kindness

Hero, Villain or Hypocrite: The Dilemma of the Undercover Dog-Fighter

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The limits of absolutism and the drawbacks of utilitarianism both come under scrutiny in assessing the strange saga of Terry Mills, whom the ASPCA recently appointed as its Animal Fighting Specialist.

Beyond question, this is a job he is uniquely qualified to hold. In 2008, Mills worked for the FBI’s domestic-terrorism task force, and went under-cover for more than a year to expose and break up a national dog-fighting ring. His efforts resulted in many arrests, and the rescue of more than 500 animals. Accomplishing all of this, however, required Mills to become part of the culture he was attacking. He trained and fought his own dogs, engaging in the very cruelty he was working to prevent. Continue reading →

Ethics and Altzheimer’s Testing: An Easy Call

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sometimes I think bioethicists spend too much of their time looking for new ethical dilemmas rather than giving thoughtful guidance on the dilemmas we already have. A recent example: the New York Times wrote about a supposed ethical dilemma appearing in the wake of new tests that reveal the likelihood of whether an individual will get Alzheimer’s at some point in the future. As the article put it:

“Since there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s, is it a good thing to tell people, years earlier, that they have this progressive degenerative brain disease or have a good chance of getting it?…It is a quandary that is emblematic of major changes in the practice of medicine, affecting not just Alzheimer’s patients. Modern medicine has produced new diagnostic tools, from scanners to genetic tests, that can find diseases or predict disease risk decades before people would notice any symptoms. At the same time, many of those diseases have no effective treatments. Does it help to know you are likely to get a disease if there is nothing you can do?”

My question is: “What’s the dilemma?” Continue reading →

Incompetence and Political Correctness at the Y: Ditching Santa For Frosty

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Last week, the McBurney YMCA in the West Village of New York City fired Santa Claus, who traditionally takes gift requests from children at its annual holiday luncheon, in favor of Frosty the Snowman. Why, you ask?

John Rappaport, executive director of the McBurney YMCA, explained, “We realized that change is sometimes good, and that Frosty is a great winter character who would appeal to a broader number of kids.”

Translation: Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: White Sox Pitcher Mark Beuhrle and His Wife Jamie

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This isn’t an earth-shattering story, but a nice one, especially if you need more than Philadelphia Eagles touchdowns to help wash the Michael Vick episode out of your brain. Some pro athletes are actually kind to dogs.

Mark Beuhrle, the Chicago White Sox pitching star, learned about a Shetland Sheepdog that was shot with an arrow, and badly injured. Beuhrle and his wife have agreed to pay any unpaid medical bills for the wounded animal, which has undergone extensive surgery. He seems to be out of danger, too.

You can read the whole story of Shelby the Sheltie here.

UNICEF’s Unethical War Against International Adoption

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

UPDATE, 12/19/2011: There is more on the topic of international adoptions here.

There are few things more harmful than a trusted organization associated with good will and good deeds that uses its influence irresponsibly, and there are few organizations with more accumulated trust than UNICEF, the United Nations organization dedicated to children’s rights, safety and welfare. That UNICEF could be promoting policies that actually harms children seems too awful to contemplate, but that appears to be what is occurring. The problem is that most people have grown up thinking of the organization as the epitome of international virtue. UNICEF doing something that hurts kids? Impossible. Since the group’s impressive moral authority seems to be focused in an unethical direction, the damage it can do before public opinion turns is substantial.

The area is  international adoptions. Continue reading →

Heeding the Christmas Season Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, it has come to this. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas season is a pre-unethical condition, getting worse every year. (Pre-unethical conditions are situations that experience teaches us deserve early ethics alarms, since the stage is set for habitual bad conduct.) The financial stresses on the public and the business community in 2010 will only fuel the creeping tendency to ignore the moral and ethical values that are supposed to underlie the winter holidays—charity, gratitude, generosity, kindness, love, forgiveness, peace and hope—for the non-ethical considerations that traditionally battle them for supremacy: avarice, selfishness, greed, self-pity, and cynicism. Combine this with the ideological and political polarization in today’s America and the deterioration of mutual respect and civility, and the days approaching Christmas are likely to become an ethical nightmare…unless we work collectively to stop that from happening. Continue reading →

Kelli Space’s Cyber-Begging? Not Unethical, Just Desperate

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Northeastern alum Kelli Space, 23, owes $200,000 on her student loans, and has to pay federal student loan agency Sallie Mae $891 per month. That figure will nearly double in a year, and Kelli doesn’t make enough to pay off her debt. In desperation, she has launched a website called Two Hundred Thou, asking for donations. These aren’t charitable donations, now—you won’t get any deduction for giving to Kelli, any more than you will giving to the homeless guy on the street. This is begging, plain and simple.

Her pitch: Continue reading →

The Ethics of Outing the Movie Star

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

My least favorite website, the ethically challenged Gawker, became the latest media source to publish rapidly spreading tales of the gay sexual escapades of a well-known Hollywood leading man who is also married, has children, attracts a great deal of positive publicity because of his family life, and, to cap it all off, is a high-profile member of a church (the Church of Scientology) that has in the past treated homosexuality as a curable malady. A book is coming out, and the author is pumping up interest in the tabloids.

The ethical question: is this legitimate news? Should it be reported? If it isn’t news, but rather a vile and mean-spirited invasion of privacy, then Gawker, as usual, is wading in slime. If, however, it is news, then why is the mainstream media ignoring the story?

This is a messy ethical conflict. Continue reading →

Unethical Lawsuit Files: The Golfer and the Diner

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The tort system  evolved to ensure that those injured by the recklessness, maliciousness or negligence of others can enlist the courts and juries to help them be made whole. It presumes, but, sadly, does not require, a measure of fairness, proportion, personal responsibility, forbearance, prudence, empathy, and common sense, as well as a lack of greed.

Two recent lawsuits, involving a golfer and a diner, illustrate how an otherwise good system can be used unethically.

First, the Diner: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Sparky Anderson (1934-2010)

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Maybe I shouldn’t call someone an Ethics Hero for behaving like all normal, considerate people ought to behave. Maybe that sets the bar too low. Still, when I learned of the recent death of Sparky Anderson, the Hall of Fame baseball manager who won World Series titles with both the Tigers and the Reds, I remembered an indelible personal incident that forever defined my impression of him. Continue reading →