The Business Ethics Blog

Facebook Rejects Image from Gay Magazine

Here’s the story, from Toronto-based Xtra magazine: Xtra cover too sexy for Facebook

Facebook hit 150 million registered users on Jan 7, and the site’s founder boasts that if the social network were a country, it would surpass Japan, Russia and Nigeria in population.

But if Facebook Nation really existed, it would be a prudish state of the worst kind.

Censors at the popular site have removed the cover image of the Sep 11, 2008 issue of Xtra, with only a vague explanation: Facebook was trying to “protect” children from viewing the image.

(The image in question (shown incompletely above) shows several people — men and women — all nude and clearly in the midst of a menage-à-five-or-six or something. The only “private” parts showing are one woman’s breasts.)

In the article cited above, Xtra fights back. Says the author, “Clearly, the breasts in question are neither violent nor malicious. One could assume that Facebook decided that the image is obscene or offensive — but under what criteria? Facebook won’t say.” What the author leaves out is that, if you look closely at the picture (down near the, um, bottom of the cover) you see much much more than a couple of bare breasts. You see evidence that an actual sex-act is going on. I’m not sure Facebook’s decision in this case is prudishness “of the worst kind.” (To be fair: gay publications have historically been disproportionately subject to censorship, so it’s forgivable if they’re a little sensitive to the subject.)

But ok, that’s beside the point. The point is that Facebook is censoring content posted by its members. And on one hand, why shouldn’t they? It’s a privately-owned company, and people enjoy its services for free (since Facebook is supported by advertising, rather than by subscriptions). Indeed, it’s not clear that the term “censorship” applies, here. That term is usually limited to the suppression of ideas (including images) by government. When your local paper decides not to publish your letter to the editor, they’re not censoring you, they’re just not letting you use their privately-owned resources to make your point. Seen from that point of view, Facebook is totally justified in autocratically enforcing its own rules, and even, arguably, refusing to clarify what those rules are.

But it’s worth considering whether the scale & pervasiveness of a company makes a difference. With regard to most companies, it’s easy enough to say, look, if you’re not satisfied with the service (if you find the company unacceptably prudish, for example), take your business elsewhere. No one is forcing you to use their service. If you don’t like it, take your business elsewhere. But that line of argumentation weakens, perhaps, with regard to companies like Facebook. For a certain demographic, Facebook is basically the social networking site. If you’re not on it, you might as well not exist. My point is that it’s worth considering whether there’s a point at which the market share of a company, and its degree of integration into clients’ lives and communities, becomes such that it needs to function, ethically, more like a democratic government than like an autocratic business.

At what point does business ethics become political philosophy?

(Note: I also posted this item on the other blog I co-write, the The Research Ethics Blog, under the title, “Pfizer: Sued in U.S. Courts over Nigerian Experiments.”)

From MSNBC: Pfizer faces NY lawsuits over human medical tests

Nigerian families can sue Pfizer in U.S. courts with claims that the giant drug maker violated international law banning involuntary medical experimentation on humans when it tested an antibiotic to treat meningitis, an appeals court ruled Friday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned rulings by a lower court judge who had tossed out the lawsuits in litigation that began in 2001.

The lawsuits sought unspecified damages on behalf of children and infants who were part of a 1996 study of the oral antibiotic Trovan. The testing occurred during a meningitis epidemic that killed more than 15,000 Africans.

(Here’s an entry from the Business Ethics Blog back in 2006 that gives some of the back story: Pfizer’s Unapproved Drug Tested on Nigerian Children)

The main reason this court decision is news is that the court is reaffirming that foreigners can sue U.S. companies when those companies seem to have violated international law. If that seems obvious, it’s not: though I think there are good arguments, it’s important to see that you do need good arguments for why a U.S. court should have jurisdiction over something that happened in another country, with its own government and its own courts.

From a research ethics point of view, it’s worth nothing (and criticizing) the fact that — at least as reported by MSNBC — part of Pfizer’s defence seems to be that the ends justified the means. Whether the fact that the trial in question went on under exigent circumstances, during an epidemic, matters to the validity of that defence is an interesting question.

Here’s an interesting interview with the Chief Executive of diamond giant DeBeers, from the Wall Street Journal: De Beers Polishes Its Image

When Gareth Penny became De Beers Group’s chief executive in 2006, the world’s biggest diamond producer was mired in some of the worst crises in its 120-year history.

Rapper Kanye West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” in 2005 and the movie “Blood Diamond” in 2006 were triggering a wave of negative publicity about buying “conflict diamonds,” which were sold in the 1990s by African rebels to help pay for their wars. De Beers had already worked with the United Nations, governments, and human-rights groups to introduce the Kimberley Process, a voluntary certification program for rough diamonds that allows the origin of the gems to be traced, but the company was vulnerable to a consumer backlash nonetheless.

The most interesting part of the story is about the Kimberly Process. The WSJ interview, read alongside (say) the Wikipedia page for the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (seriously worth reading!), makes for a pretty good case-study of how industry, NGOs, and international “soft law” can together go a considerable distance towards rescuing a once-dubious product.

The Guardian had this interesting piece today on corporate ethics during economic downturns: Hard times turn spotlight on business ethics.

Most major U.S. companies have an ethics officer, but as investors survey the wreckage of a deepening financial crisis that has exposed behavior ranging from risky to downright illegal, one might ask “What were they doing?”

Laying the blame on ethics officers is probably unfair, but it is fair to ask, of the companies whose wounds seem self-inflicted, just what their ethics officers have been up to for the last few years, how much authority ethics officers were given within the organization, and how well-resourced ethics officers’ offices were.

Interestingly, the article discusses both the ethical failings that might have got companies into their current messes, and also the extent to which financial difficulties make unethical behaviour more likely. Talk about a vicious circle.

Last Friday, I blogged about Layoffs at Profitable Companies. That same day, I did a series of interviews with CBC radio on the topic. One of them is archived here. (Scroll down to the Jan 23 section. The interview is a .ram file & requires the free Real Player. Thanks to the folks at CBC Cape Breton for making it available.)

It’s a good time to give the subject more thought. Witness today’s NY Times: “Layoffs Spread to More Sectors of the Economy”. In the current gloomy economic climate, it’s entirely likely that more companies — including profitable ones — will choose layoffs as a way to guard against what they worry will be worse times to come.

See that molecule at left? It’s sucrose. Sugar, a.k.a. “C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁” to you chemists out there. Sucrose can be derived from lots of plant sources, such as sugar cane, sugar beets, sorghum and sugar maples. But wait! Is the sucrose molecule pictured at left from a regular sugary plant, or from, like, a genetically modified sugary plant? The short answer is: it doesn’t matter. Sucrose is sucrose. It’s chemically identical whether it comes from sugar cane or sugar beet or sugar maple trees, and it’s chemically identical whether it comes from a genetically modified plant or a “normal” one. Plants also give off oxygen, you know. But genetically modified plants don’t give off genetically modified oxygen: it’s just good old-fashioned oxygen, plain & simple.

But don’t bother trying to explain this to groups currently lobbying businesses to promise only to use non-genetically-modified sugar. Check out there story, here:
Coalition of Ethics-Based Investors Aim to Stop Planting of Genetically Modified Sugar Beets

An investors’ coalition called the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) has launched a campaign to secure promises from companies not to use sugar from genetically modified (GM) sugar beets.

The http://www.DontPlantGMBeets.org campaign encourages consumers to write to 63 U.S. beverage, food and restaurant companies and ask them to swear off the GM beets for the spring 2008 planting season.

Now, why would anyone genetically modify sugar beets in the first place? The main reason (as explained here) is to render sugar beet crops more resilient in the face of herbicides. Why would anyone object to that, you ask? The groups protesting are concerned about “weak governmental review and oversight, and the lack of long-term, independent and peer-reviewed safety studies.”

Now, I’ve blogged about GM foods before. At this point, I’ll only say that of all the foods to worry about, sugar — sucrose — is very far down the list. If you’re eating a genetically modified potato, I guess you could wonder whether, of all the many many things that make up a potato, there might be something in there that could hurt you. Science says “no,” but at least it’s not crazy to wonder. But sugar — from genetically modified plants or not — is just that: it’s sugar. And hopefully the companies being lobbied, here, will have the good sense to state that in their replies to this campaign.

Last weekend, I ate at an excellent Ottawa-area burger joint (“The Works”). A family member asked for her all-beef burger “medium rare,” and the waitress cheerfully said, “OK, no problem…you don’t mind signing our waiver?” Pictured below is the waiver:

The picture’s a little blurry. But the text says:

I HEREBY DECLARE MY LOVE OF ALL MEATS RED!

To that end I request that my beef burger be cooked rarer than the Ottawa Health Department prescribed doneness of 165 Degrees Fahrenheit.

I make this decision freely, and will not hold “The Works” or any of it’s managers, employees, shareholders or directors responsible or liable for any illness, side-effects or sickness that may occur as a result of the eating of an undercooked ground meat burger as requested by me.

I declare that I am at least 16 years of age.

This isn’t unique. For articles about restaurants in other countries doing the same thing, see:

• Hotel serves up rare meat waiver (2008) and
• Burger-loving Britons signing waiver to enjoy rare delight (2002).

(For those who don’t know, the standard advice is to cook beef well to kill off potentially deadly bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella. But people who are serious beef lovers will tell you that cooking beef as well as health officials suggest essentially ruins it.)

So, in other words, the relevant health authority (Ottawa Public Health, in this case) says what you’re about to eat is unsafe. Do you want to do it anyway? A waiver like this seems a reasonable approach: public health authorities issue guidelines that are risk-averse, probably setting a standard that allows for a substantial margin of error. It’s not insane to deviate from such standards — as long as you know what you’re doing. On the other hand, it’s not clear that this waiver does anything to ensure the latter. It is a consent form, but its use does nothing to ensure that consent is informed.

For true die-hard fans (hi, Mom!) here’s a brief radio interview [dead link deleted] I did last week, on the CBC radio show Maritime Noon. (The interview is in Real Audio format; it requires the free Real Player.) The topic was this blog, why I write it, my goals, etc. The interview is about 8 and a half minutes long.

(For more of my reflections on the whole ‘blog thing, see this short newspaper piece: Prof feted for blog.)

[Aug. 2010, dead link to radio interview deleted]

I just recently watched the movie Good Night And Good Luck, and we laughed at how funny it looks, now, to see 1950’s news icon Edward R. Murrow portrayed as smoking while delivering his on-air editorials. I mean, seriously… smoking, on the job! In a white-collar job! Looking at it by 2009 standards, it seems ludicrous.

So, today, most workplaces forbid smoking in the workplace. Fair enough. Smoking is unhealthy, and there’s a fair bit of evidence against 2nd-hand smoke, too. But what about employers insisting that employees not smoke at all, even in their private lives?

From The Canadian Press: ‘Non-smoker’ stipulation for job is discriminatory: smokers’ rights group

The job requirements are on par with what would be expected for any company looking for a webmaster, with one notable exception: smokers need not apply.

And a Quebec group that defends the rights of smokers is fuming over the job posting by an anti-smoking organization, calling it discriminatory.

Arminda Mota, president of mychoice.ca, a website dedicated to smokers’ rights, says the advertisement that says the successful applicant must be either a non-smoker or an ex-smoker opens the doors to all sorts of discrimination by employers….

As much as I’d like to applaud an employer’s attempt to dissuade people from an unhealthy habit/addiction, I think the smokers’-choice group is in the right, here. An employer has no business telling employees what to do on their own time.

Now, the employer in question here — the Quebec Council on Tobacco and Health — is essentially claiming that being a non-smoker is a bona fide job requirement, given the Council’s mandate. That might make sense if they’re hiring a President, or a Spokesperson. (The news story is actually vague on just what sort of job is at stake, here.) But beyond such high-profile roles, private behaviour contrary to the organization’s mandate is just that — private.

Is it ethically OK for a profitable company to lay people off? People tend to understand it as a necessary evil when managers of a beleaguered company, awash in red ink and heading for bankruptcy, resorts to layoffs as a way of salvaging the company. But what about layoffs when times are good?

Case in point: both Microsoft and Viacom — profitable companies — have recently announced layoffs. And at least one CEO has been harshly critical. Here’s the story from Yahoo! Finance: Mass Layoffs by Profitable Firms a ‘Horrible Act,’ Diller Says

This week has brought another round of big layoffs from companies in diverse industries, including Sony, Rio Tinto, and our parent, Yahoo.

The mass layoffs are obviously a response to a steep economic slowdown but are causing a rethinking of the very role of capitalism in society: Do businesses serve the greater good, or merely the bottom line?

At the Reuters Media Summit last week, Barry Diller, CEO of IAC/Interactive, slammed other media executives for their “preemptive” layoffs:

“The idea of a company that’s earning money, not losing money, that’s not, let’s say, ‘industrially endangered,’ to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one’s counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level,”

Not surprisingly, Diller’s assessment was not shared by all. Another corporate exec, Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, thinks Viacom should have laid off more employees, in recognition of coming changes in the market; and stock analyst Walter Pritchard argued that Microsoft should have cut deeper, too.

A couple of comments:

1) Diligent pursuit of profits — within the limits of the law and morality — is a central principle of corporate governance in widely-held companies (i.e., in companies where shares are owned by lots of people). It’s generally seen as important to give CEOs a clear mandate, a mission to which they can be held accountable. This implies a presumption in favour of letting CEOs do whatever they think is necessary to generate profits in the long run.

2) When times are good, the interests of shareholders and employees very nearly line up. What’s good for one tends (imperfectly) to be good for the other. When times are tough, their interests can more easily diverge. It’s important to see the difference in how law & corporate governance structures protect those different interests. The interests of employees are protected by labour law, workplace health & safety laws, minimum wage law, etc., but they have no guarantee of permanent employment. The case is almost exactly the opposite for shareholders: shareholders can be “permanent” if they wish (they can hold onto stock as long as they want), but they have almost no other legal protections: for example, while employees are guaranteed at least minimum wage, there is no legal guarantee of any profits or dividends at all, for shareholders. All shareholders get is the promise of corporate executives to do their best to make a profit. The lack of other legal protections makes that promise pretty important.

3) Critics of profitable companies who lay off workers may well be guilty of precisely the kind of short-term thinking for which we so often (and rightly) criticize corporate executives. There’s a certain irony in criticizing CEO’s for thinking not just at current profitability, but also about the future of the company and its stakeholders.

4) The presumption noted above in favour of letting CEOs do what they think necessary (within the limits of law & morality) to generate profits is just that: a presumption. It’s not carte blanche. When layoffs are the mechanism chosen by a CEO in pursuit of profits, that CEO at very least owes us recognition of the fact that that mechanism implies some very significant human costs. So it’s reasonable to hold corporate executives accountable and to expect them at the very least to justify their regrettable decision to lay off employees.