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Ethics Question of Your Day
I've found many, many threads discussing ethics, but not really a catch-all for many different ethics questions.
Here's a quandary I sometimes find myself asking: Suppose one has an opportunity to make a lot of money by being a talk show host, running for political office, or what have you by espousing and supporting political beliefs they find detestable. Would that be wrong? Would it diminish their actual beliefs?
What about a family discussion or a discussion with friends or co-workers? Does one have any sort of obligation to defend their beliefs if they hear them being discussed and subsequently derided? Specifically, say one is of a very liberal bent. If one goes to lunch with his co-workers and those co-workers start discussing abortion and it turns out that all of one's co-workers think abortion is an evil thing that should be made illegal, does one have an obligation to speak up?
Here's a quandary I sometimes find myself asking: Suppose one has an opportunity to make a lot of money by being a talk show host, running for political office, or what have you by espousing and supporting political beliefs they find detestable. Would that be wrong? Would it diminish their actual beliefs?
What about a family discussion or a discussion with friends or co-workers? Does one have any sort of obligation to defend their beliefs if they hear them being discussed and subsequently derided? Specifically, say one is of a very liberal bent. If one goes to lunch with his co-workers and those co-workers start discussing abortion and it turns out that all of one's co-workers think abortion is an evil thing that should be made illegal, does one have an obligation to speak up?
Comments
Then again, if you charge into battle bravely, there is an opportunity for heroics. But nobody can look down on you and say you were wrong not to go charging out of the trench.
For example, if you believe that abortion is a woman's right to choose and you are offered a pile of cash to attack it, that means you were probably in a position to do abortion a great deal of harm by doing so. The money is just a measure of what your integrity, credability and reputation are worth.
The bottom line is, if you're going to sell out don't sell cheap; that's all you'll have afterward.
On the second question, standing up for a thing is sometimes commendable, and under certain circumstances failing to stand up for a thing may become condemnable, but for the vast majority of situations it's an acceptable choice to avoid non-meaningful confrontation. Also the ethical status of the topic at hand a necessary component.
She likes to send reporters after UFO sighting stories when they inevitably crop up. Around Halloween time, she's always on the prowl for "real life" ghost stories and eye-witness accounts of the other-natural. She considers them entertaining, and not from a skepticism standpoint. She also saw no problem with sending a reporter out to check out a local homeopathy convention.
In these cases, I always argue that our publications have an ethical obligation to fall back on those "fact" thingies and not contribute to the perpetuation of myths, pseudoscience, and outright lies. People are stupid.
Speaking of, this is the same boss who this morning complained to me that her "Wikipedia isn't working."
POP QUIZ: What was she talking about?
a) Wikipedia
b) Firefox
c) Laser printer cartridge
The problem is that simply covering a UFO story in any way -- even skeptically -- still lends credence to the UFO idiots. The appeal-to-authority response that happens subconsciously for most readers is, "If it's in the newspaper at all, it must be credible." This is why readers wrongly assume anyone charged in a crime is guilty of said crime (see Casey Anthony, or alternately the Boston Legal two-parter "Schadenfreude" starring Heather Locklear).
Even after reading and agreeing with a skeptical argument, faulty memories and impressions can also warp so that consumers think an article or opinion piece said something completely opposite.
Studies have shown that people resist facts that don't fit their preconceptions anyway, and memory of an article is often just plain wrong.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/hoff.htm
*Read: Non-sensationalist guys in the trenches. You know, the ones who are dirt poor because readers/viewers are more interested in embellished truths and "WHAT HOUSEHOLD SUBSTANCE COULD BE KILLING OUR KIDS, FILM AT 11" (see the Dr. Oz-fueled ABC News apple juice scare) than actual facts.
@Joe: There was a semi-recent South Park about the History Channel idiocy. Seek it out, my son.
The History Channel.
I actually did not know The History Channel was that bad until I watched the South Park episode that joked about it.
and http://ethics.npr.org/category/b-fairness/#1-fairness-in-storytelling
What a lot of these channels seem to have in common is that they tried to be commercial versions of PBS. TLC was all about science/nature/etc. documentary shows. A&E was about fine arts, theater, and a smattering of history and biographies (later to be spun off to their own channels). Bravo was also about fine performance art until it became more or less the "trashy rich women reality TV" channel (although I admit I do like Top Chef -- but it's more of a game show than reality TV IMHO, plus I consider gourmet cooking to be something of a fine art anyway, so it gets a pass). Apparently, the PBS-like programming just didn't make any money, so they had to go the trashy TV route.
This is why I give a big "fuck you" to people who say "we don't need PBS, the market will provide other avenues for PBS-style programming." The market has tried and failed.
My great uncle was a Jewish allied medic who took part in the liberation of at least one concentration camp. I don't e, know very many other details. It's obviously not something he talked about. I do know he had a hat and a gun from a Nazi officer that he showed me. Pretty sure it was an officer, because who else has a pistol? I do not know if he killed someone, took it from a dead body, found it lying on the ground, etc.
The way I see it, a person is a person. If you do anything to save the life of any person, it's good.