging on his own, concluded that his father, now elderly and ailing, had been wrongly sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
There was more. Continue reading
From Wall Street Journal blogger-extraordinaire James Taranto:
“Tax refunds are evil, because they fool people into thinking they’re “getting” something from the government, when in fact all they’re receiving is their own money, months late. If the private sector tried this–say, your insurance or power company “borrowed” money by tacking $20 on to your monthly bill and refunded it, without interest, the following year–it would be a pretty clear case of fraud.”
Beyond the obvious hyperbole of “evil”—on this blog we would say “unethical”—is there any good argument against Taranto’s analysis?
Ethics Alarms 