June 2011 Archive

The government is launching a new anti-smoking campaign with very realistic, quasi gruesome and definitely shocking images of the devastation smoking can have on the human body and soul. These images will be printed on packages of cigarettes.

There is a national public consensus that smoking is addictive and a risky behavior. It is estimated that approximately 20% of adult in America are smokers. We most likely all have family members, friends and colleagues who smoke and we may be smoking ourselves. For transparency purposes, I am an ex- smoker, now addicted to the nicotine gum!

According to the American Heart Association smoking is the most important preventable cause of premature death in the United States. Thousands people die each year of heart diseases and lung cancer caused by smoking. According to the National Cancer Institute cigarette smoking causes an estimated 443,000 deaths each year, including approximately 49,400 deaths due to exposure to secondhand smoke.

The Healthcare cost of treating diseases caused by smoking is staggering.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention smokers costs $96 billion a year healthcare costs and $97 billion a year in lost productivity. Smoking puts an unfair economic burden on other because of limited medical resources.

The good news is that the prevalence of smoking has been in steady decrease over the years.

What has ethics to do with smoking we might ask? Well, smoking is definitely not a virtue; some consider it to be a vice (a bad habit).

Smoking is a personal decision and an expression of one’s freedom. Yet the consequences of that decision impacts more than the smokers themselves.  Furthermore, governments’ efforts to dissuade from smoking and encourage smokers to quit, whether by anti-smoking campaign, banning smoking in public areas and public education through the media, should be applauded. These efforts have proven to be effective and have saved lives and money.

The ethical issue, I believe is one of freedom versus responsibility. Where does my right to smoke end and where does my responsibility to those that surround me and to society begin? Do I truly believe that I am my “brother’s keeper?” Obviously, that determination has to be made on an individual level

Freedom without responsibility can lead to dire consequences.

As Charles Kingsley, the British author and social reformist, once said:

“There are two freedoms:

The false, where a man is free to do what he likes;

The true, where he is free to do what he ought.”

Dr. Kevorkian, aka “Doctor Death” met his own two weeks ago of pneumonia. He was an advocate of assisted suicide and according to his own admission assisted at least 130 patients to end their lives.

According to the Suicide Act of 1961 anyone that “aids and abets” another to take its own life can be subject to a maximum of 14 years in jail.

Dr. Kevorkian served 8 years of a 10-to-25 year sentence in 1999. He was released on parole in 2007 on the condition that he would not resume offering assistance and advice on committing suicide. He abstained but continued speaking on what he believed were the merits of assisted suicide.

Until 1961 it was illegal to commit suicide which means that if you tried and failed you could be subject to detention!

The issue of suicide and assisted suicide is a deep moral one.

According to some psychologists, we have all contemplated suicide at one time in our lives but few of us have actually taken steps to accomplish it. The most current statistics we have on suicides dates to 2007. That year in the U.S. alone, 34,598 people took their own lives.

Those that advocate for the right to commit suicide claim that it is an individual right, the right to self determination.

Those who oppose legalizing Euthanasia claim that suicide is the result of intense psychological despair that can be addressed by professional help.  Furthermore, they argue that death by suicide hurts more than the person who commits it. More often than not, it will cause distress to all those people close to the deceased, such as family, friends and colleagues.

Suicide is condemned by most religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam consider suicide a grave sin.   The Catholic Church, in the past, refused to give a proper religious burying to those who had died by suicide.

Do we have a right to prevent someone from committing suicide? I believe it is not only a right but an obligation. According to French Law, every French citizen has an obligation “to assist someone in danger” and can be prosecuted for not doing so. We should do all we can to prevent it from happening but not feel guilty if we do not succeed because ultimately, it is a personal decision.

We may never be confronted with the issue of suicide but we may be faced with an ethical dilemma when asked for help. Helping others is a wonderful thing to do and a great way to live. However there are some situations when the help we are asked to give is not real help. If we accede to the request we become enablers, making it possible for the person asking for help to hurt himself or herself as well as others. That is particularly true in cases of drug addiction and alcoholism.

How can we determine, when we are asked to help, if the action we are asked to take will provide real help or if it is enabling?

In some situations, the answer is obvious such as giving money to a drunkard in front of a bar or loaning money to a gambler. In other situations, it may be more complex.

Below are some questions we should ask ourselves before taking any action.

1.     Will the help we are about to give have a positive impact in the long run? Will it provide a long-term solution to a present problem?

2.     What would we want be done to us if we were in the situation of the one we are considering helping? In other word, we should apply the Golden Rule.

3.     Is there any other action that we can take that might provide a long term solution to the existing problem? Refusing to be an enabler is not enough! We should go beyond the enabling request and look at what is the real need and see what we can do.

As Norman B. Rice, the first African-American mayor of a large U.S. city (Seattle) once said:

“Dare to reach out your hand into the darkness, to pull another hand into the light.”

It is with reluctance that I approach this topic. We are being saturated in the media about Mr. Anthony Weiner’s actions, his lies about them and finally his confession. Henry J. Stern, Director of New York Civic and former Parks and Recreation Commissioner writes in his column that he believes Mr. Weiner’s behavior is indicative of mental disorder. He adds: “Other leaders of countries and cities have been mentally ill. They continue until their disorder becomes public, usually as a result of an act so at variance with conventional ethical standards that it would not be tolerated by the electorate.”

Mr. Weiner’s despicable conduct does raise some interesting ethical questions. Ethics is about values. What values have been stomped by Mr. Weiner’s behavior?

Let me list just four.

1.     Accountability:

When you engage in politics and become an elected official you now have to give an account of your behavior not only to your conscience, your wife, your family and friends but also to your constituency, the people that voted for you. Mr. Weiner was elected with 59% of the vote in 2010 which translates to 47,004 people who trusted him to represent them.

2.     Honesty:

Some people, regrettably in my view, will be ready to ignore and forget his inappropriate twitters and Facebook activities but they will have a much harder time forgiving his dishonesty and repeated public lies about them.

3.     Decency:

Decency is defined as behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality and respectability. Sending lewd photos of yourself to women you do not even know highly qualifies for gross indecency.

4.     Faithfulness/Loyalty:

It is interesting to note that in most if not all of the media coverage and conversations about this disgusting episode, reference is made that Mr. Weiner while engaged in these activities is a married man. The fact that it matters to people is very reassuring to me. Even if we have, as S.E. Cupp wrote in her NY Daily News column on June 8^th “an alarming high threshold for immorality” the values of fidelity and the keeping of promises seemed to be still highly and universally respected.

There is hope for society.

King Solomon once wrote:

“Do not let loyalty and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart“”

We all lie, or at the very least, we have lied in the past. There are many different types of lies, such as “white lies” said in compassion or lying by omission or by simply by ignorance. What I am addressing in this blog is the deliberate intention to deceive. It is interesting to note that one of the many names of the devil is the deceiver.

James b. Stewart, the bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner just published a new book entitled Tangle Webs: How False Statements are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff.

In his interview on NPR he said that the crime of perjury is a serious as it always was but that it is not perceived as such. The general attitude is that “everyone does it.” He believes that perjury has reached epidemic proportion but most of the time it is undetected and when it is, it is not prosecuted. He strongly believes that perjury is very damaging to society because our whole justice system rests on an honor code that expects people to say the truth, particularly under oath.

In the conclusion of an article entitled Why We Lie, published by MOVE! Magazine, David Finn writes: “We should be scrupulous about not telling others what, to our knowledge, we don’t think is correct. And we should never be a spokesperson or provide communications resources for the policies or position of a company, a cause or a country with which we personally disagree.”

A consultant for Cap Gemini once told me, (in a bar,) that he believed that every human interaction is based on need. It is a rather cynical way of looking at life but one that has some validity. According to this view, we lie to protect or guarantee something we believe we need such as as money, reputation or even affection.

Dr. Alex Lickerman in his blog posting in Psychology Today, agrees. He says that lying is about immediate reward. He believes that we lie to obtain protection. We want to “protect ourselves, our interests, our image and others.” He says that there is a wonderful “benefit to aiming for honesty” because “it motivates us to become all the good things lying helps us pretend we already are.” He thinks that by making every effort not to lie, we are actually improving our character and reputation.

I believe the primary motivation that leads us to lie is fear. We lie when we are afraid of losing something we have or not obtaining something we need. We also lie when we are afraid of being exposed and shamed for something we have done or said.

Fear is rarely a good motivator and we should be caution not to take any action that is motivated by fear.

As the author Lloyd Douglas once wrote:

“If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all thinking, damages his personality and makes him a landlord to a ghost.”