Jim Johnson's List: Ethics

• New research explores gender disparities in business school enrollment by the different ways men and women appear to process ethical compromise.
• at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, David, and she's noticed over the years that there are always more men than women in her classes
• men tend to have more lenient ethical standards than women, and secondly, that negotiators are more likely to tell a blatant lie to a female counterpart than a male counterpart.
• men tend to apply ethical principles egocentrically. And what that means is that when an ethical decision affects them negatively, they're likely to perceive the situation as being unethical. But when the situation benefits them, they're likely to say: Well, it's a gray area - it's not such a big deal.
• at in every step of the process, right from business school on to the actual corporate world, women are confronting a triple hurdle. The first hurdle is that men are more willing to accept jobs that involve ethical compromise. Men seem to be less plagued by ethical doubt. And women are not only plagued by ethical doubt, they're actually targeted for deception.
• It's her hope that if women actually understand the way they're thinking about business, that they actually understand that process, they will find a way to stay in the game and also stay ethical.

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• You might be wondering why it is OK for Syrian President Bashar Assad to kill 100,000 people with guns and bombs, but it's absolutely outrageous for him to kill 1,400 people with poison gas. Is death really better when one is getting blown to smithereens by a cluster bomb, rather than suffocating from sarin?

• The answer traces back to the centuries-old effort to outlaw war's worst atrocities, especially attacks on civilians, according to Edward Spiers, author of "A History of Chemical and Biological Weapons."

  "The argument is that chemical weapons are indiscriminate in their effects and will injure or incapacitate people, animals and even plants that are in their path,"
• As far back as the 18th century, poisoning wells in warfare was considered cowardly -- and against the rules of gentlemanly killing. After World War I, when nearly 100,000 soldiers suffered the horrors of mustard gas, much of the world signed onto the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which banned countries from using chemical weapons first in a conflict.
• But Mr. Kerry failed to mention that it took the United States half a century to ratify the Gevena Protocol. In the meantime, we dropped napalm on Japan
• We dropped Agent Orange -- a toxic defoliant -- on Vietnam
• we continued to support Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as he gassed Iranian soldiers and villages almost daily
• Fast forward to now. What's so different? Well, for one thing, the world passed a new, tougher treaty in 1993. Americans ratified it and began destroying U.S. stockpiles of poisons. We are slated to be finished in 2021.
• It is a noble goal to rid the world of chemical weapons. It is noble to try to force brutal dictators to live up to certain standard of civility. But for those standards to be real, we have to enforce them fairly, on behalf of our enemies as well as our allies.

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• The percentage of U.S. adults who consider abortion to be morally wrong (49%) far exceeds the percentage who express this view about in vitro fertilization (12%), non-embryonic stem cell research (16%) or embryonic stem cell research (22%).

   

  Only 15% of the public thinks that having an abortion is morally acceptable. By comparison, about a third of U.S. adults say they personally view IVF and both forms of stem cell research as morally acceptable practices.

• So the federal government, at a time when it is cutting education spending, is preparing to spend $415,000 during the next 15 years to imprison a man for innocently possessing seven shotgun shells while trying to help a widow in the neighborhood. And, under the law, there is no early release: Mr. Young will spend the full 15 years in prison.

  This case captures what is wrong with our "justice" system: We have invested in mass incarceration in ways that are crushingly expensive, break up families and are often simply cruel. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States has almost one-quarter of the world's prisoners.

  This hasn't always been the case, but it is the result of policies such as mandatory minimum sentences since the 1970s.
• Almost everyone seems to acknowledge that locking up vast numbers of nonviolent offenders is a waste of money. California devotes $179,400 to keep a juvenile in detention for a year, and spends less than $10,000 per student in its schools.
• Granted, mass incarceration may have been one factor in reduced crime in the last couple of decades; there's mixed evidence. But, if so, the economic and social cost has been enormous -- including the breakup of families
• There's also contrary evidence that incarceration, especially of young people, doesn't work well in preventing crime, especially for young people. One careful study of 35,000 young offenders by Anna Aizer and Joseph J. Doyle Jr. reached the startling conclusion that jailing juveniles leads them to be more likely to commit crimes as adults.

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• our primary vocation as Christ followers is not to "stay pure," but rather to cultivate shalom. From Isaiah's picture of a wolf living peacefully with a lamb (11:6), to Paul's description of a new reality that obliterates racial, socioeconomic, and gender-based power structures (Gal. 3:28), the biblical vision of shalom dissolves any notion of hierarchy. All of creation joyfully submits to the beautiful rule of its Creator. There's no room for one creature to hold another creature (or creation itself) in contempt; God alone occupies a superior plane.

   

    Of course, it's possible to religiously avoid disdainful language while being seized with contemptuous thoughts. But, as the Book of James reminds us, our tongues are like rudders to the ships of our thought lives. Taming our language, in other words, is a good place to start.

• a new way of quickly diagnosing genetic diseases in newborns and the potential impac
• today, researchers announced they have developed a new way of testing an infant's DNA that can scan for hundreds of genetic disorders and get results in just two days.
• Dr. Stephen Kingsmore led the research team at Children's Mercy Hospitals in Kansas City
• genetic diseases are a particular problem for physicians just because of the staggering number of them that present in children, about 3,500 diseases.
• there are treatments available for about 500 of the 3,500 diseases. Not all of these treatments are truly effective, but they all have some benefit.
• even for those for whom there isn't a treatment available, getting a definitive diagnosis, and doing that quickly, makes a huge, huge impact on families who have this shock of a horribly ill baby.
• We estimate that the cost today is about $13,500 per baby. That's really the reason why we felt it was a very good place to start with newborns in an intensive care unit, because hospital stays are very expensive in these children.
• What do the doctors do if they pick up a marker in this baby that predisposes him or her to a disease much later in life
• If you decode an entire genome, you find things that you wanted to see and possibly things that you didn't really want to see. And that's some of the beauty of what we have described today

• we are targeting -- using this software system, just the regions of the genome which are relevant to a given baby.

   

  And so we don't actually see the regions which are off-target. And this gets around this, this phenomenal issue by giving relevant information, but by not seeing the information that's irrelevant to what's going on in a given baby at a given time.

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• A generation ago, working-class parents spent slightly more time with their kids than college-educated parents. Now college-educated parents spend an hour more every day. This attention gap is largest in the first three years of life when it is most important.
• Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids' enrichment activities, like tutoring and extracurriculars, by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.
• Richer kids are roughly twice as likely to play after-school sports.
• They are much more likely to do nonsporting activities, like theater, yearbook and scouting. They are much more likely to attend religious services.
• Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since.
• Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.
• The political system directs more money to health care for the elderly while spending on child welfare slides.
• Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them -- less time calling their opponents out-of-touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that comprehensively address the problem. It's politically tough to do that, but the alternative is national suicide.

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• New York City is dispensing the morning-after pill to girls as young as 14 at more than 50 public high schools, sometimes even before they have had sex.
• Plan B emergency contraception is about 90 percent effective to prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex.

• Nurse practitioners or physicians dispense the pills, and parents can sign an opt-out form, preventing their daughters from taking part. Only about 1 to 2 percent of parents have opted out, according to the city Health Department.

  The program is seen as a way to reduce a startling number: More than 7,000 New York City girls ages 15 to 17 get pregnant each year. More than two-thirds of those pregnancies end in abortions.

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• "When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising [child custody] rights,
• "When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising [child custody] rights,"

• a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child."

  Astonishingly, in nearly every state, men who father children through rape can assert child custody and visitation rights. Thirty-one states offer no restrictions whatsoever.

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