kindness

The Most Ethical Christmas Carol

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well, unfortunately I started thinking that it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas this week, so I’m depressed and miserable.

It’s my favorite time of the year because its the most ethical time of the year, but my wife, who was a Christmas fanatic, is dead; my son, who now insists that she’s my daughter, barely speaks to me though I have been nothing but supportive (because that’s my job); my sister is going to be across country for the holiday; and my mom, who was the center of every Christmas in my life as long as she was breathing, breathes no more. I have neither the time to decorate a tree properly (like I used to) nor the resources to  purchase one, and half-hearted decorations will only remind me of 2702 Westminster Place glories past. But I can’t avoid Christmas, just as I can’t avoid ““It’s a Wonderful Life”” as you know.  So I’ll be celebrating my favorite holiday here, on Ethics Alarms, with my five loyal readers and the other visitors who drop in, and pretty much nowhere else. That means, among other gifts, I will be bestowing various Christmas-related post from the Ethics Alarms Christmas attic. Like this one…

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Believe It or Not! The Murder Wasn’t The Most Disturbing Aspect Of The Charlotte Stabbing

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

It seems incredible, but Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’s murder on a Charlotte light rail train was not the most disturbing aspect of her murder by a deranged man who just decided to kill her for no discernible reason. Nor is the fact that the killer had been arrested 14 times and turned back into the streets as part of the Mad Left’s urban “de-incarceration” agenda the worst aspect of the story, or even the deliberate burying of the event by the mainstream media, which felt that the public didn’t need to know this occurred because it undermines so many Axis narratives (gun control, how safe Democrat-run big cities are despite all evidence to the contrary, “Black on white crime? What black on white crime?,” the virtues of public transportation). And it isn’t the fact that so many Americans have been brainwashed that many (including commenters on this blog) have defended the media’s censorship of inconvenient reality.

No, I have concluded upon watching the various surveillance camera videos that the worst aspect of the incident is that even after the young woman was stabbed and was bleeding out in her seat, not one of her fellow passengers lifted a finger to try to save her life.

That’s some community you have there, Charlotte. Be proud…

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Ethics Zugzwang Exemplified: The “Friend in a Lousy Show” Conflict

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I’d be surprised if I haven’t posted on this before, but a recent advice column article about the issue made me realize that the common conflict almost all of us with friends in the performing arts face routinely is as perfect example of the phenomenon I have termed “ethics zugzwang” as there is.

A theater reporter in the New York Times wrote a column titled, “My Friend’s Show Was Kind of Terrible. What Do I Say When I See Them? (You can always consider telling the truth, but it may not be advisable in this case.) [Gift link!] He breaks down the options as,

  • “Tell the truth, as a form of tough love.
  • Find something to say that is appreciative but also incomplete.
  • Lie.”

After reporting on interviews with performers and others in show biz, the reporter concludes that the most ethical option is “Lie.” He concludes, “So what to do? The consensus among those I spoke with is that the best way to be a friend is to be supportive. Leave the critical feedback to other people and other settings. ‘I think the move is always to lie,’ said the musical theater composer Joe Iconis . ‘Whether you enjoyed the show or not, if you’re actually a friend to the person who is part of the production, your job is to say ‘great job, fantastic show.’ I have never once appreciated a friend who came to a show of mine and offered unsolicited negative comments.’”

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Ethics Hero: Some Rich Person In Idaho

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The holiday-appropriate heart-warming tale is told in this video I can’t embed here. Apparently a wealthy “Secret Santa” is giving $1 million to “deserving people in eastern Idaho,” and the East Idaho News is publicizing the plan with daily surprise visit to the lucky recipient. “Brenda in Blackfoot”is first up. From the News: “She is a single mom with eight adopted children who all have special needs. She works from 4:30 a.m. to approximately 1 p.m. every day to support her children… She has really struggled… In May, they experienced a small house fire, which caused a lot of damage to her home….Googling the repairs for instructions , [Brenda] did all of the repairs herself. Her family also had a flood in their home about six weeks ago….Brenda went through cancer treatment last year as well…”

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Ethics Quiz: The Offensive Compliment

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This quiz comes from the latest inquiry to “The Ethicist.” I disagree with much of Prof. Appiah’s answer, as I often have lately, but I do concede that the question is worthy of a serious ponder.

On their way out a restaurant, a family group was interrupted by a stranger who had also dined there. He said to the inquirer’s comely daughter-in-law, “With all due respect, you are very attractive.” The inquirer rebuked him saying, “That is wholly inappropriate, sir.” The inquiry continued,

“My cousin snapped at me that it was only a compliment. My sister got mad at me for upsetting my cousin. My daughter-in-law appreciated my reaction but said that she has had “way creepier men say way creepier things to her.” I responded to them all that a stranger has no business commenting on the looks of a person, good or bad, and that this man would never have said a word if any man had been standing with us. Who is right?”

Before I give you The Ethicist’s answer and mine,

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

“Are spontaneous  compliments on a stranger’s appearance per se unethical?”

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The Student and the Homeless Man: A Cautionary Ethics Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Or, “Why It’s Unethical to Behave in Defiance of Reality.”

Or, “Why the old saw ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is constantly being affirmed.”

Or, “Why progressive wishcraft keeps blowing up in society’s metaphorical face”

Sanai Graden (left), a University of California at Berkeley senior (presumably you know what that means) was hit up by a homeless man as she visited Washington, D.C. He said his name was Alonzo, and told her he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The sympathetic young woman paid for his medication at CVS. She also got him a hotel room for the night. Sanai was a TikToker , and told her followers that she needed to raise money for Alonzo, whom she called “Unc.” Soon she bought Alonzo, aka. “Unc,” a cell phone, and put him up in a hotel for a week.

Awwww. How Christian! How kind! How progressive!

Her video became a Tik Tok sensation, with millions of views. Graden started a GoFundMe account, and it quickly raised more than $400,000. Her legion of followers multiplied: one admirer set up a GoFundMe for her that eventually raised over $26,000.

Isn’t that a nice story?

Then a report from local D.C. TV station Fox 5 revealed that “Unc” was Alonzo Hebron, 64, a long-time criminal who numbered among his convictions one for a violent assault on a homeless woman. In another, he stabbed a man in the neck with a screwdriver. Donors started asking for their money back.

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Ethics Hero: Lya Battle, “Our Lady of the Strays”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

John Hammond, as every fan of Michael Crichton, “Jurassic Park” and dinosaurs knows, built an aspirational cloned dinosaur park on a Costa Rican island, and thanks to chaos theory and “Newman,” it turned out to be a deadly disaster. But the InGen founder wasn’t too far off; he just chose the wrong species. In Costa Rica’s Central Valley and its surrounding highlands, a woman named Lya Battle has been presiding over a farm inherited from her dog-loving father (who shot her mother, but that’s another story) known locally as Territorio de Zaguates (“kingdom of strays”). She and her staff take care of, feed and love nearly 1000 stray dogs, which Costa Rica, like most non-affluent countries has far more of than it does pet dogs. (There are an estimated one million strays.) Lya boasts that she knows the name of every one of them on her farm. Here’s another photo:

Netflix featured the Lya and the Territorio in the second episode of its series “Dogs;” National Geographic has featured her story, and I learned about the amazing dog haven from an old episode of Jack Hanna’s nature series.

Lya’s Territorio takes responsibility for spaying and neutering every new dog arrival. It operates like a typical shelter, providing food and medical attention, except that the dogs run free. The most stunning scene is when all 900-plus dogs “go for a walk,” with staff leading them into the hills and forests in a noisy, barking pack.

You can get a sense of what this is like from this video…

Ethics Heroes: The L.A. Dodgers Management

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ethics Heroes have been far and few between so far this year, but this one is not only an easy call, it’s from the world of Major League Baseball.

Andrew Toles played 96 games as a member of the Dodgers from 2016 to 2018. The speedy outfielder did well in limited playing time, but he did not report to spring training in 2019 and was subsequently diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. A year later, Toles was arrested and charged with trespassing after he was found sleeping behind a FedEx building at Key West International Airport. He has been in and out of mental health hospitals ever since. But the Dodgers signed the now 30-year-old Toles to a contract in March, and revealed that the team has signed him to a contract every year since the 2019 season so he would be eligible for the organization’s health insurance.  

Nice.

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Source: Sports Illustrated

Ethics Heroes: The Anonymous Staff Of An Un-Named Restaurant In Rome

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Bear with me on this, please. Ann Althouse, who either has 72 hour days or is a witch, found the following comment in the latest Washington Post “Miss Manners” advice column and passed it on to her blog’s readers. I would have never seen it otherwise: I didn’t read Miss Manners (aka Judith Martin, who must be 90) even when I subscribed to the Post, and this column has over 1300 comments. I couldn’t find the comment Ann posted even using key word searches. (Side issue: I complain about traffic on EA, but the law of diminishing returns applies to blog commentary. The comments here vastly enhance the posts, but when comments get into triple figures, who has the time of inclination to read them? Well, I guess the answer is “Ann Althouse.” However Ann manages it, I’m glad she does.

The comment was in response to a sad letter to MM complaining about how single diners are treated by restaurants. The woman wrote, Continue reading →

A Presidents Day Encore: “How Julia Sand Saved A President And Changed The Nation”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Chester Arthur and Julia

I’m pretty sick of U.S. Presidents and Presidential history at the moment, so for my own state of mind and perhaps yours, I’m re-posting a 2015 article about my favorite story about a President ever. Here it is…

In my overview of the U.S. presidency (the four parts are now combined on a single page under “Rule Book” above), I noted that our 21st President, Chester A. Arthur, was one of my personal favorites and an Ethics Hero. He confounded all predictions and his previous undistinguished background, not to mention a career marked  by political hackery and toadying to corrupt Republican power broker Roscoe Conkling, to rise to the challenge of the office and to effectively fight the corrupt practices that had elevated him to power. Most significantly, he established the Civil Service system, which crippled the spoils and patronage practices that made the Federal government both incompetent and a breeding ground for scandal.

I did not mention, because I did not then know, the unlikely catalyst for his conversion. Recently a good friend, knowing of my interest in Arthur, his tragic predecessor, James Garfield, and presidential assassinations sent me a copy of Destiny of the Republic, the acclaimed history of the Garfield assassination and its aftermath by Candace Millard. It’s a wonderful book, and while I knew much of the history already, I definitely did not know about Julia Sand. Her tale is amazing, and it gives me hope. If you do not know about Julia and Chester, and it is not a well-known episode, you should.

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