An ethical dilemma is a situation that requires us to choose between an ethical course and one that fulfills a non-ethical want or need, like getting a promotion, winning the love of our soul-mate, or improving our financial status. Choosing the ethical option often has negative consequences, but it is still the ethical option. Thus it is more than a little disheartening to read the advice columnist who calls himself “The Ethicist” supporting the unethical option—the one that rejects an ethical value in favor of self-interest. Continue reading
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Martha Coakley, Bloody Socks and Democracy
If Republican Scott Brown, the former Cosmo fold-out, defeats Martha Coakley, the designated 60th Senate vote for Obamacare, in the special election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s long-time seat, there will undoubtedly be a flurry of columns about how she was beaten, in the end, by irrelevant, trivial gaffes that only prove how silly and provincial Massachusetts voters can be. In particular, the state’s voters will be ridiculed for rejecting Coakley after she airily dismissed Boston Red Sox legend Curt Schilling as “a Yankee fan.” O.K., so she doesn’t follow the Red Sox. Big deal. You want to choose a senator on stuff like that? Continue reading
On Frozen Tongues and the No-Accountability Culture
A Siro, Oklahoma school bus driver, who is also a teacher, leaves a fifth-grade student stuck by the side of the road with her tongue frozen fast to a metal pole. The bus driver tells the girl that she doesn’t have time to help her, and drives away, forcing the girl to free herself by slowly chewing her way off the pole. The school discusses the situation with the driver and others who are charged with transporting the children, and declares the problem solved. The bus driver, the school says, will continue in both her duties.
Enough.
It is time for everyone to resist the increasing cultural pressure to create an accountability-free society. Continue reading
Loss of Voting Rights is a Fair Part of a Felon’s “Debt”
The Washington Post has an editorial today pronouncing Virginia’s law banning convicted felons who have completed their sentences from being able to vote a “disgrace.” Why is it a disgrace? Because, the Post says, they have paid their “debt to society.” That is untrue, because the state determines what that debt should be, not the Washington Post. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: the North Carolina State Personnel Commission
In a video that I prefer not to link to, North Carolina Highway Patrolman Charles Jones is shown hanging his K-9 partner, Ricoh, off the ground and brutally kicking him because the dog would not release his hold on a chew toy. That video (and another similar one) got him fired, but the State Personnel Commission just reversed the decision, saying that Jones’s conduct did not sink to a level justifying dismissal for cause, only discipline for “unsatisfactory job performance.” Continue reading
Michael Steele: G.O.P. Ethics as Usual
It wasn’t George Bush, the Iraq War, John McCain or even the economy that made the GOP a minority party. It was arrogance, corruption and sliminess. The smug Machiavellian tactics of Tom DeLay; the just-look-the-other-way tolerance for the Mark Foleys and the Duke Cunninghams; the hypocrisy of Bill Frist and Ralph Reed; the widespread affection for crooked lobbyists like Jack Abramoff; the Bizarro World ethics of Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez…the bottom line was that you just couldn’t trust these people not to lie, sell favors, abuse their power, or dive head first into conflicts of interest. Continue reading
Napolitano Ethics: “Heck of a job, Janet!”
Is it too much to ask that our government officials don’t try to con us, deceive us, and treat us like idiots?
Apparently so. Continue reading
JFK the Philanderer: What Does It Mean?
Honest, I’m not picking on the Kennedy’s. That this surfaced today is a coincidence. But if you cross Ted Kennedy and Tiger Woods, you get Jack Kennedy, and what should appear on the web this morning but a surprising photograph:
TMZ, the celebrity trash website that likes to publish paparazzi photos of supermodels with spinach between their teeth, has a genuine scoop: it has gotten its cyber-hands on a photograph that appears to show a bevy of naked women frolicking on a yacht as a young Senator Jack Kennedy lounges nearby. [UPDATE: As explained by The Smoking Gun here, and discussed in a later Ethics Alarms post here, the photo was a hoax. The ethical issues raised by it and discussed below are still valid, however.] Continue reading
Law Students, Lawyers and Judges With Broken Ethics Alarms, 2009
I won’t keep you in suspense: my favorite is the Harvard law school whiz who celebrated his job offer from a top law firm by getting drunk and burning down a church. Forgot to check the batteries in the ol’ ethics alarm, I guess!
Here are two cautionary end-of-year lists: from the Avvo blog, the “Top Lawyers Behaving Badly” list for 2009, and, though not rich a source for black humor, the even more disturbing “Year’s Most Infamous Lawyers” from the Business Insider.
Ethics Alarms thanks Robert Ambrogi for finding them, as well the Avvo and the Business Insider for doing such an excellent job of compiling them.
Ethics Dunce: Sen. Charles Shumer
It’s a minor news event with a couple of ethics lesson, but as usual, the media’s focus is on the wrong one.
New York’s U.S. Senators, Gillibrand and Shumer, were talking away on their cell phones before take-off. The flight attendants announced, as they have been doing on flights since before Cher’s first retirement tour, that it was time to ditch the electronic devices and turn off the cell phones. The senators ignored the instructions, and kept talking anyway, because, you know, their work is So Very Important. Continue reading
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