None of them shipped their child to Russia, this week’s bad parents betrayed an infant, a 13-year old boy, and an adult daughter spiraling toward disaster… Continue reading
responsibility
Ethics Quote of the Week
“For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from ‘Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was’ and ‘Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane’ or, in a bizarre version of ‘The devil made me do it,’ “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
—Henry Louis Gates, in his New York Times op-ed, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” confronting the complicity of Africans in American slavery by selling their own people to slave-traders.
Harvard professor Gates, a respected authority on race in America despite his problems with the Cambridge police, has made an admirable effort to take the issue of reparations out of the context of racial guilt-mongering and forcing advocates to deal with facts rather than emotion. The fair starting point for discussions, Gates points out, is that the ancestors of white and black Americans profited from slavery.
Does this rule out any fair and coherent allocation of slave reparations, which were conceptually problematical already? Probably, and if so, we should move on to more productive debates. Gates is brave and responsible for shining light on a genuinely “inconvenient truth.”
Comedy Central’s Unethical Self-Censorship
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
—–Evelyn Beatrice Hall (describing Voltaire’s attitude toward freedom of speech.)
“We will defend to the death your right to say anything to get a laugh, unless you are threatened by religious zealots and terrorists, in which case we will fold like Bart Stupak in an origami competition.”
—–Ethics Alarms (describing Comedy Central’s attitude toward freedom of speech.)
Ethics, Punishment and the Dead Child in the Back Seat
Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten received a Pultitzer Prize for his feature, “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?” Focusing on the grief of parents who caused the deaths of their own children by negligently leaving them locked in over-heated cars, Weingarten, to his credit, doesn’t advocate a position in his article, although it would be impossible to read it without feeling compassion and empathy for his subjects, both those who have been prosecuted and those who have not.
The article squarely raises a classic ethical conflict, as well as the question of the role of punishment in society. As always with ethical standards, the issue ultimately encompasses how we decide what is in the best interests of society. Weingarten points out that there is no consensus on whether parents who inadvertently kill their children in this way should be brought to court: some prosecutors bring charges, others do not. Which is right?
I don’t like my answer much, but I think it is inescapable, once the emotion is left behind. Continue reading
Rush vs. Clinton: Who’s Right?
Former President Bill Clinton has sounded an alarm he has sounded before, warning that the intensity of the rhetoric on conservative radio emboldens fringe radicals to violence. As he did in 1995, when he was in the White House, Clinton lays the Oklahoma City bombing at the feet of big-government critics, a strategy that then managed to halt the momentum of Republicans in their assault on Democratic policies. Also as in 1995, King of the Radio Right Rush Limbaugh has countered that Clinton is using revisionist history to avoid his administration’s own responsibility for Timothy McVeigh’s attack, which wasn’t timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Branch Davidian massacre by accident. Limbaugh’s argument that the conduct of Federal agents in Waco (as well as Ruby Ridge) had a lot more to do with McVeigh’s anger than anything he heard on talk radio is persuasive on the merits.
Nevertheless, Clinton’s general point that talk radio is playing with fire is a legitimate one. Continue reading
Ethics, Unfairness and the Palin Problem
Is it worse for an elected official, leader, public figure or opinion-maker to be dishonest, irresponsible, or stupid? Fortunately, any of three should disqualify an individual for power or influence, so answering the question is not essential. This too is fortunate, because it is sometimes impossible to determine which disqualifying characteristic is on display.
Take, for example, Sarah Palin’s recent comments, made to a religious gathering in Kentucky, that…
“Lest anyone try to convince you that God should be separated from the state, our Founding Fathers, they were believers.” Continue reading
The Ethics of Those “Thousand Words”
The site BravoBox has a provocative post on an ever-present ethical issue on print journalism that has been with us for decades and seems to be intensifying: manipulative photo-journalism. Ethics watch-dogs come down hard on images that are photoshopped or deceptively cropped, but a publication’s choice of photo can be equally unfair when the picture hasn’t been altered at all.
A photo doesn’t have to be manipulated to be manipulative. If a picture is indeed “worth a thousand words”—and many are— responsible journalists and editor have a duty to choose those words with as much attention to even-handedness and fairness as the words that appear in type.
Leonard Sedden, Dying for an Ethics Hero—Or a Caring Human Being
In Philadelphia, a Metro Bus driver called her supervisors…
Driver: I have a passenger that’s not responding to me…It looks as though he had peed on himself and he had drooled a lot. I can’t get any actual response.
Control: Just come on down the street, the supervisor will pick you up on the line and give you some assistance.
Driver: OK, so just leave him on the bus and pickup passengers when I leave on 4:18?
Control: That’s correct. I don’t want to delay service. The supervisor will assist you on the line so we don’t delay service for the passengers.
A bit later, the Driver called in again… Continue reading
Obama’s Coal Mine Tragedy Verdict=Abuse of Power
There are two disturbing implications of President Obama’s premature condemnation of Massey Energy for the recent tragedy at its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where an explosion killed 29 miners on April 5. The first is that the President appears to have a flat learning curve, as this repeats his error in the Professor Gates fiasco in Cambridge, Mass, in which Obama condemned the conduct of a Cambridge police officer without getting all the facts. The second is that for a former law professor, Obama has a rather loose grasp on the concept of Due Process. Continue reading
The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit
It has been with us for centuries, as long as man has been fermenting vegetable matter to produce alcohol, and it is a plague on the human race. Virtually every one of us has friends, relatives or close associates with the disease, or battle the addiction ourselves; although accurate figures don’t exist, estimates of the prevalence of alcohol addiction in the U.S. range between 5 and 12%. Whatever the real figure is, it is a lot, and the disease causes a wide range of problems. For example, close to 50% of all automobile fatalities involve alcohol. Yet the public remains shockingly ignorant about alcoholism, to the detriment and convenience of alcoholics, and the devastation of their families
The ignorance is also profitable to some corporations that are not even officially in the beverage business. The ethics question is, do those corporations knowingly and intentionally encourage and facilitate that ignorance? If so, they have a lot to answer for, and so do government consumer agencies and the media. This ignorance kills.
