“Locking the barn door after the horse is gone”

Zombie Ethics, Spoiling Things For Everyone, And The Barn Door Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

With so many terrible news stories going on around the world, it is not surprising that a bumper crop of strange and stupid ones this week went almost unnoticed. In Indiana, a truck crashed and spilled 45,000 pounds of butter, whipped cream and other dairy products on an interstate. In the skies, an elderly woman went berserk on an airplane and began beating everyone is sight with her artificial leg. This, however, wins the prize: the annual Comic Con  “Zombie Walk” in San Diego went horribly wrong when a group of rogue zombie portrayers, dressed like rotting corpses and moaning, carried their method acting too far and swarmed a car containing a family with young children—a deaf family with deaf children. Ignoring the obvious alarm and terror on the faces of the car’s occupants, the Walking Dead Wannabes pounded on the car, broke its windshield, and one zombie jumped onto the hood. At that point the driver panicked, and tried to pull away from the crowd, running down a 64-year-old woman who was seriously injured as a result. Continue reading →

Laser Pointer Abuse: Why Ethics Gets Complicated

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

laser pointerThis month, the FBI announced that it was expanding a program rewarding anyone who reports an incident of an individual aiming a laser pointer at an airplane with $10,000. ( This use of the cheap lasers is a federal crime.) The bounty was previously offered in a handful of cities, but because it seems to have reduced the number of laser strikes on planes, it is being expanded nationwide.

Wait…is this really a problem? It’s several problems, in fact. The main problem is that laser pointers can, if the wielder of one gets “lucky,’ bring down an airplane. The related problem is that this country is littered with so many unbelievable assholes that we even have to discuss this….and imagine what other stupid, dangerous, irresponsible things they do when they aren’t trying blind pilots thousands of feet in the air.

Incidents where laser pointers interfered with the operation of commercial airliners have increased a ridiculous 1000% rate since 2005, when federal agencies started compiling statistics. Last year, there were 3,960 laser strikes against aircraft reported, an average of almost 11 incidents per day.

Some ethics-related thoughts:

1. There is no way around it: sociopaths, who are essentially ethics-free, are a constant threat and blight on society. Aside from the children involved, whose conduct can be chalked up to immaturity and flawed reasoning, the people who would aim a laser pointer at an airplane just for the hell of it are kin to those who set fires, vandalize buildings, create computer viruses and generally make life ugly and dangerous for the rest of us because they can. You can’t educate them or give them a sense of right and wrong. All you can do is make laws with harsh punishment for the stupid, destructive conduct these individuals engage in to give themselves a sense of power and importance. Ethics is irrelevant; their ethics alarms can’t be repaired, because they don’t exist. The laser-abusers  illustrate the maxim often quoted here that “When ethics fails, the law steps in.”

2. Anyone who uses a laser pointer this way and who is aware of the potential results is capable of much worse. This is signature significance, don’t you think? It is tempting to use such a crime as a justification for pre-crime: anyone who would do this is too stupid or too inherently anti-social to be trusted in a free society. Pre-crime, however, is a concept too prone to abuse, a slippery slope that the Constitution wisely precludes. I would, however, see no reason not to require a conviction of this crime to be disclosed to every potential employer, for all time. Nobody should trust someone who even once would risk causing an airplane to fall out of the sky because it would be cool, and I don’t care if the reason for the act was the lack of brain cells, IQ points, the sense God gave a mollusk or a missing conscience. I don’t want you in my neighborhood, near my family, or in my workplace. I don’t trust you. and I never will. Does this place a burden on you, if others feel as I do? Good, and too bad for you. Don’t try to shoot 757s out of the sky for laughs, and you won’t have the problem. Continue reading →

Preliminary Ethics Observations On The NFL Bullying Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments
The bully and the bullied.

The bully and the bullied.

If you are unfamiliar with this story, the details are here. There is much that remains in question, but the basic outline of the incident is this:

  • The Miami Dolphins, like most professional football teams and also most college teams, have a tradition of “hazing” rookies, humiliating and harassing them in various way, “all in good fun, of course.”
  • The ironically named Richie Incognito, a starting guard for the Dolphins, was known as an especially relentless and enthusiastic hazer.
  • Last weak, the team’s second-year tackle Jonathan Martin walked out on the squad and checked into to a hospital, saying he could  he could no longer deal with the continued harassment from his teammates.
  • Incognito was shown to have referred to Martin using abusive language and racial epithets in voice messages.
  • Based on the evidence of the voice mails, the Dolphins suspended Incognito, who is being defended by his team mates. Sources are saying that his career with the Dolphins, and perhaps the NFL, may be over.
  • It is likely that the Dolphin coaches were aware of Martin’s hazing.

This is the perfect ethics problem to approach with what I regard as the most important clarifying question in beginning any ethical analysis:  What’s going on here? Continue reading →

What’s Wrong With The Florida Cyber-Bullying Arrests? Everything.

/ Jack Marshall / 193 Comments

“Bullying, as they are supposed to teach you in school, is when someone uses their superior power to subordinate and humiliate someone weaker than themselves. This is wrong, and it is always wrong.”

The Sheriff of Polk County...wait, no, that's Tom Cruise, searching for pre-criminals in "Minority Report." Well, close enough.

The Sheriff of Polk County…wait, no, that’s Tom Cruise, searching for pre-criminals in “Minority Report.” Well, close enough.

This is a quote from an Ethics Alarms post earlier this year, about a school that forced students to do embarrassing things in a warped effort to discourage bullying. There is a disturbing societal consensus brewing that opposition to bullying justifies all sorts of extra-legal, unethical, excessive, abusive and unconstitutional measures, and there are a dearth of persuasive voices point out that this consensus is dangerous and wrong. Those potential voices are being stilled by a kind of cultural bullying. How can you defend bullies! Look at the victims! Think of the children! What a horrible, unfeeling person you are!

This is the only explanation I can generate for the fact that none of the commentary and media coverage regarding the Florida arrests of a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl on trumped-up charges of “stalking” following the suicide of Rebecca Ann Sedwick pointed out that the arrests were a travesty of the justice system, an abuse of power, child abuse, legally and constitutionally offensive, and, yes, bullying of a different kind. Continue reading →

Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck Classic Quote: “A Foolish Consistency Is The Hobgoblin of Little Minds…”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
ralph_waldo_emerson

I hear Ralph was good with a knife.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who uttered the title above, would have loved the Federal government, for which consistency in logic or policy is often alien indeed. In the midst of a mass effort to disarm the American people of guns with the dubious logic and arrogant presumption that they don’t need powerful weaponry since, after all, the government will save us, the TSA, it has been revealed  to me by my observant son, has secretly adopted exactly the opposite position, using polar reasoning.

My son, who likes knives almost as much as he likes guns, showed me several potential weapons in his collection that would legally pass through the new air travel regulations. He notes that officials defending the lifting of the ban on blades that could do as much damage as the box cutters of 9/11 have pointed to the self-reliance of air passengers, who have subdued several mid-air threats. “Don’t you get it?” my son says. “They’re arming passengers! They won’t say that directly, but it’s pretty obvious. The passengers on Flight 93 had to boil water and use food carts. Now hijackers might be facing a hundred angry people with knives.”

I get it! An armed and ready populace is a good thing! When the government says so, that is. So…. it makes sense to arm untrained air passengers when they face a deadly threat without police nearby, but schools should be “gun free zones” and it’s nuts to arm untrained teachers…indeed, trained and law-abiding gun owners should be disarmed lest they shoot Harvey Milk. I hearby predict that the little knife policy will last until a child gets killed by a mad airplane coach passenger wielding one, whereupon President Obama will invoke his “save just one child” rule, Rep. Rangel will declare that millions of children are being killed by little knives, and Jim Carrey will tweet that nobody who cares about children would oppose a little knife ban. The knives will then be not only prohibited again on airplanes, but will be confiscated by edict, since there’s no Bill of Rights provision protecting little knife ownership.

The behavior of our elected officials is consistent after all.

Emerson’s quote applies perfectly.

Ethics Thought Experiment: Let’s Play “What If?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
"This SWAT gag is, like, hilarious, Kendall!"Totally, Kylie. Hey, look! They just shot Khloe!""Awesome!!!"

“This SWAT gag is, like, hilarious, Kendall!
“Totally, Kylie. Hey, look! They just shot Khloe!”
“Awesome!!!”

“Swatting,” the ultra-vile and dangerous “joke” in which someone falsely calls down a SWAT team on a household that is neither in peril or threatening it, is seriously and criminally wrong—even when the victims are the almost as vile, if not necessarily dangerous, Kardashian family. The victims of a “swatting prank” yesterday, the rich, spoiled, vulgar and useless reality show family immediately reminded us of why someone might be moved to swat them by making a big joke out of the whole thing, or at least the younger generation of Kardashians did. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner are posing in obscenely tacky and expensive boob-exposing outfits while having inane and semi-grammatical conversations on their own E! reality show. SWAT me now, Lord!

But let’s not talk about how unethical swatting is, which is obvious, or how depressing the celebrity of the Kardashians is, which is makes me want to stick my head in a fryer. Let’s muse on what will happen if and when one of these swatting incidents leads to an exchange of gunfire—perhaps because a Second Amendment enthusiast is convinced that President Obama is making his big move to enslave the populace, and by God, he’s not going down without a fight. Let’s also muse on what will happen if that exchange of gunfire results in the deaths of one or more children. Just to make sure something happens in our hypothetical, let’s stipulate that the dead children are white, cute, and recently recorded a tear-inducing video urging world peace and racial harmony. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The No-Tolerance Catch 22

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

 

Should you trust this guy to be reasonable?

The Des Moines Register reports on a jaw-dropping example of “no-tolerance” management at its saddest, and the astounding fact that it did not, in fact, occur at a an educational institution, but at a bank.

Wells Fargo Home Mortgage  fired 68-year-old Richard Eggers because in 1963, when he was 18, he put a cardboard cutout of a dime in a Laundromat washing machine and was duly convicted of operating a coin-changing machine by false means. Since that time, after spending two days in jail (they were strict in Iowa back then), Eggers has been on the straight and narrow. He is a Vietnam veteran, and tells the press that he can’t remember his last speeding ticket. He has also been a loyal and effective employee of Wells Fargo for seven years. So why fire him over a stupid and trivial crime he committed when Kennedy was President, TV was black and white, Mary Tyler Moore was exciting male viewers in her Capri pants on the brand new “Dick Van Dyke Show,”and people trusted Uncle Sam? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: ABC’s Brian Ross

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Now that I think about it, nobody gets shot in Pixar movies. I wonder if movies about violence vigilantes need to be regulated…

He just couldn’t help himself. Learning of the horrible Batman theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, ABC reporter Brian Ross got on the air and reported a possible “tea party link” with the killer, James Holmes, and if you don’t think this sent a thrill up his leg, I have some gold mine shares to sell you. Anything to smear conservatives: why was he looking at tea party web pages, any more than PETA sites, or Parcheesi fan sites? Because, you see, the tea parties are violent—don’t you remember? They inspired that guy to shoot Gaby Giffords! Where else would you expect to find a madman killer?

It was fantasy, of course, and Ross and ABC duly apologized, but never mind: it worked. Confirmation bias is a sure thing. I was in a Food Court at LAX today, and heard someone at the table next to me eating similar unidentifiable swill say, “Did you hear? One of those tea party guys shot all those people!” I finally got to my room in Sun Valley (it was easier to get to Mongolia than Sun Valley) to check what she was talking about. So you see, Brian? Mission accomplished!

Others are politicizing the Aurora shooting in only slightly less outrageous ways, mostly with the sadly predictable rush of anti-gun advocates to point to the slaughter and say, “See? Guns bad.” Then comes the related cognitive dissonance trick, linking gun rights to automatic weapons to madmen and criminals using such weapons to the tragic deaths resulting from said use, hence Republicans and conservatives are really allied with killers and murderers, which gives us some insight into their true character.

I’m sure Brian Ross approves.

_______________________________________

Facts: Huffington Post

Graphic: Shout Omaha

Comment of the Day: “The Death of Raymond Zack”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Raymond Zack

Buck Best, a Northern Virginia firefighter and supervisor, weighs in with his expert perspective and nuanced insight regarding my post on the Alameda, Cal. incident involving a suicide by drowning. His wife Lianne had another Comment of the Day earlier this week; if this keeps up, I will have to call the feature “Best Comment of the Day.”

“As an 18 year veteran of the Fire Dept. and the last ten years as the Officer of a Technical Rescue team that would be responsible for just such a rescue, let me offer another perspective to this ethical question. The Fire service much like many other organizations in recent history are governed by politics and litigation. The management of the organizations are always looking to the risk analysis of any potential situation based of the money that is available. The risk analysis is not based as much on the physical risk as it is on the financial or political risk. Continue reading →

Flashback: “What Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax Can Teach America”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The Late Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax

[Not many people were checking in on Ethics Alarms when I wrote this post in response to yet another example of bystanders choosing to do nothing when a human being was in peril. Some of the comments to the Alameda post, those making excuses for the 75 faint-hearted or apathetic citizens in that city who would rather gawk at a tragedy than try to stop it,  caused me to recall the essay, which explores related issues.  I wrote it, but I had nearly forgotten about the story; when I re-read it today, I got upset all over again.Here, for the second time, is “What Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax Can Teach America.”]

The one with the premium-grade ethics alarms bled to death on the sidewalk. The people who never had theirs installed at all took pictures. Is this the way it’s going to be? Continue reading →