responsibility

Tax Deal Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

A few brief ethics observations on the current tax deal machinations on Capitol Hill:

  • It was an unconscionable breach of responsibility for Congress to neglect to address this issue months ago. Not only would a timely decision whether to extend all, part or none of the Bush tax cuts have avoided the present uncertainty; it would have aided the recovery, as businesses and individuals would have known what the tax requirements would be, and could invest, spend or hire accordingly. The reason the Democrats waited, even when it was obvious that their House majority was a goner and that President Obama would be negotiating from weakness as a result, was pure, unadulterated cowardice. Congress was willing to withhold needed policy certainty, harming the economy and the public, so they wouldn’t have to take a stand before elections. Continue reading →

Random Encounters with the Human Race: Caring and Helpless

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One of the few pleasures left in business travel these days is the chance to meet interesting people who are very different from those I typically encounter at home. One my last trip, waiting for a connection, I was buying a cup of specialty coffee an airport stand from a friendly man with a lovely African accent. “How much?” I asked.

“All of it,” he said, smiling, as he glanced at the travel funds in my wallet.

“Can’t do that, ” I joshed. “It all belongs to my wife.”

And suddenly this stranger who I was never going to see again was pouring out his life story, choking up with emotion in the process. Continue reading →

Unethical Christmas Gift of the Week: the Remote-Controlled Tarantula!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

"Merry Christmas!"

The picture shows a real tarantula, but trust me—Hammacheer Schlemmer’s remote-controlled version will work just as well for frightening the arachnaphobic senior in in your family into cardiac arrest on Christmas morning…from up to twenty-five feet away!

The delightful toy “scurries back and forth across flat surfaces” just like the real thing, and there is even a special feature that allows the operator to make the eight hairy legs “twitch,” for that extra dose of terrifying realism. It’s a bargain, at just under $30.

Of course, as the National Sick Toy Association always reminds us, “Remote-controlled tarantula’s don’t scare people to death; people with remote-controlled tarantulas scare people to death.” Continue reading →

The NFL’s Looming Choice: “Chickafication” or Bloodsport

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

At a recent conference, a physician panelist discussing NFL player head injuries said that if the average NFL player walked into a doctor’s office for a typical checkup, he’d be rushed immediately to a hospital for treatment.

The fact is slowly dawning on NFL management, the players and the public that pro football, indeed all football, is even more dangerous than everyone thought, and that normal, accepted play may still routinely cripple players in the worst possible place: their brains. The problem, ethical as well as medical, is that no one knows whether the sport can fix the problem and still be what fans regard as NFL pro football. It is a medical problem, because the data increasingly indicates that serious head trauma and long-term disability is frighteningly common. It is an ethical dilemma, because the very aspect of football that many of its fans most relish—the bone-crushing violence—is leaving players unacceptably vulnerable to depression, memory loss, personality disorders, rage, dementia, and suicide. Continue reading →

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 →

Julian Assange: Not a Hero, Not a Terrorist, Not a Criminal, Just an Asshole

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I know. Well, sometimes a vulgar word is the most accurate we have.

Our definition of journalism has yet to catch up with the cyber age, and freedom of speech does not distinguish among blogs, newspapers and dissidents. What ensures responsible use of First Amendment rights is ethics, not law. America allows journalists to act as information laundries, taking material that a private citizen was bound not to reveal by law, contract, or professional duty, and to re-define it to the world as what “the public has a right to know,” defined any way the particular journalist finds appealing.

Despite all the fulminating and condemnations by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich on the Sunday talk shows, the U.S. can’t make Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a terrorist just by calling him one, nor can it fairly declare him a criminal for accepting the product of the unethical and often illegal acts of leakers, and making it public, just like the New York Times has done on many occasions…not under current laws.  Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier who leaked many of the secret documents, is certainly a criminal. So was Daniel Ellsberg, who, to nobody’s surprise, is cheering Assange on and attacking his critics. . Assange, however, is not a criminal. He has not revealed any information that he accepted in trust while  promising not to reveal it. He is no more a criminal than the New York Times, if the New York Times was published in Hell. Continue reading →

Rangel’s Corruption Continues, Whatever He Calls It

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“In all fairness, I was not found guilty of corruption, I did not go to bed with kids, I did not hurt the House speaker, I did not start a revolution against the United States of America, I did not steal any money, I did not take any bribes, and that is abundantly clear.”

—-Rep. Charles Rangel, less than a week following his historic censure by the House of Representatives for repeated violations of House ethics rules

Thus did Charlie Rangel embrace the Clinton Standard after proven unethical conduct, which can be loosely translated as “it’s not what I did that matters, it’s what I didn’t do that should have counted.” In Clinton’s case, the defense was that his lies and obstruction of justice were in the context of what he and his defenders dubbed “personal” misconduct, not the official “high crimes” required by the Constitution, and that his real offense was being a Democrat. Rangel’s adaptation: sure he broke rules, but that was not what the House has called “corrupt” in the past, and thus he can hold his head up high. Continue reading →

Obama’s Quality of Mercy: Strained

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

President Obama finally pardoned somebody who wasn’t a turkey last week, but not before he became slowest Democratic president in U.S. history to use Article II of the Constitution to right a judicial wrong or just exercise his power to demonstrate  the ethical virtue of mercy. His choices for pardons could not have been more tepid, however, prompting a withering blog post by Prof. P.S. Ruckman, who champions the pardon power, and keeps meticulous score.

Ruckman had predicted that Obama would end the pardon drought as soon as December hit, noting that recent presidents used the Christmas holidays as a convenient pardon prop. But he is outraged at the small number of pardons, writing,

“Can President Obama say “no?” Yes, he can! Continue reading →

Irresponsible School, Cowardly Teacher, Betrayed Students: the Palm Beach Classroom Attack Incident

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Donald Charbonneau, a teacher at a Palm Beach, Florida middle school, watched as one of his students, a 13-year-old boy, Adrian Thompson, attacked classmate Joshua Poole, who was sitting at his desk. Thompson hit Poole several times, and threw him to the floor. Rather than intervening is the fight, Charbonneau left the room to get assistance. Poole says he now suffers from headaches and blurred vision from the prolonged attack, which was longer that it would have been had the teacher stopped the fight.

The school district released a statement explaining that the teacher was following a school policy dictating that staff can only intervene after undergoing “special training” on how to properly deal with such incidents.

Got it.

The policy is an irresponsible legal risk-reduction maneuver that places students at risk and turns teachers into spineless, equally irresponsible weenies. Continue reading →

An Ethical Observation and Plea Regarding the “Don’t Ask…” Debate

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Sen. John McCain thinks that there needs to be more study regarding whether gay Americans, including those who have already shown themselves to be exemplary soldiers, should be banned from service in the military once their sexual orientation is known. He, and others, don’t want to “rush the decision.” This is callous, inhumane, and wrong.

The public controversy over this atrocious and inhuman policy from the Clinton years has stained America’s principles based on nothing but bigotry and ignorance for over a decade, and now the endless slog to a cure is proving almost as bad as the disease. Continue reading →