fairness

Drug War Ethics: THIS Is Excessive Force…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Radley Balko, a senior editor at Reason Magazine, has been following the law enforcement tactic of paramilitary raids on American homes, some of which go horrible wrong, and many of which raise questions of propriety and proportion. One of the worst of these, a February raid on a family’s home in Missouri that featured the invading authorities shooting the family dog in front of a young child, is immortalized on this frightening video. The father was charged with marijuana possession and child endangerment, presumably because he used drugs in the presence of his.

Balko, who, like everyone at Reason, is a libertarian, uses the incident to press his opposition to the illegal status of recreational drugs. “This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years,” he writes… Continue reading →

San Jose State, Blood, and Misguided Ethical Absolutism

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Food and Drug Administration will not permit you to donate blood if you have engaged in certain high risk activities associated with a greater likelihood of contracting the HIV virus.  This includes same-sex intimate relations between men. “FDA’s policies on donor deferral for history of male sex with males date back to 1983, when the risk of AIDS from transfusion was first recognized,” says the agency’s website. “A history of male-to-male sex is associated with an increased risk for the presence of and transmission of certain infectious diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

Officials at San Jose State University regard this as invidious discrimination against gays.  For that reason, the University has banned blood drives at the school in protest of the F.D.A. policy since 2008, and has announced that the ban will continue. The school’s logic is simple, or perhaps simple-minded. Banning men who have sex with men from donating blood constitutes discrimination, and discrimination is always bad. Thus San Jose State, a good school that abhors discrimination, will maintain its virtue by refusing to participate in a discriminatory practice. Continue reading →

The Problem of Fairness, and David Ortiz: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Fairness is a core ethical value. It is also one of the most difficult to embody. We all know what fairness is in the abstract: treatment of others characterized by impartiality and honesty, and an avoidance of self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism. In complex situations involving many interested parties, however, seeking fairness becomes a dilemma wrapped in a conflict surrounded by contradictions. One of these complex situations now faces the Boston Red Sox, as the baseball team deals with the travails of its designated hitter David Ortiz. Sports has a fascinating habit of crystallizing ethical problems, and the Ortiz case demonstrates how hard it is to be “fair.” Continue reading →

The Fan, the Taser, and Respect for the Law

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

A teenaged fan ran out on the field in the middle of a Philadelphia Phillies game a couple of days ago. This happens many times, too many times, during the baseball season, and it is always followed by a merry chase, sometimes with fans laughing or cheering, featuring over-weight security staff or police trying to capture the fool, and occasionally a featuring a  surprise, like a player intervening and decking the guy. There was a surprise this time, all right: when the fan wouldn’t stop after the pursuing officer told him to, he was shot with a taser. And some fans cheered at that, too.

A tsunami of criticism is now crashing over the security officer, condemning the tasering of 17-year-old Steve Consalvi, sometimes in terms more appropriate to discussing Abu Ghraib. If I were Consalvi’s father, I would counsel him to immediately issue a statement taking full responsibility for the incident and absolving the officer. The teen’s conduct was irresponsible and illegal, and for it to result in any adverse employment action against the security officer who tasered him would only compound the offense. This is especially true because the critics of the officer are dead wrong. They are in the grip of a dangerous, illogical but increasingly popular idea in our culture that submitting to  legitimate police authority is one of those things that we can do or not do without consequences or stigma. The fan on the field is one of the mildest examples of disrespect for the law, but it is a perfectly good place to start getting our ethics unmuddled. Continue reading →

The Amazing Segregated Field Trip

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Dicken Elementary School in Ann Arbor decided to take only its African American students on a field trip to meet and listen to a rocket scientist, leaving all the white students behind. When the parents of some of the white students excluded from the trip complained, the school’s principal replied, in part:

“The intent of our field trip was not to segregate or exclude students as has been reported, but rather to address the societal issues, roadblocks and challenges that our African American children will face as they pursue a successful academic education here in our community.” 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 →

The Ethics Of Harvard’s “Racist E-mail” Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The whole sad, sordid story of a Harvard Law student’s racially provocative e-mail that is now circling the web like the deadly virus in The Stand can be read over at Above the Law. The simple facts are these: At a dinner discussion at Harvard Law School, a law student expressed openness to the possibility of future research showing that blacks were, as a group, genetically inferior to whites in intellectual ability. After dinner, she made a fateful decision to elaborate on her views in an e-mail to two “friends” who had been involved in the discussion.

The e-mail said, in part…

“…I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair…” Continue reading →

Charlie Crist, Martyr for Civility

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Florida’s beleaguered governor, Charlie Crist, has decided to bolt the Republican Party as the only way to continue his quest for the U.S. Senate. Tea Party darling Marco Rubio’s advantage has been “ideological purity,” much prized these days by conservatives who long for a new Ronald Reagan, conveniently forgetting that Reagan was as capable of choosing pragmatism over purity as any other successful leader. Crist, his critics say, is a chameleon, and can’t be trusted to stay in the conservative camp when the poll winds blow west.

Maybe. But what started the downfall for Crist, just months ago a rising star for the G.O.P., was his physical “embrace” of President Barack Obama last year when Obama came to Florida to stump for his stimulus package.  Continue reading →

Silliest Animal Ethics Argument Not Made by PETA

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Read it here, on the Discovery website: an article by Jennifer Viegas, illustrated by a photograph of Galapagos tortoises engaged in sex: “Do Nature Films Deny Animals Their Privacy?”

This better not be a late April Fool’s hoax.

I will retract the accusation that the article is silly if it turns out that Jennifer is, in fact, a Galapagos tortoise herself.

Unethical Website of the Month: Eater.com

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I would not have been able to resist giving the the Unethical Website title to Gizmodo [see previous post] unless there was a more typical candidate (as in “not criminal”) available. Thanks to a tip from Ethics Alarms quote-maven Tom Fuller, I give you Eater.com. It hasn’t stolen anything. It just sold out the interest of its own readers—lovers of fine foods and patrons of excellent restaurants—for a splashy feature destined to attract a flood of traffic, and to stick a knife in the backs of its competition. Continue reading →