fairness

9 Tips For Ethical Debate Watching

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The hype and predictions about tomorrow night’s first debate between Mitt Romney and President Obama are already unbearable. Yet the debates will be worth watching, and could do this revolting campaign a lot of good, if we can discipline ourselves to watch it ethically. This is harder than it sounds.

1. The most important aspect to ethical debate watching is resolving to be fair. That means don’t do your own “spin”: force yourself to be equally critical of both candidates. There are no villains in this election, much as it has been framed that way by the two parties. Neither has a nefarious objective; both are dedicated public servants and loyal Americans. If you don’t believe that, you probably shouldn’t watch the debates at all.

2. Look for honesty, and be grateful for it. I will give points to any candidate that admits a mistake, gives credit to his opponent, state that he doesn’t have all the answers, acknowledge that there is merit in some of what the other candidate suggests.

3. Look for dishonesty, and be critical of it. Are his answers evasive? Does he quote false statistics? Is he making promises he can’t keep, or has no control over whether he keeps them or not? Is he trying to mislead the ignorant and gullible in the audience? Do you trust him?

4. Watch for signs of character, good and bad. The debate isn’t scripted, which means that we have a rare chance to see the human beings (maybe) rather than the facades. Are they arrogant? Nervous? Disrespectful? Rude? Dispassionate? Impulsive? Cocky? Are they respectful? Fair? Reasonable?  Gracious?

5. Ignore the practiced zingers and the style points. Don’t be overly impressed with recitations of facts, names and numbers: both candidates are smart and do this well; so can many people you wouldn’t want in the White House on the best day of their lives. This is a crisis for each of them; the stakes are huge. How do they handle it? Are they cautious? Reckless? Unprepared? Impulsive? Brave?

6. Try to ignore whether you like either candidate, but rather examine about whether they can be persuasive to others. Try to adjust for your biases.

7. Be open to having your mind changed. The hardest task of all.

8. After the debate is over, make up your own mind before you listen to any of the partisan analysts. All Republicans will say Romney won; all Democrats will say Obama won, except pundits who want to stand out as the “objective” ones. Most of them are calculating too. Confirmation bias operates in overdrive in such events: the partisans really see it the way they want to. Ignore them. Don’t listen to them. How did you feel about the debate? That’s all that matters. Nobody knows how you should react to it better than you do.

9. Watch it. This is important, and we are lucky to have the system we have, as rotten as it often is.

One For The “Innocent Until Proven Guilty” Crowd

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Stop scaring my dog!

A commenter recently pulled out the hoary and almost always misused “innocent until proven guilty” line, which reliably makes me scream, frightening the dog and the neighbors. Thus I was happy to see this September 28 ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court, which found that Philip Pilie, a 2007 University of Georgia School of Law  who passed the bar examination in 2009, lacked the character and fitness to be admitted to practice in the state, despite the fact that he was not convicted of the crime that resulted in his disqualification.

Why? Because he did it, that’s why. Pilie contacted what he thought was a 15-year-old girl online and arranged to have sex. She was, unfortunately for Pilie, really a big, hairy, middle-aged man looking for predators who like to have sex with under-age girls. Pilie  was arrested at the planned rendezvous and charged with two  felonies,  computer-aided solicitation of a minor and attempted indecent behavior with a minor.

Pilie negotiated a deal with the district attorney to avoid prosecution. He completed a pre-trial diversion program including counseling, and all charges  were dropped. Pilie took and passed the bar exam, but was informed  in March 2009 that he lacked the character and fitness for admission to practice, because he trolled on computers for young girls to have sex with, by his own admission. His appeal to Louisiana’s highest court failed, twice.

In the latest decision, the court said that Pilie’s lack of a criminal conviction made no difference in its reasoning. “Had petitioner been a practicing attorney at the time of his misconduct, it is very likely he would have been permanently disbarred,” it wrote. “Given this fact, we can conceive of no circumstance under which we would ever admit petitioner to the practice of law.” Pilie was permanently barred from ever again seeking admission, without ever being “convicted in a court of law.” Continue reading →

Just Stop It—You’re Embarrassing Yourselves

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh yeah? Well this guy is a ROMNEY supporter!

As evidence grows that the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention may have been practicing law in Massachusetts—the state she seeks to represent in the U.S. Senate—without proper legal authorization, the description of the matter in the mainstream media, to the extent that it is mentioned at all, is that “the conservative blogosphere” is making the accusation. This ritual drives me to distraction, as readers of Ethics Alarms know. But if conservatives want to be given more respect when they uncover a legitimate story that the biased media will try to ignore or bury, they have to stop indulging themselves in utter garbage like this. Continue reading →

Most Unethical TV Series Episode of the Year: “C.S.I.” (Premiere)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In next week’s episode, D.B. dreams that he owns a bar in Boston….

I like “C.S.I.”, especially since Ted Danson took over the show as family man D.B. Russell. I won’t be watching the show for long, however, if it continues to cheat its audience as it did tonight, in the much heralded premiere to the new season.

The plot involved the kidnapping of Russell’s granddaughter in an extortion plot engineered by an imprisoned Vegas mobster. In fact, there wasn’t much to the story: they tracked down the little girl, and she was alive. The show was padded out by an obnoxious and unprecedented gimmick for “C.S.I”, showing scenes of great tragedy, violence or drama that turned out to be nothing but dark forebodings in Ted Danson’s stressed-out head. We see him viewing the body of his daughter in the coroner’s lab; she has a bullet hole in her temple. Surprise! It’s not really happening! Ted is just dreading it, because he’s so worried. D.B. gets a gun, goes in to a holding cell to talk to the mobster, loses his cool and shoots him dead. Oops! That didn’t happen either! D.B. is just thinking about how much he’d like to do that, you see. After the child is found unharmed, after real events that would have taken up about a 30 minute episode, D.B./Danson comes home to find his beloved wife leaving him! Oh, no, not that! D.B. loves his…Dang! They got me again!  That was just another day dream! Continue reading →

“Your Boss Is Insane”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On the site Learn Stuff, Sarah Wenger has produced an infographic with a strong ethics message, aimed at the vast number of people in management and supervisory positions in business who abuse their position and power, making those they lead miserable, unproductive, and insane themselves. How many horrible bosses inflict themselves on the nation? That is a mystery, though we know it’s a lot. Incompetent, unfair and irresponsible supervisors at all levels,  as the feature states,

“cost their employees their health and the U.S. economy some serious cash. Employees with bad bosses can lose their hair, gain weight and up their chances of heart disease by a whopping 25%. And to top it all off, poorly managed workplaces are less profitable and have lower levels of productivity. Psychopathic bosses: bad for you, bad for the economy.”

The problem is that management is hard, leadership is harder, formal training in either cannot cure personality defects that make being successful in these two endeavors unlikely, and because truly talented managers and leaders are so rare, most people rise to positions of power without ever experiencing what effective leadership is. A good starting point for any boss is a commitment to fairness and respect, as well as an understanding of what responsibility and accountability mean. That, of course, means ethics.

Here is Sarah Wenger’s infographic, “Your Boss is Insane,” re-published with her permission: Continue reading →

Airport Ethics: And This Is How Cheating Becomes Respectable

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The owners of these bags are suckers.

Traveling from Cleveland to Washington. D.C., today, I noted that the ridiculous airport baggage checking policies have borne predictable fruit. Easily 50% of the fliers on my plane cheated, sneaking their bags through security to avoid the luggage charge.

And it is cheating.

The airline charges $25 for each bag checked. The airport screeners don’t know or care who is on what flight, so it is easy to get bags through security that are too large to fit in the overhead compartments of some or all flights. Once you get them through security (slowing down the line for everyone else: the line in Cleveland went so slowly that I though I was in a Candid Camera stunt. Six travelers celebrated birthdays, two retired, and one girl went through puberty while we waited. And I had to shave repeatedly), the attendant at the gate will tell you that your bag won’t fit, and gives you a tag. You tag the bag, and leave it on the jetway. Then it is picked up and put on the flight. After you land, the bag is delivered to the jetway, meaning that the cheaters also get their bags without waiting for the carousel, or having to worry about them getting lost. Continue reading →

The NFL’s Replacement Ref Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

There are some things even football fans won’t stand for. I think.

It was Week #3 of the NFL season, and there is a growing consensus that the replacement referees, the consequence of the NFL’s labor dispute with its regular refs, are making, if not a mockery of the game, a mess of it. The ethics issue: at what point is the quality of the NFL’s product so compromised by sub-professional officiating that the league is cheating the public by presenting it at all?

Airlines don’t use replacement pilots when pilots go on strike; they wouldn’t dare. Chicago didn’t hire street mimes to stand in for the striking teachers. In the NFL’s case, it is making the calculation that football fans will put up with lousy officiating if the alternative is no games at all on Sunday. Meanwhile, the NFL still charges the same outrageous prices for its tickets and still collects full value in merchandising and TV revenue. Translation: It is getting full price for a less than complete product. Is that ethical? Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Panders

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I know. I’ve hated the pander-panda pun since Sen. Paul Tsongas called Bill Clinton a “pander bear” in 1992. But the newborn baby panda at the National Zoo died yesterday, there’s no way to write about it on an ethics blog, so this was the best I could do to register my condolences. Forgive me.

What would be the response of an objective and balanced news media—that is, one determined to treat both candidates equally unfairly—to  an Obama equivalent of the infamous Romney dismissal of “47%” of the electorate? We really can’t tell from the closest comparison, candidate Obama’s infamous and also surreptitiously taped 2008 comments in ultra-liberal San Francisco, condescendingly describing blue-collar Pennsylvanians who, he said, “get bitter, [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”  That was while he was running against another media darling, Hillary Clinton, so it presumably got more play than it would have if he were facing a hated Republican.

Better intelligence comes from Jennifer Rubin’s criticism today of Obama’s answer to an interviewer on the Spanish language cable station Univision, who asked him what his greatest failure was. Why, failing to achieve comprehensive immigration reform, of course! (“This is a Hispanic channel, right?”)

Really?, wonders the conservative Rubin. How about… Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: Papa Roach

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ethics Alarms’ 2011 Commenter of the Year tgt, who found this story and passed it on, asks,

“How is a horrible stoner rock band more ethical than everyone in politics?”

It’s a great, if sorrowful, question.

A.V. Club has a feature (which could be called “Start a Feud”) in which it asks a rock performer what song he or she hates, and why.  Jenn Wasner, one half of the Baltimore indie-folk duo Wye Oak (“a blend of Southern culture and Northern sensibilities…”) submitted to this invitation to get in trouble, and fingered the song in the video above, “Scars,” by Papa Roach.

Criticizing the work of other artists in the same field is unprofessional at best, gratuitously unkind and disrespectful. Papa Roach’s members would have been within their rights to fire back something less than complimentary in defense, at very least the observation that ethical musicians don’t take gratuitous shots at one another. What the band did however, was this: it sent Wasner flowers. Wasner was convinced it was some kind of diabolical trap, and tweeted as much. The band tweeted back: Continue reading →

The Part of Legal Ethics The Public Will Never, Ever Understand

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Sen. Brown has the pulse of the public on this issue, and like the public, he’s ignorant.

Especially since politicians like Scott Brown keep making sure that they misunderstand.

In this week’s Massachusetts Senate debate between Sen. Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, Brown slammed the anti-corporate crusader, the self-styled intellectual catalyst for the Occupy Movement, for accepting $250,000 from the Travelers insurance company to help the company deny claims for asbestos poisoning. He said:

“You chose to side with one of the biggest corporations in the United States: Travelers Insurance. When you worked to prohibit people who got asbestos poisoning, and I hope all the asbestos union workers are watching right now. She denied, she helped Travelers deny those benefits for asbestos poisoning, made over $250,000 in an effort to protect big corporations….”

Brown is accurately stating the way most people look at lawyers and what they do. But he is absolutely mistaken. His characterization of what Warren did is incorrect, and his inference of hypocrisy is unfair.  It is all the worse because he is a lawyer himself. If Senator Brown, as a lawyer, doesn’t understand what’s wrong with his accusation, he should. If he does know, then he is undercutting his own profession for political gain. [NOTE: The original version of the post incorrectly stated that Brown was not a lawyer. My thanks to Mass lawyer James Flood III for flagging the error.] Continue reading →