This then leads to the further question of whether, if she wants to be lied to, we ought to act in accordance with her wishes or not.
.. If we were certain she wanted the truth, and that she would not be haunted for years by re-enactments in her mind of the death, we ought not to lie. But if it were certain she wanted her own hopes for an instant death to be confirmed, it is permissible to do so.
.. Some lies are wrong because they have bad consequences; some lies are wrong because they betray trust; some are wrong because they are the outcome of vicious traits such as cowardice or selfishness; some are wrong because they deny the autonomy of rational agents. This makes the development of ethical theories more complicated than one would wish.
The Brutalism of Ted Cruz
But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.
.. But Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them.
.. The best conservatism balances support for free markets with a Judeo-Christian spirit of charity, compassion and solidarity. Cruz replaces this spirit with Spartan belligerence. He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate. This Trump-Cruz conservatism looks more like tribal, blood and soil European conservatism than the pluralistic American kind.
.. It became clear then, why right-wing conservative Republicans felt the need to explicitly add the adjective to their name – it certainly is not inherent in it. In fact, the phrase is oxymoronic. Imagine having to say “compassionate liberalism” – redundant.
.. Republicans are going to be faced with a choice—do they want their party’s message carried by a member of the Vengeance-is-Mine wing? It could win, in an election where angry sells and people may be looking for change, and therefore might be willing to throw the dice. But, I don’t think even most of the party, much less the rest of the country, would be especially happy with the results. You can only rule with that type of an approach, you can’t govern. The American people will not like rulers.
.. I keep thinking of Wiesel’s concentration camp character’s statement in Night that Hitler is the only one he trusts, because he is the only one who didn’t lie to the Jews.
.. And that platform is built exclusively on appeals to the very basest of human instincts: greed, selfishness, fear, prejudice, resentment, bigotry, ignorance, and aggression. Cruz and Trump merely express in plainer language what all the GOP candidates for president espouse as policy positions.
.. In advertising, the basic wisdom used to be: “sex sells.” Among conservatives, the basic wisdom is: “fear sells.”
Fearful people do not practice compassion and mercy.
.. As an evangelical, I am appalled by how most evangelicals act politically. Our faith never calls for us to use the force of government to impose our faith on others. We are to do it by example and win people over. We are to be the salt of the earth, not the gunpowder. We are to be a light unto the world, not a nuclear blast.
How Johnson & Johnson Set the Gold Standard for Ethics
One day in 1979, James Burke, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson, summoned more than 20 of his key people into a room, jabbed his finger at an internal document, and proposed destroying it.
The document was hardly incriminating. Entitled “Our Credo,” its plainspoken list of principles—including a higher duty to “mothers, and all others who use our products”—had been a fixture on company walls since 1943. But Burke was worried that managers had come to regard it as something like the Magna Carta: an important historical document, but hardly a tool for modern decision making. “If we’re not going to live by it, let’s tear it off the wall,” Burke told the group, using the weight of his office to force a debate. And that is what he got: a room full of managers debating the role of moral duties in daily business, and then choosing to resuscitate the credo as a living document.
Three years later, after reports emerged of a deadly poisoning of Tylenol capsules in Chicago-area stores, Johnson & Johnson’s reaction became the gold standard of corporate crisis response. But the company’s swift decisions—to remove every bottle of Tylenol capsules from store shelves nationwide, publicly warn people not to consume its product, and take a $100 million loss—weren’t really decisions. They flowed more or less automatically from the signal sent three years earlier. Burke, in fact, was on a plane when news of the poisoning broke. By the time he landed, employees were already ordering Tylenol off store shelves.
Bethany Mclean: Everything You Know About Martin Shkreli Is Wrong—or Is It?
In one breath, he calls himself a capitalist and in the next an altruist—the latter because, he claims, his real goal is to invent new drugs for rare diseases. Turing recently announced discounts of Daraprim for hospitals, and Shkreli says that for people without insurance it will cost only $1 a pill. For everyone else, insurance, which he argues is paid for by corporate America’s profits, will cover the cost. “I’m like Robin Hood,” he continues. “I’m taking Walmart’s money and doing research for diseases no one cares about.”
.. In the summer of 2007, the fund tanked when Shkreli made a $2.6 million bet, through Lehman Brothers, that the market would decline. When he was wrong, he refused to pay Lehman, instead making “veiled threats of filing a bankruptcy,” according to a lawsuit. But it was Lehman which went down in flames, during the 2008 meltdown, and although the court found in its favor, the verdict was vacated... On May 29, he tweeted, without explanation, that “this is one of the best days of my life!” The next day he sold almost $4.5 million worth of his own stock in the company. This infuriated investors who believed he was cashing out... According to an affidavit filed by Pierotti and referenced in the Retrophin lawsuit, Shkreli began harassing his family, including writing his wife a letter that said, “I hope to see you and your four children homeless and will do whatever I can to assure this,”.. “Mr. Shkreli advised me that he hasn’t talked to Mr. Pierotti in over a year so how could he be harassing him,” wrote the officer in a report detailing the incident. “I suggested to Mr. Shkreli that he listen to what I was advising him of and not try to make denials based on word semantics …. Mr. Shkreli then hung up.”.. If there’s a bright spot for those who think Shkreli’s actions are unconscionable, it’s that the attention paid to the Daraprim price increase may spell an end to the whole practice. “He basically ruined the concept for other companies,” one biotech banker says.