Facebook

Ethics Quilt: Ghosts, Teachers, Facebook, and More

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment
  • Is It Ethical to Censor Someone’s Question You Think Is Unethical?:  Here is a post questioning whether a question can be so offensive that it is unethical to even ask it. The obvious answer: if you refuse to ask it, nobody will have the chance to explain what’s wrong with it.
  • “Yeah, Well, he Probably Deserved it…”:  As mind-blowing as the video of the Texas teacher assaulting and savagely beating a male student are the many, many on-line comments expressing sympathy and even support for her actions. What on earth is going on out there? Yes, teachers are placed in a nearly impossible position by restrictions on class discipline. Yes, there are students whose conduct is outrageous. Yes, I’m sure many teachers have wanted to lash out. Yes, the kid was probably no angel. Neither these or any other factors can possibly justify an adult authority figure resorting to violence against a student, a child, and someone placed in her care by the family and the state. “Where can I contribute to her defense fund?” writes one commenter. Another’s response is that if it were her son, she would come down to the school and beat up the teacher. And people keep asking me why I bother to write about ethics… Continue reading →

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 →

“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 →

Ethics Hero: East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I know what you are going to say.  There has to be an angle, right?

“Come on: fool me once, shame on you, fool me 67,896,432 times, shame on me. A mayor donates her kidney to a citizen of her city just because it’s a nice thing to do?  Who is gullible enough to believe that?“

East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon, like many politicians, uses her Facebook page less for social networking than for political public relations, and to built those fundraising mailing lists, of course.  Almon was perusing the status updates of her more than 1,600 “friends” last year when she happened to read the status update of Carlos Sanchez, whom knew slightly. It said his friends and relatives had all been tested and couldn’t donate a kidney, which he needed desperately.

So  Almon, 35, got tested, was a match, and gave him her kidney. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Prof. Peter Tague and Chief Justice John Roberts

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In today’s world of text-messaging, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, intentionally throwing a rumor into a crowded room is only marginally better than falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowed theater. Thus Ethics Alarms regretfully has to pronounce Georgetown Law Center professor Peter Tague’s puckish stunt of last week irresponsible and unethical.

Demonstrating how unreliable it was to accept media accounts from un-named sources, Prof. Tague told his first year law class that he had learned from a “reliable source” that Chief Justice John Roberts was about to announce his retirement. Some nimble-fingered Twitter-user (or many) promptly sent the rumor into cyberspace, where it rapidly found its way onto scoop-hungry websites, especially those made giddy by the prospect of President Obama having the chance to replace one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative judges with a progressive one. By the time Tague announced to the class that his “scoop” was a fraud, just thirty minutes later, the fake story was multiplying like a virus. Continue reading →

The 2009 Ethics Alarms Awards, Part 1: The Worst

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Welcome to the first annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the best and worst of ethics in 2009! These are the Worst; the Best is yet to come. Continue reading →

Student Booze, the Police, and the Facebook Mole

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The battle to define what is right and wrong regarding social networking sites continues. The Philadelphia Bar Association has decided that it is an ethics violation for a lawyer to recruit someone to make a Facebook “friend request” to a witness to pass on to  the lawyer  the contents of  the witness’s Facebook page. The ethics committee wrote that this was dishonest conduct by the lawyer even though the witness willingly accepted the fake “friend” and would have accepted almost anyone who asked. The same tactic was pulled on University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer, who has over 400 Facebook friends and who accepted a friend request by an attractive young woman he didn’t know because, well, she was an attractive young woman. She was working for the police, however, and found photos on the site of Adam and a friend, Tyrell Luebker, with adult beverages in hand. They both were ticketed for underage drinking, and ended up paying a fine. Continue reading →

Florida, Facebook, and Teacher Conduct

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Two teachers are out of a job. Both share some responsibility for their fates. The question is how much, and whether their school districts over-reacted to their conduct.

The easier of the two tales, and by far the funnier, took place in Prairie Village, a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas.  A Mission Valley middle school teacher (make that ex-teacher) named Ryan Haraughty was drawing a map of the United States on the blackboard and drew Florida out of proportion. The extra-long, engorged Florida drew snickers from his teen age students, which Haraughty acknowledged by quipping, “Florida got excited.” Hilarity ensued. Continue reading →