The Golden Rule

Ethics Alarms Presents: The Shortest Commentary on a Question to “The Ethicist” Yet…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The Question: The inquirer’s 15-year old son is dating a 15-year-old girl. The parents just found out that the girl’s parents, who are immigrants and from another culture, do not want their daughter dating yet. The boy’s parents want to know if they should tell the girls’ parents about the relationship or, perhaps, tell their son not to date her. The ultimate question: “I’m worried I could get my son’s girlfriend in big trouble or even put her in danger. Can I just supervise them at my house and absolve myself of enforcing her parents’ rules?”

The Shortest Answer from Ethics Alarms: No.

The Slightly Longer Answer from Ethics Alarms : It’s the Golden Rule, dummy!

The More Detailed Answer: Tell your son that he may not continue dating the girl against the will of her parents, and that if he does, you will be forced to blow the whistle on her.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Remind your son the “Romeo and Juliet” is just a play.

[I didn’t even bother to read The Ethicist’s answer before I wrote this when I saw that Prof. Appiah took over 500 words to explain the easiest of ethics calls. I did notice that he mentioned “Romeo and Juliet,” however.]

Unethical Quote of the Month: “The Ethicist” (Kwame Anthony Appiah)

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We are, as I’ve argued before, entitled to a life informed by the fundamental facts about our existence. Even the painful ones? Perhaps especially those. This truth belongs to her.”

—New York Times advice columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah, aka. “The Ethicist” concluding his advice to the inquirer who asked, “My Adopted Cousin’s Biological Parents Were Siblings. Do I Tell Her?”

Kwame is pretty clearly the best of the various “experts” who have manned the long-time feature in the New York Times Magazine; at least he’s a real ethicist, a philosophy prof at NYU. (I say “manned” because the Times has never given the post of “The Ethicist” to a woman. Go figure…) Lately, however, I’ve been a bit worried about the guy, and wondering if “The Great Stupid” is getting to him. More answers like this one, and I’ll be tempted to dub him the “Un-Ethicist,” in honor of the old 7-Up campaign branding the soft-drink as the “Un-cola.”

I’m just going to focus on the quote above and not the whole column, because The Ethicist is stating an absolute principle that is absolute hooey. The inspiration for the edict “The truth belongs to her” was the usual participant in the column, “Name Withheld,” asking whether he or she, as the only living relative who knows the actual family origins of a cousin, (or as Kwame puts it, is “the sole custodian of an intimate truth concealed from the very person it concerns) should spill the rotten beans now, when they both are seniors.

Because the dark family secret can be nothing but disturbing or worse, I see no possible benefit to anyone by revealing it to the cousin now. She knows she was adopted, but she does not know that her biological parents were brother and sister—at least that’s what the inquirer’s now-deceased mother told her “in absolute confidence.” All records are sealed: there is no way for the “truth,” if it is the truth, to come out, as all involved except the adopted cousin are dead. The clueless cousin has a husband, children or grandchildren.

Even in his (as usual) prolix answer, The Ethicist struggles to find any real benefit to the inquirer revealing the secret. Any genetic abnormalities, from which the Clueless Cousin has apparently been spared, would now be detected with modern medical screening and are increasingly unlikely with succeeding generations. So he defaults to the “rule,” encomium, or whatever he thinks it is, that the cousin must have this depressing, disturbing and useless information because “this truth belongs to her.”

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Celebrity Ethics: Scarlett Johansson’s Manifesto

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

For some mysterious reason, Daily Caller reporter Leena Nasir felt compelled to attack Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson for her statements regarding fans who approach her when she is in public but not in a performing capacity.

“Scarlett Johansson put her arrogance on full display by issuing an unhinged statement about her celebrity status,” the indignant writer declared in an “Editorial.” “Clearly setting her bar as low as it can go, she casually blurted the selfish comments during the interview for her In Style cover story,” Nasir continued. “Johansson launched into a self-indulgent display of arrogance…I don’t think Johansson has a lot to worry about anymore. The people who did follow her career have likely just been turned away. It’s hard to imagine fans will care much about her anymore.”

Wow, two uses of “anymore” within three sentences. When I do that, I sentence myself to remedial writing exercises.

But back to Scarlett: what did the acclaimed actress tell the interviewer to justify such enmity from The Daily Caller? This:

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Look! “The Ethicist” Has A Real Ethics Question That Doesn’t Involve Trump Derangement!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The New York Times Sunday advice column “The Ethicist” has been indulging itself by joining in the mass Times mourning over the election of Donald Trump and the failure of the paper’s years long propaganda campaign against him. The past four featured questions have been “Is It Fair to Judge a Friend by the Way She Voted?”, “Can Voters Be Held Accountable for Their Candidate’s Behavior?”, “Am I a Hypocrite for Calling Donald Trump a Liar?”, and my personal favorite, “My Mom Voted for Trump. Can We Let It Go?” It has taken a month to get back to genuine ethics dilemmas and conflicts, but at last Prof. Appiah is where he is supposed to be all the time.

This weeks query was “A Guy I Know Had a Liver Transplant. Now He’s Boozing Again.” [Gift link! Merry Christmas!]It raises more than one ethics question worthy of discussion, including:

1. Should alcoholics who have destroyed their livers be eligible for liver transplants?

2. Is the recipient of a liver transplant behaving unethically if he or she returns to the same lifestyle that ruined the first one?

3. Do the friends of the now boozing liver transplant recipient “have an obligation to tell this man’s wife that he’s still drinking?”

The first one came up for debate nationwide when Mickey Mantle, the hard-drinking baseball great, strangely came up at the top of a liver transplant list despite being predominantly responsible for his first liver’s demise. Organ transplant waiting lists are created using several formulas and weighted values, which makes sense when distributing rare commodities. On the other hand, this is a slippery slope that slides directly into punishing people for not exercising enough, eating too much pizza, smoking or favoring dangerous hobbies, like motorcycle racing, and withholding medical care or insurance coverage of the adverse results. Alcoholism, as I learned the hard way, is not volitional though alcohol abuse is, and good luck telling the two apart.

2. The second question is also squarely in an ethics gray area. Once the liver is in an individual’s body, he or she should have complete autonomy. Sure, it’s irresponsible for someone with obligations to others to take unnecessary risks with his or her life, but that’s true with or without a new liver. I can’t define a special obligation to those who did not receive a particular liver that should affect the recipient’s decisions going forward. What happens to the new liver won’t help or harm those who didn’t get it.

3. The third question is the easy one, and Golden Rule 101. Would you want to be told if your loved one was secretly endangering his or her health? Sure you would. However, if the wife in this case has been paying attention to her alcoholic husband, I doubt very much that anyone needs to tell her that he’s drinking again.

But did he vote for Donald Trump????

Unethical Website “Above the Law” Provides a Vivid Example of What Americans Voted Against This Week.

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I keep banishing “Above the Law,” (ABL) the wildly unethical partisan and woke-biased legal gossip site, from my email and it keeps sneaking back in. This story, by Kathryn Rubino (who once concocted an alleged “scandal” about me), is so outrageous it is beneath the site’s previous bottom of the barrel lows. I didn’t think that was possible. Impressive.

A tax partner in a major law firm (his name isn’t necessary, since the issue is ABL’s abuse of him, not the lawyer himself) engaged in a dispute over the management of his apartment building and the behavior of fellow residents. ABL’s breathless headline, “Biglaw Partner Drops Slur In Dustup With Neighbors.” ‘Oh oh,’ I thought, as did many other readers. “He must have called someone a ‘nigger.’ That’s going to get him in trouble with the firm.”

That wasn’t the slur, however. He emailed a complaint that read, “The retarded tenants of 6W opened the fire alarm door to my terrace.”

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Olympics Ethics Quiz: The Sexist Commentator

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Horror.

Bob Ballard is a veteran sports announcer with the BBC who has reported on sports since the mid- 1980s. He’s been involved in covering several Olympic games. However, a wan sexist joke he uttered that would have been standard fair on sitcoms in the 1960s got him sacked from the Paris Olympics broadcast.

After the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay that ended with a gold for Team Australia, Ballard felt compelled to comment on the team’s delay leaving the Paris Aquatic Centre. “Well, the women just finishing off. You know what women are like, hanging around, doing their makeup,” Ballard said. Immediately his female broadcasting partner Lizzie Simmonds, a former Olympian and his Eurosport co-host, struck. “Outrageous, Bob,” she said. “Some of the men are doing that as well.” Ballard laughed.

Eurosport, which distributes the Olympic broadcast in Europe (owned by the same company that now owns CNN) confirmed that the comment caused Ballard’s Olympics to be terminated. “We can confirm that Bob Ballard has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect,” it said in a statement this week.

Take THAT, insufficiently female athlete-extolling pig at the Parity Olympics!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was Ballard’s dismissal, fair, proportional and just?

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Nebraska Gas Heist

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

HEY EVERYBODY, FREE GAS!

Weeeell, not exactly free, but close enough, apparently, for a previously law-abiding, 45-year-old Lincoln, Nebraska woman, Dawn Thompson, to embark on a life of crime. I would love to hear what rationalizations she used to convince herself that what she did was okay. I’d bet anything that she employed a bunch of them.

Her gas-stealing rampage began to unravel when Lincoln Police got a call from Bosselman Enterprise’s loss prevention manager on Oct. 20, 2023. A Pump and Pantry had reported that someone was ripping them off. An investigation revealed that the convenience store’s gas pumps had received a faulty software update a year earlier in November of 2022. The update managed orders and reward cards, but it also allowed anyone who swiped a rewards card twice to shift a pump into its “demo mode.” Once it was set in that sequence, gas was free as far as the pump was concerned. One rewards card had been repeatedly used to fool the pumps, and police traced it to Thompson.

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Everyday Ethics Dilemmas: The Abandoned Tools

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was walking Spuds down a street in our neighborhood when I noticed a group of tools, five or six, lying in the grass on the strip between the sidewalk and the street. They looked new: I’d guess it was about 50 dollars worth, maybe 75. There was no automobile in front of the house, though that didn’t necessarily mean no one was home.

What’s a good neighbor to do?

These were nice tools, and kids are walking around the neighborhood constantly: maybe no one would take the tools, but maybe someone would. There’s a useful but dishonest rationalization in such circumstances: they’re abandoned! I thought about picking them up and carrying them up to the front door. I considered picking up the tools, carrying them home with Spuds, and driving by later to see if the owners were home. I was tempted to just toss them from the strip to the lawn, where nobody could argue that the strip between the road and the sidewalk is public territory.

If I had not been struggling to keep my exuberant dog under control when the cooler weather makes him especially rambunctious, my calculations might have been different. In retrospect, I see that this was a Golden Rule test: what would I want someone to do if it were my tools being left behind and left to their own resources?

At the time, however, with promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, I decided to leave the tools where they were. I didn’t feel an obligation to do anything because there isn’t one (and also a useful rationalization that I need to add to the list: “This isn’t my problem”) , but clearly the more ethical course would have been to protect my neighbor’s property.

Pro Ethics Tip To Trump: If You Can’t Learn The Golden Rule, At Least Be Cognizant Of The Glass House Problem…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Donald Trump was on thin ice making fun of Chris Christy’s weight, but he just proved that he had better eschew impugning Joe Biden’s age-related cognitive decline as well.

Addressing the Pray Vote Stand summit in Washington, Trump said, “We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war. Just think of it. We would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man, and far more devastating than any war.”

Oopsie! Trump presumably meant (I hope!) World War III, not the conflict that ended in 1945. That was a Bidenesque gaffe, and the equivalent of a pundit making a grammatical error while writing about how current high school grads can’t write. And that wasn’t all. Later in the same speech, Trump started confusing Biden with Barack Obama.

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On Senator Hawley’s Unethical Questioning Of Judge Loren AliKhan

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I hate this stuff; I condemn it frequently in my legal ethics seminars as a sign of the public’s ignorance regarding the function of lawyers, and when practiced by political parties and the news media, it is particularly disgusting. And here comes supposed GOP star, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo), to pull this despicable stunt in a hearing on the qualifications of Judge Loren AliKhan, nominated for a federal district court judgeship by President Biden.

Hawley’s “gotcha!” employed to discredit AliKhan was that in 2020, when she served as Washington, D.C. Solicitor General, she defended the city in court after the Capitol Hill Baptist Church sued D.C. Mayor Bowser for religious discrimination. Bowser (who, as I’ve already mentioned once today, is one of the worst major city mayors) shut down church events to protect public health during the pandemic freak-out, but encouraged and allowed mass Black Lives Matter protests. A federal judge ruled in Capitol Hill Baptist’s favor, and the city did not appeal because as almost everyone with any legal literacy knew at the outset that Bowser’s double standard was pretty much indefensible.

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