The Business Ethics Blog

Here’s the quick version:
Bellsouth offered to donate a 250,000 square-foot building to the New Orleans Police Department.
Then, New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin, announced a plan to provide free wi-fi (wireless internet) service to all residents & businesses, in order to help rebuild the city.
Bellsouth, itself a provider of (non-free) wi-fi services, objected to the Mayor’s plan.
Bellsouth then retracted its offer to donate the building.

Here’s the story from eWeek.com.

Quick points:
1) As the eWeek story points out, the wi-fi and the donation of the building are not intrinsically linked. The implication is that Bellsouth got cranky because it assumed that the donation would result in some sort of quid pro quo, or at least some sort of goodwill. Bellsouth clearly did not get what it thought it was owed.
2) I think the most sympathetic way to interpret Bellsouth’s move: ‘Why would we act generously towards a city that is not just unsupportive, but that moves actively to undercut one of our primary services?’
3) What Bellsouth needs to learn: there’s nothing wrong with thinking that your corporate philanthropy will buy you goodwill, but don’t be so brutally literal about it. Even Social Contract Theorists (or moderately sophisticated ones), who are pretty darned sticky about reciprocity, don’t think that every interaction has to be literally a matter of Tit for Tat.
4) Before you jump to too many conclusions about cold-hearted Bellsouth, gentle reader, make sure to read the very last paragraph of the eWeek story.

A news story this week indicated that Body Shop founder Anita Roddick would be giving away her entire fortune of approximately $110 million.
Here’s the story as reported on telegraph.co.uk

She said: “I am going to start giving it away. I hope that before I die there will be a financial foundation. All my wealth is in the shares. My intention is to give my money away.

“I don’t want to die rich. Money does not mean anything to me. The worst thing is greed – the accumulation of money. I don’t know why people who are extraordinarily wealthy are not more generous.”

But don’t too excited about heading to your local Body Shop, cap-in-hand, just yet. An explanation posted on Roddick’s own website clarifies that while Roddick does indeed plan eventually to give away her entire fortune, doing so is a long-term plan:

“What I am going to do is set up a charitable foundation, through which donations will be made to groups and individuals that show leadership in the areas of global justice, human rights, environmental action and grassroots organising. But we won’t be accepting unsolicited requests. There aren’t any immediate plans to set this foundation up….”

(Thanks to Andrew for the tip.)

Pharmaceutical advertising (including advertising to health care professionals, as well as direct-to-consumer advertising) raises a number of ethical issues.

Not surprisingly, given that the behaviour of pharmaco’s has such a significant impact on human health, scholars in bioethics have been on the front lines, here. Bioethicists have done an excellent job of highlighting serious conflicts of interest, distortions of physician prescription patterns, and concerns about the disproportionate quantity of money spent on advertising (as opposed to, say, R&D).

The downside has been a relative lack of detailed, nuanced attention to issues of corporate ethics. Too often the call has simply been for the pharma industry to “shape up,” and “start behaving responsibly.” It would be really great if lots of people in business ethics took up these issues. For one thing, scholars in business ethics have at their fingertips decades’ worth of relevant literature on ethics in advertising, conflict of interest in the professions, stakeholder involvement, etc etc etc.

Here, the Director of Pharmaceuticals Marketing at Pfizer weighs in on some issues of corporate ethics in pharma advertising.

One news story does not a bad company make.
One incident of racism does not a racist company make.
One incident, in which a Wal-Mart store stalls for 2 hours after being presented with a cheque for a corporate purchase by a well-dressed black man with lots of I.D., dos not necessarily mean racism.

None the less, check out this story in the Saint Petersburg Times.

Poor Ben Rogovy. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. He saw homeless men in his Seattle neigbourhood standing holding signs asking for money. A lightbulb went on. Why not get them to hold signs that advertised something!? “Bumvertising” was born.

The idea got big coverage after it was lampooned on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. (Follow the link and then click on “Face for Rent.”)

Critics have called Bumvertising “exploitative.” The Daily Show segment used the word “unscrupulous.”

Clearly the name “Bumvertising” was ill-chosen. “Bum” is a rather dated, generally offensive term for homeless people (typically men). So, let’s take it as a given that Rogovy should think about re-branding.

OK, but seriously. What really is wrong with Bumvertising, other than its unfortunate name? Rogovy is doing more to help the homeless than the vast majority of us do. Are the homeless the only ones left who aren’t allowed to be corporate shills? Perhaps the homeless shouldn’t have to do this kind of work. Indeed, and it would be better still if the homeless weren’t homeless at all. But isn’t criticizing Bumvertising sort of a case of letting the best be the enemy of the good? How is putting a sign, and a few dollars, in a homeless man’s hands different from a corporation putting a few thousand dollars, and a corporate logo, on an under-funded theatre troupe’s marquee? So long as no one’s being asked to do anything particularly demeaning (and I just can’t see holding a small sign as demeaning) it hardly seems “exploitative.”

Here, Rogovy defends himself quite ably.

And here’s a pretty good story about the debate, in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Haiku: Japanese poetic form consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each.

Our stock value fell
When our managers told lies
No one is perfect

Alternatively, Haiku may follow a 3-5-3 pattern…

In the night
will you be haunted
by your choice?

Why business ethics Haiku? Why not? A better reason than that: if a corporate credo is a brief, concise statement of a company’s values, then the right Haiku could be like a credo on steroids. Super-brief, memorable, inspiring. Consider it a challenge…

Less than a week passed between the release of Apple’s new video-capable iPod in October and announcements that some porn sites would begin releasing hard-core video shot & formatted specifically for the devices.

(For a relatively tame…um…example, see the iPod page at soft-core site / web-community SuicideGirls.com. I found that page while researching this posting. Honest.)

(In late October, a story in Wired indicated that the porn industry, worried about a public back-lash, was having second thoughts about releasing porn capable of being discreetly viewed by the gazillions of kids currently packing iPods.)

Next, Wired reported a few months back that porn formatted for the PlayStation Portable is on its way:

“Two Japanese publishers of adult DVD video have announced plans to release a selection of their top titles on Sony’s Universal Media Disc, or UMD, format, which is currently supported exclusively by the PSP, next month. These aren’t shady gray-market items: The eight video discs will be officially licensed by Sony and carry the PSP logo on the package.”

The Wired article says Sony may be more than happy to see porn producers targeting the PSP: the adult video market is “often the path to success for a new media format.”

Is this a business ethics issue? Mehhh. It will be for folks who believe that porn is harmful. (You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a decent webpage to point you to on the “porn is healthy” side of the issue. OK, here’s one.)

Presumably, portable porn falls into the “unintended, but foreseeable” category, for both Apple and Sony. That is, they may not have designed the iPod and PSP with porn in mind, but such tech-savvy folks surely foresaw, and perhaps even now welcome, this use. Companies (and others) can of course be blamed for unintended-but-foreseeable consequences of their actions, at least in some circumstances. Firing a gun into a dark bedroom can have the unintended, but foreseeable, consequence of killing someone who happens to be sleeping there. On the other hand, most people wouldn’t hold makers of butcher knives responsible for an unintended but foreseeable use of such a knife as a murder weapon. (The key ethical principle distinguishing these two cases is what Alan Gewirth calls the “principle of intervening action.” Roughly, if someone else gets to make a choice along the causal chain between my action A and some outcome Z, my own causal responsiblity for Z is diminished, and with it my moral responsibility.) It’s not clear whether the intervening actions of kids with iPods counts as a fully voluntary intervening action in the sense that would diminish, much, Apple’s responsibillity.

(Explaing the title of this posting: Internet search engines like Google find pages based on keywords — including positioning, repetition, and variety of on-target keywords. The present posting, with multiple references to porn, sexuality, nudity, etc., will likely end up attracting accidental visitors. Google may well direct at least a few people to this page who are actually searching for real porn, not just discussion of same. That’s an unintended, but foreseen, consequence of this posting.)

As promised, here’s my reveiw of “Wal-Mart – The High Cost of Low Price.”

(Bias advisory: I don’t like Wal-Mart. I do shop there occasionally, but I have a semi-irrational dislike of the place.)

OK, what you need to know about the movie:

• It is not an unbiased documentary. It is a one-sided attack piece, and never claims to be anything else.
• It’s also a good movie. It’s worth watching.
• You need to have your critical-thinking hat on for this one.

The movie has a beautiful narrative arch.
The first 15 minutes are about the effect a new Wal-Mart store had on small mom-and-pop busiensses in Middlefield, OH. The story is told by 3 generations of the Hunter family, owners of H&H Hardware. The Hunters are sincere, simple folks who speak eloquently about small-town life, and what the store has meant to their family. I think a lot of people will, like me, find this segment kind of sad, but will feel that nostalgia for the small-town life of yesteryear isn’t enough to condemn a store that manages to provide rock-bottom prices to low-income shoppers mostly through the excellence of its supply-chain. In some ways, this is a set up. The more serious moral condemnation comes in the next section.

(Apparently, this first section of the film is also quite misleading. According to a story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the hardware store actually shut down before the new Wal-Mart opened, and the family’s patriarch denies that the big-box store was to blame.)

The second section of the movie, the big middle section, is about much more clearly blameworthy behaviour on the part of Wal-Mart. Here the movie details a range of management practices with negative effects on employees — everything from giving employees too few hours to live on (or to warrant benefits) through to coercing employees to work unpaid overtime. This section also includes stories about Wal-Mart’s lackluster environmental track-record and claims that security in their parking-lots is inadequate.

The final segment of the movie is about towns fighting back. It shows grassroots movements in Chandler, AZ and Inglewood, CA working hard to prevent Wal-Mart stores from opening in their communities. Inspirational music soars as the film portrays the activists’ success at keeping America’s biggest employer at bay.

So, what kind of beast is Wal-Mart? Should we believe this movie, or the company’s own commercials? Big topic, but here are some thinking points:

• The key, here, I think, is not to get bogged down in complicated economic arguments. For most of us, those are not relevant…yet the lion’s share of debate over Wal-Mart on the ‘net is focused on issues like the net effect of a 2% drop in nominal wages combined with a 3% drop in consumer costs. The net economic effect of a company like Wal-Mart is (or should be) a concern for governments, and net local impact should clearly be a big concern for town councils. But I generally think the big-picture economic question is a red herring, and ought to be dropped for most purposes.
• Some of the practices detailed in the movie (discriminating against women and blacks in decisions about promotion, falsifying time-cards, etc.) are clearly ethically indefensible. You don’t need an ethics professor to tell you that.
• Other “sins” pointed out by the movie are much less convincing. For example, the movie points out that a lot of Wal-Mart employees are on various forms of government assistance. It even provides numbers. But just how unusual is it for retail workers to be on one or more forms of government assistance? Personally, I have no idea. But without that sort of baseline information, a statistic about Wal-Mart’s employees is pretty close to useless.
• I’m extremely skeptical about blaming Wal-Mart for what goes on in its parking lot. The movie basically tries to suggest that the company is actually directly responsible for a number of crimes (including at least one rape and one murder) that happened in its parking lots. The specific claim is that Wal-Mart should have had security guards either patrolling or watching on closed-circuit camers. Again, this claim suffers from lack of suitable comparisons. Do other large retailers have security patrols in parking lots? Is there an industry standard in this regard? How does the crime rate in Wal-Mart parking lots compare to the crime rate in parking lots more generally?

[Thanks to Andrew Potter for a useful e-mail discussion on this topic.]

List of other movie reviews on this blog.

This one is more subtle than it at first appears to be.
CTV News has a story today about how in-car DVD players can be dangerous distractions when they’re mounted where the driver can see them. Yes, dangerous. “Experts” even say so.

Here’s a story about an Alaska man who was charged with murder after his in-car movie watching caused a fatal crash. (According to CTV he was recently acquitted.)

My first thought, and probably yours: “What kind of IDIOT…?” Of course driving while watching a movie is dangerous. Seriously and obviously dangerous.
No doubt that’s why manufacturers of these devices have built in safe-guards. According to CTV,
“If installed as recommended, DVD players will not work in an automobile unless the emergency brake is on or the vehicle is in park. But owners can defeat the safety measures by installing the devices themselves.”

And I imagine there are more than a few auto accessory shops that would be willling to bypass those safety measures for you, if you’re not the do-it-yourself brand of idiot.

So why not just ban such devices altogether? Well, turns out that at least some of them are multi-featured, including navigation systems with maps, etc. So these devices do seem to have a legitimate place on the dashboard of a parked vehicle.

Here are some provocative questions, sans satisfying answers:

• Are aftermarket installers of DVD players responsible for the poor choices of their customers (i.e., in bypassing manufacturers’ safety features)?
• Should manufacturers be selling these directly to the public, if safety features are so easy to bypass?
• Is there anything special about in-car DVD players, such that they should be regarded as a special risk and singled out for regulation, in comparison to dozens of other nameable in-car distractions?