Slate

“Ghosting” Is Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
I don't care if you are dead, Marley; when you leave my party, say good-bye.

I don’t care if you are dead, Marley; when you leave my party, say good-bye.

Slate contributor Seth Stevenson has an interesting justification for being rude: good manners are too much trouble.

This is the way the world ends, as T.S. Elliot would say.

Stevenson argues that instead of saying goodbye and thank-you to one’s host at a party, the best way to exit is “the Irish good-bye,” or in its non-ethnic stereotype form (Irish guests are presumed too drunk to say good-bye, you see), “ghosting.” “Yes, I know,” he writes. “You’re going to tell me it’s rude to leave without saying goodbye. This moral judgment is implicit in the culturally derogatory nicknames ghosting has been burdened with over the centuries.” That sentence is signature significance for me: Stevenson is an unethical jerk. I get comments and e-mails all the time accusing Ethics Alarms of “moralizing” or being “sanctimonious” when I write that obviously unethical conduct is obviously unethical. That’s because unethical people who do unethical things feel much better about themselves if nobody calls them on it, so they can maintain, as one recent commenter did here who was, I’m proud to say, chased away by the rest of you (and me) with torches and pitchforks, that ethics is “100% subjective”—Translation: “If I want to do it, it’s ethical.”

That’s essentially Stevenson’s reasoning, too.  “Is it really so bad to bounce without fanfare?,” he asks. Continue reading →

Keeping Terrible Secrets

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

shhhhSomeday I should have an ethics quiz asking which advice columnist is more unethical, Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist,” or Emily Yoffe, Slate’s “Dear Prudence.” That horrible exercise is for another day, however. Right now, I am only considering Emily’s latest botch, in which she urged a mother with a guilty conscience to take her terrible secret to her grave.

The secret in question is that the woman asking Emily’s counsel conspired to get pregnant via her gullible, not-ready-to commit boyfriend, who thought she was using birth control. Now it’s 13 years later. She and the double-crossed father are  happily married to other people, in different states, though he “is involved” in his daughter’s life, whom he accepted as his own. Mom never told him what she had done, and he believes that his daughter was an accident, leading him to stay with the family for the child’s first three years.  “Prudence’s” questioner concludes,

“…I had decided that I would go to my grave never telling anyone what I had done. Recently, a friend became pregnant after a one-night stand. Everyone assumes that was an accident, but she confided in me that she had been seeking out sex with the purpose of getting pregnant. I was so relieved to meet someone else who planned an “accidental” pregnancy that it made me wonder if I should open up about my secret. But I’m afraid if I told Ben it might change the way he interacted with Holly. My questions are: Am I some kind of monster for getting pregnant on the sly? And should I come clean, and if so, who should know?”

What? The reply to this should take about 20 seconds of thought to answer:

  • You’re relieved that one of your friends is a lying, betraying fraud? Don’t turn your back on her; I’m warning you.
  • Of course you should tell “Ben,” since he’s the one whose life was turned upside down by your selfish perfidy and deception.
  • “It might change the way he interacted with Holly,” eh? You mean “he might not send quite so much money to you to take care of Holly,” don’t you? Too bad. This is your doing, your lie, and your fault. “I don’t like the potential consequences of telling the truth” is not a justification to keep lying.
  • Yes, indeed you are some kind of monster. What you did was despicable, cowardly, cruel and wrong. Ben might be a prince about it (“Ah, that’s all water under the bridge now! The important thing is that we have our beautiful little girl, and nothing else matters!”), or he might call his lawyer. That’s his choice, and he has an absolute right to have the facts to make it his choice.

Emily, however, reasons otherwise. Don’t tell him, she counsels…

  • “Your act doesn’t make you a monster…” Yes, it really does. Didn’t we establish this in “An Officer and a Gentleman”?
  • “…nor do I think there’s any benefit to enlightening everyone now.”  That’s Ben’s call. The Golden Rule says that he’d want to know that he was tricked, and has been living a lie for over a decade. I sure would. I like to know just how trustworthy the people I associate with really are.
  • “Both you and Ben rose to the occasion and neither of you would express regret that you’re parents to Holly.” Consequentialism! So what? What if she were a rebellious, hateful, crack-addicted thief? The fact that thing turned out all right doesn’t justify the lie or keeping it hidden now.
  • “…At this late date, however, your coming clean would only cast a shadow over your character.” A character that richly deserves such a shadow.
  • “You are deeply remorseful for what sounds like a singular act of substantial deceit.”  What difference does it make that it’s a single act? A single act is enough. And this wasn’t “deceit.” This was a lie.
  • “There’s nothing to be gained by telling your husband and making him uneasy about your essential honesty.” I’d say one’s husband has the right to know the character of who he’s married to. 
  • “You and your friend are also hardly the only women to deliberately get pregnant without letting the man in on your plan, as objectionable as that behavior is.” Oh, that’s terrific, Emily. The old “you’re not the first” rationalization, a particularly dumb variation on “everybody does it.” The conduct is horribly wrong, and the first person to do it is no worse than the 2,342nd.

Gee, I wonder what Chuck would say.

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Facts: Slate

Slate Gives Us A Lovely Example Of Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Deceit_Cvr_CMYK

Thanks, Slate!

A lot of people have trouble with the concept of deceit, which is the intentional use of apparently true statements to deceive. Now I have a wonderful example to give them, thanks to Slate’s use of the most sneaky of lies as its recent contribution to the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Media Anti-gun Propaganda Division.

Slate compiled a list it called “How Many People Have Been Killed By Guns Since Newtown,” and illustrated it with an “infographic.” The list was widely used in the current “those crazy Republican gun nuts have blood on their hands” campaign led by the President, the Vice President, Mayor Bloomberg and others.  The list is unreliable, however, as an advocacy device, since one of the names it includes is Boston Marathon terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in a shootout with police. How many other gun casualties are on the list that are perfectly justified, legally and ethically, unless one is an anti-gum absolutist who thinks neither the police nor other law enforcement should have access to firearms either? Quite a few, it turns out.

The only explanation for including Tsarnaev (and the others) is to mislead the public and inflame fear and passion by maximizing the raw number of names on the “shooting death list.” Yes, this is literally an accurate (I guess) list of every gun death since Newtown, but if the purpose of the list is to dramatize the need for anti-gun measures in the wake of the Sandy Hood shooting, why is a Boston Marathon child-killer on the list? What does his death have to do with the defeat of gun-control legislation in the Newtown aftermath, or the Newtown massacre generally? Nothing…except that it inflates the number, to be used in fear-mongering and misrepresentation. And that is exactly how Slate’s list is being used…as if it didn’t know. Those defeated, Newtown-inspired anti-gun measures would not have have saved the terrorist, nor does anyone sane wish they could have. Continue reading →

Of Teenage Tweets, Politics, Fairness, and Acorns

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
How about scrutinizing the trees, and not the acorns?

How about scrutinizing the trees, and not the acorns?

Two GOP Congressmen are apologizing for the offensive tweets of their teenage sons, as well they should. But to what extent do the homophobic, racist and otherwise vile social network comment of a couple of high school students with famous fathers tell us anything about their legislator parents? Are such communications newsworthy? Should the kids be exposed to “Gotchas!” as if they were the elected officials, not their dads, and are their indiscretions legitimate clubs for political and journalistic foes to beat their fathers with?

I think these are difficult ethics questions, and I don’t much care for any of them.  Let’s examine the ethical conduct of some of the participants in this icky drama: Continue reading →

Slate’s Emily Bazelon Shows How Bias Makes Journalists Not Just Inaccurate and Unfair, But Stupid Too

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments
Besides, a judge who overturns Bloomberg's soft drink ban MUST be a conservative, because we all know conservatives are fat and eat meat and stuff and don't want people to be healthy so they don't have to pay their fair share for Obamacare, right?

Besides, a judge who overturns Bloomberg’s soft drink ban MUST be a conservative, because we all know conservatives are fat and eat meat and stuff and don’t want people to be healthy so they don’t have to pay their fair share for Obamacare, right?

The judge who struck down New York Mayor Bloomberg’s giant soft drink ban, as controversial an example of aggressive government paternalism over personal choice as one can find, has a pretty clear record of supporting traditional liberal positions, like same-sex marriage, and appears to be a Democrat. He was elected in ultra-liberal Manhattan, and supported by Charlie Rangel’s organization.

Nonetheless, writing about the decision in Slate, legal analyst Emily Bazelon wrote this…

“Judge Tingling walked on by all of that in striking down the Department of Health order. And of course he’s not the first conservative judge to find that activism from the bench is awfully appealing when it allows you to sweep away laws you don’t like.”

How does she know Tingling is a conservative judge? Why, because he ruled against a prohibition that she, a liberal, happens to like. Just consider what she is doing in this statement: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Slate Crime Blogger Justin Peters

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
Read the Slate crime blog, and you could end up like this in seven days...

Read the Slate crime blog, and you could end up like this in seven days…

Slate triggered a mini-ethics train wreck by hiring a non-lawyer for what any fool could surmise would be an assignment that would often require knowledge of the law: covering the broad issue of crime for Slate’s readers. Note: to all those scambloggers who insist that there are no good jobs in which having a law degree would be an obvious asset: here’s an example. Their note back to me: “Oh, yeah? This why didn’t Slate hire one of us?”

Touché! I presume, however, that this was because the journalist Slate did hire, Justin Peters is an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review and has pals in Slate’s management…or, in the alternative, the online magazine has a death wish. I don’t think Slate has anything against lawyers. Peters is unethical, because ethical professionals don’t accept jobs they are unqualified to perform. Then again, journalists increasingly are unaware of the concept of ethics, so now we are back to Slate, and why they would hire someone to opine in a law-strewn field without knowing shinola about the law. Continue reading →

More Advice Column Malpractice: “Dear Prudence,” Elder Abuse and Voter Fraud

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have to wonder about the values, ethics and trustworthiness of any publication that employs an advice columnist as deeply incompetent and unethical as Emily Yoffe, a.k.a “Dear Prudence.” I’m sure that I would be compelled to correct her regularly if I read her responses with any frequency, which is one of the reasons I don’t read the column. 2011 Ethics Alarms Commenter of the Year tgt just flagged this horrific example of Emily’s craft, and correctly guessed my reaction, writing, “get ready to facepalm.”  Now that my visage is permanently concave, allow me to retort.

The query comes from a woman whose mother has filled in absentee ballots for her parents, voting her own preferences and not consulting them. Worse, the grandmother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, is a life-long partisan of the party her daughter voted against on her behalf.  The questioner asks “Prudence,” “Should I attempt to intervene in some way?” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Day: Slate’s David Weigel

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“The Washington Post condemned Reid for “smear tactics not unlike those of Joseph McCarthy,” which makes sense if you think that refusing to release your tax returns is like being unfairly accused of membership in the Communist Party. It’s a nice idea, that the majority leader of the United States Senate should operate under some rules of decorum about truth, even if it is only randomly applied.”

—-Slate’s David Weigel, in a post dismissing Harry Reid’s Big Lie attack on Mitt Romney as “politics as usual.”

Somewhere at the bottom of the journalism barrel you may see David Weigel, mangling ethics

David Weigel is a Democratic flack posing as a political reporter, and my standards for his writing is low—but not this low.

The Post’s quite correct condemnation of Reid does not, as Weigel disingenuously suggests, amount to saying that “refusing to release your tax returns is like being unfairly accused of membership in the Communist Party.” It amounts to saying that publicly accusing a political adversary of evading his taxes for ten years using nothing more than hearsay from anonymous, dubious and unrevealed sources is like accusing a political adversary of belonging to the Communist party using similar tactics. Romney’s choice not to release his taxes doesn’t justify or excuse Reid’s smear, any more than McCarthy’s victims’ associating with Americans who exercised their Constitutional rights by espousing Communist sympathies justified McCarthy’s smear. Weigel is using a false and flawed analogy to excuse the inexcusable, because, like Reid, he’s on Team Obama. Continue reading →

Ethical and Unethical Adultery Advice: There is Carolyn Hax, and Then There Is Emily Yoffe

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sometimes, you just have to tell your slimy boss “No.”

Emily Yoffe is Slate’s advice columnist, in its “Dear Prudence” feature. She specializes in extreme situations: a recent column involved a teenager who realized that his mother had breast-fed him far too long because she was sexually aroused by it, and then had him fondle her breasts for years after he stopped be willing to suck on them. He asked what he should do now that his mother was subjecting his younger sister to the same treatment. (Emily did get that one right: she told him to call child services on his mother, and to seek professional help for himself.)

Last week I congratulated Carolyn Hax for her advice to a woman torn between the adulterous relationship of one friend with another friend’s husband. Notwithstanding the persistent argument of one crusading commenter who felt that I should have stood for universal adultery whistleblowing on friends and strangers alike, Hax gave, as usual, practical, ethical and measured advice.  She suggested that the inquirer tell the cheating husband that his secret was out, and that she would not lie to protect his illicit affair.  I believe that’s the right ethical balance. Hax’s advice to the woman was to be proactive in both extracting herself from the split loyalties and to be a catalyst for either disclosure or ending the affair. I also noted that the ethical duty on the questioner may be different when the betrayed spouse is an especially close friend, or a family member. Then loyalty and trust could require disclosure.

That same week, Yoffe got an inquiry from a “well-paid assistant of a successful business mogul.” Among her duties, she told “Prudence,” is to facilitate her boss’s extra-marital affair: lying about his whereabouts to business associates, deceiving his wife when she calls, and even buying gifts for the illicit lover. “Next month he’s going on a weeklong business trip,” she wrote. “He only needs to be gone for two days, but he’s taking his girlfriend with him and staying longer. I know I’m doing wrong by his wife. But I love my job, and I’m not sure what I could or should do to behave honorably in this situation.” Continue reading →

More On The Ethics Of Watching Football From Malcolm Gladwell

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

And NO,Malcolm is NOT Art Garfunkle's son!

I don’t generally post “See? Someone famous and respectable agrees with me!” links, because 1) somebody agreeing with me doesn’t validate my argument, 2) I’m trying to promote ethical awareness and analysis skills, not to be “right,” and most of all, 3) if I did, I’d feel I had to hide when the famous someone is Glenn Beck, Joy Behar, Ozzie Ozbourne or Dinky, the Pet Rock.

However, I found the comments of Malcolm Gladwell on the topic of football interesting, and I link to them here. Gladwell is the author of “The Tipping Point,” and like Jacque Barzun, Bill James, George Will, Judge Richard Posner, blogger Rick Jones and some other perceptive thinkers I admire, always worth paying attention to, even when he’s wrong. I had suggested that the increasing evidence that football-related head injuries were routinely crippling players implicated the ethics of being a football fan here, and have periodically revisited the issue on this blog  and as a guest on Michel Martin’s NPR show, “Tell Me More.” As a result, I have received a good amount of hate mail from football fans, telling me that I’m a baseball-biased idiot. I may be that, but I don’t think Gladwell is. I think that he ( and I) may be right: ethics and insurance premiums may eventually  send football the way of pro boxing.

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Spark: WTVR.com, on Ray Easterling’s recent suicide.

Source: Slate

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.