Ethics Newsline®

For some of us non-scientists, last week’s announcement of the human genome project left a stunning void. To be sure, there was much-deserved adulation for the scientific, technological, and medical consequences of these discoveries. There was a notable upward ratcheting of the metaphors describing the breakthrough. And there was a predictable salivating of the economic glands over new investment opportunities.

But missing from the news coverage — as it has been from the debate all along — was a clear focus on ethics. Again, it seems, our scientific fascination has outrun our moral concern. Even the setting — a White House press conference, presumably intended to lift the announcement out of the realm of the laboratory and position it as an issue of broad public good — failed to recognize the sobering ethical controversies surrounding this issue. The discovery was presented as a blanket blessing. In fact, it raises some of the most chilling ethical issues humanity has ever faced. Among them:

1. Designer genes. When couples can choose the genetic makeup of their children, what will they select? Will every boy be a towheaded, gregarious, straight-A quarterback; every girl a shapely, blue-eyed, quick-witted cheerleader? When choice replaces nature, will we deliberately build a rather boring monoculture that lacks diversity, vigor, and breadth? Understandable, of course, will be the desire of parents to avoid having children with debilitating diseases. But what if genetic tests indicated that the offspring will be perfectly healthy but obese, or a bit on the wild side, or immensely artistic but antisocial? Will they go unborn? Or will the DNA be manipulated to produce “normal” children? If so, who decides what “normal” means?

2. Insurance risks. When testing can predict propensities for disease among the living, that information will be highly valuable to employers. Why hire employee A, who will be absent for months with a disease that will cost your insurer hundreds of thousands of dollars and drive up your premiums, when you can hire employee B, who will have none of those difficulties? How will we shape laws limiting such testing — laws that will in effect say to employers and insurers, “This information is knowable, but you may not know it. You must continue to fight with one arm tied behind your back, guessing at risks rather than having a scientific way to analyze them.” Humanity, alas, has no record of discovering some new thing and deliberately refusing to put it into practice.

3. Costs of services. Nobody thinks DNA-based medical processes will be inexpensive — least of all the investors. For starters, the costs of ramping up medical practice to the genome level are enormous. “Most physicians in practice have had not a single hour of education in genetics, and are going to be severely challenged to pick up this new technology and run with it,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, in a recent speech. So access to these new medical technologies will go only to those who can afford to pay for them. That’s not a new concern in medical ethics. But given the immense complexities of this technology, the attendant costs may well exceed anything already in the medical marketplace — exacerbating an already severe disparity between medical haves and have-nots.

4. The slave race. If research can eliminate debilitating diseases, create desirable genetic traits, and ensure that everyone is “normal,” the creation of a master race is not far behind. In the hands of democratic nations, that’s not quite as frightening as it would have been in the hands of Hitler. But not all nations are democratic. Some tyrannies, having access to ample wealth from natural resources and ample information about the human genome from the Internet and the Web, may catch on to a simple fact: If you can create the master race, you can create the slave race. You can deliberately build a cohort of humanoids with low intelligence, strong bodies, great physical courage, docile wills, and vigorous self-reproducing capabilities. They will do whatever you tell them to do — in your mines, your fields, or your wars. You will never again risk running out of soldiers — and what’s more, you need have no more compunction about their deaths than you do about the deaths of other animals, since they aren’t quite human.

Bottom line? There’s great promise in the human genome discoveries. But all of it is at risk — all of it — unless we pour an equal amount of creative energy into resolving the ethical issues here. On that topic, the conversation has hardly even begun.

(c)2000 by Rushworth M. Kidder

With those words, a federal appeals court last week recommended that stiffer sentences be imposed in the case of three executives convicted in a price-fixing scheme. That’s our lead story this week in Business Ethics Newsline, followed by another major item dealing with litigation — a new legal theory used by New York State to sue gun manufacturers.

Next, two items about media ethics: a police accusation that a British documentary into alleged abuses at a nursing home was rigged by misleading editing, and sharp criticism of British TV fare from a media watchdog agency.

From the equity file we have two stories: a Supreme Court ruling in the case of a gay man ousted by the Boy Scouts, and a probe of alleged age discrimination against elderly patients in Britain.

We follow with three reports about international business: a report claiming multinational firms are good Canadian corporate citizens, an international agency’s plan to stanch child labor and human-rights abuses, and a headline-grabbing story from Canada about a probe into alleged stock manipulation.

And we conclude this week’s edition with an item from the ‘Whatever Happened to” file examining the corruption allegations against former German chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Have a productive, ethical week.

– Carl Hausman

CHICAGO
A federal appeals court last week recommended stiffer prison sentences for two agribusiness executives convicted of conspiring to fix prices in the global market for lysine, an animal feed additive.

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled last week that former Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) executives Michael Andreas and Terrance Wilson had received sentences too light for their crimes.

“The facts involved in this case reflect an inexplicable lack of business ethics and an atmosphere of general lawlessness that infected the very heart of one of America’s leading corporate citizens,” the appeals court wrote in its decision.

Under the ruling, the two men — each sentenced in 1998 to two years in prison and maximum fines of $350,000 — could face up to one more year in jail, reported the Associated Press.

The court’s move follows an appeal by the U.S. government, which complained that the executives got off too easily for their efforts to rig the lysine market with the cooperation of five Asian firms.

ADM pleaded guilty to similar charges in 1996, agreeing to pay a $100 million fine. The company had no comment about the decision affecting its former executives, the Reuters news agency reported.

NEW YORK
New York last week became the first U.S. state to sue the nation’s gunmakers for allegedly violating state law by creating a “public nuisance” after flooding the market with weapons that state officials claim likely will end up in the hands of criminals.

Thirty-two cities already have filed similar suits, accusing gunmakers of negligence by refusing to make safer guns and knowingly marketing weapons that appeal to criminals. These negligence suits require plaintiffs to show that gunmakers deliberately foster the transfer of guns to criminals.

New York’s action is dramatically different — and more likely to succeed in court, many analysts say.

The state’s suit hinges on an existing public-nuisance law classifying unlicensed guns as a danger to the citizenry, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The suit claims that “the presence of illegal handguns impairs residents’ ability to use public spaces. In locations around the state, parents do not allow their children to use public playgrounds or to walk home from school alone because gunfire may erupt.”

“Our theory does not require the state to prove that manufacturers acted with wrongful intent or even [carelessness],” said New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer. “Rather, we have to show in their pursuit of profit — however they acted — they created, contributed to, or maintained a condition of danger.”

In effect, New York does not need to show deliberate wrongdoing on the part of gunmakers, only that their sales practices put guns on the streets illegally.

While the lawsuit seeks no financial damages, it asks the court to order companies to change the way they market and distribute guns, banning guns that are particularly useful in the commission of crime, barring distribution to retailers known to sell guns to criminals, and forcing companies to buy back weapons seized from criminals, according to the Times.

Firearms advocates and industry representatives roundly criticized New York’s bid to hold gunmakers and distributors accountable for the end use of their products, dismissing it as political posturing, noted Reuters.

The suit, which follows a failed yearlong effort to forge a compromise between regulators and the industry, names three weapons importers, twelve wholesalers, and nine major gun manufacturers, including Glock, Colt, and Sturm, Ruger & Co. The plaintiffs were chosen because their weapons show up most often among the illegal guns seized during arrests, the New York Times reported.

Smith & Wesson, the only gunmaker to sign a government-sponsored pledge to create safer guns voluntarily, was omitted from the suit.

LONDON
The BBC came under sharp criticism last week from British police, who accused the network of airing a “fundamentally misleading” TV exposé that led to the closure of five nursing facilities.

Police in Kent, England, say the BBC skewed its story, grossly misrepresenting the quality of care at Brompton Care Home, a nursing facility for the mentally handicapped.

Using footage secretly filmed at Brompton by an undercover reporter, the BBC alleged the facility abused and neglected its patients.

After the program aired, public concern pushed Brompton into shutting its doors, setting off a chain of closures by the facility’s owners, displacing the home’s patients, and putting 84 employees out of work.

Last week, Kent Police faulted the BBC for its report, which police say was misleading and may have unnecessarily precipitated Brompton’s closure, according to the Times.

When “an organization with the reputation of the BBC” makes grievous allegations, “we have to take them seriously,” a spokesman for the police said last week.

In this case, those allegations were blatantly misleading, raising “serious doubts about the BBC’s commitment to accuracy and fairness,” he continued.

“Virtually nothing that was alleged [in the BBC exposé] could be substantiated,” police said in a statement. The department is now seeking legal advice on recouping the $50,000 spent investigating the claims.

Police say sequences were edited in such a way as to create a false impression of brutality and information favorable to the home was suppressed.

The BBC denied any wrongdoing and defended its report, insisting that it should not be held liable for the failed police investigation. “They were seeking to establish whether criminal assaults had been committed. We set out to highlight a social care issue,” a BBC spokeswoman explained.

LONDON
Britain’s media watchdog agency, the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC), last week accused networks of putting the race for ratings ahead of respect for public values.

Citing a 44 percent spike in complaints about the content of TV and radio programming, BSC chairman Lord Holme said networks increasingly are doing “whatever they can get away with” to lure listeners and viewers.

Holme chastised the networks for increasing the amount of sex, swearing, and violence on shows, and recommended the creation of a new “content regulator” to reform such trends, the Times reported.

“Perhaps broadcasters have come to depend on regulation to tell them what to do, or allowed it to take the place of their own responsibility” to viewers and listeners, Holme said. “They need to do more to make clear the values by which they should be judged” so they can be held accountable for “what they themselves believe to be their role and standards.”

Holme’s remarks followed the release of the BSC’s third annual report on consumer complaints regarding the content of U.K. radio and television.

WASHINGTON
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) last week won the right to bar openly gay men from serving within their ranks, following a 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding the group’s right to discriminate to preserve its “expressive message.”

Forcing the Boy Scouts to let openly gay men work with the group would cause a “significant burden” to the group’s right to take a stance opposed to homosexuality, chief justice William Rehnquist wrote for the Court majority.

“We are not, as we must not be, guided by our views of whether the Boy Scouts’ teachings with respect to homosexual conduct are right or wrong,” Justice Rehnquist wrote. Rather, he insisted, the Court must uphold the right of a private group “not to propound a point of view contrary to its beliefs.”

The Court’s dissenting justices had no disagreement with that First Amendment principle. But they did question the origin of the Boy Scouts’ policy against homosexual men, saying it seemed more like a knee-jerk response than a long-hallowed principle of the Scouts, the New York Times reported.

Writing for the dissenting justices, John Paul Stevens disputed the Boy Scouts’ position, insisting the group lacks an integral “shared goal or collective effort to foster a belief about homosexuality … let alone one that is significantly burdened by admitting homosexuals.”

Lacking that definitive basis, the Court should not intervene to create “a constitutional shield for a policy that is itself the product of a habitual way of thinking about strangers,” Justice Stevens concluded.

The Boy Scouts welcomed last week’s ruling, saying the group “must have the right to establish its own standards of membership,” which do not include letting an “avowed homosexual” serve as a role model.

Last week’s ruling centered on the case of James Dale, a decorated Eagle Scout who was forced out of the BSA in 1990 after members learned he was president of a gay and lesbian students’ organization at Rutgers University.

The BSA’s 20-year battle to bar openly gay people from serving has sparked a small backlash against the group, prompting a handful of city governments, school districts, and charity groups to pull their support of the Scouts, reported the Washington Post.

In light of last week’s decision, more groups with nondiscrimination policies may be compelled to cut their sponsorship of the Scouts, noted the Post report.

“The Boy Scouts have won a hollow, Pyrrhic victory,” said Ruth Harlow of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. “The Boy Scouts have fought long and hard for something that has marginalized their institution…. Now they have to live with that vision.”

Gregg Shield, a spokesman for the Scouts, dismissed that assessment, insisting that mainstream America will back the Boy Scouts’ decision to discriminate against openly gay people. “We’ll be just fine,” he told the New York Times.

LONDON
The British Medical Association (BMA) last week promised it would investigate charges that elderly patients are victimized by age discrimination.

The move came at the BMA’s annual meeting, where doctors passed a resolution officially reaffirming the principle of providing “equal access and quality of care” to all patients, “regardless of age.”

U.K. doctors recently have come under public criticism for allegedly providing inferior care and sometimes denying treatment to older patients, prompting accusations of ageism from patients’ right groups, according to the BBC.

Passage of the BMA’s resolution on equal care was followed by the group’s decision to fund a BMA Board of Science investigation into assessing and ending any alleged ageism in the National Health Service.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
A respected Canadian government agency, Statistics Canada, is reporting that U.S. and other foreign multinationals are benefiting Canada’s society and economy, and not exploiting Canadians as they have been accused of doing by vocal Canadian nationalists.

According to a report in the Ottawa Citizen, Statistics Canada has found that foreign multinationals produce more research and development than their domestic counterparts and contribute as much, if not more, to the Canadian economy.

The report finds that foreign-owned multinationals are more likely to introduce new technologies to Canada and be more innovative.

The findings significantly bolster the arguments of the Canadian government that globalization does not necessarily have to be exploitative.

However, the leading nationalist group in Canada, The Council of Canadians, remains skeptical. According to the Ottawa Citizen, Council executive director Peter Julian claimed that the report did not reveal the quantity or the quality of the R&D that foreign multinationals conduct in Canada. Julian also implied that the timing of the report’s release may have been linked to the coming fall federal election.

PARIS
Multinational firms are being pushed to respect human rights and eliminate child labor under new guidelines adopted last week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

At a Paris meeting last week, 29 OECD leaders adopted new beefed-up guidelines requiring better behavior by multinational businesses, threatening bad press and public ire if they violate the rules, the BBC reported.

“The basic premise of the guidelines is that [the] principles … build an atmosphere of confidence between multinational enterprises and the societies in which they operate,” preventing conflicts and human-rights abuses, said Australian treasurer Peter Costello, who chaired the meeting.

The OECD says the threat of bad publicity for offending companies will make the guidelines more effective than the previous document, a 1976 set of rules that were never strongly enforced.

While the new guidelines were largely applauded by workers’ rights advocates, some worry about the OECD’s decision to place enforcement on the local level, where they fear officials will cave to corporate pressure during disputes, the BBC noted.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

TORONTO
Major newspapers in Canada last week carried as their top headline charges brought by the Ontario Securities Commission against traders linked to the pension management arm of Royal Bank of Canada.

The number of people being investigated has now risen to 22, including 13 traders at 11 brokerage houses.

Nine of those charged are at Royal Trust, the pension arm of the Royal Bank of Canada.

Securities officials allege that Royal Trust employees not only planned and carried out manipulation of stock prices, purchasing stocks late during the trading day at artificially high prices to inflate the value of their portfolios, but also conspired to cover up their tracks.

The initial investigation was partly based on tape recordings of traders, but according to reports in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen, the Ontario Securities Commission charged that “after RT Capital became aware that its trading activity was under review, RT Capital reconfigured its taping system” in order to avoid telephone calls between four traders being recorded.

BERLIN
Germany’s former chancellor Helmut Kohl last week adamantly denied swapping financial kickbacks for government favors, telling an investigating committee that the allegations are nothing more than slander.

“This has been an unprecedented attempt to defame me through inaccurate reports, insinuations, and twisting of the facts,” Kohl complained, accusing political enemies of trying to ruin his legacy as the re-unifier of East and West Germany.

Investigators are looking into charges that Kohl hid $1 million in illegal donations to his Christian Democratic Party, and gave government favors to companies in exchange for cash gifts.

Testifying before investigators last week, Kohl readily admitted to — and apologized for — the first charge, though he refused to provide the donors’ names. But he denounced the kickback allegations as “absurd,” according to CNN.

In a 75-minute statement, Kohl denounced the charges of fraud and financial wrongdoing, and criticized investigators for refusing to hear his testimony since the inquiry began seven months ago.

“This process has only one goal: to criminalize me,” Kohl said.

Despite his vigorous denials, Kohl’s troubles mounted last week following the release of a 61-page report accusing the former chancellor’s administration of destroying three gigabytes of computer data — the equivalent of 1.2 million pieces of paper — during the last days of his administration.

In the report, special investigator Burkhard Hirsch said the “massive destruction of documents,” some of which included details on privatization deals, had occurred “with no legal justification,” the BBC reported.

From the Gallup News Service:

“Investor optimism sagged in June, dropping 13 points to 141, according to the latest Index of Investor Optimism, conducted monthly for PaineWebber by The Gallup Organization. In January and February of this year, the Index was in the 180 range. After falling almost 30 points in March, the Index has fluctuated between 141 and 154 for the past four months. The Index had a baseline of 100 when it was established in October 1996.

“Despite this slight decline in the Index, investors remain bullish about the market both in the short and long term. Almost half of all investors — 47 percent — project the market to be higher a year from now, while just 12 percent say it will be lower, and another 37 percent expect it to be about the same….

“Other evidence that investors maintain a sanguine view of the current financial situation is that only 27 percent of investors say they have made any trades in the past three months, and less than a third of these because of the volatility in the stock market — or 8 percent of all investors….

“Six in ten investors describe the Social Security system as one that needs either a complete overhaul (18 percent) or major changes (43 percent), virtually unchanged from a similar reading by the Index in March 1999.

“One proposal to change the system … is to put part of a person’s Social Security taxes into a personal retirement fund. About half of the investors say they have heard at least a ‘moderate’ amount of information about this proposal, while half have not.

“Regardless of how much they have heard about it, investors generally like the sound of the proposal, with 60 percent saying they would opt to have a portion of their Social Security taxes invested in a personal retirement account, and 36 percent opting instead to continue with the current system. Younger investors are especially supportive, with those under 40 and those in the 40-49 age ranges favoring the proposal by 3-to-1 margins….

“Investors also indicate that if personal retirement accounts are established, they would rather have account holders themselves manage them (71 percent) than have the funds managed by the federal government (22 percent). They also believe the money should be used only for retirement (67 percent) rather than for home mortgages and education as well as retirement (30 percent), as some observers have proposed.

“When investors are asked how important it is to them, personally, that Congress and the president address this issue, 28 percent say it is extremely important, 33 percent very important, and 25 percent moderately important — with 13 percent saying it is of little or no importance to them….”

“All progress and growth is a matter of change, but change must be growth within our social and government concepts if it should not destroy them.”

– Herbert Hoover (31^st U.S. president (1929-1933), 1874-1964)