fairness

Elevator Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Randy Cohen surprised me today. “The Ethicist,” in his weekly column in the Times Magazine, responded to a  question from a Chinese citizen whose office building had only one working elevator, resulting in long lines of office workers waiting to catch a lift to distant floors. Cohen’s inquirer asked if it was unethical for him to run up the stairs to a higher floor, and secure a place on the elevator before it arrived on his original floor, one below.

Cohen said he was “cutting in line,” and that it was unethical. Randy may well be right, but I’m not immediately convinced. Continue reading →

When the President Agrees With Me, He’s Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Let’s see if I can make this both coherent and succinct.

President Obama was ethical, responsible, and brave to weigh in on the Ground Zero Mosque (more accurately called “The Two-Blocks From Ground Zero Mosque”), and reaffirm America’s commitment to freedom of religion for all faiths by declaring that the Islamic group has the right to build its planned Islamic center.

After being roundly (and predictably) slammed by conservative talking heads, blogging bigots, and ranting reactionaries for stating the obvious, however, the President (or his advisors; the advisors are the ones who thought this was a dandy time to send Michelle and the kids on a luxury vacation in Spain, and can be identified by the large dunce caps on their heads…) decided to come back and clarify his remarks, lest anyone think he was actually endorsing the idea of an Islamic monument so near the spot where thousands of innocent Americans perished at the hands of Islamic extremists.

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” Obama told reporters in Panama City, Fla.  “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.” This statement isn’t quite “I didn’t inhale” or “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” but it is still a solid candidate for the Presidential Weasel Words Hall of Fame. By saying he would not comment, President Obama was commenting, and implying, by saying what he would not comment about, that if he did comment, it would be that the mosque was probably not such a hot idea, since fairly or not, it was bound to be misunderstood as an insult to the victims of 9-11.

It was inappropriate and wrong for Obama to suggest this, in weasel words or otherwise. (It would be more honest and forthright to eschew the weasel word method, however.) Continue reading →

And You Thought YOUR In-laws Were Bad…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Stuart R. Ross, a non-practicing lawyer who, among other dealings, once owned a chunk of the Smurfs franchise, ran out of his own money and began pestering his successful  son-in-law, David S. Blitzer, for investment capital. After Ross blew through the tens of thousands of dollars he got from Blitzer, he demanded more, and Blitzer, a senior managing director of The Blackstone Group, told him that he wasn’t getting any more. So Ross adopted another strategy: he told his daughter’s husband, through repeated e-mails and phone calls, that he would reveal unidentified, career-wrecking secrets about Blitzer if Blitzer didn’t hand over more money—$5.5 million, to be precise. Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict on O’Reilly vs. Aniston: O’Reilly’s No Dan Quayle

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Jennifer Aniston is promoting her upcoming comedy “The Switch,” about a single woman who becomes a mother through artificial insemination. In one interview. Aniston commented that “Women are realizing more and more that you don’t have to settle, they don’t have to fiddle with a man to have that child.” This rankled Fox News’ star blowhard Bill O’Reilly, who regarded Aniston’s remark as an endorsement of unwed and under-age motherhood, and told his  cable audience that Aniston was “throwing a message out to 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds that, ‘Hey! You don’t need a guy, you don’t need a dad!” His verdict: “That’s destructive to our society!…Aniston can hire a battery of people to help her, but she cannot hire a dad, okay?” Continue reading →

Steven Slater And The Rest of the Story: No Surprises

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Occasionally, there is cosmic justice. The astounding number of bloggers, media commentators and  ordinary working folks who have expressed admiration for Steven Slater, the irresponsible and unprofessional flight attendant who threw a tantrum of Adam Sandler proportions at the end of a recent Jet Blue flight, appears to have been itching for a confrontation throughout the flight, and had behaved is a rude and provocative manner to more than one passenger.

Well, of course. Continue reading →

A Traveling Photographer’s Code of Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The Photo Foodies have posted a sensible, compassionate, clear ethics code for photographers, particularly applicable to those working in foreign countries. It concentrates on the act of taking the photograph, not what one does with the image afterward.

Excellent work, Photo Foodies, and thanks for not calling the site “Foto Foodies.” I know it must have been a temptation.

You can read the entire post here. These are the tenets of the code: Continue reading →

GQ’s Unethical Rand Paul Smear

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I had a college room mate who used to strip down to his BVD’s and put a traffic cone over his head. Then,using a broom as a baton, he would burst into a room where one of our other room mates was courting a date, and march around singing “Can’t get enough of those Sugar Crisp!”

He’s now a high school principal. Another of my roomies once won a bet by secretly planting a ;large pile of some form of excrement in my bed. He’s a well-respected Wall Street broker. Yet another roommate delighted in jumping out from behind doors, naked, and assaulting us with the painful move known as a “titty-twister. He a runs a construction company, and is the best father I know. And me? I spent much of my college career engineering elaborate practical jokes and capers, including an infamous scheme to steal  the new sofa in the suite of some classmates, which they had stolen from an upperclassman.

Which all goes to show that much of the conduct of college kids, in the insular womb of academia, has nothing to do with the real world, and less than nothing to do with the character, judgment, taste and decorum they will need to demonstrate in their careers and family life. Furthermore, conduct that would be wholly unacceptable and even illegal off campus is hijinks and social experimentation on it. Anyone who doesn’t know that either never went to college, or had a really boring four years there.

It is in this context that the so-called Rand Paul “expose” in Gentleman’s Quarterly is so unfair, so contrived, and such atrocious and unethical journalism. Continue reading →

Ethics, Ethics, Everywhere…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Stories with ethical implications are popping up everywhere, in many fields. I’m running hard to keep up; if you want to join the race, here are some recent developments and notes:

  • A prominent Harvard professor and respected researcher just retracted a major paper and has been put on leave, as an investigation showed irregularities in his methods and results. “This retraction creates a quandary for those of us in the field about whether other results are to be trusted as well, especially since there are other papers currently being reconsidered by other journals as well,’’ wrote one scientist. “If scientists can’t trust published papers, the whole process breaks down.’’
  • A Wisconsin lawyer bought a farm from his own client in a bankruptcy matter, a classic conflict of interest. The lawyer’s defense was amusing: since his license had been suspended, he no longer had a fiduciary duty to his now former client. The court canceled the sale. The story is on the Legal Profession Blog.

A Vote for Keith Halloran Is A Vote For Hateful Politics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It is one thing for a comedian like Wanda Sykes to publicly wish that Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys fail (that one thing, by the way, is gratuitous nastiness without humor), and quite another for a candidate for Congress, Democrat Keith Halloran of New Hampshire, to send out a tweet to his Twitter followers expressing regret that Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston were not on board the doomed plane that crashed, killing former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Steven Slater Defenders

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

You probably have heard about Steven Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who snapped like dry twig when a female passenger refused to sit as instructed after a landing at New York’s JFK Airport, pulled out her luggage from the overhead compartment, bonking him on the head, then refused to apologize and cursed at him. Slater, emulating a scene from a Chris Farley movie that never got made, took to the public address system to curse out all the passengers, grabbed a beer, launched the emergency chute, slid down it, and fled the plane and the airport.

He was later arrested at home.  Sources told NBC that he was “having a bad day.”

No kidding. Continue reading →