rationalizations

Unethical Quote of the Week: Lauryn Hill

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“I was put into a system I didn’t know the nature of…. I’m a child of former slaves. I got into an economic paradigm and had that imposed on me. I sold 50 million units…Someone did the math, and it came to around $600 million. And I sit here before you trying to figure out how to pay a tax debt? If that’s not like enough to slavery, I don’t know what is.”

— Singer-songwriter, actress, rapper and hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill, complaining to the judge as she was sentenced to three months in prison and a $60,000 fine for failing to pay taxes on her earnings of approximately $1.8 million between 2005 and 2008.

slave couple

Lauryn Hill’s parents. OK, not really. Metaphorically, perhaps. You better ask Lauryn.

Now let’s see…Hill’s statement is…

  • An abdication of responsibility. Hill has been in the entertainment business, and wonderfully successful at it, since she was 18 and landed a continuing role on the soap opera, “As the World Turns.” Few “know the nature of” the strange world of stardom, agents, performing contracts and the rest that goes with the highest levels of American show business when they enter it, but most manage to learn the basics, and most also manage to pay their taxes. Hill has had plenty of time to learn “the system,” whichever one she was referring to. She is also a native-born natural citizen, and I’m sure the reality of income taxes didn’t escape her notice for all these years. Continue reading →

“The Only Answer”: An Ethics Hero, A Life Saved, And A Troubling Hypothetical

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
In this universe, a hero...and in an alternate one? I wonder...

In this universe, a hero…and in an alternate one? I wonder…

University of New Hampshire senior Cameron Lyle, a Division I college track and field competitor who excels in the shot put and hammer throw, has chosen to end his collegiate athletic career to save a stranger’s life.

He will donate his bone marrow today to a 28-year-old man suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Doctors told Lyle the man who will receive his marrow will live only six months without a transplant, and that there was a only one in five million chance for another non-family match. Yet the odds came up in his favor, thanks to  Lyle having his mouth swabbed to join a bone marrow registry two years ago. He was a perfect match.

Lyle says he never hesitated in his choice, once he was informed. “It’s just a sport,” he said. “Just because it’s Division I college level doesn’t make it any more important. Life is a lot more important than that, so it was pretty easy…It was kind of a no-brainer for a decent human. I couldn’t imagine just waiting. He could have been waiting for years for a match. I’d hope that someone would donate to me if I needed it.”

“He made his decision. He gave up his college season to do this. He’s a gentle giant,” Lyle’s mother said of her 6-foot-2-inch, 255-pound son. “He’ll do anything for anybody.”  Lyle’s coach Jim Boulanger, was also completely supportive, and, according to Lyle, came up with an instant Ethics Quote of the Month when the shot-putter told him of his plans.

“Here’s the deal,” Boulanger told Lyle. “You go to the conference and take 12 throws or you could give a man three or four more years of life. I don’t think there’s a big question here. This is not a moral dilemma. There’s only one answer.” Continue reading →

Different Symptoms, Same Ethics Illness: The Mike Rice-Rutgers Scandal And The Sandusky-Paterno-Penn State Tragedy

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
Missed out on your statue by thaaaat much, Mike.

Missed out on your statue by thaaaat much, Mike.

The question isn’t, as many news reports would have us believe, whether the Mike Rice affair mandates an administrative house-cleaning at Rutgers. Of course it does. The question is why, after the far uglier Penn State scandal, anyone possessing the gray matter of the Scarecrow from “The Wizard of Oz” thinks otherwise.

In case you are really smart and pay no attention to the dire ethics swamp known as college sports: Mike Rice was a very successful Rutgers basketball coach until ESPN got a hold of a video compilation of him abusing his players on multiple occasions. Though the Rutgers athletic director had seen the damning evidence in November, he let Wise off with a fine and suspension; then the recent national exposure forced him to fire Wise. This prompted Rutger’s president, Robert Barchi, to fire the athletic director (Tim Parnetti) for not taking appropriate action once he had discovered his coach was hitting, assaulting, and taunting players. And Barchi? Even though he knew, or should have known, that Rice’s methods were unacceptable, he never looked at the video (or so he says) that was available to him six months ago, until April. The New York Times reports that many Rutgers officials as well as the university’s outside attorneys knew that Rice was abusing his players,and that he had been doing so for years.

The net lessons learned from the Penn State disaster are zero. As the Times article says, “interviews and documents reveal a culture in which the university was far more concerned with protecting itself from legal action than with protecting its students from an abusive coach.” Yes, a coach attacking student is far short of child-molesting, but that’s  irrelevant: the corrupt cultural syndrome is exactly the same.  Rutgers, top to bottom, placed winning basketball games above sportsmanship, decency, fairness, and protecting their own students. The difference between Rutgers and Penn State is Joe Paterno and moral luck.

Let us be clear: if a teacher physically assaults a student, anywhere, at any level, ever, that teacher has to be fired, and probably prosecuted. A coach is no different. This isn’t open to debate. Yet I listened, as my gorge rose, to the glib and simple-minded conservative radio host Sean Hannity jabber with ex-Notre Dame football coach and facile “inspirational speaker” Lou Holtz about how Parnetti got a raw deal. Why? Parnetti built a great program! So he lets his coaches assault his players—anyone can make a mistake! Isn’t this hindsight? Second-guessing?

“Players are spoiled today; they just aren’t ready to be criticized,” said Holtz, who speaks in platitudes and nostrums that cover a Neanderthal sensibility (so you know he’s much in demand for corporate speaking gigs.)  These men are both ethics-challenged fools, but they have plenty of company.  Rutgers’ report on Rice’s abusive treatment assembled excuses and rationalizations by the authors and others. Rutgers athletic assistants said the video clips showing Rice kicking his players and throwing objects at them “were taken out of context.” What?? In what “context” is it appropriate for a college coach to do this? None! Many of Rice’s players said he prepared them well for tough competition. The report noted that under Rice’s abusive, tortious methods, the players’ grades rose to a B average. Oh! Well, that must mean assault and battery is okay, then, because it works!  This is the ethical standard Rutgers is teaching its students.

Parents everywhere: grab your student and run.

Elsewhere, Rutgers’s internal report called Rice “passionate, energetic and demanding” and concluded that his intense tactics were only aimed at improving his team and “were in no way motivated by animus.” Ah! So beating kids is okay, as long as it’s well-intentioned! This culture is sick, sick, sick and as with Penn State, it is part of a large sick culture that pervades university sports. Here’s one official from another sick school defending Parnetti:

“I think it was unfair for them to fire Pernetti. There were probably a lot of things that went into the decision not to fire Mike Rice in December. And as gruesome as that tape was, it was also a first offense for Mike Rice. I think Pernetti is taking the heat for everything and sometimes in leadership roles you take the glory probably more than you deserve and you take the heat more than you deserve. I think right now Pernetti is taking the heat more than he deserves.”

A first offense???? The video was compiled from dozens of incidents, and Rice’s penchant for violence and abuse were already known! Yeah, there were  “a lot of things that went into the decision not to fire”  Rice, none of which add up to a single good reason not to get rid of any coach who beats up kids in his charge.

The New York Post interviewed a college official who believes its all Facebook and Twitter’s fault:

“The whole situation, top to bottom is a shame. But my opinion is that there is no manual or rule book for how to handle these types of situations. To say (Pernetti) should have handled this situation a certain way, well unless you’ve been in his shoes, it’s hard to comment on it. Obviously there was a reason why Pernetti kept Mike Rice around. What was that reason? We don’t know. But one thing I saw was that his kids, his players backed him. So In my opinion do you know what got Mike Rice and Tim Pernetti fired? Social media got them fired. People make comments and form opinions without knowing all the facts sometimes. That’s the world we live in now.”

Yes, there is a rule book, and it’s called ethics, not that this guy, or whatever college he works for, would recognize it. “Unless you’ve been in his shoes”? The translation of this fatuous and offensive rationalization is simple: “Hey, there’s a lot of pressure on this guy to win, and he’s not going to let a couple of bruised sophomores jeopardize the won-lost record and alumni support. I bet you’d let the kids get beat up too.”

I wonder what schools those two anonymous officials work for? That’s the frightening part;  they could be working at almost any big time sports school, because that’s the predominant culture there.

__________________________

Sources: New York Times, Sean Hannity, New York Post

Comment of the Day: “From ‘Psychology Today’: How To Be A Better Liar—And A Negligent Endorsement Of Deceit”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
Every adult a lawyer: the politician's worst nightmare!

Every adult a lawyer: the politician’s worst nightmare!

The second Comment of the Day comes from Australia, as zoebrain flags an excellent example of deceit at work, in her comment to my post about the dangerous tendency to regard deceits as less unethical than straightforward lying, and yes, that’s quite an oxymoron.

One of the many points of contention between me and the lawscam crowd is that many of the aggrieved out-of-work and under-employed lawyers only obtained their law degrees as a means to achieve what they believed were guaranteed riches, and thus feel cheated that the current economic mess has shown that to be a false assumption. I, in contrast, assert that a law degree pays for itself over a lifetime regardless of whether or not it leads to well-compensated employment as a lawyer, and one of the reasons is that legal training inoculates you against the deceit of others. If nothing else, law students learn to pay attention to what words really mean, making it much harder for masters of deceit to fool them with carefully chosen weasel words. A nation of citizens trained in the law would not so easily fall victim to the deceit of politicians, those who peddle bad loans and investments, weight loss scams (“results not typical!”) and the predations of other con-artists….including, sadly, other lawyers.

Here is zoebrain’s Comment of the Day on the weekend’s post, “From ‘Psychology Today’: How To Be A Better Liar—And A Negligent Endorsement Of Deceit”:

“Here’s an example for you: testimony in an Australian Senate inquiry on same-sex marriage”:

Senator Pratt: But what if someone is of indeterminate gender? I am unclear whether they should have the right, according to the way you would argue it, to be part of such a union.

Mr Meney : People suffering from Turner syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome and things of that ilk are typically infertile or regarded as being mentally handicapped in some way. Many things about marriage require people to have the capacity to consent to what marriage is all about, so a significant mental incapacity might be something that might mitigate against a person being able to consent to a contract of marriage. But that is true of any marriage.

Every word true, as befits testimony from the Director of the Life, Marriage & Family Centre, Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.

“Although they are not mentally retarded, most XXY males have some degree of language impairment. As children, they often learn to speak much later than do other children and may have difficulty learning to read and write.”

——Understanding Klinefelter Syndrome — National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

“Mental retardation is not a feature of Turner syndrome, despite such claims in older medical textbooks. Thorough psychological studies show that these women are normal intellectually, but often have a characteristic pattern of intellectual functioning. While their verbal 10 usually is average or above, their non-verbal IQ may be considerably lower because of problems visualizing objects in relation to each other. This difficulty may show up in poor performance in math, geometry, and tasks requiring manual dexterity or sense of direction.”

—–Turner Syndrome — Human Growth Foundation.

He didn’t lie: it’s true that “People suffering from Turner syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome and things of that ilk are typically … regarded as being mentally handicapped in some way.” They’re not, of course, as he well knows, but that’s not what he said, is it?

That was his defense when the Organisation Intersex International took him to task for this. He didn’t actually lie. As a good Catholic, he wouldn’t do that – it would be a sin.

______________________________

Graphic: Financial Post

From “Psychology Today”: How To Be A Better Liar—And A Negligent Endorsement Of Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Tommy Flanagan

“Psychology Today” has tips for Tommy Flanagan and the other aspiring liars out there.

Jeff Wise provides what he calls “The Ten Secrets of Effective Liars” on the “Psychology Today” website. I have some problems with his list, among them that despite his protestations to the contrary, it sure reads more like a handy-dandy self-help list for the George Costanzas, Tommy Flanagans and Bill Clintons among us.

My main objection, though, is to his #3 on the list, #3 Tell the truth, misleadingly. He correctly points out that a statement that is technically true will often be the most effective way of misleading others, but writes, “Technically, it’s only a prevarication – about half a sin.” I don’t know or care about how it ranks on the sin scale, but he is describing deceit, and deceit is a lie, period, no question about it. Wise is passing on a misconception himself, one that allows the most effective and destructive liars among us deceive routinely and then rationalize that they “really weren’t lying.” Spreading this common, popular and useful—to liars—myth does more damage than any of the supposedly beneficial results of his list could make up for.

Among the sinister results of promoting deceit as only half a lie, and therefore twice as forgivable as a “real” lie, is that it gives deceit masters (like Clinton) an effective excuse when they are caught. “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry! When I said ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman,” you thought I meant that I didn’t use my superior power and influence to persuade my young female intern to give me a hummer! I should have been clearer!” Right. Thus the liar switches the real blame onto the listener who was originally deceived. If that listener likes the liar and was inclined to trust him (or her), the rationalization that it was all a big misunderstanding will often be enough to allow the party deceived to keep trusting the liar…and be set up to be deceived again. Continue reading →

The Corrupting Culture of MSNBC: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Get out while your ethics alarms still work, Rachel. They're already breaking down.

Get out while your ethics alarms still work, Rachel. They’re already breaking down.

I’m not interested in criticizing MSNBC for bias. It intends to be biased; serving as the far Left alternative to Fox News is its niche, and was a conscious business choice. What is interesting is observing MSNBC as a case study in how the pressures of a corrupt institutional culture eventually destroy the integrity and ethical judgment of essentially ethical people. From a point where it was merely left-leaning, MSNBC has gradually jettisoned any shred of objectivity, and most remnants of fairness. Much of the transformation was wrought by Keith Olbermann during his fiery tenure, but others have picked up the baton.

The most obviously corrupted have been Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, and Rachel Maddow, all previously well-credentialed and with distinguished service as legitimate and respectable journalists. Under the spell of MSNBC, Matthews has devolved into an angry, race-baiting, smearing hack; the days of grilling Republicans and Democrats with equal fervor on “Hardball” have yielded to shrill, one-sided advocacy. Mitchell’s reporting has gradually abandoned any pretense of neutrality. The greatest tragedy here, however, is Maddow. She is young, smart, articulate and skilled. She doesn’t hide her progressive orientation, but once she appeared to be a rising star, a probing journalist with a point of view, but one committed to being professional and fair within that point of view.

Maddow has joined the MSNBC gun control push, but she has so much company there among the entire span of U.S. journalists that I can hardly blame her that on MSNBC. Misleading video editing has become a staple of her employers, however, as in the disgraceful Neil Heslin “heckling” story, and now Maddow appears to have embraced the technique when it suits her narrative. Last week, to add to the “gun control opponents are heartless and callous monsters” theme that is currently popular in the media, Maddow showed a video of Sen. John McCain at an Arizona town meeting, responding to a woman whose son was killed in the Aurora shooting asserting that assault weapons were responsible and ought to be banned. Maddow introduced the clip by saying,“this happened.” What was then seen and heard was McCain tersely answering the woman by saying she needed “straight talk,” and that the legislation she favored would never pass Congress. [See Maddow’s video here] Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: “Anonymous”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“In coordination with federal authorities, the LAPD is now conducting a massive manhunt for The Dark Knight Christopher Dorner, so that they may effectively silence him forever without due process. And now since the authorization of drones have been approved for the first time ever to pursue and execute an American citizen on United States Soil, the US Government will stage this event to set a new precedent from which it can assassinate American citizens for little to no reason at all. But do not misinterpret us for we do not condone the vicious acts that Dorner has allegedly partaken in. Instead we sympathize and resonate with his struggle. Dorner was not born a killer he was a law abiding citizen that was tainted by the corrupt and inhumane practices of the Los Angeles Police Department who serve only themselves. We however do not accept this fate, and call upon our brothers to raise arms against the LAPD, for justice and for the lulz (?) we will rise to disrupt, dismantle and dissect all aspects of the manhunt whilst revealing the LAPD’s unwarranted hypocrisy.”

—-the criminal computer hacking vigilante group Anonymous, in a statement of support for renegade cop-killer Chris Dorner, who, with any luck, will have been captured or shot dead by the time this is posted.

Dorner and Anonymous, a match made in Hell.

Dorner and Anonymous, a match made in Hell.

In case it somehow eludes you, this is only the Unethical Quote of the Week because Ethics Alarms has no “Incoherent Quote of the Week,” “Idiotic Quote of the Week,” or “Pompously Embarrassing Quote of the Week.”

Anonymous stands as a illuminating example of what happens when power, in the form of technological expertise, falls into the hands of child-like individuals completely devoid of ethics training, understanding, or analytical tools. Adept with a keyboard, their concepts of right and wrong are at the rudimentary level of higher primates in a jungle environment. Hence we get nonsense like …

  • “…the LAPD is now conducting a massive manhunt for The Dark Knight Christopher Dorner, so that they may effectively silence him forever without due process.” No, the LAPD is conducting a manhunt because Dorner is a mad-dog killer of innocent citizens, and has to be stopped before he kills again. This organization’s reasoning stops at cognitive dissonance: hate what it hates, and you are thereby virtuous and good, even if you’re a vicious killer.
  • Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Chelsea Welch (The Applebee’s Train Wreck, Part Deux)

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments
Chelsea Welch 2

Chelsea Welch: Hire at your own risk. You have been warned. By Chelsea, in fact…

I really, really didn’t want to revisit the tale about the cheap pastor, the self-righteous waitress, and Applebee’s. The comments on the original post here were illuminating, not in a good way, and were profoundly discouraging. The fact that so many people are incapable of getting past their biases against any business that has to enforce basic common sense policies on their employees is depressing; the fact that they embrace wholeheartedly the idea that a minor instance of poor judgment and conduct warrants permanent vilification on the web is alarming; and the widespread rejection of the principles of the Golden Rule is scary.

Unfortunately, Chelsea Welch, the fired waitress whom I once had some sympathy for despite the fact that her firing was 100% justified, has apparently seen fit to publish a letter, although there is no way to tell that it is really hers—the way this whole scenario has gone, it probably was written by the pastor who started the whole mess to make Chelsea look bad. If that was the objective, the pastor was wrong again, for a ridiculous percentage of the commenters think the letter is perfectly reasonable, meaning, of course, that they have the ethical sensibilities of 5th graders. The cruel reader who brought this to my attention actually read the comments on one site and tallied them: 1538 supporting Chelsea, only 20 that didn’t.

<Sigh!>

Nonetheless, Chelsea Welch reveals herself as an A-1 prime ethics dunce, the kind of person who will blunder along through life behaving unethically, causing little and large harms and discomforts to those she encounters, always thinking she is in the right, because she doesn’t have the foggiest notion of how one goes about determining what  right is.

Her letter is a classic of rationalization. Some highlights (the entire letter is at the end)… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Melowese Richardson, Ohio Poll Worker

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments
Melowese Richardson

Melowese Richardson

Melowese Richardson, Ohio poll worker, doesn’t understand why she’s being investigated for voter fraud. Oh, she voted at least twice, no doubt about that, and she doesn’t deny it: According to Hamilton County records, Richardson’s absentee ballot was filed on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. Later, she told an official she also voted at a precinct polling place because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time. Double voting is something of a family tradition, for Richardson’s granddaughter, India Richardson, also cast two ballots in November, her first time as a voter. Melowese sees nothing wrong with any of this, or this either: absentee ballots for Montez Richardson, Joseph Jones and Markus Barron all came from Richardson’s Whetsel Avenue address, were received by the board the same time as Richardson’s, and the handwriting on all four of them was similar. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce Meets Ethics Hero”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

John T., a reader whose final comment on Ethics Alarms is also the Comment of the Day, provided me with another example of the same phenomenon that manifested itself in some of the more extreme comments to the recent Applebee’s post. For many people who are incapable of coherent ethical analysis, the nature of conduct is assessed not according to the ethical or unethical nature of the conduct itself, but according to whether the author of the conduct is liked, admired, identified or sympathized with, especially in comparison to the individual, authority or entity holding that actor accountable for the unethical conduct involved. Thus supporters of the fired Applebee’s waitress who violated the terms of her employment, embarrassed her employer’s customer online, and used proprietary information to do it used all manner of irrelevant or  factually false arguments to make the case that she didn’t warrant punishment, and that it was Applebee’s that was acting wronfully—waitresses are underpaid; Applebee’s doesn’t treat employees well, the pastor was “stealing” by not leaving a tip, the pastor’s obnoxious message “abused” the server (even though the server wasn’t the one who publicized the pastor’s comments), and so on. Because commenters sympathized and identified with the waitress, they crashed through logical and ethical roadblocks to find her innocent of wrongdoing, and mistreated by a big, bad, heartless corporation. In other words, emotion and bias, not objectivity and ethical analysis, took over.

John T. engages in the same fallacious process to defend the 18-year old Xanax abuser who found herself insulting the wrong judge in Miami. His previous jaw-dropping comment described the woman’s horrible demeanor and attitude as “genuinely cooperative and friendly” (she was disrespectful, mocking and seemingly stoned), and opined that unauthorized possession of a controlled substance was a “bullshit charge.” I responded, half in jest,  that with that attitude, it was remarkable that he wasn’t in jail. I’ll be back at the end, but here is John T’s masterful rant, the Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Dunce Meets Ethics Hero: Continue reading →