fairness

Lindsay Vonn and the Fairness Obsession

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethicist Rushworth Kidder has challenged the fairness of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, specifically the Ladies’ Super-G skiing event. U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn, the gold medal winner in the Ladies’ Downhill Alpine Skiing event, only won the bronze despite finishing the course in one minute and 20.88 seconds, because Austria’s Andrea Fischbacher at 1:20.14,  and  Slovenia’s Tina Maze at 1:20.63 were less than a second faster. Italy’s Johanna Schnarf, the fourth place finisher, got no prize at all, because she was a miniscule  11 hundredths of a second behind Vonn.

Dr. Kidder is crying foul. Continue reading →

Glenn Beck vs. Teddy Roosevelt? No Contest!

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Listening to Glenn Beck disparage Theodore Roosevelt is a little like listening to Ed Wood, auteur of the deathless classic, “Plan Nine From Outer Space,” condemning John Ford as an unimaginative hack.

At his uproariously received speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Beck, the libertarian talk-show host, flamboyant TV showman on Fox and current Tea Party hero effectively racked up cheap applause by pulling a quote out of Teddy’s “New Nationalism” speech and deriding it. Beck didn’t analyze and critique the speech, of course, because that would have required a discipline of scholarship and a rigor of intellect that he simply does not possess. He simply quoted this section… Continue reading →

Why Mitt Romney is Not Going to Be President

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Now that the individual who supposedly assaulted former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on a flight from Vancouver has told his side of the story, we have one more bit of evidence about Mitt Romney’s character, and it isn’t encouraging.  Romney claimed that he told the passenger in front of him to bring his seat back up for take-off, and the man struck him. He told the flight attendant the same thing, resulting in the passenger being removed from the flight.

Now the passenger, a successful rapper named Skyler Gordy, has made a video giving his side of the story, and it is 100% more believable than Romney’s version. Continue reading →

An Unethical Ethics Conference

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Fourth International Legal Ethics Conference at Stanford Law School has lined up  over 100 speakers. It is giving them no honorarium, hotel, meals or travel expenses, and despite the fact that they are providing the content and attraction for the event, the Conference still requires them to pay  registration fee of $350. Stanford is also charging its students a registration fee to attend, generously reduced to “only” $250.  But the conference can afford to be so generous, because it will also be getting registration fees from lawyers who are required to fulfill bar-mandated Continuing Legal Education requirements.

I have argued, and behavioral science suggests, that thinking about ethics helps one’s ethics alarms work well and often. The Stanford Conference suggests that either this is not as certain as I believed, or that the people running the ethics conference don’t actually think about ethics, which, if true, adds fraud to their list of ethical outrages.

The unfair and irresponsible requirements of the Stanford event has prompted least one prominent legal ethicist, Prof Monroe Freedman, to abandon plans to attend, saying, “I’m a card-carrying capitalist, but this kind of exploitation in the name of ethics could turn me into a Marxist, or a cynic.”

We should be concerned about a culture whose those in the ethics business are increasingly unethical. The sad lesson seems to be that when there is a conflict between commerce and ethics, commerce wins.

The Racist Slur on Tea Parties, and an Ethicist’s Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I thought long and hard about whether to write this post, and I resent the fact that I had to think about it at all. But it involves piggy-backing on a theme that has been finding voice on conservative talk radio, and concerns an unfair and dishonest theme being pushed by liberal talk television and certain media pundits. That means that whatever I write will immediately be taken, by those who view the world in narrow ideological terms, as a declaration of alliance when it has nothing to do with politics at all. It has to do with unethical journalism, sloppy reasoning, and dirty politics. I resent the fact that Right Wing radio is so frequently uncivil and unfair  that it sullies every legitimate observation and position that it takes. I resent the fact that so much of the public decides what they believe, not by the quality of the ideas in question, but by the identity of who advocates them. Communication is hard enough without bias serving as a perpetual hurdle to comprehension.

Oh, well….

The effort by certain commentators, TV hosts (notably MSNBC’s troika of Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann), liberal columnists and Democratic Party flacks to stereotype the Tea Party movement as a thinly-veiled racist protest is despicable, unsupportable, dishonest and unfair.  It is also insulting to Americans generally. And yes, I resent that too. Continue reading →

The Tragedy of the Climate Change Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Americans woke up today to a snow-covered world that might not be getting warmer after all.

You may not hear about it or read about it right away, depending on what your news sources of choice are. Many news organizations and reporters have disgraced themselves, their profession and their professional ethics standards (values trashed: competence, diligence, responsibility, honesty, objectivity, fairness) so thoroughly that they will surely wait as long as possible before admitting they were wrong, if not how wrong they were. But I know where this is going, and it is not going to be good for anyone. Ethics fiascos, a.k.a ethics train wrecks, never are. Continue reading →

One More Reason to Distrust Banks

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

National Public Radio did a feature on foreclosure auctions, following one real estate investor as he sought a bargain at an auction in Boston. The auction held a surprise for the investor, the reporter, and me. After the young man who was being followed by the NPR correspondent won a lively bidding battle for a $300,000 house at the bargain price of $84,000, the bank refused to sell it to him. The reason: the auction was a “reserve” auction rather than an “absolute” auction, meaning that there was an unpublished price at which the bank would sell the property, but winning bids below that amount could be rejected. The investor was angry. The NPR reporter was confused.

The auction was rigged. Continue reading →

Stats, Polar Bears, and “Truth by Repetition”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

When I did marketing for a company that created annuities for the recipients of large court damages, I was armed with alarming statistics I had gleaned from the annuity industry’s publications.  Half of the recipients of large lump sum settlements or damages from personal injury and medical negligence lawsuits had dissipated all of the funds (usually calculated to last a lifetime) within two years or less. More than 75% had blown through all the cash, often millions of dollars, within five years. These figures were accepted as fact everywhere,  and we used them profitably to persuade plaintiffs, lawyers and courts to approve annuity arrangements that would parcel out the funds over the years, keeping the money safe from needy relatives and spending sprees. Then, one day, I decided to track down the studies that were the sources of the statistics I was using.

There weren’t any. I discovered a circular trail, with various sources quoting each other. Continue reading →

The Not-So-Baffling Mystery of the Missing Ethics Rule

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

ABA  Model Rule 7.6: Political Contributions To Obtain Legal Engagements Or Appointments By Judges
A lawyer or law firm shall not accept a government legal engagement or an appointment by a judge if the lawyer or law firm makes a political contribution or solicits political contributions for the purpose of obtaining or being considered for that type of legal engagement or appointment.

That’s pretty clear, is it not? The American Bar Association, in its Model Rules of Professional Conduct, now followed (in various, eccentric forms, to be sure) by 49 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, emphatically declares that “pay-to-play” arrangements are unethical for lawyers even in states where the sleazy practice might be legal. “Pay-to play” is, after all, classic corruption, older than Mayor Curley, Richard Daley, Boss Tweed and Mister Potter. Lawyers contribute big bucks to the campaign funds of state and local powerbrokers, including Attorneys General and judges, and get big state contracts in return. It is indefensible ethically, although you can find plenty of people who will defend it, their tongues crossed tightly behind their backs all the while. Continue reading →

Blizzard Ethics and Parking Space Etiquette

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Great Blizzard of 2010 inspired The Washington Post to publish a piece about snow ethics, focusing especially on this touchy question: Is it ethical to park in a space shoveled out by someone else?

The problem with the article is that it doesn’t ask the ethically crucial second question: Is it ethical for someone to hold one of the rare cleared parking spaces on the street open, when other motorists desperately need a place to park? Continue reading →