guilt

“Is It Wrong To Go On Vacation When You’re Unemployed?”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Job hunting…

This is the question asked by unemployed author Fran Hopkins, who, her bio says, ” has been searching for full-time work since losing her job in a January 2010 layoff. While “between jobs,” she’s earned an MS degree in Health Communication, does freelance writing and public relations.” In her article on AOL, Hopkins argues that it isn’t wrong, because “I need to get away, just for a few days, close to the soothing sound and motion of the sea, inhaling salt air and unwinding. I have to restore my mental, emotional and spiritual inner resources. I’m running low.” But she feels guilty, and to read the comments, a lot of people thinks she should. On Fark, where I found the post, the wags there simply answered her query “Yes” and filed it under “Dumbass.”

Nonsense. To begin with, the question is unanswerable, since it depends on so many variables. Is it unethical to spend your kids’ college funds or the mortgage money on a vacation? Yes. Is it wrong to spend public assistance on a vacation? Yes. But these are all irresponsible acts, and taking a vacation to recharge your batteries, relieve stress and clear your mind when there are no negative consequences to anyone else from doing so is not irresponsible, and might be the smartest thing you can do.

Poor Fran has been looking for a job for more than two and a half years, and that is, or should be, hard work. Anyone who says, as some commenters do, that there is nothing for her to take a vacation from either has never looked for a work or has no idea how to do it right. Job hunting is a hard job, and a soul-killing one. After a while you tend to become negative and cynical, or pathetic and desperate, and these attitudes can be fatal to your employment prospects. If a week on Cape Cod or the Jersey Shore can restore your vigor and perspective, it is well worth the time and money.

The most annoying  criticism of Fran are the people who write that it is inconsiderate of her to take a break from job-hunting when so many of her desperate fellow-citizens can’t afford to do likewise. If there is a mutated sub-category of liberals that make me want to get a package deal on an NRA/ Ayn Rand/ Donald Trump/ Rush Limbaugh fan club, this is it: the “you have no right to be happy as long as other people are miserable” crowd. Really, however, all the criticism of Fran is annoying, because it isn’t based on concepts of right and wrong at all. There’s nothing wrong with Fran taking a vacation while unemployed; there’s nothing wrong with her giving up on employment entirely and becoming a retiree, a beach bum, a street corner philosopher, a mime or an ethics blogger, either, as long as she isn’t defaulting on her obligations to others, or sponging off people who are working.

Have a great time on your vacation, Fran. You’ve earned it.

_______________________________________

Pointer: Fark

Source: AOL

Graphic: Sidney Morning Herald

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

The Criminal Justice Ethics Breakdown: Unforgivable, Incomprehensible, and Horrifying

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

"Yeah, that's bad, but can you believe those gas prices?"

There is no longer any way for the defenders of the criminal justice system, or indeed American democracy and its ideals, to deny that thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of Americans languish in prison for crimes they did not commit. This fact is so terrible in its implications for the nation, the system, the public and the legal profession that I feel incapable of grasping it all, still, though this has been slowly dawning on me for a long time. Right now, it is all I can manage to escape denial, for the deprivation of so many innocent people of their liberty is my responsibility, as well as yours, and that of everyone else. Even in the midst of serious policy debates over so much else that is vital to our future, how can anyone argue that this isn’t the highest priority of all?

Yesterday, the Washington Post revealed that

“Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled. Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials. Continue reading →

More Advice Column Incompetence: The Case of the Jealous Sister

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"My wife is behaving irrationally. Is it me, or might she have a teeny problem of her own?"

Once again an advice columnist’s response has me considering whether there needs to be a standard of malpractice for the profession, especially when desperate, trusting people rely on them in times of crisis. I agree that anyone who is prepared to adopt the recommendations of a stranger that are based on a probably inadequate and incomplete description of a dilemma, especially when the columnist could well be a college intern, the janitor or a lunatic, is in desperate straits indeed.  Still,  if you are going to give advice, it had better meet some bare minimum of competence—even if you are just an intern.

A sad and remorseful man wrote “Annie,” the Boston Globe’s advice maven, about whether there was hope for his marriage, which recently and unexpectedly exploded. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Is It Ethical to Confess to a Murder You Were Acquitted of Committing, or Merely Annoying?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

 

Come on, O.J! If he can do it, so can you!

Isaac Turnbaugh of Randolph, Vermont recently confessed to the 2002 shooting murder of a co-worker, using a rifle to kill the victim as he was at work in the American Flatbread Co, stirring a pot of  sauce.  A jury acquitted Turnbaugh of the charges in 2004. In July, Turnbaugh contacted police and said, jury verdict notwithstanding, he indeed shot Declan Lyons in the head with the rifle and wished to surrender to authorities. Too bad, they told him. In the eyes of the law, you are “not guilty,” and have to stay that way. Double jeopardy and all that.

Your ethics quiz for today:

If you have been acquitted of a murder and have a guilty conscience about it, what is your most ethical course of action? Continue reading →

Unethical Thought of the Month: Me

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Of course,  I am likely to be the only one who can get this “award,” since I am not privy to everyone else’s unethical thoughts. Nonetheless, this was a thought that  deserves a special rebuke, and that raises many questions.

I have always been fascinated by unethical thoughts, because thoughts are not really ethical or unethical. Being ethical often requires transcending our worst instincts and selfish thoughts; one recurring theme in Julian Baggini’s collection of thought experiments, “The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten” is whether a person who automatically does the right thing is more, or possibly less, virtuous than the person who engages in the same conduct despite unethical thoughts that urge him to do otherwise. While some misguided social architects think that the way to a more ethical society is to make unethical thoughts more difficult to have through such measures as censorship and hate crime legislation, that strategy is itself unethical, offending the principle of human autonomy. An evil thought that is recognized as such, rejected and not acted upon has no true ethical implications at all.

Or does it? Continue reading →

The Ethics of “No-Body” Murder Prosecutions.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Oh! THERE's the body!!!

Texas lawyer Robert Guest has opined that a Texas jury would have convicted Casey Anthony in a heartbeat, and cites as proof the February conviction of Charles Stobaugh in Denton County. He was accused of killing his  estranged wife, though no body has ever been found at all.

Maybe.  There are a lot of differences in the circumstances of the two cases, not the least is that finding a badly decomposed body with a piece of electrical tape across her mouth has a big advantage over never finding any body at all: at least you are certain that the victim is dead.  Stobuagh, like Anthony, engaged in a pattern of lies and strange statements; for example, he suggested that his wife, who suddenly vanished and stopped using her bank account, credit cards and cell phone, was “playing a prank.”  He also began seeing a new girl friend more or less the moment his wife vanished. I’d say the biggest difference is the presumption of a motive: husbands killing their wives, especially their estranged wives, is a common and well-recognized form of homicide, with a motive that any married person immediately understands. A mother killing her young child, in contrast, is very unusual, and the presumption is that no mother would do it. The Anthony prosecution was more difficult than the prosecution of Stobuagh, even with Caylee’s body. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Blog Post of the Week: ‘But What About Caylee?”’

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

As comments, accusations and retorts featuring the Ethics Alarms All-Stars were flying around on the blog in reaction to the Casey Anthony verdict and my reaction to some of those reactions (here, here, here, and here), Lianne Best came through with an  especially measured take, one that was immediately cheered by other commenters.

There is nothing wrong with feeling deeply, and emotions are important; after all, Mr. Spock had limitations as a leader. When emotion rather than analysis drives public opinion, however, there is a risk of real harm: those attempting objective analysis may be vilified, marginalized or ignored, and rash, reckless decisions and consequences can result.  (I could, but won’t, argue that the 2008 presidential election was a classic case in point.)  Lianne cuts to the real issue deftly. Here is her Comment of the Day:

“I too often find myself embroiled in emotional opinion, with no basis in facts. It’s easy here: an adorable and completely innocent, dependent little girl was killed. Virtually every human, particularly parents, want to see that vindicated, justice found and brought. That somehow makes it better. But you know what? It doesn’t make it better to go racing off on just a blazing gut reaction, not when people’s lives are affected by our lack of thought and analysis. I was a juror in a kidnapping and murder trial. It was an immensely difficult two weeks, and the decision was agonizing. Luckily, it was also popular; it would have been awful to suffer through loud, manic public criticism of our reasoned decision on top of the process … loud, manic public criticism by people who weren’t there, who knew less (or at least differently) than we did. We have a jury system for a reason, 12 people found Casey Anthony not guilty (13 if you count the alternate juror) and we have to trust them.

“Personally, I appreciate Jack’s cooler head prevailing when my mother’s heart is shrieking.”

Marcia Clark, Exploiting the Anthony Verdict for Her Own Sake

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Marcia Clark. OK, this really isn't Marcia, but the real picture of her doesn't look like her either.

Marcia Clark’s article on the Casey Anthony verdict is so tainted with obvious conflicts of interest that it should have been rejected by The Daily Beast…or rather would be rejected by any website more selective and less shameless than the Daily Beast. This would be any fair site that does not deal in over-the-top opinion as a matter of course.

Marcia, like her colleague Chris Darden, is a rather tragic figure these days. The former lead prosecutor in the O.J. case is struggling to make it as a pundit, freshly botoxed and rendered almost unrecognizable so as to be fetching in those close-ups. After she sold the inevitable cash-in book about the Trial of the Century, she has wandered in the C-List celebrity wilderness, and will soon join Newt Gingrich and William Shatner as a celebrity novelist. She will be remembered, quite correctly, as the prosecutor who botched the O.J. murder trial, even if we give Darden an assist for the gloves debacle. (Why cable news shows insist on recycling failures as experts is an enduring mystery, the mystery being “how can the producers look themselves in the mirror after choosing recognizable flops over less well-known but more accomplished authorities?”)

But Clark apparently saw an opportunity in the Casey Anthony verdict to rehabilitate her tarnished reputation, and grabbed it. The result is “Worse Than O.J.!”, a new low in self-serving analysis. Continue reading →

Unethical Blog Post of the Week: “But What About Caylee?”

/ Jack Marshall / 81 Comments

Sad but true: the trial's purpose was not to find justice for Caylee.

If I responded to even one out of a hundred ethically muddled, logically addled posts by the hoard of bloggers in cyberspace, I’d have time for nothing else. Now and then, however, I am directed to a post that typifies the kind of free-floating, fact-starved gut sentiment that rots public discourse in America and that helps keeps the public confused and panicked.

In this case, I was directed to the post by the blogger herself, who managed to annoy me by accusing my post on the Casey Anthony jury of being callous to the victim in the case, two-year old Callie. I re-read my post; there wasn’t anything callous toward the child in any way. Puzzled, I went to the blogger’s page, a blog by someone who calls herself wittybizgal, and called Wittybizgal. Sure enough, there it was: an anguished lament about the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial entitled, “But What About Callie?”

The post is frightening, because I am certain that this kind of non-reasoning is epidemic in the United States, nourished by touchy-feely bloggers, pundits and columnists and made possible by the ingrained habit of having opinions without knowledge. Since their opinions are not supported by facts or reasoning, they can’t be debated. If you aren’t persuaded, you’re just mean, that’s all. That’s no way to decide what is right and wrong, but it certainly a popular way. Here is wittybizgal’s argument, one fallacious step at a time: Continue reading →

Fick Sighting in Prince George’s County

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Leslie Johnson, fick.

Ethics Alarms recently coined the useful term fick to describe the especially shameless individual who violates society’s ethical norms openly, publicly and flagrantly, without remorse or apology. It takes a certain kind of anti-social arrogance to be a true fick, with the gold standard established by Michigan lottery winner Leroy Fick, a millionaire who happily continues to collect food stamps because of a statutory loophole despite howls of indignation from his neighbors in one of the most fiscally-challenged states in the nation.  Other ficks who have come to light include Hugh Heffner despicable ex-fiance Crystal Harris, who plotted to humiliate him at the altar to launch a reality show. Of course, there is  longstanding Octo-fick Nadya Suleman, and celebrity fick Charlie Sheen.

Now lucky Prince George’s County in Maryland has a bona fide fick of its own.  Continue reading →