fairness

Wild Card Ethics and Cultural Expectations

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Bad ideas are contagious, especially popular ones.

Major League Baseball just expanded the number of teams that qualify for post-season glory from eight to ten. Yes, there are ethical calculations involved in this, whether baseball cares or not. Supposedly, questions of fairness were part of the reason for the change, though I doubt it—in pro sports, the engine of change is always profit. And whether the change results in more fairness or less depends on what you consider fair—or perhaps whether you are sleeping intents in various U.S. cities.

Sports is such a big part of our cultural consciousness that what the National Pastime calls fair and just cannot help but influence cultural standards. Before 1969, there were two leagues of eight, then ten, Major League teams, and the two teams with the best records in each league met in the World Series. It was a simple meritocracy, with just 10% of the teams being allowed to advance after the regular season. Oh, there was always complaining about how the rich Yankees got into the Series more often than not, while the Senators, Phillies, Astros and A’s never did, but nobody camped out in the middle of Manhattan to protest baseball talent disparity. If you lived in one of the smaller Major League cities you just scaled back expectations, that’s all. And if, by some miracle, you won, then victory was all the sweeter, because you had bucked the odds by being harder working, stronger, better. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Rhode Island State Rep. Lisa Baldelli-Hunt

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Funny, she doesn't LOOK vicious...

The Penn State scandal will have one good effect: it will embolden victims of sexual  molestation to confront those who harmed them. Unfortunately, it will also embolden political grand-standers  to propose draconian and unconstitutional measures that will encourage fear, bigotry, hate and persecution.  Rhode Island’s Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, D-Woonsocket, is ready for her close-up.

Baldelli-Hunt proposed a law this year that would allow local police to place signs on public sidewalks or streets in front of the homes of sex offenders, designating them as threats. This shows a nice 17th Century strain, placing her in the ranks of town elders of the past that encouraged various forms of branding former offenders to ensure their perpetual mistreatment.  To give her credit, though, she also can claim international inspiration from the past, and may want to consider requiring registered sex offenders to wear, say, brightly colored star-shaped badges.

The Anti-Golden Rule logic of such a proposal is stunning: how would you like a sign proclaiming the worst thing you ever did in your life in front of your home? How would Baldelli-Hunt like a sign in front of her house that says, “Outspoken endorser of persecution and hate”?

An elected official who has no concept of ethics is not only unqualified for office and incompetent, but dangerous, because there are always a lot of ethically-challenged people to lead. Baldelli-Hunt is squarely in the “the ends justify the means” camp with every brutal dictator, vigilante killer, and mad scientist fictional and real, from Dr. Frankenstein to Josef Mengele. “I have some concerns regarding sex offenders because, quite frankly, they don’t walk around with signs telling people they are sex offenders,” Baldelli-Hunt told reporters. “I’m not interested in their rights or protecting them. I have no concern for them because they are the worst of the worst.”

Baldelli doesn’t walk around with signs telling people she is a vicious fool, either, but her words do the job:

1. She doesn’t know who “they” are or what “they” did. The vast majority of former sex offenders have paid their debt to society and are not dangers to anyone. She is, therefore, selling and facilitating bigotry.

2. Every registered sex offender did not commit an offense of equal seriousness. An 18-year-old boy who has consensual sex with a 15 year-old girl is not “the worst of the worst,” or any kind of worst at all.

3. Elected officials in a community are obligated to care about every citizen’s rights, not just the citizens they like and admire. Officials like Baldelli-Hunt brought America witch trials, lynchings and segregation.

She, in fact, is this worst of the worst.

Consider this her sign.

 

Chelsea’s New Job: A Rant on Suck-up Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Now THIS is what the newscasts call "talent"...

I’m trying to locate some of the critics of “Dancing With The Stars,” many of them professional Palin-haters from the media’s left, who screamed of the injustice when Bristol Palin was chosen as a competitor on the popular has-been, D-list, fat-celebrity-looking-for- a-Jenny Craig-gig TV dance show. Remember that? I want to ask them why, if it bothered them so much for the talentless, dance-challenged Bristol to be elevated over the likes of Eve Plumb (“Jan Brady”) or Phyllis Diller or Joey Heatherton (Oh, go look her up!) for pop trash exposure for a few weeks because she has a famous mother, how they feel now about NBC hiring Chelsea Clinton as a full-time news correspondent.

I’ll tell you how I feel: it’s offensive, unfair, and an insult to just about everyone, but NBC’s own profession most of all. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: An Unknown Diner

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

A waiter’s tale from a website called An Orange Box:

The waiter vows vengeance.

Here’s tip to the Faithful: this isn’t the way to convert anybody.

Judging McQueary: Child Rape Bystander Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

You have no excuses, Kal-El. But the rest...

“It was cowardly for a 6′4″ graduate assistant to witness the rape of a child by an older man and not only take no action to stop it but also not even call the police,” writes David French in the National Review.

He is, of course, referring to Mike McQueary, then a 28-year-old graduate student assistant coach for Joe Paterno at Penn State. Others have declared that it was an “absolute moral imperative” that McQueary physically intervene to stop the sexual assault.

It is interesting that the absolute moral imperative is nonetheless linked to qualifiers. French references McQueary’s size and the fact that the alleged assailant, Jerry Sandusky, is older. Some critics have focused on his gender. Still others, making the argument that McQueary failed to intervene because he didn’t take a child rape seriously enough, have suggested that he would have acted differently had Sandusky been beating, rather than raping the child. Of all the ethical debates surrounding the Penn State scandal, the question of how much scorn should be heaped on McQueary for not acting immediately to stop the rape in progress has been the most fascinating, and to my mind, the most disingenuous. It appears that every commentator, male or female, young or old, fat or fit, is convinced that would have charged in and battled the 57-year-old former wide-receiver, pummeling him into wet submission while the child escaped. Maybe. Studies and anecdotal evidence indicate that in fact, most people wouldn’t physically intervene. Perhaps sportswriters and op-ed writers are made of sterner stuff that the rest of the public.

Yes, that must be it.

None of this is to suggest that physically stopping a child rape in progress isn’t the right thing to do; it is. For his part, McQueary reputedly didn’t take any action to stop the assault,* which in order of effectiveness would be… Continue reading →

Death Bed Extortion Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The new Mrs. DeVita holds a picture of her matchmaker, the old one.

There are few things more unfair, or that represent more of an inherent abuse of power and loyalty, than dying requests.

In 2007, Jackie DeVita , a 42-year-old mother terminally ill with brain cancer, removed her wedding ring and handed it to Colleen Leary, her unmarried sister, saying, “I want to know that this is the three of us,” referring to Colleen, Jackie and her husband, Richard. “Don’t ever leave my kids.”

A year later, in 2008, Jackie died, and three months after Jackie DeVita’s funeral, Colleen Leary became Mrs. Richard DeVita.

I hope it works out.  Jackie’s request, however, was a terrible thing to do, the equivalent of emotional extortion. Continue reading →

Ethics Exercise: Being Fair To Herman Cain Now

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The other shoe.

In the wake of Sharon Bialek’s  press conference describing an alleged incident involving of attempted quid pro quo sexual harassment by Herman Cain in 1997 [read the account here] , and the Cain camp’s instant and unequivocal denial, fair Americans are posed with a classic ethics challenge: how do they assess her accusations while being fair to the accused? It is a daunting problem, with many components. How do can we compare Cain’s credibility with Bialek’s? What, relevance, if any, does the timing of her appearance have? How are the previous, still anonymous, un-detailed allegations of hostile work environment harassment to be factored in to our calculations?

Addressing this conundrum requires wading into a jungle of biases, presumptions and  caveats. Among them:

1. Is Bialek credible? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: 53% of the American Public

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

If only Herman Cain could have been tried by the same standards of fairness as the Salem Witch Trials...

I am as sick of the Herman Cain sexual harassment issue as you are, I swear. But still..

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend among 1057 respondents revealed that 53 percent now believe that allegations of sexual harassment against Cain are true. This, despite the fact that none of the 53% know what it is he is supposed to have done that constitutes sexual harassment, and, I am quite confident, almost none of them sufficiently understand what the definition of sexual harassment is. But they are still sure he did it, whatever it is, to at least one of these women, whoever they are.

I cannot image imagine a more unfair, irresponsible and indefensible opinion. Two women who have not revealed their identities and who have not had their allegations tested, examined or confronted, and whose accusations have no descriptions or facts connected to them whatsoever, have convinced 53% of the public of a political candidate’s wrongdoing despite his denials, and despite the fact that they know of no instance where he has engaged in conduct that could fall under the category of sexual harassment. It is one thing to pronounce someone guilty of a specific act of misconduct in the absence of evidence and without the accused having a chance to challenge it. That is wrong. But to pronounce an individual guilty of  an unknown act that has only been characterized but not described, in the absence of evidence and a named accuser?

The judges in the Salem Witch trials were more reasonable and just.

Congratulations to the news media for a successful smear campaign.

Final Verdict: The Unethical Media Persecution of Herman Cain, and Five Questions for His Critics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The media’s relentless coverage of the non-story of Herman Cain’s alleged sexual harassment 15 years ago continues in defiance of all previous standards of journalistic ethics, fairness and decency.It is a disgusting spectacle, yet the number of individuals, including many of my peers, friends and colleagues, who continue to manufacture ways to blame Cain himself for his outrageous treatment continues to grow.  It is almost a full week since Politico published its fact-free hit job, and still there is nothing substantive that would allow anyone to determine with certainty or even probability that Herman Cain did anything other than spark  opportunistic accusations from female employees seeking a swift pay-off. Astoundingly, people who readily assume that Cain was guilty of wrongdoing based on their undefined claims and resulting cash settlements pronounce themselves “shocked” at the Cain’s defenders’ suggestion that the women themselves had no basis for their accusations. Yet that suggestion is at least as supported by the facts, or lack of same, as the conclusion that Cain did anything wrong.

Anonymous sources have been cited as damning accusers without any information whatsoever regarding the nature of the inappropriate conduct Cain was accused of, without any objective determination regarding whether such conduct actually occurred or, if it did, whether it constituted sexual harassment.

Worst of all, and this has been true throughout the episode (which I regard as a journalism scandal rather than a political one), the news stories and news commentary about Herman Cain’s alleged sexual harassment have almost totally neglected to make it clear to readers what sexual harassment is. The story has been repeatedly referred to as a “sex scandal,” which is wrong and misleading: there is no sex in the form of sexual harassment at issue. The so-called charges (there are no charges at this point) are repeatedly being called “serious,” suggesting Cain did something genuinely substantial and wrong, when that is completely unknown. A lot of conduct that can be used to support sexual harassment allegations may be neither intentional nor objectively harmful in any way. The average member of the public who does not deal with the term sexual harassment as a legal term presumes that it always involves so-called “quid pro quo” sexual harassment: a superior’s solicitation of sexual intercourse or other sexual conduct from a subordinate, using threats, direct or implicit, to make the subordinate comply.

This is Bill Clinton-style sexual harassment, which the public heard enough about during the Paula Jones matter to imprint it indelibly on its mind. It is also the kind of sexual harassment usually on display in “Mad Men” and in other fictional venues. The news media knows this, or should know it, so it has an obligation to make clear that this is not what the two women who filed complaints with the National Restaurant Association  alleged, whatever it was that they alleged. This should be done as a necessary component off every single story and piece of commentary about the matter, because to do otherwise is affirmatively misleading.

Cain’s mysterious, undefined, unproven and never-described sexual harassment was what is called “hostile work environment” sexual harassment. Among the conduct that have been held in particular circumstances to constitute “hostile work environment” sexual harassment are using words of endearment or compliments of a physical nature that an employee considers inappropriate, a repeated request to get together socially that an employee considers unwelcome, jokes, songs, non-sexual touching (such as putting a hand on a woman’s shoulder), e-mails including jokes, stories or photos of a sexual or risqué nature, insults with sexual associations, such as “bitch” or “whore,” looks that an individual perceives as leering or uncomfortably intense, an individual repeatedly looking at a woman’s breast, legs or derriere…or an executive encouraging or permitting any of this conduct to occur repeatedly by other employees or, in the case of an association, members or customers. As far as sexual harassment law is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether the offender intended any of this to be disruptive or not, or whether more than one member of the extended staff finds it so.

Is this what the news reports and commentary about Cain’s phantom harassment charges have clearly suggested he was guilty of fifteen years ago? Absolutely not.

I challenge those supposedly fair and unbiased critics of Cain now arguing, in classic Big Lie fashion, that it is his reaction to the misleading and vague allegations that now condemn him, to answer these five questions: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Is It Fair To Take A Criminal Defendant’s Constitutional Right Away If He Keeps Abusing It?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

"Watch the pencil! WATCH THE PENCIL!!!"

Joshua Monson, standing trial in Washington State for drug charges and multiple criminal assaults, keeps stabbing his lawyers with pens and pencils  mid-trial. He just stabbed his third—the others withdrew because of the conflict of interest created when you are afraid that your client wants to kill you—so the judge ruled that Monson had forfeited his right to counsel under the 6th Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Judge David Kurtz said Monson will have to defend himself without the assistance of counsel and will be strapped to a special chair for the rest of the trial. Kurtz advised jurors to ignore the incident, the restraints and the absence of a lawyer.  Continue reading →