The Business Ethics Blog

A major U.S. supermarket chain is going to be filling prescriptions at no charge. Price for the drug itself: $0. Fee for filling the presecription: $0.
Publix to offer 7 popular prescription antibiotics for free

Seven popular antibiotics will be available free from Publix supermarkets for people with prescriptions, even if they have a health insurance provider that would pay for them, the company and Gov. Charlie Crist said Monday.
Fourteen-day supplies of the seven drugs, among the most commonly prescribed, will be available at all 684 of the chain’s pharmacies in five states. Publix said it is not limiting the number of prescriptions that customers may fill for free.

Why are they doing it? Motives are notoriously hard to read, but no one’s doing much to suggest this is anything other than a loss-leader to get consumers into their stores. Is that bad? Ask yourself this: with many millions of uninsured children in the affected states, which would you rather Publix offered for free, to get consumers into their stores? Pharmaceuticals, or Coca Cola?

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Thanks to Consumerist

My name is Chris MacDonald, and I work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. OK, that second part isn’t true, but if it were, I might not be allowed to write this blog, or at least I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you who I work for, according to a new “guideline” issued by the CBC’s management. (CBC managers have asserted that it’s a guideline, not a policy. As far as most of the concerns about the document are concerned, it’s a spurious distinction.) [See update below.]

The document is not publicly available — in fact, it hasn’t been officially distributed within the CBC yet — but it got leaked internally, and lots of CBC employees have seen it. It caught CBC-based-bloggers off-guard; despite the fact that several of them had proactively written their own set of voluntary guidelines a few years ago, they weren’t included or consulted in the process of devising the new official guideline.

According to the InsideCBC blog (an official, sanctioned, insider’s blog), the new policy applies to a CBC employee’s personal blog “if the content clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada.”

Among the requirements of the guideline/policy:

• Bloggers are “expected to behave in a way that is consistent with our journalistic philosophy, editorial values and corporate policies.”
• “[T]he blog cannot advocate for a group or a cause, or express partisan political opinion. It should also avoid controversial subjects or contain material that could bring CBC/Radio-Canada into disrepute.”
• To start and maintain a blog of this kind, you need your supervisor’s approval.

Note, also, that the guideline/policy applies to all employees, not just to journalists (whose blogs might reasonably be mistaken for news) or to marquee on-air personalities.

The guideline has caused a stir among CBC-employee-bloggers and beyond.

A lot of objections have already been raised in the Comments section of the I see a couple of the InsideCBC blog. And while some elements of the document seem unproblematic and even constructive, I see a couple of types of problems with it. One has to do with content. The other has to do with process.

Content:
There are clearly a number of elements of the guideline/policy that are either unclear or unenforceable or both. For example, the stipulation that it applies to blogs “if the content clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada.” Several commenters have pointed out that there are lots of ways, intentional and unintentional, that a blog could associate itself with the CBC. The blogger might self-identify as a CBC employee, or merely imply or even just let slip that she or he is an employee. In terms of specific requirements, the one that has most angered those involved is the stipulation that employees must seek their supervisors’ permission to write a personal blog. This seems on the face of it a pretty serious restriction on freedom of speech. Maybe (maybe) CBC has the right to make that stipulation as a matter of employment contract, but having a right to do so doesn’t make it appropriate, or wise, to excercise that right.

Process:
It’s pretty bad that bloggers at the CBC were caught off-guard by this guideline/policy, for at least 3 reasons
1) For policies and codes of all kinds, buy-in is crucial. Given how difficult this policy will be to enforce (i.e., very) it’s utterly essential that the people to be governed by it accept it as legitimate and wise. Oops.
2) The CBC employees with blogs are a pretty smart bunch, who have thought a fair bit about what their obligations are. And, just through experience, they undrestand blogging better than anyone in CBC’s editorial offices is going to. What a shame not to draw on that knowledge and experience. Serious error.
3) By drafting a document that doesn’t reflect, acknowledge, or draw upon the bloggers’ own manifesto, CBC management is neglecting the fact that some of their very bright employees have expected considerable effort on the very issue they’re now seeking to regulate. At very least that seems disrespectful.

Now that the errors have been made, the serious ethics & leadership challenge lies in whether & how CBC managers can recover. “Recovery” here means ending up with a policy that is clear and enforceable, and retaining some semblance of moral authority in the eyes of their employees.

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Disclosure of potential bias: I’ve got a friend among the CBC-employee-bloggers affected by this new guideline/policy.
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Update
According to this update from CBC, the document referred to above was “only a proposed early draft.” (Note that “proposed” doesn’t make sense there: either it was a draft, or it wasn’t.) Also according to the update, “There are currently no specific corporate policies in effect relating directly to blogging.” (This update is brought to you by the nice Media Relations and Issues Management people at CBC, who asked me to correct the above posting.)

(My last day of blogging live from the Society for Business Ethics meeting.)

The session I attended during this final session of the conference featured three papers.

The first paper was by Waheed Hussain (Wharton School of Business), on “Corporations and Consequentialism.” which argued that welfare consequentialist theories don’t provide a compelling account of the moral obligations of corporations and their managers (roughly because he suggests that welfare consequentialism requires profit-seeking in a way that’s inconsistent with certain kinds of social responsibility and with the operation of at least some non-profits).

Next, Anne Barraquier (CERAM/Sophia Antipolis) presented on “Exploring Knowledge Creation Mechanisms of Socially Responsible Organizations As a Factor Of Value Creation.” She presented the results of a qualitative study of the fragrance and flavours industry, and in particular of the relationship between knowledge creation activities and social responsibility.

Finally, Kalynne Hackney Pudner (Auburn University), gave a presentation called “Respect and the Googled Employee.” (Actually the title in the programme, which I like slightly better, was “MySpace Friends and the Kingdom of Ends.”)  The presentation was about the ethics of companies mining on-line resources to find out information about employees (e.g., Googling them or digging through their MySpace pages.)

Every year at its annual meeting, the Society for Business Ethics holds a joint session with the Social Issues in Management division of the Academy of Management.

This year’s speaker at the joint SBE/SIM session was Robert Frank (Cornell University). Frank’s talk was called “Identifying the Right Targets for Moral Outrage.”

Nearly-exact quotation of Frank’s opening sentence: “Moral outrage is socially useful. It is a scarce resource. So it’s crucial that we expend it wisely. And it seems to me that we’re currently expending an awful lot of moral outrage in unwise ways.”

It was an interesting & engaging talk. Basically, Frank’s argument was that we ought to consider carefully which kinds of cases expression of moral outrage can expected to be effective in. In particular, he argued that moral outrage is particularly unlikely to be useful when aimed at people caught in competitive domains where they really seem to have few alternatives than to engage in the kinds of behaviour that sparked our outrage. So, for example, we ought not to be outraged at the board of directors that decides to pay some ‘ougrageous’ amount to their CEO; that seemingly excessive rate of pay might be justified by the market for talented managers and the expected value that this particular CEO is likely to bring to the firm. (Loosely: “don’t hate the player; hate the game!”)

Mostly, Frank seemed to suggest that we aim our moral outrate at political decision-makers who structure the systems within which the rest of us interact. (But Frank’s answer was disappointing — in fact, he didn’t seem to have an answer — when during Q&A, he was asked why we ought to be morally outraged at politicians who, after all, are caught up in the logic of their own competitive domains.)

See also Robert Frank’s books:
The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas (2007)
Luxury Fever (2000)
Passions Within Reason (1988)

(More blogging live from the Society for Business Ethics conference.)

I spent the afternoon attending an “Emerging Scholars” session, which consisted of four very fine presentations.

Tara Ceranic (a Ph.D. student at University of Washington) presented on “The Importance of Being Emotional.” Her main question: how do emotions affect ethical behaviour? She focused on guilt, compassion, contempt and elevation (the last of which essentially means praise-of-others), how each of these might be correlated with ethical behaviour, and how particular contexts might influence emotion.

Next, Bidhan Parmar (U of Virginia) gave a presentation called “Moral Psychology & Business Ethics: From Individual Sensemaking to Organizational Interpretation.” (In addition to giving a very good presentation, Parmar distinguished himself by being the very first person in SBE history to play Stairway to Heaven backward, as part of his presentation, to let the audience hear the hidden message.)

Third, Miguel Alzola (Rutgers University) spoke about “The Moral Psychology of Character in Business Ethics,” which was a defence of virtue theory against situationist philosophers and social psychologists. (Situationists argue that there just is no such thing as “character,” on the grounds that human behaviour has been experimentally proven to be highly variable according to small changes in situations.) Roughly, Alzola argued that situationists a) are mistaken about what it is that virtue theory actually claims, and b) are mistaken about the implications of their own experimental data.

Finally, Jeff York (U of Virginia) made a presentation called “Stakeholder Green,” about whether & how the natural environment ought to be considered a stakeholder in corporate decision-making. York’s project is in its early stages, but basically he wants to argue that the natural environment ought to be eligible to be counted as a stakeholder, roughly on consequentialist grounds.

(I’m still blogging “live” from the Society for Business Ethics conference.)

Lunch today at the SBE featured Ed Hartman’s Presidential Address, entitled “Reconciliation in Business Ethics: Some Lessons From Aristotle.” The reconciliation Ed talked about is his proposed reconciliation between fact-based disciplines such as Organizational Behaviour and Organizational Theory (which are about the way things are in business organizations) and the normative discipline of ethics (about how things ought to be). Ed reminded us that part of the reason that ethics is treated as a separate (and often optional) set of issues, separate from “business” decisions, has to do with an arguably faulty separation of purely factual and purely normative issues in the minds of many (but thankfully not all) businesspeople. He called upon us to recall how often normatively-laden descriptions affect our descriptions of “facts,” and the many ways in which the facts of situations affect our moral interpretations of specific actions.

It was a good, and thought-provoking talk, and I suspect further attempt at summary wouldn’t do it justice. If you want to hear more of Ed’s view, check out his books:
Organizational Ethics and the Good Life (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Conceptual Foundations of Organization Theory (Ballinger, 1988)
Substance, Body, and Soul: Aristotelian Investigations (Princeton University Press) (Princeton University Press, 1978)

(I’m blogging from the Society for Business Ethics conference.)

I started my morning listening to Richard DeGeorge (University of Kansas) talking about “Privacy in Public Space and Non-Governmental Surveillance.” DeGeorge outlined the various kinds of corporate surveillance (general v. individual, security v. marketing), and suggested that strongest arguments against non-governmental surveillance are going to be rooted in arguments about the harms that result from such surveillance than in arguments about privacy.

Next, Ian Maitland (University of Minnesota ) gave a talk called “Virtue or Control in the Governance of the Firm?” — essentially, it was a talk about what the evidence from experimental psychology says about the balance between virtue (character) and control (tight rules) that will work best in corporate governance.
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In the next session, I heard Exequiel Hernandez (University of Minnesota) give a talk called “Stakeholder Theory and Corporate Morality: Is a Shareholder Focus Associated With Corporate Unethical Actions?” Hernandez argued that firms that are shareholder-focused may tend inadvertently to foster cultures that make corporate fraud more likely (and, as Robert Kolb pointed out during Q&A) more likely to end up harming shareholders.

Next, Daryl Koehn presented a paper (co-authored with Joe Ueng) called “Back-dated Stock Options and Restatements of Suspect Earnings:  Is There a Correlation?” She presented data showing interesting correlations between various kinds of financial deceit at corporations.

Next I saw Denis Arnold (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) present on “The Ethics of Direct to Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising.” (Great topic, btw: see this blog entry.) Denis did a careful examination of the pharma industry’s claim that direct to consumer (DTC) advertising is intended to “educate” consumers, and argued that the communication techniques typically used make DTC more like manipulation than education. He also usefully proposed that any new regulation ought to differentiate between “reminder ads” and “product claim ads,” on one hand, and “help-seeking” ads (the kind that say “Have these symptoms? See your doctor”) on the other.
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The final session of the morning was a panel on “Social Science Approaches to Business Ethics Research.”

Kirsten Martin (Catholic U. of America) gave a presentation called “Business Ethics and a Rich Research Agenda,” which focused on the uses of qualitative research in Business Ethics. She gave a nice explanation of the differences and complementarity between qualitative & quantitative research.

Second, Jared Harris presented “Endogeneity in Business Ethics Research: a Rely to James.” The problem of endogeneity is essentially a problem of how to make sure, in cases where you observe an correlation between A and B (e.g., between shoddy bookkeeping and poor performance), that there isn’t some 3rd factor “C” involved in either mediating A and B or in causing both A and B. Harris suggested a number of statistical & methodological ways of controlling for endogeneity. (Best — most fun — answer during Q&A: “I’m not sure there’s an answer to your question that I can give in plain English, but there is an answer.”)

Next, Daylian Cain (Harvard), gave a presentation on experimental economics called “What Good Can Come Out of the Lab?” Daylian gave some very nice evidence from experimental econ that our brains — our powers of reasoning — don’t actually work the way we experience them working. And this applies to moral reasoning too: there’s good reason to think that the moral reasons we believe motivate us in particular cases are not actually what motivates us. (In other words, in at least some cases you are mistaken about what ethical reasons are making you do the things you do.)

(I’m blogging brief notes from the Society for Business Ethics conference.)

My afternoon started with attending a session on Ken Goodpaster’s book, Conscience and Corporate Culture.

Goodpaster took the podium first and sketched the outline of the book. He said that central to his book is the notion of “teleopathy,” which he defines as a mindset that involves “the unbalanced pursuit of purpose.”

Next, Jeffery Smith gave some comments on Goodpaster’s book, and focused on the sense in which the notion of conscience involves finding an equilibrium between appeal to general principles, and a focus on the particularities of specific situations. Smith also drew a number of comparisons between Goodpaster’s book and Patricia Werhane’s work on moral imagination.

Then Wim Dubbink made a presentation (on Goodpaster) called “Is Teleopathy a Pathology?” He situated Goodpaster’s work within a history of critiques of the market. He also suggested that Goodpaster needs to tell us more about the sources of teleopathy, and the extent to which teleopathy is a necessary, or only contingent, feature of free-market capitalism.

Goodpaster then offered a response to Smith’s & Dubbink’s commentaries. He said too much to summarize, but one nice point he made had to do with the sense in which moral “imagination” allows moral agents to get closer to the reality of other agents, rather than (as some might suppose) the ability to engage in flights of (moral) fancy.
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The afternoon ended with a moving tribute to Robert Soloman, a phenomenally productive and well-respected philosopher of business, who passed away in January. The session was chaired by SBE President Ed Hartman, and featured remembrances of Robert by his friends and fellow scholars Robert Audi, Joanned Ciulla, Daryl Koehn, and Richard Nielsen, along with lots of moving and funny anecdotes from members of the audience. I regret that I never got to meet a man who was so much admired, respected, and loved.

I’m blogging from the Society for Business Ethics conference. (I won’t be sending out email notices about this or subsequent blog entries over the next couple of days.)

Here are a few notes & bullet points (nothing very structured) about things I’ve seen so far:

I caught the tail end of “The Ethics of Pressure Groups and Stakeholder Reciprocity: The Missing Link in Stakeholder Theory,” by Yves Fassin, of Ghent University.
– interesting paper; reminding us that ethics is for NGO’s & others, too; useful broadening of the scope of business ethics.
– My friend Daryl Koehn (University of St. Thomas ) asked a very good question about what mechanisms are available for implementing the kind of accountability Fassin was arguing for.

Then I saw “Building a Case Against Corporate Social Irresponsibility,” Timothy S. Clark, George Washington University
– useful reframing, at least as a provocative change in vocabulary
– not clear whether “social irresponsible” is intended to mean something different from “unethical.” It probably should mean something different, if the “social” part is to meaningful at all (because not everything unethical has a “social” impact).

Next I heard Norman Bowie on “Organizational Integrity.”
Best line (I’m paraphrasing, here): “I’ve lost faith in codes of ethics, because codes of ethics lack ‘asset specificity.’ The key to organizational integrity is a sound ethical climate. An ethical climate has high asset specificity and is not easily copied.”

Then Ed Freeman (the ‘father’ — grandfather? — of stakeholder theory) gave a presentation called “Building an Ethical America” — part of an ambitious book project of his. He called for an end to “saints-and-sinners” thinking, and proposed a re-moralization of our institutions. What he meant by that was not a ‘return to old-fashioned values,’ but a rethinking of various social institutions and their purposes.

Also of note: During Q&A, Freeman said that the most important question of political philosophy is “How do we sustain value-creation & trade over time?” The question of justifying the state (the question normally taken as being primary) Freeman said should come second.

Yesterday I blogged about paying to offset the CO2 emissions from the flight I was on.

Loyal reader Sandra, from Montreal, emailed with a simple question: who paid the $4.80? Was it out of my pocket, or (because I’m a university professor with federal research grants) was it paid for by taxpayers? (Sandra admitted that it’s a piddling amount to worry about, but she’s rightly interested in the principle.)

Great question! The simple answer: I paid it myself. I don’t have any idea whether carbon offsetting is an “allowable” expense, or how I would even go about trying to claim it on my travel claim. But should it be an allowable expense? Should the taxpayers who pay the other expenses related to my research also pay for carbon offsetting? Well, currently, neither the federal government nor the relevant granting agencies nor my university’s Financial Services department has signalled that this would be allowed. Of course, I suppose I could give it a try: I could submit the receipt (under the heading of “miscellaneous expenses, I guess), and who knows, I might just get reimbursed. Should I? That would amount to me deciding — on behalf of the taxpayers of Canada — that carbon offsetting is not just a good cause, but a better cause than anything else that money could have been spent on. It would make me feel better, maybe, about all the travelling (and hence polluting) that I do. But do I have the authority to make that decision?

This immediately got me thinking: what if I were the CEO of a company, and the issue wasn’t taxpayer money, but shareholder money? And what if the bill for my offsetting (let’s say it’s not just for travel, but for whatever industrial processes my company carries out) was not $4.80, but some more significant amount, perhaps in the thousands or millions of dollars. Wouldn’t the question would remain fundamentally the same?