… but the fascists say that it’s the people who don’t want to live under a totalitarian theocracy who are the problem. No reasonable person who wears a jacket with leather elbow patches and smokes a pipe can pick which side is right! Oh, if only there were some compromise on both sides.
/s
See also "Why is everyone so angry about all the time? Clearly the problem is that people are angry, and if everyone calmed down and were more like us centrist bothsidesist fence-sitters, we’d be able to pretend that fascism and all the rest is a legitimate point of view have a discussion.
The Ethicist never really takes a position and this particular column was especially annoying, which is why I prefer the section sidebar: Ask Judge John Hodgman. He’s funny, he takes a position and it’s a well-thought out ruling.
The vast majority of philosophers I’ve polled think that ethics professors, on average, behave just about as ethically as their peers in logic, metaphysics, etc., and others of their socio-economic class generally, or they behave considerably worse.
It seems like it would provide balance to the extra rights we grant journalists (things like not revealing a source, even if they have committed a crime or are accused of one) to also have responsibilities - namely, not to sit on information of urgent national/international/public interest in order to pad their book sales. If you know something that changes the world like this, you take the time you need to verify it but that’s it - it goes to press. If you later want to write a book about it, great. Then the book needs to stand on it’s merits, not on the fact you withheld critical information that can only be accessed through the book.
there is not really a significant difference between “confirmed rumors” that someone is thinking about something and “unconfirmed rumors” that someone is thinking about something
