fairness

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 →

Gizmodo and Gawker: Guilty, Greedy, and Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Count Ethics Alarms with those who hope Gawker and its affiliated gadget site Gizmodo get as many books thrown at them as possible if the iPhone theft case gets to court.

As is always the case with Gawker, a completely ethics-free operation that has snickered about its participation in other outrages—such as its “Gawker Stalker” feature allowing people to alert the world to the exact location of any celebrity who is out, you know, trying to live—the sites management is crowing about doing wrong. “Yes, we’re proud practitioners of checkbook journalism,” tweeted Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media. “Anything for the story!” Anything including fencing stolen goods, it seems. Nicely, the law often has a way of making unethical people wish they were more ethical, and this should be an example of that.

If you have somehow missed the story all the gadget geeks are tweeting about, Gawker released a scoop photo spread on Apple’s yet-to-be-released iPhone after an Apple engineer stupidly, carelessly and unethically left a prototype that he was entrusted with in a bar. It was found by someone who understood its value and who it belonged to, and who also had no more scruples than, well, Gawker. That meant that this California law applied… Continue reading →

Complaint Ethics, With A Dash of Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

My wife had to deliver some documents to my son’s school, one of those large mega-magnet schools that are locked up tighter than Alcatraz during school hours to keep out drug-dealers, assassins, and street  mimes. After being blocked at “Entrance One” by a big guy in shades and a starter jacket (he looked like a club bouncer), she was sent to “Entrance Two.” There she encountered another security obstacle, a desk commanded by an imposing looking woman. There were four others seeking access. One of them, a suited gentleman, presented identification. One was identified by the woman at the desk as someone “who went to school here last year,” and he was allowed to pass the checkpoint on her recognizance alone. Another woman, who said she was a parent, also said was there to pick up something. She had no I.D., however “I’m not going to make you go back for your purse,” she was told. “Go on in.” My wife, also without her purse, was told she did have to present I.D., and had to hike back to the car and return with her driver’s license.

Should my wife report this arbitrary and obviously flawed execution of security procedures to school administrators? And a harder question..

Should she make an issue of the fact that both the woman at the desk and the parent she allowed to pass without I.D. were African American, and my wife is not? Continue reading →

License Plate Ethics: Is a Hateful Message Unethical If Nobody Understands It?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles, following analysis worthy of the cracking of the ENIGMA code during World War II, concluded that a vanity plate reading “14CV88” was “racially offensive” and had to be pulled from the road. Prof. Eugene Volokh raises the issue of whether this violates the First Amendment (he suspects it does), but the more interesting question, at least for me, is whether there is anything unethical about displaying a message like this.

Oh! I forgot to explain to you why you too should be horribly offended at the “message!”  Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from ‘Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was’ and ‘Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane’ or, in a bizarre version of ‘The devil made me do it,’ “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”

—Henry Louis Gates, in his New York Times op-ed, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” confronting the complicity of Africans in American slavery by selling their own people to slave-traders.

Harvard professor Gates, a respected authority on race in America despite his problems with the Cambridge police, has made an admirable effort to take the issue of reparations out of the context of racial guilt-mongering and forcing advocates to deal with facts rather than emotion. The fair starting point for discussions, Gates points out, is that the ancestors of white and black Americans profited from slavery.

Does this rule out any fair and coherent allocation of slave reparations, which were conceptually problematical already? Probably, and if so, we should move on to more productive debates. Gates is brave and responsible for shining light on a genuinely “inconvenient truth.”

Mayor Bloomberg’s Off-shore Tax Havens: Legal, and Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

It has been revealed that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s family foundation makes extensive use of off-shore tax havens and hedge funds in the Cayman Islands, avoiding U.S. taxes that other major foundations choose to pay. You know the Cayman Islands: that’s where the criminal law firm in John Grisham’s novel The Firm helped its Mafia clients hide their income. I’m not suggesting that Bloomberg is ripe for a takedown by Tom Cruise. I am suggesting that it looks terrible, and leaders have a duty to avoid looking terrible. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: P.G.A. Golfer Brian Davis

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I don’t follow golf, but if this sort of thing happens very often, I may have to become a fan…in spite of Tiger Woods.

P.G.A. tour veteran Brian Davis was facing Jim Furyk in a playoff at the Verizon Heritage, and trying to finally win a P.G.A. event. His approach shot to the first hole in the playoff bounced off the green and landed in the rough. When Davis attempted to knock the ball back up to the green, his club barely swiped a weed on his backswing. The rules of tournament golf decree that touching anything lying around the ball during a player’s backswing violates  the prohibition against moving loose obstacles or impediments to a shot. The required penalty: two strokes, enough to guarantee that David would lose the play-off and his best, maybe only, chance for PGA glory, not to mention a seven figure prize.

Davis may have been the only one to notice the infraction, but golf is a game that calls for self-reporting. That’s what he did: he called the violation on himself, and made himself a loser. Continue reading →