Everyday Ethics

North Carolina recently passed Amendment One, a constitutional prohibition on same-sex marriage.  They are not the only state to seek legislative action to prevent same-sex marriages–in fact, 30 states currently have laws on the books prohibiting them.  However, what is somewhat unique about North Carolina’s approach is the fact that they opted to amend their state constitution, effectively ending further debate about the issue.

Since this is a blog about ethics, I’m less interested in analyzing the politics of this event, and more concerned with the arguments that might be given against same-sex marriage.  There are three lines of argument typically given against same-sex marriages.  Two of them are simply bad arguments, while the third requires empirical support that is not immediately forthcoming.  At best, we seem to have a very weak case for prohibiting same-sex marriages.

The Religious Argument

Many opponents of same-sex marriage argue for their position on religious grounds.  An argument of this sort might look like the following:

1.  We should legally prohibit scenarios which are likely to lead to acts that the Bible (or some other important religious text) deems morally wrong.

2.  The Bible deems homosexual sex morally wrong.

3.  Same-sex marriages are likely to lead to homosexual sex.

4.  Therefore, we should prohibit same-sex marriages.

While this argument is valid, the first premise is clearly false.  For example, property ownership and unequal distribution of wealth makes theft more likely, and the Bible clearly prohibits theft, but we do not think this means we should prohibit property ownership and redistribute wealth.  Further, this is also an argument against homosexual relationships, and only the most ardent zealots argue for that.  However, there is another way to formulate the religious argument.

1.  We should prohibit social relationships structured in ways that differ from their structure as defined by the Bible.

2.  The Bible defines marriage as a union of male and female.

3.  Therefore, we should prohibit same-sex marriages.

There are two ways to respond to this argument.  The first, which applies equally to the first version of the religious argument, is that a secular society should not base its legal standards on any particular religious text, because many of its own citizens do not subscribe to the tenets defined by that text.  But the further issue is that, as with the first argument, the first premise is obviously false.  The Bible endorses several kinds of social relationship that we now find deeply objectionable, including polygamy, slavery, and regarding one’s spouse and daughters as a kind of property that can be exchanged and traded.  Clearly, we do not think that the Bible is the best guide for how social relationships should be defined in general, so it’s not clear why we should utilize a Biblical definition in this one case.

The Biological Argument

Many opponents of same-sex marriage, despite being motivated by their religious convictions, nonetheless recognize that they cannot base a legal opposition to same-sex marriage on religious commitments.  One course of action is to retreat to a biological argument against same-sex marriage.  That argument proceeds as follows:

1.  We should prohibit marriages where the primary purpose of marriage cannot be satisfied.

2.  The primary purpose of marriage is procreation.

3.  Same-sex couples cannot procreate.

4.  Therefore, we should prohibit same-sex marriages.

There are two concerns with this argument.  First, the second premise is dubious at best.  For many people, the purpose of marriage is multi-faceted, and not primarily a means to facilitate procreation.  Ironically, this premise seems contrary to the alleged sanctity of marriage that same-sex couples supposedly infringe upon.  What sanctity is to be found in a baby-making contract?

The other concern is that the first premise of this argument implies that people with fertility problems, as well as post-menopausal women, should not be allowed to get married, because they are incapable of procreation.  But this is absurd.  Clearly, we cannot base opposition to same-sex marriage on a biological argument.

The Harm to Children and Families Argument

Once religious and biological opposition to same-sex marriage is ruled out, there isn’t much left for the opponent of same-sex marriages to base their position on.  This is a problem, because if we are to deny something as important as the ability to get married to the person one wishes, we ought to have a good reason for doing so.  The benefit of the doubt, I think, is on the opponent of same-sex marriage.

The last resort for the opponent of same-sex marriage is to argue that permitting same-sex marriages is harmful to both “traditional” families and the potential children of same-sex couples.  The argument would be something like this:

1.  We can prohibit certain social arrangements when allowing them would be more harmful, overall, than prohibiting them.

2.  Allowing same-sex marriages would be more harmful, overall, than prohibiting them.

3.  Therefore, we can prohibit same-sex marriages.

Formalizing this argument is a good idea, because only then does one see how many problems it has.  First, the second premise is an empirical claim that requires support, and it is very difficult to find any reputable evidence that same-sex marriages harm, or are likely to harm, anyone.  The children of same-sex couples appear to be socially well-adjusted, while it’s not clear how same-sex marriages would actually be harmful to more traditional families, in spite of claims to this effect.  However, there is quite a bit of evidence that prohibiting same-sex marriages is harmful to same-sex couples.  At best, we need more evidence in support of the second premise.  At worst, we already know that it’s false.

Setting empirical worries aside, however, the first premise is clearly not something we should endorse.  Although consequentialist reasoning appears in our policy-making habits quite often, we are not consequentialists all the way down.  We tend to think that there are certain rights and goods which are so fundamentally important to people, that we should protect them, even if we would all be better off not protecting them.  The first premise requires a commitment to consequentialist reasoning that few of us would accept.

Perhaps there are other arguments against same-sex marriage–if so, please share them in the comments so that we can talk about them too.  But as it stands, we do not seem to have any compelling arguments against allowing same-sex marriages.  Next time, I’ll consider some arguments for allowing same-sex marriages.  But until then, we should pause to consider how deeply troubling it is that North Carolina, and thirty states altogether, have prohibited something for which we seem to have no good arguments for prohibiting.

Some time ago, I wrote on the topic of whether there might be something ethically problematic about purchasing a home that has been foreclosed on. The basic thought behind the argument is that when someone does this, they are benefiting from the misfortune of others, and in some sense using that person as a means to their own end.

This was met with a very intelligent chain of comments, which rightly pointed out that the presence of a violated contract between the original purchaser and the bank renders the subsequent purchase of a foreclosure home permissible.  The idea there was that once the original buyer violates the terms of the contract, they forfeit any stake in the home that they might have had, and thus cannot be negatively affected by the subsequent purchase of their home at a discounted price.

I bring this up because my wife and I are presently shopping for a home, and the market is literally flooded with homes that are either bank-owned or available for a short sale, where the bank accepts an offer that is below what is still owed on the home.  Short sales allow homeowners to get out from under a home that is no longer worth what they owe on it, so this can be a very good thing for them.

What I find particularly interesting is that now that I am in the position of possibly benefiting from a bank-owned or short sale home, I am not particularly swayed by the concerns that motivated my earlier arguments that this practice might be morally problematic.  Thus, I want to engage in a bit of moral psychology, to try to determine how a person well-trained in deductive reasoning, who has identified valid arguments against a practice, can nonetheless fail to be moved by the conclusions of those arguments.

My hope is that by identifying some plausible explanations of this all-too-common phenomenon, we can better understand the  moral shortcomings that we have, and make sense of why those shortcomings are often resistant to rational modification.

Option 1:  Some of my premises are not true.

This is a possibility that should be entertained whenever we fail to see the force of our own arguments.  Valid arguments are not necessarily good arguments.  Perhaps I should go back and consider whether some of my assumptions are illegitimate.  This option has the advantage of being both simple, and explaining why I am not moved by my own arguments.  However, it will only succeed if at least one of my premises turns out to be false.

Option 2:  My willingness to consider purchasing a bank-owned home is not a rational decision.

It is now well-established that the brain has at least two distinct pathways for processing information.  One of them is a rational pathway, and it engages cognitive centers of the brain, primarily the prefrontal cortex.  This is the pathway of reasoned deliberation, and the source of my valid arguments.

The other pathway is an emotional pathway, running more or less directly from our perceptual faculties through the amygdala.  This pathway is responsible for things like our near-immediate fear response upon seeing a snake or a spider, or our avoidance behavior when something is thrown toward us at a high speed.  Because these two pathways are discrete, it is possible for them to diverge wildly, even over time.

This dual pathway model of brain processing suggests another explanation of my failure to be moved by my own arguments.  It may be that though my rational pathway leads me to worry about the ethics of purchasing a bank-owned property, my emotional pathway is sending me a “go-for-it” signal that I interpret as indicating permissibility. If motivation stems from the emotional pathway, as many people think, this would account for why I am not moved by my own conclusions, even if my arguments are sound.

Option #3-I am more motivated by self-interest than I realize.

This is no doubt true of all of us, and I think moral philosophers sometimes neglect the extent to which self-interest still dominates many of their deliberative processes in real life.  Although I don’t particularly like this option, it does explain the data rather well.  In a “cool moment,” I find the arguments against purchasing a foreclosed home convincing, but when the rubber meets the road, I am moved to do what benefits me.

I’m no psychologist, and none of this is intended to be definitive.  Rather, I simply want to offer some plausible explanations of the sort of moral dissonance that many of us experience.  Perhaps there are other explanations that work better.  The point is that the problem of moral motivation has a practical dimension, and is not simply a matter of theoretical interest.  Failing to be moved by moral considerations is a phenomenon that occurs with troubling regularity.  Perhaps by developing a thorough explanation of how this can occur, we can redirect our efforts at moral education in a way that makes it less common.

If reasoned arguments do not move us to do the right thing, it may be time to consider other strategies.

In a seemingly endless Spring of sports scandals, the University of Arkansas fired head football coach Bobby Petrino, following revelations that his mistress, who was also a former employee of his football program, was involved in his recent motorcycle accident.  Part of the explanation of Petrino’s firing was that he had engaged in a “pattern of manipulative and misleading behavior,” and had “negatively and adversely affected the University of Arkansas and our football program.”

While this event should mostly be understood as a moment when the University of Arkansas opted for doing the right thing over winning football games, an exceedingly rare event in today’s collegiate athletic environment, one part of Petrino’s firing troubles me.  It has repeatedly been stated, by both the University of Arkansas and various talking-head sports pundits, that it was Petrino’s decision to hire his mistress into a position with his own football program, and then to deceive his employer about having done so, which lead to his termination.  The infidelity alone, though regrettable, was not enough to justify firing him.

But, given the explanation of his firing, why was this not enough?

It might be argued that Petrino’s philandering was irrelevant to his job performance.  He was very successful as a football coach, and that is what matters to his employer.  However, that argument could be used against the actual reason given for Petrino’s termination.  Hiring his mistress, then lying about it, didn’t make him a bad football coach, only a bad human being.  Clearly, Arkansas fired Petrino because he made them look very bad, in a broadly public way.

For most people, it was Petrino’s “inappropriate relationship” with an engaged 25-year old that made him, and Arkansas in virtue of employing him, look bad.  As a head football coach at an academic institution, Petrino is charged with setting an example for the young men under his tutelage.  By cheating on his faithful wife and failing to properly value his family, Petrino failed this duty.

Hiring Jessica Dorrell, lying about the nature of their relationship, and then trying to conceal that relationship from his employer only exacerbated the most egregious wrong that Petrino committed.  This decision was more an act of stupidity than immorality, but stupid plus immoral is a great recipe for losing your job.

By claiming that Petrino was fired because he hired Dorrell, or that he lied about his involvement with her, implies an unusual value hierarchy at the University of Arkansas, where presentation of one’s public persona is more important than how one conducts oneself with the people they ought to care most about.  This is why, though I appreciate Arkansas’s moxy, I wish they’d handled things a bit differently.

Petrino did negatively affect the reputation of the University of Arkansas, but that damage was almost immediately repaired by his firing.  The best reason to fire Petrino, the reason Jeff Long should have cited in his press conference, is that Bobby Petrino is a bad person.  So while I respect Arkansas’s decision to fire Petrino, I would have respected it more if they had done it for the best reasons.

Ozzie Guillen has built a reputation as someone who says what he thinks, consequences be damned.  That trait showed itself again during a recent interview with Time magazine, where Guillen spoke favorably of Fidel Castro, stating that he “loved” and “admired” him.  These comments were not well-received in Miami, a city that is literally filled with Cuban refugees who feel something other than love and admiration for Castro.

As the manager of a professional baseball team in a city full of Cuban people, Ozzie should have known better.  As Ozzie Guillen, purveyor of controversial soundbites, he should have realized that this is one thing he should not have said.  But he said it, the Marlins suspended him for it, and now he will try to rebuild a deeply fractured relationship with the Latino community of Miami.  Ozzie, it seems, is not “one of us” after all.

There are some who have objected to Ozzie’s suspension, appealing to the First Amendment’s protection of a basic right to free speech.  Thus, in addition to provocative soundbites, Ozzie has also given us an opportunity for a civics lesson.

While the First Amendment does protect people like Ozzie from persecution by state and federal governments, it does not prohibit the Marlins from punishing Ozzie for his words. Ozzie cannot be put in jail for being a Cuban sympathizer, or for simply sounding like one.  But that is the extent of the protections provided to Ozzie Guillen by the First Amendment.

For the Marlins, this was obviously a business decision.  They are trying to succeed in a market that is heavily populated with people who were directly affected, in a negative way, by Castro’s government.  It simply makes good business sense to come down hard on Ozzie, to indicate to their fan base that such comments will not be tolerated.  None of this is a violation of Ozzie’s constitutional rights.

In other cases, the lines are a bit blurrier.  Suppose I feel that homosexuality is morally wrong, and I incorporate this point of view into my lecture materials for an introduction to ethics course that I am teaching.  Should the First Amendment protect this speech act too?  On the one hand, we might think this is just like the Ozzie Guillen case–I can’t be put in jail, but my employer can fire or discipline me.  On the other hand, if my employer is a large state university, then I effectively work for the government, and any sanctioning on their part would appear to count as government-sponsored sanctioning.

The point is just this.  Ozzie Guillen can be suspended by the Marlins, without a violation of his First Amendment rights, because the Marlins are clearly not a government entity.  But in the public sector, where lines are blurrier, it is much less clear what the First Amendment ought to protect.  It doesn’t protect the employees of privately-owned corporations from sanctions by their employer.  Beyond that, the discussion remains surprisingly open.

In two previous posts, I considered what I take to be the most controversial elements of the Stand Your Ground law, now infamous for its role in the Trayvon Martin shooting, and then offered a couple of arguments in favor of that law.  Before focusing more directly on ethical issues in the Trayvon Martin case itself, I want to briefly offer an argument against the Stand Your Ground Law.  This argument is compelling for its simplicity and for its grounding in a highly intuitive principle.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the old statute that Stand Your Ground replaced required individuals who believed they were in imminent danger to attempt to avoid confrontation.  You might describe this as a duty to flee, if you can.  Stand Your Ground retracted this duty, and replaced it with a right to stand and defend yourself, even when it would be much smarter for you to avoid a confrontation.

I also mentioned, in a previous post, that a right to autonomy might be invoked in support of Stand Your Ground.  After all, many laws currently on the books allow people to make choices about their own lives, even when the actual choices they make turn out to be incredibly bad for them.  The qualification on this right, however, is that a person’s autonomous choices must not harm others.  I want to now return to considerations of harm, in order to formulate what I take to be the best argument against Stand Your Ground laws.

The Harm Principle is a cornerstone of liberal democracies.  It states, roughly, that the prevention of harm to others is sufficient reason to prohibit a person’s autonomous actions.  In other words, you can do what you want, but not if it seriously harms other people.  This is where the Stand Your Ground law runs into  trouble.  It seems that by granting individuals an expansive self-defense right, invokable whenever a person believes they are in imminent danger, we subject others to serious risk of harm that could be avoided.

Let’s take the Trayvon Martin case as an example.  Suppose George Zimmerman really believed, however incorrectly, that Travyon Martin was a threat to him.  Would George Zimmerman have shot Trayvon Martin in the absence of a law that granted him benefit of the doubt on a self-defense plea?  It seems plausible to say that the deterrent effects of the old law, requiring George Zimmerman to try to avoid the perceived danger posed by Trayvon Martin’s presence, might have given Zimmerman some motivation to refrain from shooting.

Under Stand Your Ground, however, Trayvon Martin was subjected to undue harm at the hands of George Zimmerman and his arsenal of false beliefs.  Lacking any legal deterrent against acting, Zimmerman was free to shoot Martin, and then claim self-defense, without fear of prosecution.

This, in my view, is the best argument against Stand Your Ground–it subjects persons to substantial risk of harm, at the hands of individuals who have false beliefs regarding imminent danger to themselves.  (I will ignore whether individuals who really are in imminent danger ought to be allowed to “stand their ground.”)

Typically, we permit individuals to have false beliefs, so long as the having of those beliefs does not lead to substantial harm to others.  Because Stand Your Ground eliminates the counterbalance provided by the threat of criminal prosecution for acting on one’s false beliefs, it subjects individuals to unjustified harm.

This is not the only argument that one could make against Stand Your Ground.  I am sure there are substantive legal challenges that could be raised, and there is no doubt compelling empirical data that tells against laws of this kind.  But my argument has two positive features that these other approaches lack.

First, it is exceedingly simple. Harm to others is bad, Stand Your Ground facilitates serious harm to others, so we ought not endorse Stand Your Ground.  It also benefits from being grounded in a principle that almost anyone would accept:  We ought to avoid harming others, when we can.  If this principle is one that we should adopt, then clearly we ought not adopt legal statutes like the Stand Your Ground law.

In a previous post, I outlined what I take to be two key components of the now infamous “Stand Your Ground” law permitting individuals who believe they are in imminent danger to defend themselves without fear of criminal punishment.  This law, it seems, was a contributing factor in the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old teen from Florida.  In this installment of our series on this case, I want to briefly consider a couple of arguments in favor of Stand Your Ground, in the hope of getting a better sense of what proponents of this law might find appealing about it.

As I mentioned in the previous post, one feature of the Stand Your Ground law that requires support is the elimination of a duty to avoid confrontation, as the previous statute required, and the introduction of a right to defend oneself, even when it would be reasonable to flee.  First, we should note that one need not support these aspects of the law in isolation, because a duty to avoid confrontation and a right to defend oneself are incompatible.  You cannot have a duty to walk away if you have a right not to do so, and vice versa.  In this case, arguments for a right to stand your ground will also count against a duty to try to avoid confrontation.

There are, I think, two well-established rights that one might appeal to in defending a right to stand your ground and defend yourself against imminent danger.  First, we might appeal to a right to autonomy.  This right, which is well-established in the law, generally allows individuals to be the arbitrators of their own life decisions.  Thus, when you believe your safety is threatened, a right to autonomy allows you to stand and fight, or walk away as you see fit.

The other well-established right that might be appealed to in defense of Stand Your Ground is the right to one’s own body.  The idea here is simply that your body is, roughly, your own property.  You own it, and are therefore permitted to defend it against injury by others, just as you are permitted to defend your home against invasion by thieves.  If we take Stand Your Ground cases to involve the exercise of a right to one’s body, again we seem to have a basis for something like a right to stand and defend yourself when you believe you are in danger of being injured.

There is, however, another aspect of the Stand Your Ground law that is more difficult to defend.  The Stand Your Ground law grants individuals a right to defend themselves when they believe they are in imminent danger, even when it would be more reasonable to flee.  This means, for example, that if you are being threatened by five angry gang members, you have a right to defend yourself by trying to shoot all five of them, even though what you really should do is run away.

While it’s a little troubling to legally substantiate unreasonable choices in this way, the right to autonomy again gives some support to this provision.  In many cases, we allow individuals the freedom to do massively stupid things, provided they do not harm others.  (I will return to the issue of harm to others in the next installment of this series).  Again, it seems that there is some legitimate basis for allowing people to defend themselves, even when doing so amounts to a terrible decision on their part.

For myself, the most disconcerting thing about Stand Your Ground is the high credence it places on what people believe, rather than on what is true.  For example, in the Trayvon Martin case, George Zimmerman apparently believed Trayvon Martin was an imminent threat to him.  But was this a reasonable belief?  That’s what is now being debated, but the initial evidence suggests that George Zimmerman was, at best, wildly mistaken about the threat Trayvon Martin represented to his person.

Belief is a tricky thing, in both ethics and the law.  On the one hand, we want to allow people some semblance of freedom to believe what they take to be the truth, even when we think their beliefs are mistaken.  However, we don’t want to allow people’s false beliefs to lead them to harm others, and we certainly don’t want to use the law to protect such people.

Thus, while the Stand Your Ground law is initially rather shocking to the ear, there are some well-established rights that one can appeal to in defending it.  But the low epistemic standard for when a person is justified in defending themselves against perceived danger remains deeply troubling.  At a minimum, Stand Your Ground needs to include some notion of reasonable belief that one is in danger, not just a belief, however unreasonable, that this is the case.  Otherwise, Stand Your Ground elicits the unacceptable consequence of protecting wrongdoers who have harmed others on the basis of unsubstantiated and unreasonable beliefs.

Next time, we’ll look at arguments against the Stand Your Ground law, so keep coming back.  We’re not done with this case just yet.

Last week, the nation was shocked to learn of the killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old black male who was shot to death on the streets of Sanford, Florida.  What makes this case particularly noteworthy is that the shooter, George Zimmerman, has not been arrested or charged with a criminal act.

Why, you ask?  Because Florida, like 21 other states, has adopted a controversial “Stand Your Ground” Law.  This law allows individuals who believe they are in imminent danger of being injured or killed, to “stand their ground” and defend themselves, even when this occurs outside their home.  This includes the use of lethal force.  The result of this law has been a huge increase in self-defense cases, and not everyone agrees that these results are acceptable.

There are many ethical issues that one might raise regarding the Trayvon Martin case.  Instead of these, however, I want to first focus more specifically on the Stand Your Ground Law itself, and think about what arguments we might be able to give in favor of, and against it.  Since I’m a philosopher, rather than a lawyer, I’ll be utilizing the philosophical toolkit of logic and critical analysis, rather than appealing to previous case law or judicial interpretations.

As I see it, there are two particularly significant components of this law, which  require substantive arguments to support them.  First, the Stand Your Ground laws eliminate the duty to try to avoid violent confrontation, if you can.  Prior to the adoption of Stand Your Ground, a person who believed they were being threatened had to try to avoid trouble before defending themselves.

Stand Your Ground eliminates this duty, replacing it with a right to defend yourself, even if it would be reasonable to remove yourself from the situation instead.  More importantly for the Trayvon Martin case, it allows a person to defend themselves in public places, as well as their own homes.

The second component of Stand Your Ground laws that need argumentative support is the provision that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the benefit of the doubt is given to the person who pleads self-defense.  The idea here, I take it, is simply that when police investigators have no evidence which contradicts a person’s claim of self-defense, it is taken for granted that their claims of self-defense are true.

Clearly, this second provision is a function of the first.  We could not have a law which allowed a person to defend themselves against perceived imminent threat unless they had some measure of legal protection for doing so.

In my next post, I’ll consider arguments for Stand Your Ground laws.  Later, I’ll look at arguments against such laws, and conclude by looking more closely at whether Travyon Martin’s killing is even a candidate for a Stand Your Ground defense.  By thinking carefully about the arguments on both sides, hopefully we can get a clearer sense of what is really at stake in this case.  Stay tuned!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently completed a one-month Facebook vacation.  For many of us who spend a good deal of our work time in front of the computer, sites like Facebook are a huge “time-sucker,” and for many people the behavior is truly out of control.  Much like more conventional addictions, the best approach to an unhealthy Facebook obsession is to go cold turkey.

My last post offered three tips for a successful Facebook vacation.  Now, I want to briefly highlight three benefits that I’ve experienced from having taken this break.  By the time you finish reading this, you’ll be well-prepared and highly motivated to complete your own Facebook vacation.

1.  Clarity about Facebook friends

Many of us have far more Facebook friends than we ever could have imagined, and many of these people do not really count as friends in anything but the Facebook sense.  By taking a break from Facebook, you will gain a better sense of whose Facebook updates really matter to you, and which are simply cluttering up your home page.

After your Facebook vacation ends, you will be highly motivated to purge these Facebook pseudo-friends.  The result is a more streamlined home page.  More importantly, this is a page you can easily skim through in just a minute or two, and with less likelihood that you will become distracted away from more important activities.

2.  You aren’t missing much.

It turns out that, despite one month away from Facebook, I didn’t become a recluse or a pariah, miss out on anyone’s life-changing news, or frankly, miss anything important at all.  The Facebook lives of my Facebook friends went on just as before.  They didn’t seem to miss me, and if I missed them, I can’t say much about what it is that I missed.

The reality is that online communities are mostly superficial; anything you miss by taking a break is probably not worth being around for anyway.  But when you’re in the grips of “the Beast,” it’s hard to imagine that this could be so.

3.  The Force is strong with this one.

Even after taking a one-month break, seeing that Facebook isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and realizing how much time you are wasting on this stupid site, you will immediately feel the pull to go right back to your old behavioral pattern.  Re-enter the fray with great caution, and make an effort to hold yourself back as much as possible.  Otherwise, all your hard work will be for naught.

This is way tougher than it sounds.  Facebook obsession is much more like a “real” addiction than I ever imagined.

You already have some idea of how to succeed at your Facebook vacation, and now I’ve given you some reason to want to do it (as if your chronic time-wasting wasn’t motivation enough).  All that’s left now is to do it.  Take that step, commit to a Facebook vacation, and get some of your time back.

Unfortunately, no amount of writing can get you to take that last step.  Making the most of your time is ultimately up to you.  Do stop by and let us know how it’s going!

As part of my continuing quest to become more efficient, and to adapt time-management strategies from other domains to the unique demands of academia, I want to share my recent experience with taking a Facebook vacation.

We all know what a bane to our productivity sites like Facebook can be.  We know there’s nothing happening on there, because everyone we know is at work.  Yet we log in.  Then, seeing that we have no notifications, we go trolling for interesting posts we might have missed.  We might follow a link to a Youtube video of a fat guy doing jumping jacks, or a blog about cat toilet-training.  Before we know it, twenty minutes have passed.  Dejected, we sigh quietly to ourselves, asking “why do I do this?” and we have no answer that begins to make sense of our admittedly ridiculous obsession.

If this sounds at all familiar, I highly recommend a Facebook vacation.  The concept is simple enough:  you simply take a break from Facebook, a specified amount of time where you do not log in.  I recently undertook just such a break, but before I share a bit about that experience, I want to suggest a couple of tips to ensure that your own break is successful.

1.  Pick a reasonable amount of time.

I opted for one month, which was a little long, but manageable, and seemed rather easy once I got about two weeks into it.  I was a three to four times per day Facebook checker, so if you are more of an “every five minutes,” or worse, a “logged in constantly” person, perhaps a week, or even one day would be an appropriate starting point for you.

The point is to pick an amount of time that will feel like an achievement for you if you accomplish it, but that won’t be so long that it seems impossible.  If your response to a period of time is “That seems like a while, but I think I can manage,” you’re probably in the right spot.

2.  Go Public

There’s nothing like fear of public shaming to motivate a person.  The first thing you should do, upon deciding to take a Facebook vacation, is update your Facebook status to indicate this.  I know, sounds wildly counter-intuitive.  However, this has the dual role of making your intentions known to your close friends (or at least your Facebook friends), as well as letting people know that Facebook won’t be a reliable means to reach you for a while.  Post an alternative means of contact, such as your regular email address.  This will give others, but more importantly yourself, the impression that you are serious.

3.  Avoid the Facebook Piggy-back

By far the biggest threat to my own successful completion of a Facebook vacation was the fact that my wife did not take it with me.  Occasionally, she will sit down next to me, computer in hand, and log into her Facebook account.  Normally this is no big deal, but during my Facebook vacation I felt a very strong pull to glance at her page.  After all, we have many shared friends, so this was effectively a way to see my own page, without violating the rules of my Facebook vacation.

Unfortunately, it also bred curiosity about friends we don’t have in common.  What if something amazing happened to them, and I didn’t know it?  What if they found a new, even better cat toilet-training blog, or a video of two fat guys doing jumping jacks?

Fortunately, my wife was very supportive of my efforts, and upon seeing me peering at her page, promptly scolded me back onto the right track.  This is one way that going public is particularly important; it licenses others to become a part of your efforts, and to feel comfortable pushing you to stick to your commitment.

By adopting these three, simple strategies, your Facebook vacation is much more likely to be successful.  In my next post, I’ll share a bit about my own Facebook vacation experience, particularly why taming this particular beast is particuarly important to successful time-management for the academic.

It has recently come to light that the New Orleans Saints, under the direction of defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, engaged in a practice of paying “bounties,” financial benefits awarded to players who made extremely hard or vicious hits on certain opposing players.  While the precise details of these bounties is apparently open to debate, the basic idea is this.  Prior to a game with, say, the Arizona Cardinals, it would be decided that certain key Cardinals players would be the subject of bounty payments if they were eliminated from the game by a hard hit.  In other words, knock Kurt Warner out of the game, and receive an extra $100.

Now that this has come to light, there are a variety of issues under discussion.  The first, and most central, is whether this is truly objectionable conduct, or simply “part of the game.”  Ancillary, but related, is the fact that many people who participated in the practice clearly regarded it as wrong, yet did nothing.  Williams himself has said as much.

These issues are interesting, but not my focus here.  Instead, I want to use this as an opportunity to demonstrate the important difference between professional ethics, and ethics more generally.  There are compelling arguments that one might make in favor of a bounty program, and the opinion of most current and former players is apparently that there is nothing really wrong with it.  Of course, there are also good arguments one could make on the other side, probably by pointing to the pervasive ethical norm against deliberately harming others for one’s own benefit.  Clearly this is the motivation for a bounty system, which suggests that it is, at least prima facie, morally impermissible.

All of this, for my purposes, is beside the point.  At the time this practice was going on, there was an explicit ban on bounty programs in the NFL.  The NFL acts much like other professional associations and organizations, in that it establishes and enforces many of the ethical norms that operate within a practice.  Just like the American Medical Association sets the ethical standards for physicians, the NFL decides what sort of conduct is ethical for its players.  In this case, there is simply no question that the professional ethics of the NFL dictated that these actions were morally impermissible, irrespective of the reasonableness of that ethical norm.

This is not the first time, and certainly will not be the last, when a player or group of players has been caught or fined for doing something that is prohibited by the professional ethics of the NFL, and has responded by challenging the reasonableness of the violated ethical norm.  Williams has been admirable in not doing this, but other players have not had similarly good sense.

My point is simply that these are two different issues.  It is one thing to argue that an ethical norm is unreasonable, and quite another to argue that one should not be punished for violating that norm once it is established.  By failing to differentiate, even in their own minds, between the reasonableness of a professional norm and the fact of an action’s being prohibited by a professional norm, many players and coaches come off as missing the point, complaining because the rules are “unfair” only because they got caught breaking them.