Petraeus, Moralizing, & Leadership Obligations
This past Friday, David Petraeus, a retired 4-star general in the US Army resigned from his position as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He resigned because evidence had surfaced that he had had an extramarital affair.
On the surface, of course, this is just another example of a powerful man succumbing, as all too many seem to do, to the all too common temptation to betray his marital commitments. And, again on the surface, it raises questions about whether private foibles are sufficient reason to think a man unfit for public office. Petraeus himself, in his letter of resignation to President Obama, said he had shown “extremely poor judgment.” The question that always arises — remember Clinton/Lewinski? — is whether poor judgment in personal matters necessarily implied poor judgment in public matters, or whether instead the scandal really just amounts to a puerile bit of titillation.
But the fact is that Petraeus is not just another man, and not even just another man in a leadership position. He was, until November 9th, Director of the CIA, the most important intelligence organization on the planet. He was, in other words, one of the world’s most desirable candidates for blackmail. And so any transgression that could serve as fodder for blackmail is immediately amplified in magnitude. Clearly, marital infidelity is pretty high on that list. Someone in a position like the one Petraeus had has to stay squeaky clean, not for moralistic reasons, but for national security reasons.
And the seedier details that have been emerging seem to bear this worry out, at least to some extent. The woman with whom Petraeus is said to have had the affair, Paula Broadwell, is now said to have sent threatening letters to another woman who she saw as a rival for the general’s affections. That’s not to say that anything like blackmail was in the offing. But it suggests that the Petraeus/Broadwell affair had dark edges to it beyond your standard tale of marital infidelity.
There will surely be, in the coming weeks and months of analysis of this matter, plenty of talk about the demands of leadership and the character and integrity it requires. But what leadership at the highest level really requires is not just character, but an acute awareness of your own weaknesses — including weaknesses you share with the rest of the human population — and the ability to foresee and forestall the risks the flow from those.
Ethics, Law, & Workplace Social Media
Filed under: employees, internet, law, rights, social media |
Leave a Comment Yesterday as part of the Business Ethics Speakers Series I host, we held a panel discussion on “Ethical and Legal Aspects of Workplace Social Media.”* It’s a topic that a lot of organizations are thinking about these days, and it raises a lot of tricky questions. How much control should an organization try to exert over employees use of Twitter at work? When two employees kvetch about their employer on Facebook, is that a private conversation or a public one? Is it OK for an employer to gain access to a potential employee’s Facebook profile in order to engage in screening?
For the panel, I invited three of the most thoughtful people I know on the topic. All happened to be lawyers, but all come from very different perspectives and intersect with the topic in very different ways. And all of them were interested not just to talk about the legal standards that apply to social media in the workplace, but also about the ethical principles that ought to underpin such standards.
Mark Crestohl, who chaired the panel, is AVP for Global HR Regulatory Policies at TD Bank. In his comments, Mark suggested that what is most important for employers is to explain to their employees what it expects of them when they engage in social media. Mark explained that at TD, they explain to employees that they must adhere to the bank’s usage guidelines when any one or more of three situations arise: when the employee uses equipment (e.g., a corporate smartphone) provided by the employer; when they use network access provided by the employer; or when they are discussing topics related to TD or the financial services industry.
Panelist Dan Michaluk is a Partner at Hicks Morley, Canada’s largest HR law firm. He said his advice to corporate clients is that then need to have a social media policy that is “risk-based and culture-tuned.” In other words, cookie-cutter policies just won’t do. He also said that clear internal guidelines are important, and that guidelines and policies need to be enforced consistently. But he also warns clients to think carefully before engaging on the ‘hard cases,’ the kinds of cases that test the line between private activity and activity that causes a significant risk to an employer interest.
Finally, Avner Levin is a colleague of mine at the Ted Rogers School of Management, and Director of the Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute. For Avner, the key is to keep having a rich conversation about the issues social media raise. He pointed out that we tend to strive to behave online in ways that mimic the standards we have developed offline. But, he noted, we also seek, online, to present different aspects of our identity to different audiences — our employer, our colleagues, our family, our friends — in the same manner that we do in the real world. His plea was that we do our best to make sure that our workplace policies respect those individual needs and desires.
But that just hints at the rich discussion that went on. You can see the webcast of the event in its entirety by clicking here: Ethical and Legal Aspects of Workplace Social Media.
——-
*The panel was co-sponsored by the Ethics Practitioners’ Association of Canada.
Storms, Global Warming, and Corporate Citizenship
Filed under: corporate citizenship, disaster, efficiency, environment |
Comments (6) Humans are (very likely) changing the earth’s climate. And changes in climate are (very likely) making storms worse. And worse storms are (definitely) a bad thing. Granted, it’s hard — in fact, foolish — to try to draw a straight line between any individual’s or even any corporation’s behaviour and the Frankenstorm that just slammed New York and surrounding areas, but the fact remains that the devastation that storm wrought was not the effect of a mere freak of nature. As Businessweek bluntly put it, “it’s global warming, stupid.”
But what matters more than the cause of global warming is what we can do about it. In particular, what can business do about it?
Large-scale problems tend to require large-scale solutions, and so there’s a natural tendency to leave such issues to government. This is so for two reasons. First is simple scope: you driving a hybrid car or switching to CFL bulbs just isn’t going to accomplish much. Second is the nature of collective action problems: each of us benefits from a wasteful, energy-intensive lifestyle, and it seems narrowly rational to let other people (or other companies) bear the costs of doing things differently. But the fact that it’s tempting, or even narrowly rational, to let others bear the burden, or to wait for government to act, doesn’t make it the right thing, or even the minimally decent thing, to do.
So what can businesses do — what is it possible for them to do — in response to a trend in global warming that is clearly posing increased risks?
To begin, of course, they can work to avoid making things worse, by avoiding burning carbon and adding to the load of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This means looking at relatively small, obvious stuff like seeking energy efficiencies in their operations, promoting telecommuting, reduce air travel, and so on. Luckily, most such efforts are relatively painless, since they tend to reduce costs at the same time. Sometimes mere laziness or a focus on “how we’ve always don’t things” gets in the way of making such win-win changes. Don’t be lazy. Innovate. Share best practices with your suppliers, with other companies in your sector, and if you’re a B2B company, with your customers.
The second thing that businesses can do is to work with, rather than against, government efforts at making things better. In particular, it is a fundamental obligation of corporate citizenship not to block government action aimed at effective action at slowing climate change, and in particular action aimed at dealing effectively with the effects of climate change. If, for example, a government wants to pass rules forcing businesses to pay the full cost of their energy usage, or rules that impose industry-wide energy efficiency rules, business should welcome rather than oppose such changes. Energy inefficiencies impose costs on other people, and hence count as the kind of externalities that go against the fundamental principles of a market economy.
It’s also worth noting that asking what business can do is not quite the same as asking what your business, or any particular business, can do. Business organizations and trade associations abound, and there’s plenty they can do to a) help members share best practices and b) foster industry-wide standards that can help businesses live up to their social obligations while at the same time maintaining a level playing field.
Finally, business can do the things that business is supposed to be good at: efficient management, synergistic use of a range of kinds of human capital, and innovation. That stuff isn’t just a good recipe for commercial success. It’s an absolute obligation. And innovation is clearly the key among those three aptitudes. Efficiency — tightening our belts — will only get us so far. We desperately need a whole slew of truly brilliant new ideas for products, services, and productive processes over the next decade if we are to meet the collective challenge posed by changes in our environment. And it’s foolish to expect government to provide those ideas. It’s time for business to step up to the plate. There can be no better way to manifest a commitment to corporate citizenship than to be the kind of corporate citizen that sees a business model in trying to help us all cope with global warming.
Business Obligations During Natural Disasters
Filed under: corporate citizenship, disaster, employees, philanthropy, safety |
Comments (1) As Hurricane Sandy bears down on Atlantic City, New York, and (eventually) parts of eastern Canada, thousands of businesses large and small are faced with dilemmas related to doing business before, during, and after a potential state of disaster. Certainly some businesses won’t have a choice, as flooding either wipes them out or makes access impossible. The NYSE and Nasdaq have both made the unusual move of staying closed for the day today (Monday).
But others will have hard choices to make, and no easy formula for making such choices is at hand.
Choice #1 pertains to the basic issue of staying open. Here, business owners need to balance the safety and security of their employees and buildings, on one hand, with the needs of their customers on the other. The weight given to the needs of customers must of course depend on just what you’re selling. If you sell water and flashlight batteries, a sense of social obligation ought to keep you open ‘as long as possible.’
The second choice has to do with the closely related question of whether businesses should require employees to work before, during, and after a natural disaster. Sometimes being at work will pose risks to health and safety, and sometimes the risk lies in getting to work. The transit closures that go with severe weather are a factor here, too. Lack of access to public transit can make it difficult, and sometimes dangerous, for employees to get to work. But then again, in some cases employees — especially ones earning an hourly wage — will prefer to work, in which case telling them to go home may be overly paternalistic.
The third question is about prices. In a reasonably free market, prices tend to go up when goods are scarce and when demand is high. And natural disasters have a way of both limiting supply and raising demand. As supply chains get cut off, it may be reasonable for businesses to raise prices somewhat in order to cover additional costs. But stores need to be careful to stay on the right side of the law — most jurisdictions have anti-price gouging laws that put limits on just how much you can raise prices in the wake of disaster.
All three choices involve difficult decisions about how to balance the competing interests of various groups. But in terms of fundamental motivation, it’s also worth pointing out that staying in business as long as possible can be a great way to build goodwill. A business that is there for its community in times of crisis is likely to reap rewards for a long time to come.
The business I happen to work for — Ryerson University — is an unusual kind of business when it comes to questions like these. I asked our VP Administration & Finance, Julia Hanigsberg, about the criteria Ryerson uses to decide whether and when to close.
“The safety of our community is the primary consideration on whether to close the university or cancel classes during extreme weather conditions or other emergency situations,” Hanigsberg told me. “Our Integrated Threat and Risk Assessment team monitors the situation by scanning publicly available sources and consulting with expertise available in the broader public sector about road conditions, availability of public transit, information from Emergency Services etc.”
One particularly interesting point that Hanigsberg made had to do with the fact that, really, the university never fully shuts down. Hanigsberg says: “Unlike most businesses, even when we ‘close’ the university is operational 24/7 with students in residence, research labs operational etc.”
The same is true for hospitals, of course, as well as other public services like shelters. But the same is true for businesses such as hotels and kennels and airports. Anything charged with the 24/7 sheltering and feeding of humans or animals — is unlikely to shut down entirely. The same obviously goes for essential services, such as police, fire, and ambulance. They’re not businesses in the traditional sense, but they face the same dilemmas, albeit with a much stronger public service impetus pushing them to keep the wheels turning.
The inability to shut down entirely brings special obligations, of course. For starters, it puts a premium on planning for disasters. Businesses that can’t shut down need to have plans in place, and need to train employees both in safeguarding their own health and safety, and in looking out for the customers who may be entrusted to their care in the most trying, and ethically challenging, of circumstances.
‘Do Your Best’ in The Tangle of Global Business
Filed under: accountability, competition, corruption, ethics, excuses, international |
Leave a Comment I spoke recently to a corporate audience on the topic of Ethics for Leaders. One of the sub-topics I touched on was the fact that leaders need not only to make good ethical decisions, but also to help others make good ethical decisions. As a practical example, we looked at techniques a leader might use to help someone else understand what is ethically problematic about bribery. Sure, someone in a leadership position might have the authority simply to give orders; but in many cases it will be much more effective to explain the values and principles that underlie a particular prohibition.
One of the attendees at this session pushed back in a useful way. “I get the ethical argument against bribery, and I agree. But I’ve talked to Sales Managers overseas who say it’s just not realistic to avoid everything that could be construed as a bribe. How do I deal with that, beyond simply pointing to the FCPA?”
This is a tough challenge, one that needs to be taken seriously. Whether it’s bribery or nepotistic hiring practices, local practices that violate the rules of business “back home” can seem hard to avoid. Business is a competitive game, and it sometimes really is the case that scrupulously following the written rules puts a company at a significant — maybe even definitive — disadvantage.
It’s far too easy to play Monday Morning Quarterback and to speak in idealistic terms about integrity in business. But ethics isn’t about being a saint; it’s about finding a way to do your best to find suitable limits on profit-seeking behaviours when those behaviours put other people’s legitimate interests and rights at risk. So, if we are to avoid sounding preachy, what can we say about the Sales Manager above?
First, make sure the “when in Rome” argument isn’t just being used as a fig leaf to cover up what is really an appeal to convenience. Sometimes it may be easier to follow local custom, but that’s not quite the same as necessity.
Second, if — if! — it really is necessary, when doing business overseas, to engage in practices that wouldn’t be allowed back home, are you at least doing what you can to a) minimize the frequency of such violations and b) working, in at least some small way, to improve standards in the local business community? Bribery and other forms of corruption are truly corrosive, and economies in which they are common would be much better off without them. Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?
Third, ask whether unscrupulous (or merely ‘grey zone’) behaviour is being used to cover up poor performance. It may be that the Sales Manager who feels the need to offer bribes simply isn’t very good at his job and is looking for ways to succeed without having sufficient talent or making sufficient effort. Sometimes lack of ethics suggests lack of competency.
And finally, ask what your company can do to change incentives such that a Sales Manager isn’t so single-mindedly driven by numbers that he feels compelled to bend or break the rules. No one within an organization should ever think of themselves as having just a single objective. Yes, a Sales Manager is in charge of Sales. But he also has responsibilities that include risk management (including avoiding bringing the company into shame or into court) and managing morale within the sales team. People will behave according to how you reward them, and so reward mechanisms ought to be as balanced as you would like their performance to be.
The challenges posed by doing business in the global marketplace are never easy. Only by avoiding both naïveté and cynicism can you hope to do good while still doing well.
Pipeline Whistleblowing: Getting the Ethics Right
It was reported recently that an engineer for TransCanada, Evan Vokes, has now gone public with claims that the pipeline company has been lax in the standards it applies to having its pipelines inspected.
Whistleblowing is among the most complex ethical issues in the world of business. Whistleblowers are people who demonstrate that there is — there must be — a limit to the loyalty of even a dedicated employee. Whistleblowers go outside the boundaries of their organization to report actual or immanent wrongdoing. They often prevent grievous harm, but in doing so they inevitably impugn the character of their organizations, and sometimes of their co-workers. And of course, there’s always the worry that the self-appointed whistleblower is actually just a malcontent bent on revenge. But such cases aside, whistleblowers perform an essential public service.
A few points are worth making about the TransCanada case in particular.
The first is that, at least as the story is told by the CBC, Vokes is the perfect whistleblower. He’s got the relevant expertise (he’s both a welder and an engineer) and he’s got a reputation for honesty and integrity. Further, Vokes carried out the whistleblowing properly: he proceeded in perfect ethics-textbook fashion by first making his concerns known to his superiors, and then escalating up chain of command. Only when it became clear that internal channels weren’t working did he go outside of the company to bring his concerns to the relevant regulatory agency.
Second, the fact that Vokes felt the need to blow the whistle suggests a failure of leadership within the company. According the the CBC’s report, Vokes made his concerns clear all the way up the corporate hierarchy, and everyone “right up to the chief executive officer refused to act on his complaints.” A
“It’s fine” — just like NASA’s space shuttle Challenger
The latest update to this story, of course, is that TransCanada has now temporarily shut down its Keystone pipeline, citing safety concerns.
Is a Store a Person?
Contrary to what many claim to believe, the union representing workers at Zellers stores in Calgary, Alberta, believe that corporations (or businesses more generally) are in fact persons, morally and legally. At least, that’s what seems to be implied by the position they are taking.
Here’s the background, for those who don’t already know. Zellers is Canada’s second-largest chain of discout stores. The well-known American chain, Target, has acquired the leases on 189 Zellers locations (about 3/4 of the total). So, over the next couple of years, Zellers signs will be taken down, and Zellers merchandise will disappear, to be replaced by Target signs and merchandise.
But what about the employees? Not surprisingly, they will be laid off by Zellers. Target, apparently, will welcome applications from the former Zellers employees, but with no guarantee, for example, that their years of service for Zellers will count for anything. They will, in other words, be brand new employees as far as Target is concerned.
But wait, says the union representing those employees. You mean that a worker with 20 years experience could conceivably leave Zellers one day, return (to the same building) the next morning to her new job at Target, and find she’s being paid like she’s got zero experience? So much for being loyal to loyal employees!
But notice what this line of reasoning assumes. It assumes that a store — indeed, a physical location — is something that can have responsibilities. The sign can change; the merchandise can change; even the ownership can change. But the store where you’ve worked the last 20 years is still, on some level, the same store. Or so the theory goes.
And the theory is not without some basis in law. In at least some jurisdictions, union representation, for example, carries over to the new owners when a business is sold. You can’t sell your business and thereby simply void the contract with the union representing your employees. (You can imagine the alternative: two brothers could “sell” their company back and forth to each other every 6 months just to neuter the union. It’s probably in the public interest to keep that loophole closed.)
But the present case isn’t quite like that. Target isn’t buying the Zellers stores lock, stock, and barrel. They’re simply taking over the buildings. So the transfer is unlikely to fall under the principle that a pre-existing collective agreement “goes with the business.” So for the union to assert that Target has responsibilities to the employees-formerly-known-as-Zellers-employees requires an especially strong version of the corporate “personhood” thesis, according to which corporations are to be treated as individual entities, under the law, for purposes of contracting, land ownership, and so on.
I doubt the union’s argument here can be made to hold water, though I would be interested to hear if readers think differently.
My main point, here, is just to point out the presuppositions of the union’s position, especially given that it presupposes a point of view that is rejected (albeit wrong-headedly) by so many.
Lance Armstrong and the Ethics of Competition
Filed under: adversarial ethics, compliance, corruption, excuses, scandal, sports, white collar crime |
Leave a Comment On Wednesday, The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released a small mountain’s worth of evidence against champion cyclist Lance Armstrong. Not surprisingly, comparisons to corruption in the world of business were not far behind. On Twitter, a number of wags referred to Armstrong as the “Bernie Madoff of cycling,” or variants on that.
The comparison with Madoff is unsurprising. In both cases, you have wrongdoing of impressive scope. In both cases, the wrongdoing was truly brazen, going on right under the noses of regulators. In both cases, you can’t escape the feeling that someone should have been able to figure it all out sooner. And in both cases, you see the eventual fall of a man who was a hero to many.
But the comparison is also off-target in important ways.
For one thing, the USADA’s account of things suggest that Armstrong was not just a cheat, but a ringleader. While others may have been complicit in Madoff’s scheme, there’s no suggestion that he engaged in organized, cynical bullying to push others into wrongdoing the way Armstrong apparently did. Armstrong is accused of having used his position of leadership to coerce others into cheating too.
The bigger difference, though, has to do with differences in the nature of the competitive contexts in which Armstrong and Madoff were each embroiled. Madoff was a stockbroker and investment advisor. It is a job in which an honest person can find success. For all the talk of Wall Street being a place where crooks thrive, there’s no indication that an investment advisor has to be a crook just to survive or to do his or her job effectively. And even if it were the case that cooking the books was somehow normal, something “everyone was doing,” that fact would do absolutely nothing to justify Madoff’s ponzi scheme. It’s not something that, in any sense, Madoff had to do.
Armstrong, on the other hand, was a cyclist competing at elite levels, during an era in which, by all accounts, doping was absolutely rampant. And in such a setting, it does at least arguably matter that “everybody does it.” It is an unfortunate fact that in the world Armstrong competed in, for every individual cyclist doping was a necessary evil, a way of keeping the playing field level. Any cyclist not engaging in doping was effectively relegating himself to the back of the pack. That’s not an excuse, but it’s an accurate description of the facts of the case.
So doping was, in a sense, non-optional for the elite cyclist trying to do his job properly, because after all his job is to try to win. And during the era in question, doping was apparently “allowed” under the unwritten rules of the cycling game. It was embedded in the social norms of the relevant group. It was, in other words, a collective problem. Regrettable, to be sure, but the sort of problem that is devilishly hard to solve, and against which individual integrity is absolutely impotent to solve it.
In this sense, doping is much more like bribery than like a ponzi scheme. Where bribery is rampant, it may literally be true that a company cannot compete without engaging in that kind of corrupt behaviour. But bribery, like doping, is an arms race that no one can be sure of winning. And the damage it does is significant. Like doping, it exposes competitors to all sorts of dangers. And when such behaviour is exposed — as in the case of Walmart Mexico earlier this year — the result is not just scandal, but a loss of confidence in the integrity of the game itself.
GMO Labelling and Consumer Rights
Filed under: activism, consumers, labelling, product safety, rights |
Comments (3) Next month, Californians will vote on Proposition 37, regarding the mandatory labelling of genetically modified foods. Because it’s about food, and because it’s taking place in California — a place where they take their food and their plebiscites seriously — the effort has been highly-publicized and highly politicized. California is both an important agricultural state and the state with perhaps the highest concentration of believers in the “Natural is Good” mantra. So it’s not surprising that the fight over Prop 37 is raising some dust.
One of the favourite slogans of the pro-Prop37 forces is the claim that consumers have a right to know what they’re eating. This is a strong claim. Using the language of rights is a way of making the strongest possible kind of ethical claim, a way to draw a line in the topsoil, as it were. To say that someone has a right to something is quite different from saying merely that “it would be good if we did this” or “good people and good companies do this sort of thing.” It expresses a kind of moral absolute.
Indeed, if it were true that consumers really have a strong right to know what they’re eating — including, presumably, a right to know the genetic makeup of their food — then Prop 37 ought to be redundant. Any corporate citizen worth its salt makes every effort to respect its customers’ rights. When there is a right to some piece of information, institutions and methods of production need to be designed and implemented to respect and promote such rights.
But the idea that we have a right to know what we’re eating can’t stand up to scrutiny, at least not if we define “what we’re eating” to include every aspect of the food’s makeup and indeed its history. Counter examples are easy. If you’re sipping a Coke, do you have a right to know the exact proportion of various ingredients? No, that’s a secret. If you’re eating in a restaurant, do you have the right to know the Chef’s method for searing your tuna steak so perfectly? Of course not — though you of course have the right to eat elsewhere.
Or consider this example: do you have the right to know whether the banana you’re eating was picked on a Thursday? (Imagine that Thursday is a holy day in your religion.) No, because recording and tracking day-of-harvest for boatloads of bananas would be difficult and expensive. Yes, the fact might matter to you a lot, but there are other ways of accommodating your interest in that information, short of attributing a morally weighty (let alone legally binding) right to it. Taken seriously, the right to know your food’s history even implies that the racist or sexist or homophobe has a right to personal information about the people who handled their food along the supply chain. And yet surely there is no such right to information that let’s someone act out their prejudices.
The point is that people might want to know all sorts of information about the food their eating. And that’s fine. But saying they have a right to it is a different thing altogether. Rights protect important interests. And there simply is no compelling evidence that anyone needs to know that genetic makeup of their food, or that a right to such information would protect any important consumer interest.
Addendum:
For more, see my previous entry on the “Right to Know What I’m Eating” over at my Food Ethics Blog.
The Ethics of Changing the Rules of the Game
Filed under: adversarial ethics, competition, entertainment, regulations, sports |
Comments (1) 
We all agree on the need to play by the rules of the game. But what do we do when the rules need changing? Under what circumstances should the rules be changed? What should the process be? What are the rules of the game with regard to changing the rules of the game?
These kinds of questions arise in any competitive, rule-governed domain, whether organized sport or politics or the world of business. In sport, the rules in question are the ones established by various leagues. In politics, the rules are legislative and sometimes constitutional. In business, the rules in question are the ones established by government regulators.
Last week, McGill philosopher Daniel Weinstock gave a talk on this topic, in a Business Ethics Speakers’ series that I host at the Ted Rogers School of Management. His talk was called, “Should business dictate the business of rule change in sport?” He was taking aim at the suspicion on the part of many sports fans that rule changes are sometimes effected by for-profit professional leagues for mere financial reasons that have nothing to do with the spirit of the game.
Along the way, Weinstock suggested that if you look at the patterns of rule changes in professional sport, you see that there are basically four kinds of reasons given to justify such changes. They are:
1) Increasing safety;
2) Closing loopholes in existing rules;
3) Increasing entertainment value of the game;
4) Improving the precision of adjudication by referees.
Sports fans will find it easy to think of examples of rules being changed by various professional leagues for just the reasons cited. But Weinstock’s framework can also be applied usefully to the broader question of how and when rules are changed in rule-governed domains more generally.
Weinstock’s first category is easy to apply to business: there are plenty of occupational health and safety regulations and consumer protection legislation that fall under this heading. Rule changes that fit the second category — loopholes — are also plentiful. The third category, entertainment, seems out of place at first glance. But think of it this way: Weinstock is basically referring to rule changes that are aimed at keeping the game productive, making sure it continues to produce the ‘good’ it is intended to produce. Seen this way, any regulatory change intended to promote efficiency or competition fits something akin to Weinstock’s third category.
Finally, there’s the fourth category, which has to do with improving the accuracy of referees. In regulatory terms, this includes rule changes that make it easier for regulators to do their jobs, including record-keeping and disclosure requirements of all kinds.
Are these the only valid reasons for effecting regulatory changes in the world of business? Probably not. But using something like Weinstock’s framework as a lens gives us a good start at making sense of the overall pattern of regulatory requirements to which business is subject. Not all rules are good ones, but neither are they arbitrary. Seeing the patterns is the first step towards sorting the good from the bad.
The Business Ethics Blog 