Ethics

Let's talk about rapist doctors.I'm not talking about doctors who take advantage of anesthetized patients. That's a problem law enforcement can deal with. What I'm talking about is someone like Dr. Michael Parsa, who works at the University Medical Center of El Paso, and who essentially raped an unidentified woman for the police, according to a lawsuit filed by the … [Read more...] about No Means No: The Medical Exception

I've been staying away from the Lance Armstrong mess because I don't follow sports and I haven't been paying attention to what's been happening. However, a few days ago at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall tore into a Washington Post op-ed in which Professor Braden Allenby argued that the sporting world should allow performance enhancing drugs. Jack thinks he's badly wrong, and … [Read more...] about Lance Armstrong: Evil Or the Future of Sports?

In Jack Marshall's list of 24 unethical rationalizations for bad behavior, the number one rationalization -- the king of all rationalizations -- is "Everybody Does It." Although I agree in principle, I find it interesting to explore the nuances and exceptions. In Part 1 I discussed cultural norms, and how sometimes ethical behavior is defined by what everybody … [Read more...] about Everybody Does It – Part 2: Relative Judgement

A few weeks ago at the Ethics Alarms blog, Jack Marshall published his list of 24 ways people justify unethical behavior. He starts the list with an old rationalization that is the basis for several others: 1. The Golden Rationalization, or "Everybody does it" This rationalization has been used to excuse ethical misconduct since the beginning of civilization. It is based on … [Read more...] about Everybody Does It – Part 1: Cultural Norms

A couple of days ago, I posted about this silly graph, which shows the wage gap between men and women: The dotted gray line on the graph at first seems to show that "Women's Wages as a Percentage of Men's Wages" are dropping, but that turns out to be because the dotted gray line is plotted against the right-hand scale, which is printed upside down, with the larger … [Read more...] about More About That Graphic Sin