fairness

No-Tolerance Idiocy of the Year: Southern Lee High School in Sanford, N.C.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ethics Alarms has not yet completed its annual Best and Worst of Ethics lists for 2010, but I’ll hand out this title right now.  The persecution of student Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, N.C., has all the elements that make no-tolerance enforcement of school rules ethically offensive: a lack of common sense, absence of proportion, dismissal of empathy, rejection of fairness and justice, disregard for the welfare of an innocent child, and most of all, incompetent, cowardly, utterly stupid school administrators.

Yes, I think we have a winner. Continue reading →

Boseman v. Jarrell: A Gay Mother Tries to Use Legal Discrimination To Her Advantage

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Julia Boseman and Melissa Jarrell were domestic partners in Wilmington, North Carolina, and always wanted to raise a child together. In May of 2000, they decided to make their dream a reality, and began the process of having a baby. They decided that Melissa would do the child-bearing, but Julia would be equally involved in the process in every other respect. They  chose an anonymous sperm donor together after researching and discussing various options. They jointly attended the medical session necessary to conceive their child and to administer proper prenatal care. Julia read to the gestating child in Melissa’s womb and played music for him; she also cared for Melissa during her pregnancy and was present at the birth. Melissa and Julia jointly chose their son’s first name, and agreed that he should have a hyphenated last name composed of their surnames. In every way, they behaved publicly and privately as the parents of the child, introducing him into their respective extended families.

But North Carolina refuses to recognize same-sex marriages, so in the eyes of the state, Julia was not legally a parent. To remedy this obstacle, she sought and received a court order adopting the child without severing her partner’s legally recognized parental rights. Officially, their child now had two, same-sex parents. Then the couple split acrimoniously, with the acrimony greatly magnified when Melissa sought to limit Julia’s contact with her son.

Julia sued, arguing that she was the child’s parent as much as Melissa. Continue reading →

A Missing Dollar, a Jackpot, and Seven Lousy Friends (UPDATED)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Gordon Gekko was full of it. Greed isn’t good, and the Hacienda Hills Country Club lottery ticket affair proves it. It is also an example of when the legal resolution of a controversy is very complicated, but the ethical verdict is a cinch.

For nine years, 72 year-old Jeanette French was part of the group of retirement community residents and employees at the Villages’ Hacienda Hills Country Club that pooled money each week to buy Florida lottery tickets, each putting in a dollar. She didn’t make it to the Golf Shop where the group met one lottery day, but that French didn’t think that was a problem: the established practice was that another member of the group would put in a dollar for the missing member, who would pay him or her back the next day. The day that Jeannette had other commitments, her group bought what turned out to be the winning ticket, to the tune of $16 million in the Florida lottery.

Yippee! Jeanette’s seven good friends, however, now argue that she has no right to a share of the winnings, because nobody put in that dollar for her. Continue reading →

Gee, Thanks a Bunch, Chris…Big Lie Ethics and Obama’s Birth Certificate

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Great. Now Chris Matthews is giving support to the birther conspiracy theory.

The excitable MSNBC host recently asked why President Obama doesn’t just put the suspicion and rumors to rest by giving the OK for Hawaii to release his original birth certificate, thus proving that he was born a U.S. citizen and ending the claims that Obama is really foreign-born and never was eligible to become President of the United States. By lending his credibility and perceived legitimacy to the lament of the birthers, Matthews has engaged in irresponsible conduct and done a disservice to the President, the office of the President and the nation. Continue reading →

“True Grit” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I haven’t seen the remake of “True Grit,” but I know I will, and like many other fans of the original 1969 version, I’m trying to conquer my biases. The latest effort by the usually brilliant Coen brothers creates ethical conflicts for me, and I am hoping I can resolve them right now. Can I be fair to their work, while being loyal to a film that is important to me for many reasons?

The original, 1969 “True Grit” won John Wayne his only Oscar for his self-mocking portrayal of fat, seedy law man Rooster Cogburn, 

who is hired by a young girl to track down her father’s murderer. I love the film; I saw it on the big screen nine times, in fact. Remaking it with anyone else in the starring role feels like an insult, somehow, as if the Duke’s version was somehow inadequate.

Intellectually, I know that’s nonsense. Artists have a right to revisit classic stories and put their personal stamp on them, and they should be encouraged to do it. Every new version of a good story, if done well, will discover some unmined treasure in the material. Why discourage the exploration? Continue reading →

“Books for Christmas?!” A Christmas YouTube Ethics Lesson…For Parents

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Last year, a three-year old opened a Christmas present and told off his parents when he discovered a book instead of a toy. So amuses were the parents at their offspring’s absence of gratitude and manners that they put the video of his disappointed response on YouTube. This Christmas, the video has gone suddenly viral, and there are dozens of web posts all over cyberspace holding the little ingrate up as an exemplar of all that’s wrong with Christmas, children, America, materialism, and more. Many commenters are suggesting just desserts for this budding illiterate, like no Christmas presents at all, nothing but books as presents from now until puberty, or nothing but books by Dean Koonzt, Sarah Palin, or  Marcel Proust. That’ll teach him. Continue reading →

Ethics and Altzheimer’s Testing: An Easy Call

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sometimes I think bioethicists spend too much of their time looking for new ethical dilemmas rather than giving thoughtful guidance on the dilemmas we already have. A recent example: the New York Times wrote about a supposed ethical dilemma appearing in the wake of new tests that reveal the likelihood of whether an individual will get Alzheimer’s at some point in the future. As the article put it:

“Since there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s, is it a good thing to tell people, years earlier, that they have this progressive degenerative brain disease or have a good chance of getting it?…It is a quandary that is emblematic of major changes in the practice of medicine, affecting not just Alzheimer’s patients. Modern medicine has produced new diagnostic tools, from scanners to genetic tests, that can find diseases or predict disease risk decades before people would notice any symptoms. At the same time, many of those diseases have no effective treatments. Does it help to know you are likely to get a disease if there is nothing you can do?”

My question is: “What’s the dilemma?” Continue reading →

Lindsay Lohan Has Privacy Rights Too

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Lindsay Lohan brings enough problems on herself. She doesn’t need unethical professionals to make her life even more chaotic by violating her privacy rights. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce, Christmas Division: Jill Patella

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The last Christmas gift Jill Patella got from her late husband, who died in 2007, was a six foot tall plastic statue of Santa Claus that loudlysings Christmas songs in a jolly baritone. In his memory, Jill decided to put the singing Santa on her front lawn this year, where he has been singing around the clock, driving her neighbors Lorillard Avenue in Union Beach, New Jersey to consider Santacide.

Jill explained her intentional infliction of the holiday noise pollution by telling reporters, “This year was the time. He [her late husband, not Santa] would have wanted me to live life again.”

She did not explain why she believes that her departed husband’s definition of “live life” was “show utter disregard for the neighbors.” Even if Mr. Patella was the kind of selfish, irresponsible person who believes that his tastes and desires trump the right of the people around him to enjoy their holidays without having to listen to a giant mechanical singing Santa, that would not excuse her for carrying on his unethical ways.

There is such a vast area of reasonable Christmas conduct between the insane poles represented by NPR’s Nina Totenberg apologizing for using the term “Christmas” on TV, and the in-your-face Christmas celebration represented by Jill Patella’s lawn concerts. Why do so many people have such a hard time locating it?

America’s Ignorant Public: What’s Worth Reporting?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

John Avlon’s dubious conversion from the author of a best-selling book labeling politicians who disagreed with John Avlon as “wingnuts” to a “No Labels” champion reminded me that he was one of many commentators to draw great significance from a Harris poll last spring that revealed what he called “scary” beliefs held by Republicans. There were several such polls this year about Republicans, conservatives and Tea Partiers; expressing alarm at how ignorant right-leaning Americans are became something of a media fad. For a news media largely dominated by reporters, producers and editors desperate to stave off the erosion of support for Barack Obama, the polls were perfect ammunition: they were genuinely newsworthy; reporting them undermined the credibility of those “scary” Tea Party rallies; they created an opportunity for the news media to bolster its own credibility by explaining why, for instance, the President was not the Anti-Christ, and perhaps best of all, it reinforced the conviction of the majority of newsmedia reporters who self-identify as liberals that they belong to the smart side.

Perhaps it isn’t so strange, then, that only a few news outlets and even fewer commentators chose to feature the results of a recent Harris poll showing that 40% of the U.S. public thinks that Karl Marx’s signature phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” originates  from one of the America’s founding documents. Continue reading →