In practice, ethics usually means "how an organization justifies its monstrous behavior, especially to outsiders." Ethicists are the people who do said justification.
Oh it's worse than that. She wrote people should learn to go "beyond blame".
They enriched themselves (the parents), buying properties worth $15m in the Bahamas.
Same as for the "effective altruist" guru of SBF: he got a $15m donation and bought a mansion in the UK for the "effective thieves" movement. Last I checked that guru tweeted that he needed some time to reflect on what happened and, last I checked, he didn't offer to give back the property acquired with stolen money. Thankfully that property may be clawed back at some point: decades (already) after the Enron scam, ill-acquired money is still being clawed back. So there's hope.
To me these people are despicable worms. That's why I cannot get along with people who want to pardon everyone... I'm loyal. I respect the law. But I've got zero compassion for the complete, total and utter scum of this earth.
I was briefly involved with her in a nascent startup (I was leading the engineering side) until she just openly suggested to screw a business partner up, taking up its money and committing fraud, all that without the slightest hint of remorse in her body language. As if I just told you, "oh, it's sunny outside". gg and left that "project" immediately.
Later heard she had to move to Montreal because she had screwed so much people in our hometown that she couldn't find anyone even willing to sit down with her; she was stealing money from everyone she could, pretty much. I wonder what's the endgame for these people or if it's some sort of compulsive disorder, like people who literally can't resist to steal small things from stores.
Traits like: lack of empathy, lack of remorse, bloated self-image, need for admiration, deceiving others
I've also personally dealt with a couple of people like this, people that ran small charities, and volunteered in community projects.
They are attracted to the perceived moral virtue that these institutions bestow.
Not to disparage that majority of people in these institutions that are trying to do good work.
Once you get close enough to these people to hurt you, you become highly attuned to it.
Better call Saul.
Your sentence was cut off? She is a member of the Board of Advisors to the Stanford Ethics in Society Program. That means she helps direct an academic program researching ethics, not that she enforces ethical rules within Stanford.
Professional ethicists and moral philosophers do not, and generally do not claim to, act morally better than others. Their profession is about researching the consistency and implications of moral rules.
Judges are generally held to a higher standard than the general public, so I guess there is irony/hypocrisy when they commit a crime they have convicted others of. But that’s not what Fried was doing.
They do however claim a better understanding of ethics. So unless she's been saying, "Gosh, I knew it was wrong but did it anyway," then it looks like the contrast between her professional expertise and her behavior would still qualify as ironic. As would her role teaching law and ethics when contrasted with both SBF's behavior and his many, many shady statements.
The "ethics expert = more ethical" connection has never held up and mainly serves as a gotcha.
It's true that, as you say, she could use her knowledge of ethics to be less ethical. But that would just be a different kind of irony for somebody who teaches on law and ethics.
That is a little like saying people who teach music don't claim to play an instrument very well. Universities are full of professors who can't do the thing they teach about very well. But I think we should be skeptical of people who study a thing they can't practice.
You can be skeptical all you want of ethics/morality as a field of academic research! I think there are some good reasons to be. That doesn’t mean the researchers are hypocritical when they sometimes act immorally (as all inevitably will on account of being humans), or that it’s ironic or whatever.
If you showed the same obviously unethical act to both a layperson and an ethicist and asked them, purely as a thought exercise, to present a collection of ethical justifications for what they saw the ethicist would almost certainly have an easier time doing so and would produce arguments which were more convincing (at least to ethicists) due to their familiarity with accepted frameworks.
It might be reasonable to guess that as a consequence ethicists overall may have a greater capacity for unethical conduct than arbitrarily selected members of the public (controlling for other factors).
Teaching in itself - understanding a complex topic and communicating to newbies - is a skill that is independent of the ability to do the thing.
The issue is that when you start studying ethics you'll learn pretty quickly that what's right or wrong isn't exactly that obvious. You don't go to a philosophical ethics class and get taught what's good and bad like in church, you get taught how to think about the many ethical systems that exist.
That means you're going to enounter the ethics of Max Stirner, who was so radically Egoist he makes Ayn Rand look like a puppy loving communitarian, and you're going to encounter Jesus Christ. That people who study ethics for a living often have views that seem so unethical to most people isn't really surprising simply because they're exposed to such a broad range of views.
People who have are perceived as ethical are usually the people least exposed to ethics as a field of study, because they're exactly the people most likely to adopt the beliefs of people around them.
Effective altruism seems like a weaponization of morals to support wealth hoarding.
If I assume that she authored the piece sincerely rather than as some navel gazing intellectual and virtue signaling exercise, then it isn't a shock that her child has a defective comprehension of right and wrong (or at least was atypically vulnerable to having one installed by others-- e.g. utilitarian consequentialism and 'effective altruism').
It's also not surprising that such a person would strive to get themselves placed in a position of authority on the subject-- not in spite of a psychopathic, ethically defective, or just overly rationalized worldview but specifically because of it.
The bar here is so much lower.
For example, I know several people who work for the government, not so much because they want to help the people, but because it is a stable steady job.
Power does not corrupt. The corrupt seek power.
Page 177:
Joseph Bankman, Bankman-Fried’s father, is a tenured Stanford Law School professor who served as an officer, director, manager and/or pro bono counsel to a number of FTX Group entities. Barbara Fried, Bankman-Fried’s mother, is a Professor Emerita of Stanford Law School. She served as a member of the Board of Advisors of Stanford University’s Ethics.
Or this part about this dad on page 183:
And the Debtors allege that Joseph Bankman directed “donations of more than $5.5 million” to Stanford University in an attempt to “curry favor with and enrich his employer at the FTX Group’s expense.”