infidelity

Ethics Alarms To “The Ethicist”: It’s Called “The Golden Rule”—Why Is That So Hard?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I hadn’t checked in for a while on Kwame Anthony Appiah, the N.Y.U philosophy teacher and author who finally brought ethical consistency to the New York Times magazine’s advice column, “The Ethicist.” I was surprised to find him struggling to answer two family related queries that I would have assumed he could and should have answered  easily with three words: “The Golden Rule.”

The first inquirer asked in part,

Recently a mutual acquaintance who knows my friend’s husband well told me that he has been cheating on my friend on and off for years with someone who once worked with him.I know that if I reveal this information, my friend will take their child and leave her husband. Do I sit on this information and pretend the affair isn’t happening, or do I tell her?

Isn’t that an easy call? Of course she should tell her friend. The Golden Rule applies: would she want to be told if the positions were reversed? Sure she would; anyone would. Not telling her would be a betrayal of the worst kind.

Yet Appiah uses 608 words to reach that conclusion. 608! This makes a slam dunk of an ethics decision appear to be a difficult one. Oh, it’s difficult in the sense that the inquirer has to take sides in a crisis affecting a couple she and her husband are close to, and thus the repercussions as well as the process will be unpleasant, but that’s life. One of the Ethics Alarms rules is that if you can fix a problem, fix it. The Ethicist’s rabbinical musings about the decision just supplies a dangerous volume of rationalizations to temp the questioner into keeping the husband’s secret, and abetting the harm. Continue reading →

On The Way To Bali, An Unethical Conduct Cascade

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

One unethical act often opens the floodgates to many, in in unexpected, and unexpectable ways. An ethics alarm failure triggers another, then another. But who would expect that an extramarital affair would cause a passenger plane to have to make an emergency landing, for example?

All the moe reason to keep those alarms in working order.

The distaff side of a couple on the way to a vacation in Bali on a Qatar Airways flight apparently had reason to be suspicious of her husband, so when he fell asleep, she oh-so-carefully  manipulated his snoozing thumb to unlock his smartphone with its print, and did some snooping.

Ah HA! The bastard had been cheating on her!

So calmly, maturely, she began screaming and beating on her dastardly spouse so violently that the pilot had to divert the flight and land.

Cascade re-cap:

  • Triggering unethical act: Marital infidelity.

1 to 10 Betrayal of Trust Scale score, with 1 being a forgivable lie and 10 being treason, I rate this an 8.

  • Secondary unethical act: Appropriating the body of another while he is incapacitated, and doing so to invade his privacy. (No credit for discovering above triggering unethical act.. That’s consequentialism: the result of an act cannot retroactively justify the act.)

Betrayal of Trust Scale score: 6

  • Culminating unethical act: Physical violence on a plane endangering innocent passengers, forcing the plane to land, inconveniencing many.

I don’t have a scale for that.

But it was the most unethical of all.

What a fun couple!

(Pssst! GOP? Awful Human Beings Are Not Qualified To Be President!)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Coincidentally, this newt is also a miserable human being...

I suppose that it was inevitable that the “Anyone but Mitt” bloc of Republican voters would eventually give Newt Gingrich a second look. After all, he can put a complete sentence together and stays current on world events. He doesn’t take pride in being inarticulate (like Rick Perry) or think it’s cute not to know a thing about foreign countries (like Herman Cain).  Unlike Michele Bachmann, he could pass a junior high exam in American History; unlike Ron Paul, he doesn’t live in a parallel universe. Newt isn’t bland and weightless, like Rick Santorum, and he doesn’t appear to be a holograph, like Jon Huntsman. He’s obviously smart.

This is all true, and yet Newt is a wretched choice. Not because he has virtually no executive experience (and we should be learning what that means.) Not because in his only extended attempt at filling an important and challenging leadership position when he was Speaker of the House, he squandered a position of strength with ethical misconduct and unrestrained hubris worthy of the House of Atreus.  Newt is unqualified to be president because he is demonstrably an awful human being. Continue reading →

Newt Gingrich: Ethics Victim…Ethics Miscreant…Walking, Talking Ethics Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The Ethics Lesson

I’m glad Newt Gingrich is in the presidential race, however foolishly and futilely. He is perhaps the perfect illustration of how a potential political leader’s private personal conduct is not only relevant to assessing his fitness to lead, but predictive of it. What makes Newt especially useful in this regard is that he is a Republican, and all the Democrats who are going to be sneering at his candidacy will have to square their attacks on his character with their indignant claims in 1998 that Bill Clinton’s adultery, sexual harassment and lies were irrelevant to his leadership—and they weren’t truly private or personal.  Similarly, Newt will be helpful to some of my ethically-addled trial lawyer friends who have argued that John Edwards is still a trustworthy lawyer, despite his betrayals of his dying wife, his family, his supporters and his party.

Of course private conduct is relevant to judging a leader, especially when private conduct shows an individual to be dishonest, disloyal, cowardly, ruthless, selfish and cruel—like Newt. Cheating on two wives and leaving both of them when they were battling health crises isn’t a mistake, or a coincidence, or a misunderstanding; it is a pattern, and a symptom. You can’t trust Newt. You can’t rely on Newt. You can’t believe Newt. Ask his ex-wives, and eventually, I am quite certain, his current one.

Today conservative talk radio is abuzz with Gingrich’s frenzied efforts to sooth the conservative faithful after he attacked Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget reforms over the weekend. What??? You mean Newt Gingrich stabbed a political ally and  fellow party stalwart in the back without warning? Who could have seen that coming? Oh, only everybody: You can’t trust Newt. You can’t rely on Newt. You can’t believe Newt. Ask his ex-wives. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Newt Gingrich

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them. I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness. Not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness. I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think most people, deep down in their hearts hope there’s a forgiving God.”

—–Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, preparing for a presidential run by attempting to explain and apologize for his serial marital betrayals, the most spectacular of which was visiting his first wife while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery to announce that he was divorcing her to marry his mistress. Then he cheated on his second wife, the former mistress, with a member of his staff. He ditched Mistress #1, Wife #2, for Mistress #2, who became Wife #3. This is why he needs a forgiving God, or at least a forgiving electorate.

Newt’s defense now is that he felt so passionately about his country that it caused him to dump his cancer stricken wife (so much for all that “in sickness or in health” stuff), and later, while he was leading a party that was making the case that a U.S. President shouldn’t be having on-the-job sexual encounters with interns, using his staff and appointees to cover it up, and lying about it under oath in court, to commence a second extra-marital affair of his own. This, naturally, helped let President Clinton wiggle of his well-earned impeachment hook, and also helped cement the socially destructive public perception that 1) everyone cheats on their spouses, so it’s okay, and 2) you can’t trust any of our elected leaders.

Thanks for nothing, Newt.

God is welcome to forgive you; I won’t. You are obviously untrustworthy. Once cheating on a spouse may be a mistake; cheating on a second spouse is a behavior pattern. If a politician who likes to invoke God will lie to and betray two women who he swore, before God, to take “’til death us do part,” not to mention his children, I see no reason to assume that he won’t betray voters who has never met, loved, or lived with.

God’s forgiveness is irrelevant to the central issue of whether New Gingrich has the reliability of character and core values to justify entrusting him with great power. As his self-serving quote demonstrates, he does not.

But good luck with God, Newt.

 

Eliot Spitzer, the Harvard Club, and Blackball Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Eliot Spitzer, we have learned, has been blackballed by the New York City Harvard Club. Although over 11,000 graduates of the august institution are members, and the club, which is always seeking funds and rejects an application about as frequently as its alma mater plays a decent football game, nonetheless found Spitzer wanting.

Is this a surprise to anyone? There are only a few reasons to join the Harvard Club or even tolerate it, unless one has an unhealthy affection for the stuffed heads of things Theodore Roosevelt shot, many of which are hanging on the wall. The main reason is prestige (and to let visitors know that you graduated from Harvard without having to say so). A club, by its very nature, suggests some degree of exclusivity; one’s cache from belonging to a club derives from its members. I can imagine a rational person feeling some sense of pride in belonging to a club of Harvard graduates. I cannot imagine a rational person feeling any special sense of exclusivity emanating from membership in a club that includes Eliot Spitzer. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Robert M. McElwaine, 1925-2010

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Every time I hear about a new tell-all book by a famous person’s former lover, spouse, political aide or appointee, full of embarrassing revelations about what celebrities, political leaders or admired (or reviled) historical figures did or said behind closed doors or in the dead of night, I admire Bob McElwaine just a little more. When he died this month, the Washington Post obituary described him as a man who knew how to keep a secret. He did, but he was much more than that.

Robert McElwaine was a gentleman. Continue reading →

JFK the Philanderer: What Does It Mean?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Honest, I’m not picking on the Kennedy’s. That this surfaced today is a coincidence. But if you cross Ted Kennedy and Tiger Woods, you get Jack Kennedy, and what should appear on the web this morning but a surprising photograph:

TMZ, the celebrity trash website that likes to publish paparazzi photos of supermodels with spinach between their teeth, has a genuine scoop: it has gotten its cyber-hands on a photograph that appears to show a bevy of naked women frolicking on a yacht as a young Senator Jack Kennedy lounges nearby.  [UPDATE: As explained by The Smoking Gun here, and discussed in a later Ethics Alarms post here, the photo was a hoax. The ethical issues raised by it and discussed below are still valid, however.] Continue reading →