Ever since I saw the video of Congressman Hank Johnson (D-GA) declaring his anxiety over the possibility that the island of Guam will “tip over” and “capsize,” I’ve been wrestling with the question: Shouldn’t there be some minimum level of intelligence and competence for members of Congress? I’m not considering anything lofty here, but a man whose vote helped pass a health care bill of unprecedented complexity that will affect every American just revealed that he thinks islands are like icebergs or floating trash can covers. This suggests that he may be subject to many other misconceptions, since he has apparently never read a newspaper, much less watched a National Geographic special. Not to be unkind about it, but such a statement, uttered on television for all the world to see, is prima facie evidence that he is an ignorant dim-wit. Whatever a safe and responsible cut-off point would be for admission to Congress, can we agree that fearing the capsizing of Guam would put one well below it? I don’t know about you, but I’m a little frightened. Continue reading
health care reform
Whatever Else It Is, Move-On.Org Is Not Hypocritical
The Wall Street Journal blog “Best of the Web” suggests that Move-On.Org’s latest fund appeal is hypocritical. Why? Well, the progressive organization is now promoting the version of health care reform that finally passed, although during the endless debates and bill-drafting it opposed the same bill, saying…
“America needs real health care reform–not a massive giveaway to the insurance companies. Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressives should block this bill until it’s fixed.”
Is Move-On talking out of both sides of its metaphorical mouth? Continue reading
The Ethics of Unethical Ethics Teachers
An essay by lawyers Joel Cohen and Katherine A. Helm begins with this story:
“Noted ethics philosopher and Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell once was questioned by the Harvard Board of Governors about having an extramarital affair with a student. When faced with the hypocrisy of being an ethics professor engaged in immoral conduct, Russell argued his private affairs had nothing to do with his professional duties. “But you are a Professor of Ethics!” maintained one of the board members. “I was [also] a Professor of Geometry at Cambridge,” Russell rejoined, but “they never asked me why I was not a triangle.”‘
The authors use the anecdote to explore the issue of whether proven ethics miscreants like Eliot Spitzer, Rod Blagojevich and disbarred class action lawyer William Lerach ought to be lecturing, speaking, or otherwise being listened to in regard to their opinions and advice on ethics. After all, acting teachers are often indifferent actors, and the best baseball managers weren’t much as players. Why should ethics be any different? Continue reading
Unethical Website of the Month: Bloomberg News
Seldom does any news media organization make its absence of fairness and objectivity on a topic so obvious that there isn’t some room for argument, but Bloomberg managed to scale the heights with its headline to a story by reporter Heidi Przybyla. Her report covered the results of a Bloomberg poll designed to create a profile of the members of the Tea Party movement, which has been holding multiple demonstrations across the country to protest passage of President Obama’s health care reform bill.
The poll results themselves were unremarkable, given what we already have learned about the Tea Partiers’ objectives and objections. Over 90% of those polled by Bloomberg said that they feared that the nation was turning to socialism, with the federal government trying to control too many aspects of Americans’ lives. In answer to another question, 70% felt that Obama’s Administration needed to put more resources into job creation. So Przybyla, her editors and Bloomberg’s management chose to headline the report with this:
“Tea Party Advocates Who Scorn Socialism Want a Government Job” Continue reading
Anger and Accountability in the Obamacare Aftermath
“Anger” is the watchword in the media and blogosphere this week. Democrats are using the epithets and “hate speech” from the more uncivil members of the Right to demonize adversaries, try to muzzle the opposition, and raise money. Republicans are trying to harness anger to fuel their drive to triumph in November. Talk radio is trying to fan the flames, because it’s good for ratings. But anger is neither healthy nor conducive to clear thought. Antidotes vary according to the type and cause of the anger, but in this massive breakout, what is needed is the ethical value of Accountability. Neither the objects of the anger nor the angry themselves are blameless, and it would measure the anger level considerably if everyone would accept their fair share of accountability for the rage: Continue reading
Making Sure Your Shrink Has Only Your Needs in Mind
Psychiatry and psychoanalysis were supposed to transform humanity for the better by allow us to understand what makes us happy, sad and crazy and to control it, rather than to let it control us. But after a century that witnessed Woody Allen undergoing intense treatment for decades that resulted in his marrying his step-daughter (and feeling darn good about it!), the profession is increasingly resorts to a shrug and a prescription. The good news is that many of the new drugs seem to do the job a lot better than Dr. Freud’s couch; the bad is that psychiatrists are often conflicted by their financial ties to drug companies.
Writing in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institutes of Health, states that American psychiatrists need to reform a “culture of influence” that has been nurtured by too many goodies offered to doctors by pharmaceutical companies and happily accepted, including big ticket items like research grants, trips, fees for writing friendly journal articles and entertainment, and smaller trinkets like coffee mugs. Continue reading
The Marcelas Owens Bias Test: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
The photo in question, which you can see here, shows young Marcelas Owens being embraced by Vice President Joe Wash-My-Mouth-Out -With-Soap Biden as President Obama signs the health care reform bill.
If you see nothing wrong with using an 11-year-old boy who has lost his mother as a PR prop, go to the back of the ethics class. Sure, Marcelas probably enjoyed the trip to Washington and all the attention. Those microcephalics (pin-heads, in carny-speak) who used to be exhibited in circus freak shows enjoyed the attention too. But an 11-year-old cannot give consent to being used as a cynical political “freak” to tug at the heart strings and convince easily swayed people with an intellectually dishonest inference. Continue reading
The Damage of Health Care Reform “By Any Means Necessary”
I have no idea whether the health care reform bill, assuming it finally gets passed in one form or another, will make things better or worse, and if you are honest about it, neither do you…and neither, I am certain, do most of the elected representatives who will have voted for it or against it (or for it and against it) by the time the dust clears. To only cite the most obvious proof, the bill’s current form was just posted yesterday, giving Congress 72 hours to read and understand over 2,000 pages of technical jargon and badly-written prose. I don’t believe I have ever read 700 pages a day for three days at any point in my life, and if I have, I know it had to be something more diverting than a health care bill.
Relying on second-hand analysis—also by individuals who haven’t read the current bill—simply puts us (and the members of Congress) at the mercy of the biases of those rendering the opinions. For example, one of my favorite commentators, Robert Samuelson, has persuasive arguments against the bill here and here, while one of my least favorite, Paul Krugman, weighs in on the bill’s virtues here and here. Now, I think Krugman has squandered his credibility by blatant untruths in the past (One howler, his infamous statement about the national health care systems of Canada and Great Britain that “We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false” is derisively quoted almost daily by Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto as he relays tales of national health care horrors from the London press), but the man has won a Nobel prize: maybe he’s right and Samuelson is wrong. I really don’t know.
I do know this, however: whether the bill proves to be disaster or panacea, the manner in which President Obama and the Democrats have gone about passing it has done real and lasting harm. Continue reading
More “The Good Wife” Ethics
The CBS legal drama “The Good Wife” has a good cast, well-scripted stories, and apparently a preference for misleading the American public on attorney ethics. Here’s the setting for its most recent set of gaffes: attorney Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) and her supervising partner are battling an evil insurance company (you didn’t really think Hollywood would stay on the health care reform sidelines, did you? With a big vote coming up? ) that refuses to pay for in utero fetal surgery necessary to save an unborn baby from certain death. The insurance company’s attorney has a strong case, but offers a deal: it will pay for the surgery if Florrick’s firm will drop a class action lawsuit against the company. The partner, Will Gardner, refuses the offer: many other desperate members of the class need to make the insurance company pay for treatment, and besides, the law firm, which is in dire financial straits, needs the income that the class action might generate.
There are three things ethically wrong here: Continue reading
Self-Destruction Ethics Alarms: A Woman’s Unethical Quest For Fat
Yesterday, the world heard about Donna Simpson, a New Jersey woman who weighs in at about 500 pounds. She sasy she wants to be the fattest woman alive, and is managing her diet and exercise to achieve that lofty goal. Of course, all those Twinkies and pork rinds cost a lot of money—her weekly grocery bill averages more than $800—so she earns extra cash by putting herself on Gluttoncam, or whatever she calls it, where freakophiles can watch her gorge herself online for a reasonable fee. Her partner, the news reports say, is completely supportive. “I think he’d like it if I was bigger,” giggles Donna. “He’s a real belly man and completely supports me.”
Okaaaaay….
Obviously this situation is unusual…at least, I hope it is. Still, it raises many difficult ethics questions, some with broad implications:
- We are told that it is cruel, greedy and heartless for insurance companies to withhold coverage for “pre-existing conditions,” and should be compelled to insure everyone without regard to special risks. Does this apply to Donna Simpson? Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 