Stanford Prison Experiment

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/21/18: Assholes, Frauds, And Hypocrites

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Good morning!

1. “A Nation of Assholes” Update: A congressional intern, can be heard yelling, “Mr. President, fuck you!” at President Trump this week as he arrived at the Capitol for a meeting with Republican lawmakers, as heard in a video clip recorded by NBC’s Frank Thorp. Nice.  This is what “the resistance” and allied Democrats—and Robert De Niro, Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert and the rest, like Peter Fonda, Jane’s younger, less talented brother, who tweeted, “We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles and see if mother will stand up against the massive giant asshole she is married to”— have produced. Hold them accountable. Hold the members of Congress who employs her responsible too: she obviously is reflecting the attitude she absorbs in the office all day long.

As that 2015 post makes clear, making someone like Trump our leader, and thus our culture’s ethics role model—yes, that’s how leadership works—does lead to this kind of disgusting, divisive and un-American conduct. However, it doesn’t justify those who sink this low. She must be identified and fired. Those rationalizing her outburst should be rebuked, just as those who tried to justify Rep. Joe Wilson’s unforgivable “You lie!” during an Obama State of the Union address should have been rebuked.

Besides, after she is fired, MSNBC will probably give her a show.

2. You know, such incidents are making it hard for me to maintain my ethical objections to boycotts. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was having a working dinner at Cocina Mexicana, a popular Mexican restaurant in Washington, DC.  Protesters from the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America entered the restaurant and began harassing her, based on the controversy over the handling of illegal immigrant families at the Mexican border. You can read their content-free chants here; the only one that interests me is “”No borders! No walls! Sanctuary for all!”, which is signature significance for a lawless, ignorant fool. She had to leave after about ten minutes.

Why were the protesters allowed to enter the restaurant and interfere with a customer’s meal? It doesn’t matter who the diner is: the establishments duty to is treat guests as guests while they are in the establishment. Has Cocina Mexicana apologized to Nielsen? It doesn’t matter, really: that kind of abuse should not be permitted even once. Are we now going to have establishments segregated by ethnicity and sympathy for open borders?

I won’t eat there, even if someone else is paying. Continue reading →

From Massachusetts: Proof That It CAN Happen Here…and Does; That It CAN Happen To You…and Might.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tortured. At his Special Needs school. By good people like us.

As I recently wrote to a commenter on another post, Ethics Alarms is not intended to catalogue every prominent example of unethical conduct, and not just because attempting to do so would require a fleet of bloggers. If it is discussed here, an incident usually requires some kind of ethical analysis to determine whether it is ethical or not, or has larger cultural or societal significance. That the incident at the center of this post was unethical (as well as illegal), there can be no doubt, and that, ironically, is why it is worthy of special attention. The conduct is self-evidently horrific and beyond justification, and yet it occurred anyway, in a community, state and nation where virtually every sentient citizen over the age of nine would say that it could never happen—not here, not in the United States of America, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The fact that it did happen is both a revelation and a warning.

Film footage under seal since 2002 was finally shown in a Massachusetts courtroom this week. The film shows how the staff of a school for special needs students in Canton, Mass., the Judge Rotenberg Center, strapped a disabled 18-year-old student named Andre McCollins to a table and proceeded to torture him, administering 31 jolts of electricity to the screaming boy over a seven hour period. Lawyers defending the school in a lawsuit have claimed that the atrocity was “treatment,” but other evidence indicates that it was punishment—for  McCollins’ defiance of a teacher’s demands that he remove his jacket in class. Continue reading →

The Hazing Abuse of Michael Warren

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Michael Warren should have consulted Kevin Bacon...

A fraternity hazing story—yes, amazing as it seems, there are still hazings—raises the persistent ethical issue of whether a victim is responsible for his own mistreatment if he consents to it. Even if he shares responsibility, however, his consent does nothing to reduce the ethical failings of the abusers, or those of the irresponsible authorities who presided over a sick campus culture.

Michael Warren is an African American who was the only black pledge of the Alpha Delta Omega fraternity at Hartwick College (in Oneonta, New York). His potential “brothers” locked him in a bathroom with other pledges for hours, where they were subjected to ear-splitting music and strobe lights; he was forced, he says, to dress like a pimp, a humiliating bit of racial stereotyping; and, shades of the evil Omega Theta Phi fraternity in “Animal House,” was paddled so hard that he needed medical treatment (“Thank you, sir, may I have another?”). Warren complained, and found himself a pariah on campus, making him so uncomfortable that he gave up his scholarship to transfer to Hofstra. Now he is suing Hartwick, and his lawyer is arguing that his mistreatment by the fraternity “may have ruined his life.” Continue reading →