The Business Ethics Blog

Here’s a fun story, with an irritating title, from Salon.com: Who needs ethics laws? We have real-estate records, by Tim Grieve. [You should be able to view the story for free; but you might have to agree to watch a commercial to get to it.]

Citing an Associated Press story, Grieve writes:

According to the story, Ryun bought his Capitol Hill house from the Family Network for $410,000 in December 2000. He paid $19,000 less than the Family Network had paid for it two years earlier — an unlikely deal, as anyone who has followed the Washington, D.C., housing market can tell you. The house is now valued at $764,310.

The Ryun revelations come just months after the political life of Rep. Duke Cunningham gave way to bribery charges because a scrappy reporter stumbled upon real-estate records that showed a defense contractor had sold Cunningham his house at a $700,000 loss.

First, the thing that’s irritating about the title (though it’s not Tim Grieve’s fault) is the term “ethics laws.” It’s a silly and misleading term. Most good laws prohibit activities that are also unethical. So, in a sense most laws are “ethics laws.” So, it’s a poor term for the particular sub-set of laws discussed in the Salon.com story, namely laws established to regulate things like conflict of interest and bribery.

(I’ve blogged about the distinction between ethics & law before, in discussing the way the term “corporate ethics” has come to mean something like “not breaking the law,”, and again in discussing theEnron trials.)

What’s fun about the story is that it’s about investigative reporters cleverly hunting down evidence of wrongdoing by lobbyists and the politicians they lobby. Of course, the rhetorical question in Grieve’s title is also off-base: we need laws prohibiting this sort of behaviour precisely so that, when an investigative reporter digs it up, someone can be called to account not just by the media and the public, but by the courts.