Pet Sales, Municipal Rules, and Social Responsibility
Filed under: consumers, CSR, government, regulations, retail |
Comments (5) Toronto’s city council has just told an entire category of retail stores that they must only sell second-hand goods. No, the move isn’t some ‘green’ initiative aimed at encouraging recycling. It’s an animal-welfare edict, a move to force pet stores to sell dogs and cats sourced exclusively from “shelters, rescue groups or people giving up animals for free.” In other words, no more puppy-mill puppies or kitten-mill kittens are to be sold in Toronto.
See the story here, by Carys Mills for the Globe & Mail: Toronto Council bans pet shop sale of dogs, cats, unless they come from shelters.
The motion was passed unanimously, with all councillors bravely taking a pro-puppy stand. And it’s not surprising to see unanimity, even regarding a restriction on commerce, when that restriction can plausibly claim to protect not just helpless animals, but customers (including children) too.
One interesting point about this is the focus — both legal and ethical — on retail. Regulation (in this and many other cases) has, in principle, 3 possible targets: producers, consumers, and retailers. Council has chosen to focus on retailers — rather than, say, pass rules about how dog breeders should operate. Partly that’s a matter of jurisdiction: the municipal government has some authority over how business is conducted within its territory, but no jurisdiction over production processes at puppy mills in far-flung rural locales. But it’s not just a matter of jurisdiction: enforcement can be a lot more efficient when it can focus on just a handful of retail outlets. Retailers are the intermediaries between producers and consumers, and so they’re effectively gatekeepers. That makes them a good target for regulation, but it also means that as crucial links in the flow of ‘product’ (i.e., pets, in this case), they have power — and with power comes responsibility.
The other interesting point here has to do with the public good. The sale of a pet is notoriously likely to result in ‘externalities’ — that is, to have an effect on people not party to the transaction. Poorly-socialized puppies may grow into dangerous dogs. Unwanted dogs and cats may be abandoned, turning into social nuisances, and straining municipal resources such as dog-catchers, bylaw enforcement officers, etc. Unhealthy pets may transmit communicable diseases to other people’s pets. So the policies and practices that a pet store follows affect the interests not just of customers and suppliers, but of society at large. In other words, we see here good examples of that subset of ethical issues that truly are about the social responsibilities that businesses have.
Ethical Oil: Choose Your Poison
Filed under: accountability, activism, advertising, boycott, brands, consumers, critical thinking, energy, human rights, markets, pollution |
Comments (3) There’s oil, and then there’s oil. Right? Or is there only, you know, oil? Does it matter, ethically, where the oil we consume comes from?
That issue has arisen very recently and caused a minor diplomatic dust-storm: a Canadian ad offering a moral critique of Saudi Arabian oil specifically has apparently offended the Saudis, who have asked that the ads be taken off the air.
See this summary, by John Terauds for the Toronto Star: Canadian ethical oil ad stirs Saudi ire
A Canadian-made television ad that speaks out against oil imported from Saudi Arabia has raised the ire of the Middle Eastern nation, prompting it to send a threatening legal notice to broadcaster CTV.
The 30-second ad, produced by Toronto-based ethicaloil.org, focuses on discrimination against women in the conservative Muslim country….
But the ad in question isn’t just anti-Saudi oil; it’s a defence, by means of contrast, of good ol’ Canadian oil, derived primarily from the oilands (a.k.a. tarsands) of Alberta. Yes, the same oilsands that have themselves generated so much criticism on environmental grounds. Now it’s certainly not the first time someone has been accused of greenwashing the tarsands. But to slam Saudi oil as unethical in order to proclaim tarsands the ‘ethical alternative’ really does strain credulity.
Now the critique of Saudi oil isn’t entirely without merit. Saudi cultural standards for the status and treatment of women are ethically indefensible. But the “ethical oil” claim for the oilsands is a serious stretch, at least if it’s supposed to point to a bright and clear difference not just in particular ethically-salient characteristics, but in overall ethical goodness.
In principle, we could look at this as a matter of “choose your poison.” Do you want the oil that’s associated with human rights violations, or the oil that’s associated with environmental destruction? Interesting dilemma, in principle. But for most of us, it’s a moot point: oil (and the gas that comes from it) is an undifferentiated commodity, and we don’t get to choose based on nation-of-origin. So it’s not like the ad in question is really intended to help consumers make more ethical consumption choices.
More likely, what the group behind the ad is doing is the rhetorical equivalent of fracking, injecting the novel term “ethical oil” into existing debates over the oilsands, not because the term actually makes any sense, but simply in the hopes of stirring something up.
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Update: Take a hew poll on this topic, here: Oil Poll: Human Rights or Environment?
Reverse Discrimination in High-Profile Hiring
Filed under: activism, decision-making, discrimination, governance, leadership, stakeholders, values |
Comments (5) Discrimination has a bad name, in part because what we typically mean by the word “discrimination” is more like “unjustified discrimination” or “discrimination on morally-irrelevant grounds.” But discrimination per se — even discrimination based on normally-irrelevant characteristics like race or disability — is not always bad. In a very few cases, discrimination is rooted in bona fide job requirements. The classic example is that it’s OK to discriminate against the visually impaired if you’re hiring pilots; having good eye-sight is a bona fide requirement for being a pilot. Being white, on the other hand, is not.
For a recent controversy over reverse discrimination (or rather over a failure to engage in such discrimination) see this recent case from Halifax, Nova Scotia. By Clare Mellor, for the Chronicle Herald: Africville trust hiring prompts some anger: Choosing white minister ‘insulting’
Some members of Nova Scotia’s black community say they are outraged that a white person has been hired as executive director of the Africville Heritage Trust and are calling for her resignation.
“I find it insulting to all black people,” said Burnley (Rocky) Jones, a local lawyer and well-known human rights activist.
“Surely we, within our community, have many people fully qualified to do such a job.”
The trust was set up to establish a memorial to Africville, a major African-Nova Scotian community destroyed on the orders of Halifax officials in the 1960s.
The trust’s board of directors, which includes six representatives of the Africville community, recently hired Carole Nixon, a white Anglican minister, for the position….
So-called “reverse discrimination” is challenging, ethically. Preferential hiring of individuals from historically-disadvantaged groups can be a ham-fisted way to right past wrongs. But in at least some cases — particularly cases involving high-profile positions — the symbolic significance of the job in question has to at least be considered. (A very similar controversy arose a couple of years ago, when the Canadian National Institute for the Blind hired its first non-blind CEO.)
The first thing to note about the Halifax / Africville case is that it’s not primarily a black-vs-white dispute. It’s clear that those who oppose the hire don’t speak for Halifax’s entire black community. The Board of Directors of the Africville Trust is the body that did the hiring, and although detailed information about the composition of the Board is hard to find, the article cited above does say that the Board “includes six representatives of the Africville [i.e., black] community.” That doesn’t change the fundamental ethical questions at stake, but it does sweep away any thought that this is just an us-vs-them debate.
It’s also worth pointing out a legal worry, here. Hiring based on race is generally wrong, and typically illegal. It’s not clear to me (a non-lawyer) that excluding non-blacks from consideration for a job like this would even be legal. Do the critics of this hire simply think that the job posting should have said “Whites Need Not Apply?” Likely not. But a subtler position is logically open to them, anyway, namely a position that says something like “if in doubt, give the job to the black candidate” (based perhaps on a presumption of greater personal understanding of the issues at stake). But again, I don’t know whether that would be legal. (Does anyone reading this know?) And surely no on really wants to settle, as one activist quoted in the story suggests, for a candidate who is merely “fully qualified”. After all, there might well be a number of “fully qualified” candidates, and so you’re still going to need to make a decision. And if the job is important, then we likely want it filled not just by someone qualified, but by the most qualified person.
But on the other hand, critics of this decision do have a point, and that has to do with the symbolic value that would attach to putting a black person in charge of the Africville Trust. It’s not hard to see that selecting a black man or woman for this kind of leadership role would send a certain kind of message, and maybe give black kids in Halifax another positive role-model, one more non-white individual occupying a position of prestige and influence.
All in all, I’m not sure what to think about this one. But one thing I’m pretty sure of is this: if you think a case like this has a clear and simple answer, you’re probably not thinking about it hard enough.
Ethics, Ethics Everywhere: A Day in the Life of a Business Magazine
As a professor, I always make a point of emphasizing to my students that ethics, far from being a niche topic, is actually pervasive in business. Ethics is what differentiates commerce from crime, but commerce also raises lots of interesting and complex ethical controversies. Really, most of the interesting stuff about business has an ethical element.
One way to illustrate that point is to look at the contents of business magazines. More specifically, let’s look at a recent issue of Canadian Business. As I’ve noted before, Canadian Business does more than most biz magazines to feature ethical issues on its website. But what I’m interested in today is the stories covered in the print version of the magazine. So here’s a quick look at the ethical issues — not necessarily labelled as such — in a single issue (the September 26, 2011 issue) of Canadian Business.
In the magazine’s 78 pages, you’ll find the following ethics-related stories:
On p.4, interim Editor-in-Chief, James Cowan, has an editorial responding to criticism of the cover of the magazine’s Sept. 12 issue, which featured an attractive woman in a tight red dress. Was this particular way of portraying a successful business woman exploitative, as one letter-writer suggested?
On pp. 12-13, there’s a piece by my colleague Richard Leblanc on governance standards and the recent scandal at Canadian company Sino-Forest. (And as I’ve argued before, corporate governance just is about ethics.)
On p. 14, there’s a short piece by Marina Adshade on adultery among executives. (For why that’s a business-ethics issue, see what I wrote about Eliot Spitzer three years ago.)
Then on pp. 14-15, there’s a piece by yours truly on a South African winery’s attempt to come to grips with its slave-holding past. The key question I contemplate is whether owning up to that past is a matter of basic ethics, or a more complex issue of social responsibility.
On pp. 19-21, Michael McCullough has an article on Warren Buffett’s argument for why wealthy Americans like him should pay more taxes — which raises fundamental questions about not distributive justice, freedom, and property rights.
On pp. 22-26, there’s a lengthy article by Robert Thompson on a Canadian drug company’s attempt to develop a sexual-dysfunction drug for women. The obvious comparison is with Viagra, a drug nominally intended to treat real dysfunction, but widely recognized, and criticized, as being more commonly used as a so-called “lifestyle drug.”
On pp. 28-31, you’ll find an article, by Jasmine Budak, on how companies deal with — and why some of the resent having to deal with — maternity leave. That topic raises all sorts of questions about fair treatment of employees, and about what sorts of employee benefits are just too burdensome to be fair to businesses and co-workers.
Finally, Angelina Chapin’s article (pp.50-52) about lingerie sales in conservative Islamic countries isn’t exactly about ethics, but it certainly raises questions about conflicts, and perceived conflicts, between various value sets.
All in all, I have to conclude, with some modesty, that if you’re a magazine reader interested in ethical issues in business, you certainly don’t have to head straight to the article by the ethics professor to scratch that itch.
And there really is a deep point about business, here. Ethical standards are inherent to the very idea of doing business. Those standards apply, contextually, to a thousand tiny details about how business gets done, to a thousand questions that need to be answered in the course of doing business. Different people will have different ideas about what those standards should be, not least because different people will have different stakes in the outcome. One result is that “ethics stories” are actually all over the place, in the business press, and they’re relatively seldom labeled that way.
Stem Cell Fraud
Filed under: consumers, critical thinking, fraud, health, marketing, product safety, science, technology, trust |
Leave a Comment Stem cell science is pretty sexy. And as the saying goes, “sex sells.” And if something sells, someone is liable to make a buck off it, whether it’s right to do so or not.
See this opinion piece (in The Scientist) by Zubin Master and David B. Resnik: Reforming Stem Cell Tourism.
As with many new areas of technological advancements, stem cell research has received its fair share of hype. Though much of the excitement is warranted, and the potential of stem cells promising, many have used that hype for their own monetary gain. … Young and elderly patients have died from receiving illegitimate stem cell treatments; others have developed tumors following stem cell transplantations….
Master and Resnik point to the need for patient education, and to the limits of international guidelines, but their main focus is on the ethical responsibilities of scientists — including the responsibility not to cooperate in various indirect ways with unscrupulous colleagues. (It is very, very hard to do clinical science in a vacuum, and so isolating unscrupulous scientists may be one way to put them out of business.)
But it’s important to point out that this is as much a story of business ethics as it is of scientific ethics. The unscrupulous individuals preying upon the sick aren’t doing it for free. What these clinics are doing is committing fraud, and endangering their customers in the process.
Now there’s nothing ethically subtle about that. You don’t need a Ph.D. in philosophy to know that fraud is bad. But there’s another, subtler, issue here, namely an underlying theme about the general lack of scientific literacy on the part of consumers and the ability of business to use it to their advantage. Companies of all kinds can do a lot of good in the world by promoting scientific literacy, and by being scrupulously careful about having the facts straight when they present their products to consumers and tell them, “this works.”
Now of course, we’re never going to prevent such behaviour entirely. As long as there are desperate people in the world, there will be snake-oil salesmen eager to make a buck from their misery. But as Master and Resnik suggest, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
The Corporation is Not a Psychopath
Filed under: corporations, critical thinking, definitions, film, personhood |
Comments (13) Readers may already be familiar with documentary that came out a few years ago, called The Corporation. The film has many flaws; I can’t show it to my students without pausing frequently to correct misleading assertions and half-truths. But the key problem with the film lies in its attempt to arrive at a single, simple diagnosis for the many problems we see in the corporate world. The central conceit of the film is that the corporation fits the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy — that corporations, quite generally, act in destructive ways that demonstrate an utter lack of empathy or remorse. The problem is, the claim is utter bunk, and is utterly unsupported by what the film shows to viewers. But it’s also an idea that has struck a chord with a lot of people, seemingly summing up their darkest fears about corporations.
Part of the problem is that the film is sloppy with language. The film is called The Corporation, and the makers of the film clearly intend to refer to ‘the corporation’ in the abstract, corporations as a group, the very idea of them. It’s not referring to any particular corporation — like, that one over there. But in building its case, it cites diverse behaviours by various particular companies, and uses those to check off, one by one, the diagnostic criteria that psychologists associate with psychopathy in humans.
Here’s the list of diagnostic criteria that the film uses:
1) callous unconcern for the feelings of others;
2) incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;
3) recklessness with others’ health & safety;
4) deceitfulness;
5) inability to feel guilt;
6) failure to follow social norms.
The problem is that in order to use this list as a diagnostic tool, you need to apply it to a single ‘patient.’ But the film doesn’t do that, not ever; instead, it cherry-picks examples of heinous behaviour from across dozens of corporations over dozens of decades. It finds an example of Callous Unconcern on the part of one company, Recklessness on the part of another, and Deceitfulness on the part of others still. And so on.
The result is a kind of sleight of hand, and not very subtle sleight of hand at that. You can do the same trick with any ‘patient,’ of course, when your ‘patient’ is an entire category. If you cherry-pick examples from across many many particular cases, you can easily arrive at a diagnosis of psychopathy not just for The Corporation, but also fo The Government, The University, The Church, The Union, The Charity, The Newspaper, or even — *shudder!* — The Highschool Volleyball Team.
Now it is crucial to note that by pointing out this flaw in the argument put forward by the film, I’m not defending any of the companies that it mentions. Many of those companies have done terrible things, including things that are outright criminal. The point is that the film fails utterly in its attempt to prove that the corporation as a whole is a “psychopath,” or anything like it. And the result is much more than a documentary that fails to make its point. The result is a distraction, as viewers duped by the film are told to write off the very notion of profit-seeking corporations, a prescription that ignores the enormous amount of human wellbeing that has resulted directly from the activities of corporations, and also diverts attention from a more focused critique of the very real flaws that exist in the way particular corporations are governed and regulated.
How Should Companies Memorialize 9/11?
Filed under: advertising, brands, corporate citizenship, corporations, disaster, marketing, philanthropy |
Comments (5) The day has passed, but it’s a question that’s sure to arise again — just under a year from now, and the year after that, and so on.
What can, or should, businesses do with regard to a relatively recent tragic event like 9/11? The cultural significance of an event like 9/11 is hard for anyone to ignore, especially on the tenth anniversary of that fateful day. And companies thrive on raising their profiles, a feat that can most readily be accomplished by riding the coattails of cultural significance. But when the culturally-significant event in question is a tragic one, corporations need to tread carefully.
This general topic can be split into two more specific questions:
1) Can or should companies use references to an event like 9/11 in their advertising?
2) Can or should companies do something to memorialize such events?
The pure advertising question seems easy. Using references to 9/11 in ads is tacky, if not outright unethical. (For some examples, see this nice slideshow by Jim Edwards for Bnet: “10 Advertisers Exploiting the Sept. 11 Attacks to Push Their Brands”.) Profiting from other people’s pain and grief just isn’t a socially-constructive business strategy.
The problem of course is that it’s hard to separate questions 1 and 2. Naturally, any effort on the part of a company to memorialize an event is likely to be seen as an attempt by that company to raise its own profile.
But memorializing an event like 9/11 in some way seems unobjectionable, and perhaps even obligatory. The hard question is what form such memorializing should take. The best ways, perhaps, are the small-scale and personal ones. Giving employees time off work to attend memorial services, for example. The same principle applies to expressions of sentiment: small and local seems best. A simple sign on your front window that says “Never Forget 9/11” seems to make the point best — better than, say, splashing that same slogan across millions of product packages — and is much less liable to engender suspicions that the expression of sentiment is self-serving.
As an final point, notice that this is precisely the kind of question for which the term “corporate citizenship” provides the right fulcrum. Some people try to use that term to cover all questions of corporate right-and-wrong , but that’s a mistake. Not all obligations or rights are rooted in a weighty concept like citizenship. But this one is. How we respond to national and international tragedies is clearly an issue of citizenship, in the full political sense of that word, the sense that implies a set of rights and responsibilities related to participation in public life. An alternative word like “sustainability,” which some people take to encompass all ethical questions, just doesn’t cut it here. How companies choose to respond to the anniversary of an event like 9/11 says a lot about how they see themselves as corporate citizens, as participating members of a still-grieving community.
Charity: Does Apple Do its Share?
Filed under: CEOs, charity, corporate citizenship, definitions, philanthropy, profits, values |
Comments (23) Forget what your accountant tells you is tax-deductible. What counts as a charitable donation, ethically?
There have been a few rumbles around the internet recently about the lack of corporate philanthropy at Apple Computers, and about now-retired CEO Steve Jobs’ own lack of philanthropic donations. See for instance by John Cary and Courtney E. Martin, on CNN: Apple’s philanthropy needs a reboot
Apple’s…charitable identity — or egregious lack thereof — disappoints us. It’s time for Apple to start innovating in philanthropy with the same ingenuity, rigor and public bravado that it has brought to its every other venture….
Cary and Martin acknowledge Apple’s participation in the Product Red program (which has raised tens of millions for relief of AIDS in Africa, and for which Bono recently praised Jobs). But Apple made $14 billion in profits last year, and Cary and Martin think it’s pretty clear that Apple is obligated to give some of that away. They’re not so clear on where that obligation comes from, except to point to precedent within the computer industry. Both Google and Microsoft have well-established philanthropy programs — both of which, as Cary and Martin note, have drawn fire. Hmmm.
The interesting thing here is that Cary and Martin’s criticism implicitly raises interesting questions about what counts as philanthropy.
Take, for example, Apple’s sizeable donation to the fight against Proposition 8, California’s anti-marriage-equality effort. Was that a charitable donation, or a piece of political activism? Is there a difference?
Apple has also been known to donate computers to schools, and regularly gives students (and, ahem, professors like me) a discount on computer purchases. Of course, critics will propose that those are really marketing gimmicks. But then, no sane person thinks that corporate philanthropy stops being ethical when it’s a win-win proposition.
But then, back to the issue of why. Why are corporations obligated to give to charity? One group of critics is fond of pointing out that profits belong to shareholders, and so when corporate execs donate corporate funds to charity, they’re giving away other people’s money. And even within the modern Corporate Social Responsibility movement, the saner folks are at pains to emphasize that CSR isn’t about charity. It’s about making some sort of social contribution, preferably one that makes use of a company’s special capacities and core competencies.
And as a recent piece in The Economist pointed out that, if you’re talking about doing good in the world, you really must look at what Apple has done to put beautiful, highly-functional, productivity-enhancing devices in the hands of millions of consumers. That’s not exactly the same as feeding the world’s starving masses, but then neither is a corporate donation to build an opera house, or to get your company’s name on a plaque in the lobby of the local business school. The questions we ought to be concerned with are questions about a corporation’s net impact on the world, and the methods it uses along the way. A focus on corporate philanthropy risks obscuring both of those questions.
Food Industry Ethics, Regulatory Reform, and Corporate Citizenship
Filed under: complexity, consumers, corporate citizenship, food, government, markets, regulations |
Comments (1) I blogged yesterday about the importance of sound government and rule of law as a background condition for ethical corporate behaviour. Here in Canada (as in most other developed economies) we grumble about our government and our system of regulation, but we’re actually relatively lucky that way, by world standards. Our economy is thriving (quarter-to-quarter hiccups aside) in large part because businesses here have the luxury of doing what they do against a background of generally-stable government and generally-sane regulations.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t room for improvement. One key area in need of (constant?) improvement is food policy. It’s an incredibly complex area, with an enormous range of interests at stake and a huge range of values at play. Public policy is, as a result, pretty messy. For more details, see this new report by the Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Food in Canada (CFIC). Here’s a summary, from Better Farming: Canada’s food policy system overloaded: report
Out of date policies, laws and regulations as well as conflicting government involvement stymie innovation and economic growth in the country’s food sector says Conference Board of Canada report…
(You can download the report here.)
Economic growth in the food sector isn’t of direct relevance to consumers (though it is of direct relevance to those employed in the sector). But consumers still have plenty of reason to care about food policy. All questions of food policy have a more or less direct impact on the health and/or pocketbooks of consumers; and hence all questions of food policy raise ethical issues (many of which I’ve blogged about). For example, according to the BF story:
The report reviews the Canadian approach to food regulation based on a study of six issues: food additives, genetically modified foods, health benefit claims, country-of-origin labeling, inspection, and international trade. [hyperlinks added]
Industry, of course, has a role to play in helping to reform regulation in this area. But in doing so, industry must think especially carefully about its ethical obligations. Normally, the slogan “Play by the Rules!” sums up the lion’s share of a company’s obligations. But when the issue at hand involves figuring out what the rules — i.e., regulations — should be, industry needs to consider very carefully the full ethical weight of the notion of “corporate citizenship,” and remember that a citizen is someone who participates in policy debates with an eye not just to their own interests, but to the public good as well.
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Thanks to Prof. Richard Leblanc for bringing the CFIC report to my attention.
If You Can’t Take the Heat, Get Out of the Banana Republic
Filed under: corporations, corruption, decision-making, energy, government, international, risk |
Comments (2) Some neighbourhoods simply are not worth the trouble, and the entire nation of Ecuador may be one of them. Ecuador is a significant producer and exporter of oil (ranked 30th in the world), but it is also a place where effective rule of law is being called into question.
See this story, from Americas Forum: Chevron says rule of law no longer exists in Ecuador
James Craig, Chevron’s spokesman for Latin America, said in a recent statement that Ecuador, in the past seven years, has seen a deterioration in the administration of justice, which in his opinion began with the removal of judges of the Supreme Court in 2004….
Of course, this statement is from a corporate spokesman, so we’ll surely take it with a grain of salt. But those claims are not unsupported. See for instance this report (only slightly dated) on Ecuador from Global Integrity Report: Ecuador, 2008. Ecuador ranked 127th on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2010.
So, what should Chevron do? The short, harsh answer: get out of Ecuador. Multinational companies all need to acknowledge that there are some places where they simply cannot — should not — do business. For most kinds of companies, that includes war zones. But it also includes places where the kind of background conditions that make a market economy possible, including stable rule of law, do not exist. Naturally, corporate risk managers keep a close eye on such things. The risk that some cowboy government official is going to appropriate your earnings or toss managers into jail on trumped-up charges is not one to take lightly. But there’s also an ethical risk, here. The standard, conservative ethical rule for companies is that they should go about their business without force, fraud, or deception, and within the boundaries of the law. But that rule of thumb only makes sense — even a little bit of sense — where a reliable legal system exists. When the rule of law is in serious doubt, the preconditions for the ethical conduct of business simply do not obtain. Not only do such situations jeopardize the interests of a whole range of stakeholders; they eliminate the crucial fulcrum of ethical corporate decisions.
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Hat tip to legal scholar Errol Mendes (a.k.a. @3mendous on Twitter) for pointing me to this story.
The Business Ethics Blog 