Porn: Finding Ethics in the Strangest Places

It should surprise nobody that Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita,” now out of jail for shooting her lover’s wife, married and in her mid-thirties, is outfitted with nifty breast implants and making money shooting porn films. At least her notoriety is being exploited in a manner that does not confer true celebrity status for her misconduct, unlike, for example, Michaele Salahi, who has been featured in glamour shots by the national media as a  direct result of her crashing a White House social event with her equally shameless husband. Amy was dismissive of her part-time porno career in a recent interview, and the woman she shot in the head, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, suggested in a follow-up interview that Fisher was ethically clueless (a not too far-fetched conclusion, all things considered), and that the fact that she made her living being photographed performing various sex acts despite being the parent of small children proved it.

This got me thinking about pornography..no, no, wait!—I mean about the ethics of pornography. Continue reading

Ethics and the Killer’s Liver

Johnny Concepcion, a 42-year-old man accused of stabbing his wife to death,  received a liver transplant at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in New York, raising the natural question, “WHAT?!!”

Or to be more precise: Wouldn’t it be more ethical to withhold a life-saving liver transplant from such a man, and give the liver instead to someone who isn’t a blight on society and likely to spend the rest of his life in prison?

No.

Continue reading

The Ethics Verdict on Haitian Luxury Cruises

Luxury cruise lines and their passengers are being condemned in some quarters for continuing to dock their ships at Haiti’s private beaches while the rest of Haiti is in the midst of destruction, death and horror. “Royal Caribbean is performing a sickening act to me by taking tourists to Haiti,” one critic wrote one poster on CNN’s “Connect the World” blog. “Having a beach party while people are dead, dying and suffering minutes away hardly makes me want to cruise that particular line,” wrote another. Continue reading