The Business Ethics Blog

“My job requires a certain… moral flexibility.”

That’s one of the great little lines delivered by tobacco appologist Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart) in the movie “Thank You for Smoking,” which I caught on TV the other night. The movie is a comedy about Naylor’s struggles as chief spokesman for a tobacco industry group. I won’t attempt a full review of the movie: suffice it to say that it was funnier than I expected, and does a good job of sending up Big Tobacco without getting distractingly preachy.

But the movie got me thinking about a topic that has long bothered me, namely the degree of culpability to be associated with various roles within the tobacco industry.

The major problems with cigarettes, of course, is that a) they’re deadly even when used correctly, b) they’re highly addictive, and c) they’re attractive to (and have often been marketed to) people too young to know what they’re getting themselves into. And please don’t give me the old “it’s a legitimate business, aimed primarily at consenting adults.” It’s a killer industry. But ok, let’s assume they’ve got the right to do business. The fact that you’ve got a right to do business, doesn’t make your business right. So, what does this imply for all the people involved in the industry? That means not just tobacco execs, but tobacco farmers too, and all the people who work for tobacco companies, whether in sales, R&D, accounting, or of course marketing.

Maybe I’m just in a cranky mood today, but I, for one, see no good reason not to blame each and every person who works for a tobacco company. Not equal culpability for all, of course. The janitorial staff doesn’t deserve the same opprobrium that we reserve for top executives and marketing types. (The janitorial staff likely has fewer skills, and hence fewer job options, and certainly has less control over the company’s behaviour.) But still, I don’t see any reason why every person working in (or providing consulting services to) the industry shouldn’t feel ashamed. I suspect anyone in the industry who feels otherwise is simply showing themselves capable of the sort of “moral flexibility” alluded to above. It’s also known as “self-serving rationalization.”

Does anyone know of anything written on this topic? If so, let me know.
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Update:
Asher Meir, “The Jewish Ethicist,” had some useful comments on this issue on his blog. I think his comments make a good deal of sense, even without their grounding in Jewish law. Thanks Asher!

This interesting item from the Aug 4 edition of The Economist (Blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption) is about the evolutionary psychology of altruism. It reports the results of an intriguing study by researchers at Arizona State, suggesting that there are gender-based differences in the types of altruistic acts that men & women engage in. The researchers started with the question, what motivates cases of altruism where there doesn’t seem to be any obvious payoff.

To investigate this question, the researchers made an interesting link. At first sight, helping charities looks to be at the opposite end of the selfishness spectrum from conspicuous consumption. Yet they have something in common: both involve the profligate deployment of resources.

That is characteristic of the consequences of sexual selection. An individual shows he (or she) has resources to burn—whether those are biochemical reserves, time or, in the human instance, money—by using them to make costly signals. That demonstrates underlying fitness of the sort favoured by evolution. Viewed this way, both conspicuous consumption and what the researchers call “blatant benevolence” are costly signals. And since they are behaviours rather than structures, and thus controlled by the brain, they may be part of the mating mind.

The study further suggested that men tend to prefer to give money, whereas women tend to prefer to give their time. There’s an explanation for this in evolutionary terms, based on what men and women need to display in order to attract a mate: “what women want in a partner is material support while men require self-sacrifice.” So, to attrace mates, men show they can spend, and women show they can care. (For those of you not versed in evolutionary psychology, please please note that this kind of reasoning does not imply that these are conscious motives or that they are universal and overwhelming. It’s just a way of saying that psychological mechanisms are likely to have evolutionary back-stories, just as physical traits do.)

OK, so the question: what does this imply about corporate philanthropy? After all, most CEO’s are men. Are the motives attributed to males in the study cited above affecting corporate giving? What’s really motivating corporate largesse? And an interesting empirical question: does the philanthropy of companies headed by men differ in kind from the philanthropy of companies headed by women? And should shareholders be worried that CEO’s might be making philanthropic decisions rooted neither in a desire to generate goodwill in the community nor in a genuine interest in doing good, but in ancient procreative drives?

Is it unethical to make money by facilitating illegal immigration?
See this story from Reuters: Mexico town booms as “Wal-Mart for migrants”

Ignore the Wal-Mart reference in the headline. It’s a red herring: the story has nothing to do with Wal-Mart. It’s about a small town on the south side of the US/Mexico border where a lot of businesses make a good deal of money catering to Mexicans who are about to make an illegal dash across the border.

Illegal immigration to the United States via the Sonoran Desert is big business in the town of Altar in northern Mexico, the last major settlement before the U.S. border, 60 miles away.

Around half a million people pass through Altar every year before the dangerous walk northward.

With few activities other than helping migrants, Altar offers services from money transfers and doctors to people smuggling and prostitution.

Pharmacies specialize in electrolyte solutions to avoid dehydration on the walk north, as well as caffeine and ephedrine stimulants to increase stamina and overcome fatigue.

Gallon water bottles are on sale at almost every corner and a Mexican bank has opened a branch in Altar to service migrants who receive money from U.S. relatives for their trip.

So, are these businesses doing anything wrong? Are they facilitating illegal immigration? Are they doing something exploitative? The article says little about prices, but it’s easy to imagine that prices in Altar reflect the desperation of its customers. On the other hayd, are these businesses indeed doing something positive by helping make the deadly treck through the Arizona desert a little safer? After all, at least one reputable charity seems to think so:

A Red Cross unit gives migrants pre-trek check ups and helps with the injuries of those who did not make it through the desert and were sent back by U.S. Border Patrol agents.

“This is the gateway to hell,” said Red Cross volunteer Amado Marcelo Coello. “They don’t know what awaits them out there,” he added, holding up a photo of a desert scorpion.

Food for thought: there’s a whole spectrum of goods and services being offered in Altar. Some merely could be used in an illegal border crossing. Others are likely to be used in an illegal border crossing. Still others ar almost certain to be used that way. And at least some services (i.e., human-smuggling) are directly implicated. Is there a clear bright line between the ethical and the unethical businesses in Alta?

Two days ago I had the pleasure of hosting Gary Cohen (from the Keck Graduate Institute) for a talk at Saint Mary’s University where I teach. Gary presented to a very distinguished group that included representatives from a number of industry groups and granting agencies. The title of Gary’s presentation was “The Business Case for Ethics in the Biosciences: A Lawyer’s Perspective.” But in fact, Gary rightly problematized the idea of focusing on the business case (i.e., on the idea that biotech companies — or any other company — should think of ethics as a means to profit.) Roughly, Gary argued that the idea of “doing well by doing good” is wrong-headed for two reasons. First, decent people ought to want to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. And second, if a company focuses on the bottom-line rationale for ethics, it can undermine the kind of customer-oriented behaviours that actually do result in profits. Gary quoted George Merck (who founded Merck & co. in 1891) as putting it this way: “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear.”

For me, the crucial difference is in the level at which you think about the instrumental value of ethics. It’s one thing to acknowledge that ethics might be good for business. And it might make sense for industry associations or boards of directors to promote ethical behaviour because they recognize that connection. But the day-to-day operationalization of that idea almost certainly shouldn’t include the ethics-brings-profits thesis. On the front lines, that thesis is almost certainly self-defeating, and more likely to breed cynicism than it is to foster appropriate behaviour.

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)