This is an easy one:

Ethics are for people to get along with each other.

Flags aren’t people. Flags can’t feel hurt. Flags can’t participate in reciprocal ethics.

People aren’t flags. People can feel the trauma of getting stomped. People can participate in reciprocal ethics.

Rule 1: if you wouldn’t like other people infringing on your political expression, don’t infringe on the political expression of others.

If you wouldn’t like people stomping on you, don’t stomp on others.

The originator, the sharer, and the cheerleaders of this pic are bad, violent, malevolent, evil motherfuckers.

Toya Graham is either a national hero or a national villain, depending on whom you listen to and what they understand about basic ethics.

“I just lost it,” said the mother of sixteen-year-old son Michael, about the moment when she saw Michael throwing rocks at police, tracked him down, smacked him around in front of the cameras, and became an internet sensation. “You never want to see your child out there doing that,” she said, going on to denounce violence against the police. But Michael probably saw it another way. Who’s right?

Rule 3 says “who started it” is an important consideration. From Michael’s perspective, he may try to argue that the police started it by being violent to Freddie Gray, the man whose death at police hands sparked the riots. Michael would be wrong in this. Rule 3.3 says none of us belong to a hive-mind collective, so it is not justice to levy violent consequences on a vast group like “tha po-leece.” Even if Michael had identified the one policeman responsible for Gray’s death (which none of us reasonably believe he did), rock-throwing does not serve rule 3’s purpose of mitigating damage: it is a physical technique aimed purely at antagonization and escalation. He had no basis on which to claim ethical motivation.

His mother, on the other hand, responded, yes, with violence, but aimed only at one human being whose actions she had witnessed first-hand, and for whose training and civilization she was responsible. This is clearly within the bounds of rule 3 and its corollaries, so Toya gets the pass. She used her violence only in response to an already-extant act of violence, per rule 3.1, and only against the one person whose guilt she could clearly ascertain, in accordance with rule 3.3. So the ethical among us must agree with Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, who said he wished he had more parents who took charge of their kids, and with Graham, who said the situation wouldn’t have been as bad if there were more mothers out there monitoring their sons.

There are a lot of unethical editorialists weighing in on the subject. Salon.com author Joan Walsh called praise for Graham, “hideous white hypocrisy” and “clueless media applause.” Her editorial is rife with different standards set for people based on the color of their skin, in bold defiance of rule 1.2. “This page isn’t directed at them,” Walsh writes outright about black people who praised Graham’s ethical behavior. Apparently she doesn’t expect black people to understand her admonitions to white people. What a racist, unethical asshole.

An editorialist for theroot.com, Demetria Lucas D’Oyley, writes that she will not condemn Graham’s reaction, but continues, “I will point out the hypocrisy of people who applaud Graham and yet condemn Baltimore’s protesters, who have been called ‘thugs’ and ‘animals’… when their reactions and Graham’s are one and the same.”

They are not one and the same. Graham’s violence was directly aimed at a single clearly-guilty party for whom she was responsible, and was effective at removing him from the riot and preventing further violence by him. If the rioters could say the same, I would be supporting them too, but they can’t… and the only reason these writers can’t recognize the difference is because they are themselves blatantly ignorant of the ethics of violence as well.

At the Sturgis motorcycle rally, in 2013, Robbie Knievel, son of famed motorcycle stunt-man Evel Knievel and accomplished stunt-man in his own right, was busted for drunk driving. Completely unapologetic, he raved (in what I can only assume was a drunken tirade) that, “I ride motorcycles, and I drink. I’m a frickin drinkin, drivin daredevil. I jump motorcycles, I ride motorcycles and I frickin drink and ride. That’s my deal.”

There were no takers on the deal he was offering.

There is nothing unethical about drinking, and there is nothing unethical about being drunk. But drunkenness does not excuse anyone from their responsibility to be good, no matter how famous they may be. If you break the golden rule while drunk, you become an outlaw from it just the same, and must face the consequences of such dereliction whether drunk or sober.

Drunk driving Robbie Knievel just caused a four-vehicle pile-up last week, slamming into a line of vehicles with his SUV.

Fortunately, this is one of those instances where the law matches the basics of ethics. For having broken rules 2.1 and 2.2, Robbie is already spending time behind bars and faces fines as well.

Fame will not excuse you from being fundamentally ethical, and neither will making a poor grasp of ethics part of your identity. Is that just “who you are;” is that “what you do?” Well, stop doing and being that. You can choose better for yourself… so do it.

That’s my deal.

As riots once again break out amid protests about police violence, I recall an analyst being interviewed on Democracy Now during the Ferguson riots who advocated that we must “get past the violence” to listen to what the protestors are demanding.

This, of course, is impossible.

Violence is the cornerstone of ethical philosophy. It is the entire goal of ethics, to eradicate violence. It is the source of all miscommunication, in both Ferguson and in yesterday’s riot in Baltimore, that good people believe that violence makes a message unlistenable, while evil people believe that violence is what should prompt others to listen to their message.

These evil people are mistaken. Rule 1.1.1 says not to commit violence against others physically, and rule 2.1 says not to steal or damage the property of others. Riots, regardless of motivation, are by definition the exact antithesis of these rules. They are evil, and those who commit them are evil.

Feeling ignored? Feeling shut out of the process of justice? Would you like to right a wrong that you perceive in government? Don’t riot. That’s exactly the worst way to get your message communicated and acted upon usefully.