Much gratitude is due to Buzzfeed for this lovely and timely sequence of “21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity,” of which the photo above is one. Yes, I’m sure one or more may be photoshopped. At this point, I really do not care.
I don’t know about you, but I need a little reinforcement today.
A simple Ethics Dunce just doesn’t do Ray Dolin justice.
Yes, I guess you’re kind, Ray—kind of an idiot.
You may have read the initial story. Ray was hiking across America to promote a personal memoir called “Kindness in America,” when, Ray told police, he was the victim of a drive-by shooting in Montana, leaving him with a bleeding bullet wound in the upper arm. “How horrible and ironic!” the press exclaimed. “What a sad indication of the cruelty in the nation. Imagine–shot while promoting kindness!”
Except that it turns out that Ray shot himself. You see, his promotional hike wasn’t getting the attention he expected, so he thought a random and ironic attack would be just what was needed to give his book publicity a shot in the arm! Har!!!
(I’m sorry.)
The problem was that his description of his drive-by attacker resulted in an arrest of an innocent driver, and when police pressed Ray on the details of the shooting as he lay recuperating in his hospital room, he finally had to admit that the whole thing was a hoax. I suppose one can be kind and be a liar too, but eventually the unethical trait undermines the ethical one. For example, the woman who stopped to help Dolin after he shot himself was being kind, and he he thanked her by making her a pawn in his self-enriching deception. That’s not very kind.
On balance, I would say that Ray Dolin needs to bone up on some of the subtleties of ethics, including the virtue of kindness and the importance of honesty, before he’s qualified to write a book about it. I guess you could say that he jumped the gun. Har!
I’m sorry again.
But what a moron.
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Pointer: Drudge
Facts: Billings Gazette
Graphic: Daily Telegraph
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.
Uh, wrong meeting, Barney…
A friend who is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous flagged an interesting ethical dilemma involving the huge, loosely-affiliated alcoholism recovery and support group.
Judges often order mandatory attendance at AA meetings as conditions for leniency in alcohol-related crimes, like DUI, spousal abuse, and others. The problem is that AA is system of commitment and trust, and someone who only comes to meetings under threat of jail time have neither. It is the AA attendee’s acceptance of the reality that they are helpless against alcohol and willingness to commit fully to the program with others like than that allows AA to be as successful as it is, and the assurance of anonymity the group provides makes its existence possible. “Court-ordered attendees slink in here, roll their eyes, do their time and leave,” he told me. “How do we know that they aren’t regaling their friends with hilarious tales about what does on at meetings? What right does a judge have to make AA host someone who doesn’t really meet the group’s criteria?”
Good question, and it’s the Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Is it ethical for judges to force a non-profit, non-government, voluntary organization to assist the justice system at the risk of their own integrity and their members’ confidentiality?
This time I’m going to let everyone weigh in before I show my cards.
Here is a link that discusses some of the related issues.
You’ve probably heard or read the story by now.
Wait! Maybe he’s Cherokee!
17-year-old Jeffrey Warren rose to accept the $1,000 college scholarship awarded by the local Martin Luther King Senior Citizens Club during seniors night at Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, California, and provoked both laughter and awkward gasps. He was obviously white—as white as Elizabeth Warren—and the scholarship for intended for black students, though Warren didn’t know that when he applied.
Later, Warren decided to give back the money. His family said they didn’t want the African-American women who gave out the award to be foiled in their attempt to help young black scholars, and that it was the right thing to do. I would say that it was a right thing to do, and showed exemplary kindness, compassion, empathy, generosity, charity and altruism. Jeffrey had every right to accept the money. The Club’s requirements were vague, and did not make it clear that he was not eligible when he applied. If he and his parents had wanted to make a political and philosophical statement about the hypocrisy of a race-based scholarship in the name of Martin Luther King, this was an ideal opportunity, and an argument could be made that this would have been the “right” thing to do as well, if not “righter.” Continue reading
Boy, Kathy Lee, are you lucky!
Visiting the late version of the Today Show to plug a film, actor/comedian Martin Short was not expecting to have to answer awkward questions about his wife, Nancy Dolman, who, after all, has been dead since she succumbed to ovarian cancer two years ago. Then again, he might have, since his host, the flighty Kathy Lee Gifford, could not reasonably be expected to uphold the basic standards of professional journalism, which include knowing whom you are interviewing and avoiding mortifying one’s guests. Sure enough, Gifford left her index cards to wax enthusiastic about her “good friend’s” marriage, as if she and the Shorts regularly hung out together. Kathy Lee said, “He and Nancy have one of the greatest marriages of anybody in show business. How many years now for you guys?” Short, who is a pro, managed to conceal his discomfort and pleasantly responded, “We … for 36 years.”
Gifford then went into full Kathy Lee mode, which resembles a boa constrictor squeezing a goat. “But you’re still, like, in love?” she asked. Short responded, “Madly, madly in love.” Continue reading
The fun prom…in the parking lot.
When Lexington (Kentucky) Catholic High senior Hope Decker, 18 tried to take sophomore Tiffany Wright, 16, to the school’s senior prom as her date, school officials told the couple that they would not be admitted, because their unholy same-sex coupling violated the Catholic Church’s teachings. Defiant, the couple tried to enter the school’s gymnasium that night, where the prom was held, but as promised, their tickets were refused. So their fellow students held an impromtu protest prom outside the official one, in the parking lot. They played music from their cars, and set up a table for refreshments.
“We had a wonderful night, and we were surrounded by true friends,” Wright said. “I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.”
Here is what else she will remember for the rest of her life: Continue reading
“OH THE HUMANITY! I mean…well, you know what I mean…”
A good friend related this scene on Facebook, and asks if she is losing her mind:
She was shopping at the open air fish market on Maine Avenue in Washington, D.C. when a vendor, whose cart was full of live blue crabs, had an escape attempt. One of the crustaceans made a dash for freedom, only to be squashed by the wheel of the cart. “I screamed and then burst into tears,” she wrote. “It was awful. I tried to save the little guy.” Then she realized that people were laughing at the drama, thinking it was a comedy….laughing at the crab getting crushed and at my friend for being upset by it.
She wrote: “Now I know he was destined for a pot of boiling water. But somehow – seeing that little creature getting run over was just too much for me. I know someone was going to eat that crab – but do we have to be cruel?”
Your Post-Mothers Day Ethics Quiz for crab mothers everywhere:
Were the laughers cruel, or merely recognizing a funny scene when they saw one? Continue reading
“WAAA! I wanted that ball! By the way, where am I?”
I skipped this ten-minute controversy from last month, but I think it was worth mentioning from several ethics angles, so consider this catch-up.
Rangers fans Sean Leonard and Shannon Moore were at a Texas Rangers-Yankee game a few weeks ago when a game ball was tossed into the stands by Texas’s Mitch Moreland. They caught it and gleefully posed for the TV cameras, which also caught a three-year old boy crying hysterically next to them. Immediately, the couple was vilified far and wide, on TV, in blogs and on radio talk shows ( Business Insider called them “The Monsters Who Made A Little Boy Cry”) for taking the ball and not giving it to the child. The main accuser who sparked all this hatred was Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay, who told his radio audience that the couple was taunting the unhappy boy.
Outrageous, all right, but Kay, not the couple. Kay’s description of what occurred was speculative and even fanciful, and for other commentators to commence vilifying the two fans without knowing anything about them, or even why the child was crying, was frighteningly unfair, irresponsible and cruel. Yes, you too can be caught on camera and turned into a national punching bag! Later, we discovered that…. Continue reading
Happy birthday, Jon.
Conservative columnist George Will has only occasionally mentioned his Down Syndrome-inflicted son Jon in his columns, but when he has, it has provided an extra dimension to Jon’s father, who usually comes across in print and on TV as cynical, dour, and archly intellectual. Today is Jon’s birthday, so Will devotes the full column to him, his challenges, and, when all is said and done, ethics.
It’s a beautifully written piece, as Will’s columns often are, and a tender one. More importantly, however, it is an essay that should provoke thought, beginning with the fact that the only reason Will wrote this column is that he and his wife chose, 40 years ago, to do what 90% of all parents informed that their gestating child has Down Syndrome refuse to do: allow the child to be born.
The column is here
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Graphics: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Yesterday, an Off-Broadway musical closed that I launched on its remarkable run nearly 12 years ago. The show had productions in four states, D.C. and London; it had over 450 performances; it became the cornerstone of one very talented (and very nice) actor’s career, and an important opportunity for several others. It gave a dear friend immense pleasure, satisfaction and recognition in the final decade of his life, and probably saved my theater company from bankruptcy. Most important of all, perhaps, is that it entertained thousands of people. If I got bopped by a trolley tomorrow, the show would undoubtedly stand as one of the major accomplishments of my entire strange, eclectic, under-achieving life.
And yet…feeling good about the unlikely saga of the show, now that it has finally (probably—it has risen from the dead before) seen its last audience, takes considerable effort for me, and has from the beginning. My satisfaction is more intellectual than emotional, because I know that I personally benefited less from the show in tangible ways in proportion to my contribution to it than anyone else involved. Although I restructured the script, re-wrote, added and cut lines, wrote new lyrics to one song and added two others to the show, including the finale, I’m not credited as a co-auther. I own no part of the property, and never received a dime in compensation. Those closely connected with the original production know all of this, but the extent of my role in the creation and success of the show has been invisible to audiences for over a decade. Continue reading
