The Business Ethics Blog

This past Friday I delivered The 2010 Edwards Family Lecture in Business Ethics at the University of Saskatchewan, on the topic “Greenwashing and Corporate Moral Motivation.”

The talk was basically whether corporate motives matter in making an accusation of greenwashing. Though the term is sometimes used more loosely, I think greenwashing is best understood as an attempt (usually in advertising) for a company to highlight a relatively minor environmental accomplishment as a way of distracting viewers from a poor environmental track record. Greenwashing is a problem, because it can to a certain extent mislead or manipulate viewers. But certainly there’s nothing unique about greenwashing in that regard; other forms of “puffery” in advertising is more-or-less taken for granted. I think that a big part of what actually explains people’s strong negative reaction to greenwashing is lies in the hypocritical element of greenwashing: how could a company like that dare to brag about this puny environmental accomplishment?

There’s a problem, though, if a charge of greenwashing imputes a particular motive to the company involved (typically, I think, the accusation is that the motive for greenwashing is an interest in distracting from something or covering something up.) This is a potential problem because accurate attributions of corporate motives is difficult. Some people are entirely skeptical about the very existence of corporate motives: some people think corporations are merely legal fictions, and legal fictions don’t have minds, let alone motives. I’m not quite so skeptical about the existence of motives: I think it’s at least possible that corporations, as complex entities in their own right, can have motives (and intentions and interests and desires). But there remain two problems. Even if corporate motives can exist, it’s still possible that in particular situations there actually was no corporate motive per se: it might just be that a corporate decision was arrived at, but that it was supported by dozens of important internal stakeholders for dozens of different reasons. The other problem is a problem of knowledge: even if a corporate motive exists, it may be terribly difficult for outsiders (and sometimes even insiders) to figure out what it is.

Where does that leave us? My skepticism about divining corporate motives is not intended as a way to let greenwashers off the hook. The fact that corporate motives can be hard to discern doesn’t at all mean that we shouldn’t be on guard against companies trying to pull the wool over our eyes. But it might well mean that it’s smarter just to focus on present behaviour, good or bad, and do our best to call attention to environmental claims that are either false, or far less impressive than the companies making them want them to seem.

(Thanks to both the Edwards Family and the Department of Philosophy at USask for the invitation & the hospitality.)

It’s a perennial favourite with adults and kids alike. And it’s potentially deadly. Should manufacturers act?

The villain: the good ol’ hotdog.

Here’s the story, by Dakshana Bascaramurty writing for the Globe and Mail’s health & fitness blog: Wanted: a redesigned hot dog

The hot dog may be a saviour for time-pressed parents and a favourite among picky eaters, but a respected health body says it can also be a serious danger to children.

The American Academy of Pediatrics identified the hot dog as the greatest food-related choking hazard to children in a policy statement released yesterday.

“If you were to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, you couldn’t do much better than a hot dog,” Gary Smith, lead author of the statement and professor of pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine, said in a release. “It will wedge itself in tightly and completely block the airway, causing the child to die within minutes because of lack of oxygen….”

So, should hotdog manufacturers act, to reduce the risk to kids?

I’m sure for many people, the immediate response will be a skeptical one. There are lots of ways to die, and indeed lots of things that kids can choke on. You can’t prevent all accidents, and you can’t make products 100% safe. Leave the hotdog-makers alone!

I’ve got a lot of sympathy for such views. But there are at least a few factors that make me think it’s at least plausible that hotdog manufacturers have an obligation, here.

1) Hotdogs aren’t just a choking hazard. They’re choking hazard #1. Sure, every product brings dangers. You can choke on literally anything you can fit into your mouth, whether solid or mush or liquid. But when one product dominates the top of the choking-hazard list, it’s hard not to think that manufacturers of that product should pay attention.

2) The risk is there regardless of how vigilant a parent is. There’s no parental negligence required for a 10-year-old to choke on a piece of hotdog. So you can’t plausibly just say “It’s up to parents. Parents should be more careful.”

3) This is an area where no company could reasonably rely on government regulation, because specifying a regulation for non-choke foods is essentially impossible. First, it’s hard to imagine what the regulation would look like…a ban on food products of a particular diameter? That seems unlikely. Second, the worry here is about kids, but most food isn’t sold as “food for kids” — it’s just sold as “food.” And it seems a bit intrusive for government to ban a certain kind of food altogether, including for consumption by fully aware and rational adults.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just a hotdog. What could be more common and more innocent than the beloved hotdog? But we shouldn’t let the cultural centrality of a food (or other product) seduce us into exceptionalism. So, if you think the manufacturers of the highest-choking-risk food have no responsibility to improve their product, do you also think that goes for other products that are most-dangerous in their respective categories?

From the Times Online: Gap factory danger to African children

A factory that makes jeans for Gap and Levi Strauss is illegally dumping chemical waste in a river and two unsecured tips where it poses a hazard to children.

The scandal was uncovered by a Sunday Times investigation into pollution caused by a plant in Lesotho, southern Africa, which supplies denim to the two companies. Dark blue effluent from the factory of Nien Hsing, a Taiwanese firm, was pouring into a river from which people draw water for cooking and bathing….

We should being by saying, yes, this is a bad thing. Polluting water that people need to survive is generally wrong. In some cases, it seems justifiable for developing nations to choose lower environmental standards in exchange for economic development, but I doubt that argument applies very well to this particular case.

But it’s worth noting that the headline for this story is misleading. The factory in question isn’t a “Gap factory”. It’s the factory of a company that supplies denim to the Gap. That might not seem like a huge distinction in an era in which large companies are regularly held responsible (and increasingly accept responsibility) for the actions of their suppliers. But it does matter. The headline is importantly misleading, for two reasons.

First, there’s a moral difference between me doing X, and someone who sells me things doing X. To begin, I can normally only bear any responsibility if I know (or should know) what the person selling things to me has done. It’s good that, in 2010, it’s harder for big companies to turn a blind eye to wrongs done solely in order to meet their demands. But that’s different from saying that we ought to lob an accusation — an accusation of hurting children, in this case — as soon as there’s any slippage in a company’s supply chain.

Second, if consumers see this headline and think they can save children in Africa by avoiding Gap jeans, they’re wrong. For starters, the story (for those who get that far) actually supplies 2 companies: The Gap and Levi Strauss. But beyond that, if you actually were going to make a decision about what jeans to wear based on the environmental and labour conditions under which they were made, you need to know about the product as a whole, and the company’s production processes over all. Indeed, what you really need is comparative information, not just information about one company.

I can understand why activists like to single out big companies for special attention. Yelling “Gap hurts children!” gets more attention than “wholesaler you’ve never heard of hurts children.” But those of us focused on understanding problems (including newspapers like The Times) should hold themselves to a different standard.

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(Thanks to LK for this story.)

Tiger Woods just held a press conference, making a 14-minute apology for his transgressions.

The apology itself was point-by-point perfect, so perfect that it’s hard not to imagine that it was the product of professional PR advice (not that there’s anything wrong with that — if I had his profile and were in his situation, I’d seek expert advice at this juncture, too.)

He offered two very different explanations for his wrongdoing, explanations that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but just very different.

Woods’ first explanation was that he had succumbed to temptation. The particular explanation he offered was that he had allowed himself to believe that the rules didn’t apply to him, and that he had allowed himself to think that he had earned the right to enjoy the temptations around him. (As I’ve discussed here before, there’s reason to think that excuse-making, and in particular the process of making exceptions for oneself, is a key component in various kinds of wrongdoing.)

The second, very different, explanation, was a medical one. Though he was vague about this, Woods said he had spent most of the last 2 months in treatment, receiving counselling and therapy. (Roughly, it seems the implication is that he suffers from addiction — namely, that he’s a sex addict.)

I don’t know (and the talking heads on TV don’t know either, regardless of what they say) which of those explanations is correct, or whether there’s some truth in both of them.) But it’s crucial to see how different those 2 explanations are. The first is basically cognitive: the implication is that Wood had formulated a certain kind of argument in his head, namely an argument that said that he was subject to an exception to the rules he said he himself believed in. The second explanation is, roughly, biomedical — roughly that there is something, presumably something subconscious, in Tiger’s head that makes him behave wrongly.

Now, Tiger Woods’ wrongdoing was primarily not a question of business ethics. His wrongs were largely personal wrongs. But the question of what makes people do bad things is an important one in business ethics (and in other fields). So it’s worth considering: is the cognitive (excuse-giving) part of his explanation plausible? Is it sufficient? And to the extent that it resonates with what we know about other cases of wrongdoing, does it point to a strategy for reducing the frequency of wrongdoing in particular contexts?

Padding expense claims or otherwise abusing expense accounts may well be the most common form of petty wrongdoing in the workplace, perhaps second only to stealing office supplies. Such behaviour is likely to be common because it is so often necessary for employees to pay for certain kinds of expenses up front (travel, for instance) and get compensated for it later. Typically, such expanse claims are subject to some form of oversight by the Accounting Department. But it’s probably worthwhile, from the point of view of administrative efficiency, to structure an expense-claims system such that they basically trust employees to report their expenses honestly. And with that trust comes the opportunity for malfeasance — an opportunity some people find too good to pass up.

So, what ethical standards apply to filling out and filing an expense claim?

First, it should go without saying that expense reports should be honest and accurate. There’s no justification for ‘padding’ an expense claim. Some may say that the organization they work for is cheap, and that by padding expense claims they’re simply taking what they’re really owed. That, of course, is simply a self-serving rationalization — akin to the shoplifter claiming that she’s not doing anything wrong because she’s merely exacting restitution for having been cheated by the store in the past.

So, basic honesty is a given. But what sorts of things is it OK honestly to claim? Well, most obviously, you can claim things that your organization’s expense claims policy permits you to claim.

Now, some expense claim policies are vague, stating only that “reasonable” expenses will be covered. That leaves lots of room to manoeuvre. Some people will use such vagueness to their own benefit, trying to argue that if there’s no specific rule against claiming a certain kind of expense, then it must be OK to do so. Of course, that doesn’t follow.

Why don’t organizations just make the rules clearer? Well, fair question. And maybe they should. Some policies probably are too vague. But a certain amount of slack and vagueness is inevitable. No policy, no system of rules can ever be so complete as to describe in full detail exactly what is and is not permitted. For one thing, policy-makers sometimes just can’t foresee every eventuality that could arise. Further, ask yourself this: would your world (your organization) really be better if policies were as detailed as possible, and left no room for individuals to use their judgment?

So, when rules are vague, what should you do? How should you decide whether a particular expense is or is not fair to claim?

The most obvious rule of thumb, here, is that in order to be ‘expensable,’ an expenditure should be one that you had to undertake only because of your job. Here’s an obvious example. The airfare to meet a client in another city is very likely alright to claim: you wouldn’t have had to expend that money in the first place if not for your job. But your pyjamas probably are not a reasonable expense to claim, since you were going to wear those wherever you slept that night.

One last piece of common-sense advice: if all else fails, consider the ‘publicity test.’ When contemplating submitting your receipt for that espresso maker for your ‘home office,’ ask yourself whether that is an expense you would be happy to see honestly reported in your local paper, or that you would be happy to explain to the person or persons to whom you are ultimately accountable: shareholders, in the case of corporate employees, or taxpayers in the case of public employees. Now of course, explaining yourself can be a pain, especially when it’s hard for outsiders to understand the requirements of your job. (For example, I blogged last year about the use of corporate jets and pointed out that most people don’t know that some big companies require their CEOs to use a corporate jet, for security reasons.) When people don’t understand your job, things that you know are essential expenditures can look frivolous. But still, being accountable — being willing to answer for your actions — is central to the kind of agency role undertaken by employees in organizations of all kinds. Your organization entrusts you with an expense account; the quid pro quo is a willingness, on your part, to be accountable for how you use it.

Many people interested in business ethics are fascinated by the idea that ethics is good business, or that you can “do well by doing good.” Others think that idea is obvious hogwash.

So, are ethical behaviours profitable? Well, are swans white? The answer is yes, mostly, except when they’re not.

The obsession some people have with the obviously-partly-true and obviously-partly-false claim that “ethics brings profits” is regrettable. It seems to me a truism of commerce that, in the long run, you’ll tend to do well if you deal honestly with customers, treat your employees well, deal honourably with suppliers, etc. But everyone in their right mind knows that that basic truism doesn’t mean you can’t ever make a little more (sometimes a lot more) by doing something bad. And so, “ethics is good business” is a lame sales pitch, at least when the person trying to sell it implies that it applies to every single decision, at all levels, and that it implies the very highest level of virtue.

Now, of course, there’s of room for some interesting empirical work, here. Somewhere between “ethics never brings profits” and “ethics always brings profits” lies the truth, and it would useful to know just where the truth lies, and what the relevant variables are. Even though doing the right thing is (by definition) the right thing to do, even when it’s not profitable, it would be nice to know under what circumstances those two things are liable to go hand-in-hand.

The key philosophical error people make here is in thinking that the “ethics is profitable” idea applies on a decision-by-decision basis. It doesn’t, and it can’t, any more than it’s true that “honesty always pays” in our personal lives. Now, it’s clearly true that having a set of ethical rules that we (mostly) all (mostly) abide by is “profitable”, socially. (See, e.g., Nobel-prize-winning economist Ronald Coase on how moral rules make commerce more efficient.) And it’s clearly true that generally acting ethically is a pretty decent route to success for any given individual or firm. (Though it’s important to note, here, that I think the list of ethical “oughts” for business is much smaller than some people, particularly people in the world of CSR, seem to think.) But is ethics profitable all the time? Obviously not.

So, if people try to sell you or teach you the dumb version of the profit-ethics connection, they’re selling & teaching an obvious falsehood. But that doesn’t mean there’s no connection at all, and it certainly doesn’t mean that being profitable should be seen as somehow being definitionally opposed to acting ethically.

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This blog entry began life as a comment on this useful blog entry by Charles Green: Financially Justifying Ethics: A Faustian Bargain?

This is just an update. Not sure if there’s anything ethically interesting here at all.

Three weeks ago I blogged about bananas being packaged (in South Korea) in plastic wrappers. Extra packaging for a banana seemed odd. A week later I posted an update with an explanation from Starbucks: the plastic wrappers, they had told me, reflected Korean ‘cultural norms’ dictating that premium produce be individually wrapped.

OK, interesting answer.

But now, in a recent issue of MacLean’s magazine, there’s a story (by Kate Lunau) that gives a much more plausible explanation — and it’s about bananas being sold right here in Canada. According to Lunau’s story, retailers package banana’s for individual sale to help extend the very small window of time during which bananas are the pristine yellow colour that consumers demand, rather than either too green or too brown. Here’s the story: An inconvenient fruit.

Now I’m not sure what to think about the two different explanations. Maybe there really are 2 separate reasons, I guess. Or maybe there’s a failure of communications within Starbucks.

Some might say (re the Maclean’s story) that if it’s that much trouble to get pristine bananas to consumers, we shouldn’t bother. Some might say the same about the “cultural norms” explanation. But then, potato chips come in a plastic bag too. Either way, garbage is generated. Presumably the healthfulness of the banana makes the garbage generated worthwhile, socially. Yeah?

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Thanks to Michael B for pointing me to the Maclean’s story.

This story brings together Americans’ two ‘favourite’ battles. One, an annual epic battle between opposing sports teams, carried out on the gridiron, namely The Superbowl. The other, a never-ending battle between opposing moral points of view, carried out in seemingly every nook and cranny of American life, namely the abortion debate. Add to that a debate over corporate responsibility and a debate over free speech, and it’s not hard to see why sparks are flying.

(That much is cultural anthropology for me. I’m a Canadian. Our “Superbowl” is called the “Stanley Cup,” and it’s a hockey game not a football game. And abortion has not been the subject of significant debate in Canada since 1988.)

So, here are the basics of the current story: CBS, the tv network airing the Superbowl today, has agreed to air an ad by conservative Christian group, Focus on the Family. It’s a pro-life/anti-abortion ad featuring Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and his mom. Though the full ad has not been seen publicly yet, the gist of it apparently is a claim that Tebow’s mom, Pam, had, while pregnant with Tim, refused medical advice that she have an abortion. The result of her refusal is the man we know today as Tebow, a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback. That would be just another little human-interest story, if it weren’t for the way Americans are deeply, bitterly, divided over abortion.

(You can get more details here, from The 5th Down, the NY Times’ NFL Blog.)

The question being debated: should CBS be airing such a controversial ad during the Superbowl? Within broad limits, networks can pretty much air whatever they want: if CBS wants to air controversial ads, it’s within its rights to do so. Heck, if it wants to adopt a pro-life/anti-abortion editorial view, it can do that two.

But two issues complicate the matter:

1) In recent years (?) CBS has had a policy of not airing controversial ads during the Superbowl. Why the exception? Now, CBS is of course free to change its policy. There’s been a suggestion that the economic downturn has prompted the network to be a little more daring. But that argument will only work if other, equally controversial ads are allowed in the future, from a range of moral-and-political points of view. Failing that, CBS would become the network that allows controversial ads only representing certain points of view. It’s hard to judge which way CBS is going, based on a single ad. In other words, based just on the Superbowl, CBS’s new strategy might be “allow controversial ads” or it might be “allow conservative Christian ads.” Time will tell.

2) Questions have arisen about the accuracy of the claims being made in the ad. Tebow was born in the Philippines. Abortion was entirely illegal in the Philippines then, as it is now. So, the claim that Tebow’s mom was advised to have an abortion is a claim that her physicians counselled her to break the law (and offered to break it themselves, too). The illegality angle means that a) the story is less likely to be true (though not obviously false) and that b) the story effectively accuses physicians of criminal behaviour. The question then becomes: should CBS care? It’s probably not plausible to say that a broadcaster is morally responsible for the veracity of every claim made in any commercial it airs. But then again, this isn’t just “any commercial.”

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(Note: if you want to post comments, please stay on-topic. The topic is corporate responsibility. If you want to debate abortion itself, there are lots of other places to do that. Exceedingly inflammatory comments will not be approved. Thanks.)

This is the third of 3 blog entries on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Yesterday I argued that the Court’s decision was fundamentally the right one, because the decision struck down a law that sought to use clumsy and intrusive means to achieve dubious ends. (And I pointed out that it’s possible to think the decision is the right one even if you worry about the possible consequences of that decision.)

Today I want to talk about the role of corporate personhood in the Court’s decision and in the underlying issues. Much of the furor over the Citizens United decision seems to be rooted in a reaction against the notion of corporations being (or merely receiving protections normally reserved for) persons. I think much of that reaction is misguided: not because I’m in favour of an expansive understanding of corporate rights, but because I think many people are misunderstanding what “personhood” means in this context, and the history of that notion.

A few points about the notion of corporate personhood, and the Court’s view on it:

1. The U.S. Supreme Court did not, in the Citizens United decision, suddenly declare corporations to be persons, contrary to what you might have heard. All they did was declare that one of the limitations on corporate speech could not be justified in light of the U.S. Constitution (in particular, the First Amendment). The Court left in place the legal restrictions on corporate donations to political candidates, and it left in place requirements about the obligations of corporations to disclose their political expenditures. Corporations were, prior to this decision, and they remain, after this decision, a kind of person before the law, with a limited range of rights and responsibilities.

2. It’s worth noting that the Court’s decision (in PDF, here) does not focus on, or argue in favour of, corporate personhood. Indeed, it mentions the concept just once in 57 pages of argument. The view of the Dissenting judges was that the decision by the Majority of the Court must have assumed that corporations are in some strong sense “real persons.” How else could corporations be thought worthy of constitutional protections? As a matter of Constitutional law, though, the majority’s argument was simply that the First Amendment applies to speech per se, not to the speech of men or humans or persons or anything else. Just speech. Ethically, I think the key is really that you can’t limit the speech of corporations without thereby limiting the speech of the persons (executives, employees, and shareholders) who make it up. Corporations are instruments: legal “persons”, yes, but also instruments or mechanisms by means of which real, flesh-and-blood humans achieve their ends. The Court’s decision is worthy of support not because it helps make sure that corporations per se are able to express themselves, but rather because it helps make sure that human beings are not denied a mechanism through which they sometimes choose to express themselves.

3. Legal personhood for corporations is not new. It goes back at least hundreds of years. At heart, all it means is that the corporation exists as an entity separable (ethically and legally) from the human beings that work within it. GM exists today despite the fact that none of its founders or original employees is alive today. You can sign a contract with Apple, and Apple (as a legal person) is required to honour its warrantees, without you having to interact with every shareholder in the company. Governments and courts have, for centuries, seen the wisdom of allowing (and sometimes insisting) that corporations be treated as collective entities (in legal parlance, as “persons.”) As I’ve argued before, there are good reasons Why Corporations Must be Legal Persons. Assigning some form of personhood to corporations (and churches and universities and unions and so on) is how we assign both rights and responsibilities to them. If corporations were not in some sense persons, they could not sign contracts and own property or do any of the other things that makes them useful to us. If corporations were not in some sense persons, you could not sue them when they do wrong. The piece of legislation that the U.S. Supreme Court declared, in part, unconstitutional — the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — itself treats corporations as persons, since it imposes criminal sanctions on certain kinds of corporate behaviour.

4. Personhood is not a monolithic concept. The fact that the Court rejected some restrictions on corporations does not imply that corporations are now full-fledged persons in the same sense that competent adult human beings are. We have always recognized many different “kinds” of persons, with different sets of rights and responsibilities. Note that the rights and responsibilities of a child, for example, differ from those of an adult (even though both are persons). And the rights and responsibilities of a foreign tourist, for example, differ from those of a citizen (even though both are persons). The fact that corporations are regarded as a type of person does not mean that they’re going to be accorded the right to vote next. And the fact that they don’t have certain rights (e.g., the right to vote, or to adopt children, or to marry) does not mean they aren’t (in some sense) persons.

In summary, I think the corporate-personhood issue is a huge red herring, here. It’s a distraction. If you think (as I do) that there are specific rights that corporations shouldn’t have, argue against those. Treating corporations as in some sense persons should be the beginning of a conversation about which rights and responsibilities we think they should have.

(This is the second of 3 blog entries on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Yesterday’s was about what corporate citizenship requires in light of the decision. Tomorrow’s entry will look at the decision from the point of view of the vexed notion of corporate personhood).

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was fundamentally right, it seems to me. I’m not a lawyer, nor a scholar of the U.S. Constitution, but from what I can see the decision was a sound one constitutionally. More importantly, for my purposes, the decision was the right one ethically. And as Glenn Greenwald at Salon rightly pointed out, you don’t have to like all of the possible consequences of this decision in order to believe that it was the right decision. (See Greenwald’s blog entry, What the Supreme Court got right.)

The law the Court struck down (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act or BCRA, and really the Court only struck down part of it) was problematic both in terms of ends and in terms of means. Ends vary in their moral worth, as do means; so, the ends don’t always justify the means. Some ends of course are particularly worthy, and may justify just about any means. And some means are so clearly harmless that their use is ok regardless of what your goals are. Though most of us think that consequences matter, few of us think that absolutely any means is justified in pursuit of good consequences.

So, first, what were the law’s ends, its objectives? The BCRA sought to limit corporate political speech, in order to limit the influence of powerful corporate interests in the political sphere. That first, immediate goal of limiting speech is of course worrisome in its own right, in any society that values freedom. The ultimate goal (limiting corporate influence) is problematic too. First, it’s problematic because it’s not really clear that corporate money actually exercises a catastrophic amount of influence. Indeed, some scholars have wondered Why Is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics? [pdf] (ht to Marginal Revolution). But more fundamentally, the goal of reducing corporate influence is only a good one for those who think corporate influence is (mostly? always?) a pernicious thing. That is, it requires that the corporate point of view is generally a bad one. And you’re perfectly free to think that’s the case. Certainly that’s a conclusion reached by lots of people. But it’s not a view shared by all. And ultimately the question is whether governments ought to be playing favourites, whether they should be deciding that certain points of view ought not be heard. I for one think there are individuals out there whose views are pernicious, and I would rather they not be heard. But that doesn’t mean I want the government passing laws to prevent them from speaking.

What about means? What means did the law employ? In seeking to limit the influence of powerful corporate interests in the political sphere, the law basically made it a criminal offence for corporations and unions to spend money on independent political communications in the weeks leading up to an election. In this regard, the law was both overinclusive and underinclusive. It was overinclusive in that it applied equally to very small (even single-shareholder!) corporations and nonprofits. And it was underinclusive in that it limited the political speech of wealthy corporations but not of wealthy individuals: there are no limits on how much, say, Bill Gates or Warren Buffet is allowed to spend on promoting a political candidate. The relevant section of the BCRA was a bad means to achieve its supposed ends.

So, the law sought to use clumsy and intrusive means to achieve dubious ends. So the ends pretty clearly don’t justify the means, here. When you’re messing with fundamental rights — even when you’re doing so in the pursuit of noble ends — the means you employ need to be pretty carefully targeted. From what understand, that is an acknowledged principle of constitutional law; it’s also a pretty good ethical rule of thumb. That’s why the Court’s decision was right.