So,
I have several chapters to read this week and yesterday's chapter was on ethics.
Good gawd! Again.
Business. Law. Ethics. In one chapter?
Right?
I plugged my nose and dove in. Actually, it wasn't as bad as some of the stuff I had read on ethics. Probably because they were trying not to pin anything down too much because it might be a good thing to take a strong ethical stance when discussing business and law. That would lead to students going, "Yeah, but ..."
As it turns out, they didn't connect ethics with law in the way the last text did. In fact, they went the route of quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, "I agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is not law at all.'" Later, they said that a person should give consideration to the law when considering ethics, which is good advice for the wrong reason. A person should give consideration to laws but understand that they have no relation with ethics but a person should be aware of the penalties that may be imposed against them and put that into their calculation when determining a course of action.
In fact, I thought I was actually going to make it through the entire chapter without marking a single thing for this blog, which is both good and bad. Then they decided to touch on the gray area a bit. What happens when you find yourself in the conundrum of being faced with two choices, both of which are good, or both of which are bad? How do you determine which is the best right or the least worst bad? Then they brought out a heavyweight of difficult decisions.
President Harry Truman was faced with this monster. Should he continue to fight a conventional war and lose who-knows-how-many men in battle or should he unleash Godzilla in the form of atomic weapons killing a couple hundred thousand Japanese citizens, injuring tens of thousands more, and inflicting the ravages of radiation on countless others? "The ethics checklist presents no clear-cut answer."
Except that it does. The very first item on the author's checklist is, "What are the facts?"
Well, the facts are that Japan had agreed to surrender prior to the presentation of the mushroom clouds. Their only condition was to keep the emperor in place as the emperor. Truman refused, stating that surrender must be unconditional. Then he dropped the fires of hell on the people. Japan surrendered unconditionally and the United States kept the emperor in place as the emperor to help stabilize the country.
After atomic bombs, they probably needed the stability.
I think the point is ... nevermind.
He never minds anyway.
True dat.
You know, I can hear you guys right?
You know, I usually don't speak much about Constitutional Rights and such unless an article brings them up or it's part of one of my classes. I tend to look more at fundamental rights and, when laws are passed, the governments ability to enforce them. The Internets has, and will even more dramatically in the future, changed the planet and the lives of the people on it.
But, since we've been discussing the First Amendment, I thought this story I ran across this morning was interesting and appropriate. It is now illegal in Missouri for teachers to interact with students online except on school websites. It's been labeled the Facebook law because teachers may not have any contact with students on Facebook, which happens to be the most popular social site at the moment.
The law is stoopid.
That's a strong and well-researched stance.
Yes. Quite.
Actually, the law made me think back to my high school days. I had this history teacher (and because of my complete lack of memory - I can't remember his name) who was a great teacher. Interesting, funny, energetic, and any other word that you would not use to describe a high school history class. He was much more about the people, what they did, and, most importantly, why they did it.
If he were teaching today and I was his student, I'd follow him on Facebook or his blog, if he had one (as long as I didn't live in Missouri where learning from great teachers in the off-hours is illegal).
This then escorted my mind back to the present and the reality of such laws. If he had a blog and students visited it, would he be breaking the law? Would he have to ban their IP addresses if he knew them? Couldn't they just use other computers? Just how does the state of Missouri plan on monitoring every single student's online activity to make sure they don't have any contact with their teachers?
If they tap into Skynet to track everything, will this stop teachers from sleeping with students?
It seems that in some cases, the laws may be quite dismissive of Constitutional Rights but it also seems that with the Internet, it's possible to be quite dismissive about the laws.
Thoughts?
In addition to your thoughts, give me a caption for this:
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