I was just stopped at an intersection. A beautiful young woman in a slightly but attractively over-tight skirt, crossed the street in front of me, prominently displaying her perfectly toned, shaped and maintained derriere, the equal of any in the National Derriere Hall of Fame. In the hand of the her arm facing me, she held a bag with bold lettering announcing “BEST BUNS.” My driver side window was open. I watched her walk away.
I said nothing.
Ethics is hell.
From the You Find Ethical Controversies in the Strangest Places Dept., this post from “About the Occult”:
“There are many people (about 0.5%) who use PSI [psychic abilities, to you non-X Files fans] to do evil. Are there laws concerning that? Using ESP AT ALL should be ILLEGAL!!! It is UNETHICAL!!!”
The ethical analysis is certainly sound, even if the assumptions are flawed.
Randy Cohen surprised me today. “The Ethicist,” in his weekly column in the Times Magazine, responded to a question from a Chinese citizen whose office building had only one working elevator, resulting in long lines of office workers waiting to catch a lift to distant floors. Cohen’s inquirer asked if it was unethical for him to run up the stairs to a higher floor, and secure a place on the elevator before it arrived on his original floor, one below.
Cohen said he was “cutting in line,” and that it was unethical. Randy may well be right, but I’m not immediately convinced. Continue reading
As a well struck foul ball hurtled toward his girlfriend, Bo, nattily attired in a backwards cap, evacuated the area and allowed her to get hit. It is in such instinctual decisions that character, or the lack of it, reveals itself. When it’s crunch time, Bo thinks about #1. There are a lot of Bo’s out there, but if one of them reveals his true colors early in a relationship, there is no excuse for trusting him. Since trying to stop a baseball from hitting his date doesn’t enter his thought process, just imagine what other acts of selfishness, disloyalty and cowardice Bo may be capable of.
Urgent message to Bo’s girlfriend, courtesy of the Amityville Horror house: “GET OUT!!!!”
I try to keep the number of Ethics Heroes and Ethics Dunces in rough balance here, and sometimes I despair of how few of the former and how many of the latter I have to choose from. Perhaps part of the problem is that good conduct is more common than bad conduct, and thus has to be especially flashy before the media notices. Or perhaps I am not giving sufficient credit to small, ethical gestures that in their own way make a difference.
This brings us to Pete Abraham, a writer on the Red Sox beat for the Boston Globe. Pete writes the “Extra Bases” blog, and does something that I have not seen before. At the end of his post every morning, Pete signs off with, “Thanks as always for reading the blog.”
It is a small but genteel exhibition of civility and manners that, for me at least, serves the same purpose every morning as Ben Franklin’s Daily Questions. It sets the ethics alarms for the day and reminds me to not get so focused on work, tasks and problems that I forget to help smooth out the edges for those around me.
I’ve never met Pete Abraham, but I hope I do some day. He is obviously a kind and caring person who understands the importance of civility. He knows how to set his ethics alarms.
And best of all, he’s a Red Sox fan.
Oh—I almost forgot! “Thanks as always for reading the blog.”
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in the case of Rehberg v. Paulk that one who sends an e-mail has no “expectation of privacy” in its content, once it is sent to a third party—-and that third party can even be the internet service provider. Which means, in essence, that e-mails aren’t private any more, if this ruling stands.
Here you have a good example of how courts can re-define formal ethical standards on multiple planes with a few words. This means that one of the most influential Federal Courts has given the green light to any government agency or employer who chooses to read your e-mails. It may well be that lawyers who send documents containing confidential client information have breached their duty to protect confidences. It means that if your room-mate reads confidential messages on your laptop without your permission, the law says its your fault, not his.
This is the point where ethics, manners and the Golden Rule becomes more important than ever. The court case may change the law, and it may be legal to read other people’s e-mails without permission, but it’s still not right.
For an excellent scholarly dissent from the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling by Prof. Orrin Kerr, see his argument on the Volokh Conspiracy.
[Many thanks to Prof. Monroe Freedman whose post at the Legal Ethics Forum alerted me to both the case and Prof. Kerr’s critique.]
Three springs ago on the streets of Pittsburgh, David Hackbart was starting to parallel park when a car pulled up behind him. Don’t you hate that? Hackbart did too, and presented his flip-off finger to the anonymous driver in silent protest. “Don’t flip him off!” came a shouted edict from someone outside his car, and Hackbart, not in the mood for officious intermeddling, gave the anonymous civility referee The Finger as well. Continue reading
“”Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Kanye,” they sang. “Let them pick guitars and drive them old trucks, ’cause cowboys have manners,they don’t interrupt..”
Country Music Award show hosts Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood, in a parody of the song, “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” giving a much-deserved shot to rapper Kanye West for disrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV awards. Swift also was a big winner at the CMA’s, but West was nowhere to be seen.
In today’s Sunday New York Times, the City Room column is devoted to the increasingly common topic of public grooming, specifically flossing one’s teeth in public. Lion Calandra recounts an exchange with a young woman doing her dental hygeine on the subway, who finished by throwing her used floss to the subway car floor.
“Maybe you should do that at home,” Calandra suggested. “Maybe you should mind your own business,” the woman sneered. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 