ALLEGORY
1. Stopping to help the couple was a generous and ethical act. As with any time one trusts strangers, it involved some level of risk. Still, it was the right thing for the older motorist to do, a pure Golden Rule decision.
2. When anyone sees someone being abused or mistreated, whether it is a stranger or not, he or she should register an objection, and if the abuse is egregious, intervene to the extent necessary to protect the abused.
Attacking a motorist who has stopped to help you for any reason is the mark of a jackass;
Defending oneself when one has been attacked by a man 30 years younger for nothing more than an appropriate reprimand is justified;
The incident reeks of Moral Luck. The Good Samaritan did everything right, and yet the people he tried to help are worse off, and he may end up being charged with using excessive force. Nevertheless, he did the right thing, twice. The fact that it all spun out of control does not mean what he did was any less right. Bad luck turned a generous and ethical act into a fiasco.
Lesson: Doing the right thing doesn’t always result in desirable results, and proactive ethical conduct often has risks. This is, in part, what Theodore Roosevelt was referring to when suggested that those who would accomplish great things should “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.”
Michael, who knows college culture from personal experience, elaborates on the University of Miami athletics scandal, which he correctly notes is hardly news, just a predictable escalation of corruption we have tolerated for too long. When the reaction to an instance of corruption is “well, that’s no surprise!” it is a symptom that we are becoming inured to a cultural condition that should not be tolerated.
Among the many provocative, informative and heart-breaking comments to the Ethics Alarms post about the continued persecution of convicted sex offenders after they have completed their sentences...
...by putting people who have already served their debt to society in situations where their very instability repeats the internal conditions that led to offense.
Charlie Sheen tends to have that effect. The man is superficially charming but thoroughly loathsome, so bereft of anything resembling decency or common sense that the media and the public can enjoy his prolonged flameout without a twinge of guilt. And yet he's mesmerizing for precisely that reason.
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On some deep, horrible level that most people don't want to admit, that's what makes Charlie Sheen darkly attractive, and impossible to ignore, much less shun: his sheer, arrogant, delighted-with-himself I-don't-give-a-damnness. We have to play by rules. He doesn't. He's the guy who gets away with it.
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He is the Anton Chighur of tabloid media, capable of withstanding (or so it seems) any amount of controlled substances as well as public shaming.
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Back in 2000, right before Charlie Sheen started on "Spin City," I interviewed his father, Martin Sheen, who told me that he'd personally taken his son to jail after his last flameout because he couldn't bear the thought of enabling him anymore.
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Charlie wouldn't have been impressed. What good is a giant penis to a man with no balls?
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Harper doesn't terrorize women; he uses them, but only if on some level they want to be used. He has no ambitions. He just wants to get high, get laid, and get away with it.
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Penn, the head of cartoonishly evil P.R. firm Burson-Marsteller, wrote a little Huffington Post column warning the president that he will surely lose reelection if he "abandons" the "vital center."
taken by his dual approach of not denying or suppressing the anger that he still lives with -- which for quite some time led him to soak himself in drugs, alcohol, and sex -- but also doing his best to dissipate and reduce the pain and anger.