White Courtesy Telephone

Peter Singer on the Distinction Between Good and Bad Charity

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Peter Singer’s op ed on the distinction between good and bad charity is a provocation.  It’s a provocation because he makes a strong assertion—that his brand of Utilitarian ethics can help philanthropy “make the biggest possible impact in the world,” and because he supports this assertion with the barest hint of an argument.  He presents what are typical Utilitarian-style dilemmas and invites the reader to resolve them—e.g., should you use a $100,000 gift to help build a new museum wing or to save 1,000 people from blindness?—but these thought experiments fall far short of establishing his thesis, and they suffer from a number of hair-raising leaps in logic that are, in my experience, typical of academic moral theory.*  More troubling, perhaps, Singer takes great care to narrowly frame the choices faced by the average donor, magically reducing the breadth and complexity of these choices to a bare Utilitarian disjunction.

To understand Professor Singer’s point of view, it helps to know something about the theory of Utility developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and elaborated upon by scores of moral philosophers ever since.  In a nutshell, Mill argues that when making a choice between two actions, we should choose the action that maximizes the overall “utility,” or, equivalently, that produces the most good.  For Mill the greatest good, the summum bonum, was happiness, which he further defined as pleasure and the absence of suffering.

Note that this is not a theory about how people do in fact make moral choices; it’s a prescription for how we should make these choices.  It’s intended to regulate rather than describe behavior.  And it appears to lead us to right action in a wide variety of cases we encounter daily.

I will spare the reader the dizzying number of arguments made for and against Mill’s views; the creative variations (Rule Utilitarianism, Preference Utilitarianism, etc.); the head-spinning alternatives to Utilitarian-style theories.  I will, however, sketch some of the most salient problems with the theory and invite the reader to do a little more research, weighing all these things in his or her heart:

1. The first challenge facing any prescriptive moral theory is the question of why we should accept it in the first place.  There are, after all, competing formulations (e.g., the Golden Rule, the Categorical Imperative, etc.) that inspire what many of us would judge to be “moral” behavior, and that are not clearly equivalent to the Principle of Utility. Professor Singer criticizes the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) website because it asserts that there’s no objective answer to the question, ‘What is the most urgent issue that a donor might address?’  He then attempts to prove his point by sketching an argument grounded in the Principle of Utility.  But since there is no deductively valid argument establishing the truth of the Principle of Utility, why should we accept his argument?  I should clarify that there is no such deductively valid argument anywhere—not in Singer’s article, nor in his books, nor in anybody’s books.  It’s not in these places because it doesn’t exist.  Inductive arguments abound, but there is none that moral theorists universally judge to be strong.  In light of this uncertainty, RPA’s assertion doesn’t seem so far off the mark.

So how do you make a case for any moral theory?  At the very least you would want to show that the moral judgments generated by your theory accord best with those made by … whom? the Dalai Lama? Kim Kardashian? some other competent moral authority?  If our theory doesn’t yield the judgments we expect, shouldn’t we abandon it?  And here we come to a second problem with Singer’s argument …

2. The Principle of Utility appears to support some outrageous moral choices.  Since Professor Singer is fond of hypothetical scenarios, here’s one of my favorites from college days.  Imagine that in some post-apocalyptic world, you are a denizen of a nation of sadists.  You take pleasure in watching other people experience pain.  One day, the only other human being on earth chances across your borders and is taken prisoner.  One of your number suggests that each day at six o’clock in the evening, the unfortunate prisoner, who is by no means a masochist, be tortured and that his torture be televised throughout the country bringing pleasure to hundreds of millions of sadists.  As a good Utilitarian you reason that the pain inflicted on the prisoner is far outweighed by the overwhelming amount of pleasure you produce for your fellow citizens.  If the Principle of Utility requires that we torture a human being for the pleasure of others, can it really be a guide for right action?

This is but one of hundreds of counterexamples adduced throughout the years to cast doubt on Utilitarian theories in their many variations.  You can find a classic thought experiment, the so-called the “Trolley Problem,” and some of its cousins described here.

3. Those readers who are already on their second or third cup of coffee will have noticed some of the lacunae in my gloss of Utilitarian theory.  How do we, except in a few very narrow cases, know what action will produce the most good?  How can I measure the good I produce?  And who gets to determine what it is that we should try to maximize—i.e., what it is that constitutes the “greatest good”?

On this last point, you will find a great deal of shimmy-shammying in Singer’s article.  Initially, he asks us where a $100,000 donation will do the most good, without telling us what he assumes the nature of that good to be.  In the very next sentence, we’re asked where this donation will “lead to the bigger improvement in the lives of those affected by it.”  But is this the same as producing the most good?  A little further on in the article, it’s “the biggest possible positive difference to the world” that we’re after, which then shifts immediately to “the most positive impact for your time and money.”  Are these all equivalent?  And if so, doesn’t Professor Singer need to establish that they are?  And what, in instrumental terms, does any one of them mean?  These are his formulations, but might not the greatest good for some be that we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves?

                         *               *               *               *               *               *

Here’s the kicker: Professor Singer is intimately acquainted with these and many other objections to Utilitarian-style arguments.  And yet he proposes to bring into philanthropic choice-making—as part of some purported “emerging international movement”— the same apparatus that has failed to win consensus in the domain of moral theory and that moreover, in the eyes of many, leads to manifestly bad, and, in some cases, horrifying moral choices!

Professor Singer is clearly counting on the philanthropic community to engage the argument and sort these issues out in reasoned debate.  This, for reasons I’ve alluded to before, is not likely to happen.

In my view, the biggest challenge to Singer’s suggestion is the problem of the philanthropic “blank slate”— what I’ve called elsewhere the “Ur Question” in philanthropy.  In Professor Singer’s scenarios, the choices for the donor have already been tightly narrowed: e.g., you either prevent blindness or you help open a new museum wing.  Some form of Utilitarian reasoning might help you there.  But many donors, when they start out on their philanthropic journeys, do not face such stark choices.  They want to do the most good they can for the world but encounter an infinite number of possibilities.  Is it better to fund direct services for the poor, or to fund the changing of those social, economic, and political structures that produce poor people in such prodigious numbers?  It might be true that all lives have equal value, but do I or do I not have a greater responsibility to those in my own country?  Shouldn’t I get my own house in order first?

These pressing questions are not addressed by Singer’s suggestion that, “In general, where human welfare is concerned, we will achieve more if we help those in extreme poverty in developing countries, as our dollars go much further there.”  Nor is there the slightest hint in Singer’s article that we might maximize the Good by addressing the causes of extreme poverty in these countries.  Once we start contemplating these and other options as donors, the space of possibilities becomes rather more crowded and the dream of a hedonistic calculus governing right behavior in philanthropy becomes that much more distant.

 

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* I had the opportunity to study moral theory as a graduate student and later taught it, both as a teaching fellow for Michael Sandel at Harvard University and as an assistant professor of philosophy at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.  The strangest argument in Singer’s article is the one that proceeds as follows:

Suppose you have a choice between visiting the art museum, including its new wing, or going to see the museum without visiting the new wing. Naturally, you would prefer to see it with the new wing. But now imagine that an evil demon declares that out of every 100 people who see the new wing, he will choose one, at random, and inflict 15 years of blindness on that person. Would you still visit the new wing? You’d have to be nuts. Even if the evil demon blinded only one person in every 1,000, in my judgment, and I bet in yours, seeing the new wing still would not be worth the risk.

If you agree, then you are saying, in effect, that the harm of one person’s becoming blind outweighs the benefits received by 1,000 people visiting the new wing.

This last conclusion doesn’t follow at all from Singers’ premises.  There are countless reasons why we might avoid the new wing without our being forced to accept the conclusion that “the harm of one person’s becoming blind outweighs the benefits received by 1,000 people visiting the new wing.”  We might forego a visit, for example, because we know that there’s another equally good museum down the road that has no record of blinding its patrons through the effect of shadowy “demons.”  We are not, in other words, forced to make the choice Professor Singer believes we must make.

Related articles

The Rules Do Not Collapse Smart-ly

Steve Jobs, The Meaning of a Nonprofit, and The Moral Imagination

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I.

I remember my sense of anticipation some 18 years ago when I landed my first foundation job. None of my friends or colleagues had any inkling what happened inside these black boxes that consistently swallowed our proposals and issued polite rejections.

I had heard that foundations were about social change, that they were about marshaling private capital for the public good. I was excited by the idea of working with colleagues who had the time to think deeply about our community’s greatest challenges, who were not constantly passing the hat to pay the light bill.

My first day on the job, I met former activists who knew what it was like to grow up black and poor; I admired the view from my 28th story window of the city I loved. On my second day, I chided myself for my overly romantic idealizations of foundation work. Of course sexism, careerism, and other isms could exist here as elsewhere. But still, foundations were anointed institutions, set apart to serve as the conscience of the community. On my third day I was wondering what I had gotten myself into.

If my idealizations were so far off the mark, what then was a foundation supposed to be about?

One reader of a recent post commented thoughtfully about the purpose and identity of community foundations:

… [S]hould philanthropy uphold or challenge the status quo? I've always seen the role and purpose of [community foundations] as being one of brokerage between the two positions. We stand of necessity with a foot in both camps, and it is our specific function to interpret each side to the other and make them intelligible. A [community foundation] that plants itself squarely on one side or the other will betray its mission.  …  We serve mutually incompatible constituencies—proponents of social change vs upholders of the status quo. All over the world, I suspect, people in [community foundations] are deliberately muddying waters in order to satisfy both at once. It’s what we’re good at, and if we leaned too far in either direction we’d stop being [community foundations] and become something else.

So beautifully expressed. I immediately begin to wonder about the apparent cold-bloodedness of our hypothetical translator. Was he supposed to have no feelings one way or the other about what he was asked to interpret, and if so, why did he bother? Did he interpret ultimately for the sake of a paycheck or for the sake of justice? And did it matter?

It’s not only community foundations that struggle to keep one foot in two camps, to broker between the lived experience of poverty, say, and the privileged world of trustees.  Small and large private foundations struggle with this as well, as does every nonprofit intent on survival.  Can an organization interpret the world to everything and everyone except itself?

Perhaps a community foundation ceases to be a community foundation not when it sides with justice, but when it fails to understand what living in community requires of us.  Perhaps any foundation or charity betrays its purpose, its identity, when corporate thinking completely replaces moral imagination.

II.

I expect many observers of the nonprofit field have grown tired of arguments that pit values like efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability against more liberal values like adaptability, empathy, and justice. Organizations that embody the latter need a nonprofit chiropractor to straighten their spines, the argument goes; their stiff-necked corporatist cousins need to work on their flexibility. Those who make these arguments typically come to the triumphant conclusion that we need both kinds of thinking in our field.

Some go further and remind us that the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit, while still relevant to the Internal Revenue Service, has lost its meaning for a new generation of social entrepreneurs who have learned to think outside the IRS’s checkboxes. They argue that there’s a growing sector agnosticism in our field, and that it’s only a matter of time before the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit goes the way of the 8-track tape. They point to the jobs made possible by for-profit companies, to the services they provide and the products they create, and they ask, “Is this not also a kind of social value?”

In our headlong rush to let everything be everything, to embrace blended corporations and the like, it’s important to call to mind some values that cannot be so easily “blended.” Consider one of the stories currently in circulation about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple.

The A-List: New York in This Time of Fireblazing Movements

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As I watch The A-List: New York, a new reality series on the Logo Channel, I think back to a talk I once heard by an activist who spent his life advocating for the poor of Rio’s favelas.  ‘Please don’t fight for the poor,’ he said, ‘because you think you should like them.  Many of the poor I’ve met are not especially pleasant.’  If I extend that lesson to the The A-List I’m forced to conclude that vapid, self-absorbed, fashion-obsessed gay men should have as much a right to make me want to disown my species as anyone else.

And yet I watch.  I watch.

It’s very pre-postmodern of me, but I always look for the moral center in works of art, whether high or low.  In the case of the The A-List, this appears in the form of an avuncular figure, Mike Ruiz, a fashion photographer who wears tight tee shirts emblazoned with words like “Love Muscle.”  Mr. Ruiz is kind enough to give modeling advice to the beautiful young men who seek his help.  After criticizing one model’s portfolio for being “too Miami,” he sets up a photo shoot to give his oeuvre more of a New York edge.  This involves smearing the young man’s face and arms with grease and photographing him while he evinces looks of world-weariness.  I assume from this ritual that no one can make the A-list in New York unless he still manages to look alluring after having been run over by a cab.

Austin Armacost, aged 22, a “model turned fashion connoisseur” whose antics upend the other characters’ attempts to behave like self-contained professionals, reminds us that “We’re in the middle of a very fireblazing human rights movement right now, so it’s time that people see we’re not freaks or molesting young boys—we’re regular people too.”

Art, he suggests, should function as a mirror held up to Nature.  For a man like me, a man not aging especially well, the mirror thing has gotten pretty old.  Each morning as I stand at my bathroom vanity, I inspect myself and see my Human Nature just barely concealed by my age spots and thinning hair.  At least on The A-List, the characters’ Human Natures spend a lot of time in the gym and look rather fetching parading about in yellow Speedos.

And so I watch, I watch, careful not to let this fireblazing human rights movement pass me by, as so many others have: the sagging pants movement, the tiny little backpack movment, the-rising-inflection-at-the-end-of-your-sentence? movement.  I watch as I might watch a train wreck: awestruck, horrified, but still unable—OK, unwilling—to avert my gaze.



Hurry! Big Pol Sale Ends November 2nd!

… But there’s still plenty of influence to be bought at everyday low, low prices!

While the Citizens United Supreme Court decision might have set back the efforts of advocates working to introduce democracy to the United States, it had the beneficial effect of creating a new market for the buying and selling of political influence.  This is a great boon to those of us concerned about our sagging GDP.

The polling stations will close November 2nd, but don’t worry if you miss this window of opportunity.  Our still-tepid lobbying rules make it perpetual open season on members of Congress. Even Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D., District of Columbia), who hasn’t faced a serious political challenger in years, has given lobbyists the “come hither.” According to a report in the October 18, 2010, issue of the National Review:

The “chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management”—as she described herself—called a lobbyist who had given to her “other colleagues on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee,” but not to her.  And she was puzzled.  “I was, frankly, uh, uh, surprised to see that we don’t have a record, so far as I can tell, of your having given to me despite my, uh, long and deep, uh, work,” ... “In fact … my major work … it’s been essentially in your sector.”

I would fire the lobbyist not only for this oversight but also for failing to help the members of this Subcommittee draft their legislation.  As we learned from the Corrections Corporation of America’s work in Arizona, simply lining the pockets of legislators is not a vigorous enough exercise of our free speech rights.

The Island of the Yooks and the Zooks: Notes on the Systems Heresy

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In philanthropic and nonprofit work, discussions of “systemic reform” can sometimes beguile us.  We might, without realizing it, succumb to the Systems Heresy: the naïve belief that fair institutional structures and a fair enforcement of laws will inevitably produce fair social outcomes.

We understand that unequal initial conditions—a legacy of slavery for one group, say, but not for another—can lead to unequal outcomes, however fairly constituted our institutions and laws might be.  But the problems associated with the Systems Heresy go deeper than this.

Imagine an island of ten million souls inhabited by two tribes, one called the Yooks, the other the Zooks.  The Yooks, who outnumber the Zooks ten to one, part their hair on the right while the Zooks part their hair on the left.  Imagine further that a god—call him Milton—endows the island’s inhabitants with equal abilities and gives to each Yook and Zook five thousand Talents with which he or she might participate in a system of production and exchange.

There’s one problem: the Yooks hate the Zooks.  This bigotry drives the Yooks to give all their business to Yook merchants.  Yooks, who by their overwhelming numbers own most of the island’s wealth, more readily aggregate their capital to increase the productive capacity of their businesses, further favoring Yook communities.  Over time, the Zooks fall behind the Yooks.  Unable to compete effectively with their more numerous and increasingly more prosperous neighbors, Zook communities languish then decay.

This thought experiment suggests one way a fair system with equal initial conditions might lead to unequal social outcomes over time.  It’s certainly not fair of the Yooks to shut out the Zooks, but it’s a bit of a strain to say that this lack of fairness is a property of the island’s system of institutions and laws.  It’s more accurately a moral failing on the part of the Yooks.  This moral failing undermines whatever degree of fairness might be built into the island’s institutional structures.

This is for me the great lesson of the Systems Heresy: systemic reform that doesn’t somehow attend to the values we bring to a given system is a shot in the dark and borders on social engineering of the most speculative variety.

The classically Liberal conception of the state provides a values-neutral framework of rights in which each individual can pursue his or her own vision of the Good.  In a Liberal state, it’s not the government but rather civil society that’s most clearly charged with perfecting and transmitting the values we share as a people.  This great civilizing work happens—or rather, should happen—in our schools and churches, in our trade unions, on the streets, wherever people gather to reflect and deliberate.

I’m not convinced, however, that our discussion and negotiation of values is robust enough to prevent us from injecting the venom of the Yooks into any system we might yet devise or evolve to.  Our ignorance of history, the corporate ownership of the media and its concentration in fewer hands, and the abiding anti-intellectual climate in this country are among the factors exploited by those who resist the kind of social transformation many of us desire and work for.

Systemic reform is necessary, but it’s only one of the battles progressives need to engage.

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Have a thought to share?  Leave a comment by clicking here.

Image source: Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book

Think Impactful. Think Turn-Key. Think Sticky C2C.

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As the new business manager for the White Courtesy Telephone, I asked my assistant Pauline to check out the company we keep in our blogroll.  She found this post from Phil Cubeta on The Role of the Holy Fool:

If we are to cure the souls of our clients, or victims, much less our leaders, we must first cure ourselves of vanity, and of fear. The first sign of wisdom is Motley.  Anyone who thinks that The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the like are enough is a Fool, and a bad one, lacking humor.  Ignorance, dogma, and complacency, bourgeois striving for measurable results denominated in inches, ounces, or dollars are virtues up to a point because they connect you to the mass market and the mass mind in a society devoted to base enjoyments.  But to cure yourself and others you must go a lonelier way.

Look at me, Phil.  Don’t slouch: What’s with all the big words, my friend?  What you write is the Old School thinking of a pre-networked age, more bricks than clicks.

Here, hop aboard the corporate torpedo.

At the White Courtesy Telephone, we believe it’s better to mesh strategically than reconfigure reactively. We know that without infomediaries like ourselves, subscriber communities will be forced to de-optimalize. Our feature set is unmatched, but our one-to-one e-commerce and non-complex incentivization are often considered a terrific achievement.

Quick, Phil: Do you have a 24/7 plan for syndicating new paradigms? I didn’t think so.

We, on the other hand, will transform the power of metrics to exploit.  It may seem realistic, but it’s compelling.

What will you offer them, Phil?  Grown men and women in motley; overcooked servings of satire and parable.  If these things really had the power to change the world, they’d be illegal.  Moral truth is what’s traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Here’s a few bucks.  Get yourself a new hat.  And here’s my card: call me if you want me to do for you what I did for Sean.

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Business-babble courtesy of the Corporate Gibberish Generator at AndrewDavidson.com.

The Nonprofit Money Ethics Quiz

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For each question below, choose the answer that best applies, then check your score at the end of the quiz …

1.  We should accept money from Philip Morris USA for our Snuff Out Teen Smoking campaign.  After all, the Philip Morris tobacco company doesn’t force people to use its products—each of us can choose to smoke or not.  And even if a grant from the Foundation is blood money, and the company will use its support of our program to convince feeble-minded regulators that tobacco companies prefer to see members of the American public die from other causes, the grant will nevertheless succeed in doing some good for the world.  In any case, the real problem with tainted money is that there’s not enough of it.*

Agree or Disagree?

2.  It’s OK to name our theatre for a major donor who really cares nothing for the dramatic arts—and who in fact snores loudly during each performance he attends—rather than name it for our founder who put every penny of his modest savings into the company.  After all, our founder—now an insane pauper living in a discarded refrigerator—doesn’t want the recognition, and the major donor’s gift will clearly accomplish a lot of good.

Agree or Disagree?

3.  Even though the human rights organization I lead champions the cause of prisoners of conscience and other persecuted minorities, it’s perfectly reasonable for my board, when choosing to invest our modest endowment, not to screen for corporations that invest in China Security and Surveillance Technology, a company that operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies.  After all, this company will soon become a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and the tens of thousands of dissidents who are sent to the Chinese gulag every year would want us to hasten China’s entry into the family of nations (including the United States) that marry state-sponsored torture and the denial of basic human rights with the other benefits conferred by free-market economies.

Agree or Disagree?

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Check your score: Score zero points for each “Agree” response and one point for each “Disagree” response.  A score ranging from zero to three indicates that you’re probably human.

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Image source: Curtis Publishing

*Thanks to my colleague Akwasi Aidoo for this bon mot.

How To Free Our Funder Minds ...

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We can start by contemplating, then rejecting, the following two widely held notions.  Ready?  Say omm ...

1.  It’s my job as a funder to separate the wheat from the chaff, the bad nonprofits from the good.  I reward the effective nonprofits by giving them money (for a few years anyway); I discourage the ineffective nonprofits by denying them funding.

What images come to mind when you hear grantmakers describe their relationships with applicants and grantees?  A judge who listens with strained solicitude to an attorney’s pleas?  A pioneer who circles the wagons against marauding Indians?  A benefactor who becomes peevish when his ward speaks out of turn?

The tropes we live and work by might not seem important, but they reveal a lot about attitudes and habits of mind that keep us mired in the transactional, unable to make that important shift to the transformational.

The funder who sets himself up as judge makes two critical mistakes, in my view.  First, he fails to see applicants and grantees as potential colleagues working toward a common goal.

The second mistake is a little more subtle.

If you’re a funder, isn’t it really your primary responsibility to achieve your mission—to feed the hungry, to help people quit smoking, to produce plays of the highest artistic quality?  If so, achieving your mission might require you to help certain underperforming nonprofits do their work more effectively.  Their leaders, for example, might be long on vision but short on management skills.  By focusing exclusively on an impoverished set of performance measures, you might miss key opportunities to advance your goals.  You might also end up missing the point entirely.

2.  Different funders have different missions and therefore different funding priorities.  Thus it’s perfectly appropriate for some funders to forego supporting “overhead” and other organizational strengthening costs like board development, the upgrading of financial reporting systems, and the like.

That’s like saying you’ll support all the consonants but none of the vowels in a commissioned report.

Don’t let yourself become a philanthropic freeloader, a tick on the body of responsible grantmakers.  It’s every grantmaker’s responsibility to support overhead and organizational development costs.  I’ll go further: Because almost all nonprofits benefit from organizations like the Foundation Center and Independent Sector, it’s every grantmaker’s responsibility to help underwrite the costs of these organizations as well.

Give responsibly.

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Image source: All-American Ads of the 30s

Business As Usual For The NYSE

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Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.     —Mao Zedong

1.

From “An Opportunity for Wall St. in China’s Surveillance Boom” in the September 11 New York Times:

Li Runsen, the powerful technology director of China’s ministry of public security, is best known for leading Project Golden Shield, China’s intensive effort to strengthen police control over the Internet.

But last month Mr. Li took an additional title: director for China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, among other customers. The company has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company’s listing and Mr. Li’s membership on its board are just the latest signs of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus.

Wall Street analysts now follow the growth of companies that install surveillance systems providing Chinese police stations with 24-hour video feeds from nearby Internet cafes. Hedge fund money from the United States has paid for the development of not just better video cameras, but face-recognition software and even newer behavior-recognition software designed to spot the beginnings of a street protest and notify police.

According to Terence Yap, vice chairman and chief financial officer of China Security and Surveillance Technology:

his company’s software made it possible for security cameras to count the number of people in crosswalks and alert the police if a crowd forms at an unusual hour, a possible sign of an unsanctioned protest.

2.

The New York Stock Exchange Foundation supports programs that:

help to achieve equality for all people by promoting civil rights, inclusiveness and respect for people’s differences …

It’s a good thing the Foundation only funds these programs in New York.

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Image source: The Age

Blogethics Schmethics: An Object Lesson for the Third Sector

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Via Mother Jones

K. Daniel Glover, editor of National Journal’s Technology Daily and the author of its Beltway Blogroll, was criticized by prominent citizens of the Blogosphere this past December after he wrote a New York Times op-ed describing the cozy relationship between some A-list bloggers and various presidential campaigns.  Some of these bloggers, he noted, disclosed their campaign connections only after being outed.  Mr. Glover was surprised at the bloggers’ “thin-skinned” reaction to his op-ed.

Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD, lays part of the blame for this strong response on journalists who insist—strangely—that the ethical standards of their profession should also apply to bloggers.  Armstrong was himself strongly criticized two years ago when he suggested that

the campus blogethicists don’t understand … that we are at war out here every day on the front lines as partisan Democratic activist bloggers against a Republican machine that uses whatever means it takes to win. So, if it’s not against the law, I don’t want to hear about it, because in the political arena, the first thing that matters in elections and campaigns is winning …

Is this an example of that “muscular liberalism” I’ve heard so much about?  If so, a-rrrrr.  Vigorous suspensions of the ethical get my jing-jang all wibbly-wobbly, especially when they invoke military metaphors.

Front-line-alicious!

It’s no doubt a burden for Mr. Armstrong to absolve himself—for all our sakes—of moral responsibility.  We need to honor his sacrifice by applying the same principles to the execution of the War on Terror.  Let’s defeat the enemy first, and later, at a more convenient time, as we dig up the mass graves and convene some Senate panels, we can indulge our feeling for ethics.

Hey, you chicken-hearted liberals: Not one more word about your moral scruples until Johnny comes marching home, dig?

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Image source: Right Wing News