Clarence Thomas Has Reportedly Been Accepting Gifts From Republican Megadonor Harlan Crow For Decades—And Never Disclosed It

Alison Durkee

Forbes.com

Originally posted 6 APR 23

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting trips from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow for more than 20 years without disclosing them as required, ProPublica reports—including trips on private jets and yachts that could run afoul of the law—the latest in a series of ethical scandals the conservative justice has faced amid calls for justices to follow an ethics code.

Key Facts

• Thomas has repeatedly used Crow’s private jet for travel and vacationed with him including on his superyacht and at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, where guests stay for free, ProPublica reports, citing flight records, internal documents and interviews with Crow’s employees.

• The justice has stayed at Crow’s resort “every summer for more than two decades,” according to ProPublica, and reportedly makes “regular use” of Crow’s private jet, including as recently as last year and for as short as a three-hour trip from Washington, D.C., to Connecticut in 2016.

• While Supreme Court justices are not bound to the same code of ethics as lower federal court judges are, they do submit financial disclosures and are subject to laws that require disclosing gifts that are more than $415 in value, including any transportation that substitutes for commercial transport

• Experts cited by ProPublica believe Thomas may have violated federal disclosure laws by not disclosing his yacht and jet travel, and that the stays at Crow’s resort may also have required disclosure because the resort is owned by Crow’s company rather than him personally.

• Thomas’ stays at Crows’ resort also raise ethics concerns given the other guests Crow—a real estate magnate and Republican megadonor—has invited to the resort and on his yacht at the same time, which ProPublica reports include GOP donors, ​​executives at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, leaders from right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute, Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo and Mark Paoletta, the general counsel for the Trump Administration’s Office of Management and Budget who now serves as Thomas’ wife’s attorney.

The info is here.

How do people use ‘killing’, ‘letting die’ and related bioethical concepts? Contrasting descriptive and normative hypotheses

Rodríguez-Arias, D., et al., (2009)

Bioethics 34(5)

DOI:10.1111/bioe.12707

Abstract

Bioethicists involved in end-of-life debates routinely distinguish between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’. Meanwhile, previous work in cognitive science has revealed that when people characterize behaviour as either actively ‘doing’ or passively ‘allowing’, they do so not purely on descriptive grounds, but also as a function of the behaviour’s perceived morality. In the present report, we extend this line of research by examining how medical students and professionals (N = 184) and laypeople (N = 122) describe physicians’ behaviour in end-of-life scenarios. We show that the distinction between ‘ending’ a patient’s life and ‘allowing’ it to end arises from morally motivated causal selection. That is, when a patient wishes to die, her illness is treated as the cause of death and the doctor is seen as merely allowing her life to end. In contrast, when a patient does not wish to die, the doctor’s behaviour is treated as the cause of death and, consequently, the doctor is described as ending the patient’s life. This effect emerged regardless of whether the doctor’s behaviour was omissive (as in withholding treatment) or commissive (as in applying a lethal injection). In other words, patient consent shapes causal selection in end-of-life situations, and in turn determines whether physicians are seen as ‘killing’ patients, or merely as ‘enabling’ their death.

From the Discussion

Across three  cases of  end-of-life  intervention, we find  convergent evidence  that moral  appraisals shape behavior description (Cushman et al., 2008) and causal selection (Alicke, 1992; Kominsky et al., 2015). Consistent  with  the  deontic  hypothesis,  physicians  who  behaved  according  to  patients’  wishes  were described as allowing the patient’s life to end. In contrast, physicians who disregarded the patient’s wishes were  described  as  ending the  patient’s  life.  Additionally,  patient  consent  appeared  to  inform  causal selection: The doctor was seen as the cause of death when disregarding the patient’s will; but the illness was seen as the cause of death when the doctor had obeyed the patient’s will.

Whether the physician’s behavior was omissive or commissive did not play a comparable role in behavior description or causal  selection. First, these  effects were weaker  than those of patient consent. Second,  while the  effects  of  consent  generalized to  medical  students  and  professionals,  the  effects of commission arose only among lay respondents. In other words, medical students and professionals treated patient consent as the sole basis for the doing/allowing distinction.  

Taken together, these  results confirm that  doing and  allowing serve a  fundamentally evaluative purpose (in  line with  the deontic  hypothesis,  and Cushman  et al.,  2008),  and only  secondarily serve  a descriptive purpose, if at all. 

A pdf is here.

Action and inaction in moral judgments and decisions: ‎Meta-analysis of Omission-Bias omission-commission asymmetries

Jamison, J., Yay, T., & Feldman, G.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Volume 89, July 2020, 103977

Abstract

Omission bias is the preference for harm caused through omissions over harm caused through commissions. In a pre-registered experiment (N = 313), we successfully replicated an experiment from Spranca, Minsk, and Baron (1991), considered a classic demonstration of the omission bias, examining generalizability to a between-subject design with extensions examining causality, intent, and regret. Participants in the harm through commission condition(s) rated harm as more immoral and attributed higher responsibility compared to participants in the harm through omission condition (d = 0.45 to 0.47 and d = 0.40 to 0.53). An omission-commission asymmetry was also found for perceptions of causality and intent, in that commissions were attributed stronger action-outcome links and higher intentionality (d = 0.21 to 0.58). The effect for regret was opposite from the classic findings on the action-effect, with higher regret for inaction over action (d = −0.26 to −0.19). Overall, higher perceived causality and intent were associated with higher attributed immorality and responsibility, and with lower perceived regret.

From the Discussion

Regret: Deviation from the action-effect 

The classic action-effect (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982) findings were that actions leading to a negative outcome are regretted more than inactions leading to the same negative outcomes. We added a regret measure to examine whether the action-effect findings would extend to situations of morality involving intended harmful behavior. Our findings were opposite to the expected action-effect omission-commission asymmetry with participants rating omissions as more regretted than commissions (d = 0.18 to 0.26).  

One explanation for this surprising finding may be an intermingling of the perception of an actors’ regret for their behavior with their regret for the outcome. In typical action-effect scenarios, actors behave in a way that is morally neutral but are faced with an outcome that deviates from expectations, such as losing money over an investment. In this study’s omission bias scenarios, the actors behaved immorally to harm others for personal or interpersonal gain, and then are faced with an outcome that deviates from expectation. We hypothesized that participants would perceive actors as being more regretful for taking action that would immorally harm another person rather than allowing that harm through inaction. Yet it is plausible that participants were focused on the regret that actors would feel for not taking more direct action towards their goal of personal or interpersonal gain.  

Another possible explanation for the regret finding is the side-taking hypothesis (DeScioli, 2016; Descoli & Kurzban, 2013). This states that group members side against a wrongdoer who has performed an action that is perceived morally wrong by also attributing lack of remorse or regret. The negative relationship observed between the positive characteristic of regret and the negative characteristics of immorality, causality, and intentionality is in support of this explanation. Future research may be able to explore the true mechanisms of regret in such scenarios. 

A pdf is here.

When telling the truth is actually dishonest

By Jena McGregor
The Washington Post
Originally published December 29, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The type of lie known as a lie of omission might be thought of as being similar to paltering. In both cases, the deceiver isn't telling the whole truth. But they're different, says Rogers: One is the passive failure to disclose something a negotiation counterpart doesn't know, while paltering is the active use of truthful statements to mislead.

Say you're negotiating with a buyer over a used car you're trying to sell. If the buyer says "I presume the car is in excellent shape and the engine runs well," simply failing to correct him if the engine has had problems is a lie of omission, Rogers says. But if you say "I drove it yesterday in 10-below temperatures and it drove well," even if you know it's been to the shop twice in the past month, that's paltering. Opportunities to lie by omission, Rogers says, actually "don't arise all that often."

Of course, classifying whether voters or negotiation counterparts will see "paltering" as ethical is vastly complicated by an election in which the usual standards for truth and political rhetoric seemed to be ignored. Seventy percent of the statements by President-elect Donald Trump examined by the nonpartisan fact-checking outlet Politifact have been rated mostly false, false or "pants on fire."

The article is here.

People Don’t Consider Lying by Omission to Be Any More Honest Than Plain Old Lying

By Cari Romm
New York Magazine: The Science of Us
Originally published December 15, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Past research has shown that people are more willing to lie by omission than they are to tell an outright falsehood, and over a series of six experiments, the researchers found that paltering is no different — to the teller, it feels more ethical, like something between the truth and a total lie. (They also found that it’s incredibly common: In one survey administered to Harvard business students, roughly half admitted that they had previously used paltering as a negotiation strategy.)

The problem is, those on the receiving end don’t feel the same way: Across the various experiments, people who learned that their conversation partner had paltered to them said they considered the move to be just as ethically rotten as telling a bald-faced lie.

The article is here.

Judgment before principle

Engagement of the frontoparietal control network in condemning harms of omission

By Fiery Cushman, Dylan Murray, Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Sophie Wharton and Joshua D. Greene

Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience

Correspondence should be addressed to: Fiery_Cushman@brown.edu

Abstract

Ordinary people make moral judgments that are consistent with philosophical and legal principles. Do those judgments derive from the controlled application of principles, or do the principles derive from automatic judgments? As a case study, we explore the tendency to judge harmful actions morally worse than harmful omissions (the ‘omission effect’) using fMRI. Because ordinary people readily and spontaneously articulate this moral distinction it has been suggested that principled reasoning may drive subsequent judgments. If so, people who exhibit the largest omission effect should exhibit the greatest activation in regions associated with controlled cognition. Yet, we observed the opposite relationship: activation in the frontoparietal control network was associated with condemning harmful omissions—that is, with overriding the omission effect. These data suggest that the omission effect arises automatically, without the application of controlled cognition. However, controlled cognition is apparently used to overcome automatic judgment processes in order to condemn harmful omissions.