responsibility

The Teacher’s Pilgrimage

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

KHAN!!!!!

In August 2008, nine months after starting her job as a middle school math teacher in Berkeley, Ill., Safoorah Khan asked her school to give her three weeks off in December for a pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. Though a Muslim is supposed to make the pilgrimage, called a hajj, once in a lifetime and Khan was under 30, she insisted that this was the time for her to go, and believed that the school’s refusal—it argued that having to replace her for that length of time in the middle of the school year was unfair to the students and a burden on the school’s budget—was discriminatory. She quit, made her pilgrimage, and thus infused with the wisdom of Allah is suing the pants off of her former employers. Her lawsuit alleges that by refusing to make a “reasonable accommodation” to her request, it was discriminating against her on the basis of her religion.

Meanwhile, Eric Holder’s Justice Department is joining the case on her side. Continue reading →

What Your Boss Shouldn’t Ask You To Do

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

"And I won't dress like that, either!"

Reading all the comments from readers who think sick children and their mothers have the right to demand our time and attention, no matter what our own needs and responsibilities may be, made me think again about a persistent issue in the workplace. What constitutes a reasonable and fair request from an employer to his employees, other than to do their jobs diligently, honestly and well?

I have encountered this issue several times in my career, and it impeded that career, such as it is, more than once. For example, I do not believe that an employer can tell you, or even ask you, to participate in a charity of the employer’s choosing. He, she or it cannot demand that you spend your weekends painting the houses of the poor, either. Nor is it ethical for an employer to make you play softball or climb mountains under the bizarre conviction that these activities improve office performance. Continue reading →

Your Tax Dollars At Work: Last Night’s Quality Programming on PBS

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Masterpiece Theater presents....

I hate to belabor this, but I’m going to anyway: those who argue that PBS must receive taxpayer funding because it fills a void in quality programming that will not appear anywhere else are either lying, because they know this isn’t true, or never watch PBS, which means they are also lying by asserting something they have no knowledge of.

Last night, my local PBS station featured a two-hour program (it was a repeat of a 2004 PBS special) featuring commercial TV trash quiz show host Wink Martindale giving fake questions to a panel of Rip Taylor (see photo), the bread-ball and confetti hurling prop comedian from the Sixties and Seventies, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Dr. Phil’s forerunner who was a favorite guest of the late Merv Griffin, and Brett Somers, a Phyllis Diller-light comedienne best known for being Jack Klugman’s wife and as a regular panelist on the Seventies version of “The Match Game.” Continue reading →

One More Reason To Defund NPR, or “Boy, Did I Ever Go Into The Wrong Profession!”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The primary reason to end funding for NPR and PBS is that the government shouldn’t be funding competitors of private broadcasting organizations.

The second reason is that anything public broadcasting does that is sufficiently popular and valuable  (“Sesame Street,” “The Prairie Home Companion,” “Car Talk,’ et al.) will be picked up by commercial stations, and those programs that are not should not be underwritten by taxpayer dollars.

The third: NPR’s audience is narrow and affluent, and doesn’t require a public subsidy, particularly when cutting down the budget deficit is a national priority.

Finally, NPR can’t be trusted with public funds. It claims to be objective, but isn’t; it is mismanaged, and isn’t appropriately frugal with taxpayer funds.

This comes under the final category. The salaries of the top NPR talent do not reflect restraint in expending precious resources.  Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: NFL Owners

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The less THIS happens, the better.

I was wrong about the N.F.L.

On Tuesday, the N.F.L. owners voted to move kickoffs back to the 35-yard line, where it was until 1994. The new rule will make the game less exciting but more safe. I didn’t think they’d do it.

The league has a problem—I mean, other than the impasse in labor negotiations that threatens to disrupt the coming season and lose owners and athletes millions. Its game is more popular than ever, but little by little, the evidence is mounting that it is also lethal. Playing pro football injures the brains of a higher percentage of the athletes than anyone suspected, and far worse than suspected. Players are quite literally sacrificing their lives, or at least two or three decades of them, for the Sunday entertainment of America. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: New York Times Op-Ed Writer David Brooks

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“Besides, the legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.”

—-David Brooks, writing in the Times about the messy United Nations coalition now intervening in the Libyan civil war.

This is blatant consequentialism, and Brooks is incredibly mistaken to write it. Would Lincoln’s war have been “illegitimate” if it had resulted in a defeated North and two nations, one still clinging to slavery? W.W.II “achieved” virtual slavery for million of Europeans whose freedom was conceded to the Soviet Union, the frying of two Japanese cities full of civilians, the opportunity for Mao to launch the worst genocide in human history, and 40 years with a very real risk of a nuclear war that might have exterminated humanity. Was that war legitimate?

The legitimacy of a war is measured by whether its cause is just, and its objectives are both vital and beyond accomplishing by any other means. What any war ultimately achieves is determined by events and factors impossible to know when the war is commenced, as well as pure, dumb luck..

Rating Judge Kozinski’s Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The Ninth Circuit declined the opportunity to reconsider its controversial (and wrong) decision earlier this year that declared the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional.  That means that according to the Ninth Circuit, pretending to have won a Purple Heart or a Silver Star is protected speech, and Congress’s law making it a felony to wear such a medal when you haven’t done anything to deserve it is an infringement of free speech. I discussed this issue here.

This post, however, is about some interesting dicta in this week’s decision, courtesy of the Ninth Circuit’s most colorful jurist, Judge Alex Kozinski. The Judge has flip-flopped on this question now twice—he was against the Act, then for it, then against it again.  But this time around, he graced us with some provocative thoughts about why lying isn’t always wrong.  He wrote: Continue reading →

How I Nearly Caused The World To Explode, and Other Travel Musings

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Lots of time to fume and muse about the ethical implications of a frustrating day and an aggravating week while taking an interminable plane trip to Houston: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Fort Wayne Mayor Tom Henry

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Mayor Trivial T. Spineless

He was, without question, the best mayor Fort Wayne, Indiana has ever had. When he first took office, he consolidated city departments launched construction of Fort Wayne’s massive underground sewage system and built the city sewage treatment plant, which is used to this day, seventy years later. When W.W. II came, he held war materials drives, upgraded city equipment and services, and broke ground for was is now Fort Wayne International Airport. and lowered city tax rates. In his last term, he opened up a major area of the town for development by elevating the railroad tracks. And he kept taxes low.

For 21 years beginning in 1934, this dedicated public servant was only not mayor for three years: he died at his post in 1954. And the people of Ft. Wayne haven’t forgotten him. This year, when city officials asked its citizens to vote on whose name the new government center should bear, the response was overwhelming. Ten times more people again voted for the former mayor they had always voted for while he was alive than for anyone or anything else (the runner-up choice was “Thunderdome”).

The current mayor, however, has decided not follow the results of the poll. He thinks the name would be inappropriate. You see, the famous leader that the people of Fort Wayne want to honor was named Harry Baals.

The current mayor’s name?  Trivial T. Spineless. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day:”Yes Julea,You Have A Right To Your Beliefs; You Just Don’t Have A Right…”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

An Ethics Alarms heartfelt thank you and “I owe you one!” to Ethics Sage, for cutting to the other core ethical point about what was wrong with Julea Ward’s refusal to counsel a gay student, and why she should have been dismissed from the university course as a consequence. It wasn’t just failure of responsibility, which my post was fixated on, but also failure of caring, compassion, and our shared duty as human beings to help each other even if our religion encourages us to regard those human beings as immoral.

Ethics Sage shows his handle ain’t just horn-blowin’ with this Comment of the Day, on the post “Yes Julea,You Have A Right To Your Beliefs; You Just Don’t Have A Right…”

“Julea Ward’s refusal to counsel a gay student is despicable on many levels. What if the student’s life had been threatened and he went to counseling to get some advice? How can anyone not act to help a person in that kind of situation or others we can think of that may or may not have anything to do with being gay? By refusing to counsel the gay student, Ward failed miserably not only to meet the requirements of the course but to act as a human being with compassion for another.”