Ethics Newsline®

This week’s commentary consists of a President’s Letter from Rushworth Kidder, which was mailed last week to the Institute’s 1,600 members worldwide. Though longer than our usual commentaries, we’re reprinting it in light of the ethical issues swirling up around the possibility of war with Iraq.

I don’t recall just when the word courage entered our conversations. But the other day, during a break in an ethics seminar I was leading in the Midwest, it showed up in a discussion about Iraq.

Some were appalled at the prospect of military action, incredulous that the United States could suddenly abandon its age-old values of justice and respect. Others were appalled that the nation might back down from its long-held commitments to defend the values of freedom and responsibility. Given the context — a seminar on ethics — this was no battle royal of rant and invective. Each side was considerate, reflective, reasonable, but each was willing to risk the displeasure of others — perhaps even to endanger the harmony of the group — to articulate its convictions. And at some point, they began talking about the importance of taking courageous stands in defense of your principles.

Then a father with two grown sons made a thoughtful observation. One of them, he said, was a marine; the other was marching for peace. “I think they both have moral courage,” he said.

He’s right, but not obviously. When most people think of courage, they gravitate toward war stories. Combat calls forth some of the greatest expressions of physical courage, with individuals risking death, wounds, or capture for something beyond themselves. That “something” can be as close as the soldier at your side — or as distant as the ideal of independence and the homeland. War also engenders heroism among non-uniformed combatants, from Paul Revere’s ride through Lexington and Concord to the anonymous hundreds who harbored Jews in Europe during World War II.

But warfare involves more than physical courage. Among the most agonizing choices made by military officers are the morally courageous decisions that risk reputation, respect, friendship, or career for the sake of principles. Who’s to say which takes more courage: throwing yourself into the sea to save a drowning sailor, or standing up to superior officers when they scapegoat subordinates?

Less well understood is the courage required of noncombatants, particularly peacemakers. Their lives can unfold along fissures of intensity every bit as harrowing as those facing combatants. Their courage can be enormous. But more often, I suspect, it shows forth in modest ways. Heroes are made not only in the heat of battle but at the hearthside, not only in the crackling immediacy of a crisis but in the patient enduring of the ordinary. If, as John Milton wrote, “They also serve who only stand and wait,” it’s also true that waiting, pondering, and reflecting sometimes require the boldness not to do but to forbear doing. Yes, courage requires action. But action that is ill conceived, rash, or inept turns courage into foolhardiness. Sometimes the moral courage of the peacemaker will be to slow the pell-mell pace and ask, Have we thought this through? And sometimes the moral courage of the combatant will be to answer back, Can we afford not to act?

The standoff over Iraq reminds us why the world needs a balance of peace marchers and marines. On two occasions only a generation apart, the twentieth century experienced this imbalance — and reaped its horrors. In the first, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain refused in 1938 to stand up against Hitler’s absorption of Czechoslovakia, paving the way for World War II. In the second, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson charged ahead in 1965 with a military response in Vietnam, aggravating the social explosions of the next decade and beyond. What would it have taken, early in the Johnson era, to ask, Have we thought this through? Moral courage. But what would it have taken in Chamberlain’s day to ask, Can we afford not to act? Moral courage.

The present standoff with Iraq — coming, again, about a generation away from Vietnam — makes the case for both brands of courage. Though neither side likes to admit it, the moral arguments for and against a U.S.-led invasion are finely balanced. There is plenty of right on both sides. To see how, consider what happens when you apply three ethical principles to this discussion of whether or not to go to war:

• Ends-based. Under the standard of utilitarianism, the most ethical outcome is the one that does the greatest good for the greatest number. Ends-based thinkers are invited to think about consequences — indeed, they must do so, speculating about what might happen if, or if, or if. Posit, then, the world of 2030. Will we look back and say, The war in Iraq created wholesale fragmentation, nearly ruined the global economy, dragged us into impossible nation building, and drove a wedge between Western and Islamic cultures that we’re only now beginning to heal? Or will we look back and say, Our failure to deal with Iraq, we now know, made weapons of mass destruction available to terrorists, finally allowing them to bring down the global economy after the catastrophic destruction of (fill in the name of a major U.S. or European city)? If neither of these stark polarities is a pleasant consequence, our task is to imagine better futures — and then have the courage to steer the ship of our collective discourse in that direction.
• Rule-based. Under the terms promulgated by Immanuel Kant, the most ethical outcome arises when the highest principle is made universal — when, in other words, the rule you’d like to see applied becomes the absolute that must forever be followed in similar circumstances. What if the rule were, Always stand up to evil tyrannies bent on destroying you? You’d go to war. But what if it were, Always protect the innocent subjects of coercive despots? You’d refrain from attacking. The task is to determine which of these rules — or, perhaps, other more compelling ones — you most want to see enshrined behind the word always. One thing is clear: Both are right. But which is the higher right?
• Care-based. Under the Golden Rule, the most ethical outcome arises when we do to others what we’d like them to do to us. Here the problem lies in defining which “others” we mean. Is Saddam the other? That’s hard to imagine. But what about his subjects? Suppose we ourselves were trapped in the web of a vicious tyranny. Would we want someone to liberate us with military intervention? Or would we want someone to help us work through our problems with more gentle interventions? But what if we were citizens of other countries? Would we want someone to save us from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists, or to save the world from the horrendous dislocations inherent in war?

It would seem, then, that there’s a moral imperative for peace — and a moral imperative for war. Determining which side occupies the higher ground will be a matter of individual intuition, experience, and wisdom. One thing is obvious, however: Neither side is wrong. Both have powerful values-based reasons to support them, so neither can prevail ethically by vilifying the other. And each demands moral courage of its supporters.

As we move toward some resolution of the Iraq situation, how will that moral courage show through? As it always does: by persistence when the going really gets tough. The toughest challenges to moral courage, I suspect, arise because of three latent fears: confusion, exposure, and discomfort.

1. Confusion. To say that the world is getting more confusing is to understate the obvious. As complex issues increasingly surface — and as simple issues proliferate and compound themselves — it takes discipline to grasp them and understand their significance. We may yearn to make decisions in full possession of all relevant facts and interpretations. In practice, we do the best we can with muddled arguments and incomplete details. The courage to trust your intuitions is really the courage to persist in the face of confusion.

Such confusions are manifold in decisions about Iraq. Do we know all we need to know? Hardly. Are we sure we can trust those who say we must go to war, or those who say it’s safe to avoid it? Not really. Yet can we walk away from the confusion and refuse to face the issue? Only if we lack the courage to be moral. Pressing each argument to its ethical end point, refusing to be frightened by confusion, we can demand new clarity from both the peace marchers and the marines.

2. Exposure. It also takes courage to stand up to the fear of exposure. If that sounds strange, consider the courage needed to cope with stage fright, whistle-blowing, or civil disobedience. The desire to shrink from prominence, find hiding places, and avoid leadership roles is a disturbing human response. Facing up to it, however, is more problematic than facing up to confusion — because while few people covet confusion, many an egotist longs for fame, popularity, and adulation. The courage to endure exposure, then, starts with an exploration of motives: Am I seeking the limelight for mere personal gratification, or am I opening myself to public scrutiny because the community needs real leadership?

Here, too, the Iraq issue calls forth our moral courage. If I feel strongly about war or peace, am I willing to say so openly? If I haven’t formulated a position, do I have the courage to admit I don’t know? If I honestly don’t know how I feel, can I avoid a kind of moral chameleonship that appears to agree with whatever attitudes happen to be coloring my immediate context? Or have I the courage to push back, question both sides, and expose whatever logic (or lack of it) needs to come to the surface?

3. Discomfort. In the end, however, perhaps the greatest threat to moral courage comes from complacency. Courage is rarely found among those afraid to put at risk the tidy pleasures of the unruffled life. Moral courage can be messy, uncomfortable, and disturbing. It’s easier to believe that neatness and order ought to prevail, that it’s impolite to rattle the world’s equanimity, that what e. e. cummings called the “furnished souls” of our lives are too nice to want to abandon.

Demanding clarity, risking prominence, enduring discomfort — that’s some of what moral courage is all about. The other day a friend reminded me of Dante’s famous comment. “The hottest places in hell,” he wrote, “are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” Dante wasn’t calling for war. Nor was he pleading for peace. He was simply crying out for engagement, for the courage to take a stand when, as now, the chips are down.

(c)2003 Institute for Global Ethics

”CBS granting an interview to a news source is not granting moral equivalency to all sources. CBS is not putting Saddam Hussein on par with the president of the United States in anyone’s opinion. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the universal consensus is that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy.”

– Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, speaking to USA Today after CBS News broadcast an interview with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. (“Saddam Interview Angers White House,” USA Today, Feb. 27.)

WASHINGTON
The federal government last week charged eight current and former executives at Qwest Communications with manipulating revenue figures to defraud investors and mislead regulators.

The charges were handed down in two separate indictments centered on the telecommunication company’s dealings from 1999 to 2001, a period for which the firm was forced to restate its earnings due to more than $940 million in bookkeeping errors, reported the Associated Press.

In one indictment, federal prosecutors accused four former Qwest executives of conspiring to falsely report more than $33 million in revenues by deliberately misstating payments due under a contract, reporting the revenue as a lump-sum payment instead of as installments to be paid in the future.

In a separate indictment, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the same four executives, as well as four others, with inflating revenues by roughly $144 million from 2000 to 2001 in order to meet investors’ expectations.

“The defendants couldn’t make the numbers work by following the rules, so they cheated,” SEC chairman William Donaldson alleged last week.

Qwest spokesman Steve Hammack declined to comment on last week’s indictments, but said the company, which provides local telecommunications services to 14 states, was cooperating with the government.

“As a company, as individual employees, we hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards as we conduct our business,” Hammock said.

Only one of the executives indicted last week still works for Qwest, noted the Reuters news agency.

LONDON
Some of Britain’s leading auditing firms have begun adding disclaimers to their reports, warning that only shareholders can hold the accounting firms liable for bookkeeping fraud or errors, the New York Times reported last week.

The report notes that PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young are among the firms now employing the disclaimers.

The statements are an attempt by the auditing industry to contain their legal liabilities in the case of deliberate or accidental fraud, according to the U.K. Institute of Chartered Accountants, which self-regulates the sector.

While admitting that the statements attempt to limit legal fallout for auditing wrongdoing, Institute president Peter Wyman insists that they do so by clarifying existing British law, not by limiting the law’s reach.

“It’s not designed to restrict any further the duty of care, it’s simply to stop it accidentally from being widened,” Wyman told the Times.

The disclaimers warn that in the case of bad bookkeeping, only a company’s stockholders — not its lenders, bondholders, prospective investors, or employees — have the legal right to sue.

Analysts say that the statements, still untested in court, are unlikely to appear on audit letters for firms in the United States, where federal securities laws override private contractual deals, noted the Times.

Still, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it is looking into the growing use of disclaimers. “We’re aware of the issue and are considering the implications,” an SEC spokesman told the Times.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

TORONTO
John MacNaughton, the CEO of Canada’s Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board, which oversees more than $12 billion in pension funds, has decided to give away $2.35 million representing a windfall from the exercise of stock options in 2000 when he was on the board of JDS Uniphase Corp.

As head of one of the largest institutional investors, MacNaughton said he felt compelled to take the action, given that the CPP Investment Board announced recently that it would oppose all company stock-option plans, according to a Globe & Mail report.

According to the report, MacNaughton also stated that he gave most of the profit to the CPP Investment Board and the rest to a handful of charities because he felt that the longer he stayed in his job, the more he realized that the unforeseen windfall did not seem right and may be at odds with his duties as a manager of the giant pension fund.

DÜSSELDORF, Germany
German prosecutors last week charged six men, including the head of the country’s largest bank and the head of the country’s leading union, with allegedly making illegal payments used to bribe executives to approve a corporate takeover.

The charges center on U.K. telecom giant Vodafone’s hostile takeover bid for Germany’s Mannesmann in 2000, reported the Independent.

Prosecutors contend that when the deal started going sour, it was sweetened by between $108 million and $137 million in payoffs for Mannesmann executives who opposed the deal — payments allegedly authorized by a Mannesmann supervisory board.

Among those named in last week’s indictments were Deutsche Bank head Josef Ackermann, former Mannesmann head Klaus Esser, and Klaus Zwickel, the head of Germany’s industrial union IG Metall.

The men are charged with breaching shareholder trust by authorizing and accepting the illegal payments “in return for their support for a ‘friendly’ takeover,” according to chief prosecutor Hans-Reinhard Henke.

Those payments “served purely for the enrichment of the beneficiaries in connection with Mannesmann’s takeover, not the company’s good,” Henke charged.

Ackermann and Zwickel have both denied wrongdoing, insisting the charges are unjustified, noted the Associated Press.

BOSTON
A federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit challenging President Bush’s right to launch an attack on Iraq without formal approval from Congress, ruling that the issue was outside the court’s purview.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro said that unless the case involved a direct conflict between the executive and legislative branches of government — President Bush and Congress — the court had no right to get involved.

The decision dismisses a lawsuit filed by three unidentified members of the U.S. military, six parents of U.S. troops, and six members of Congress, who said a Bush-ordered war on Iraq would violate the separation of powers guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution bars presidents from declaring war without the approval of Congress, a formality that has not been invoked since World War II, reported the Associated Press.

In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, requiring the U.S. president to seek congressional approval before or shortly after ordering military action abroad, according to the AP.

Justice Tauro said that there was no conflict in this case for two reasons: Congress had sided with Bush in an October resolution supporting military action in Iraq, and Bush had not yet ordered military action.

“The issues raised in this case are political questions beyond the authority of this court to resolve,” Tauro concluded.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer John Bonifaz said Tauro’s ruling was wrong and pledge an appeal, reported the Boston Globe.

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Supreme Court last week ruled that racketeering and extortion laws cannot be used to keep abortion protestors from shutting down women’s clinics, even when those protests become violent and block patients’ access to services.

Last week’s 8-to-1 decision ends a 17-year court battle between anti-abortion groups and the National Organization of Women (NOW), which argued that by effectively shutting down clinics, protestors were acting illegally.

After a Chicago jury agreed in 1998, the case was upheld on appeal. Last week, the justices reversed those rulings and threw out the group’s argument, saying racketeering and extortion laws were being misapplied, reported the Baltimore Sun.

According to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, racketeering laws cover only those cases in which property is actually acquired by the racketeers. While abortion protestors were essentially ruining the business of clinics by blocking access and harassing patients and doctors, no property was actually being transferred, the court ruled, disqualifying NOW’s legal argument.

“Petitioners may have deprived or sought to deprive respondents of their alleged property right of exclusive control of their business assets, but they did not acquire any such property,” Justice Rehnquist wrote.

Last week’s ruling was applauded by an unlikely alliance of civil liberties groups and conservative anti-abortion organizations, which jointly argued against barring the protests under racketeering laws.

Civil rights groups claimed that allowing the laws to stanch protest would diminish the free-speech and civil disobedience rights of U.S. citizens — rights that have been used to address issues from slavery, women’s voting rights, and discrimination, to the current conflict with Iraq.

Last week’s ruling, opposed only by Justice John Paul Stevens, likely will have little effect on the tenor of current anti-abortion protests, due to the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, noted the Sun.

That law, passed by Congress eight year after NOW filed its original suit, shields women from the harshest kinds of harassment outside clinics, though the penalties for violations are generally lower than those afforded by racketeering laws, reported the Boston Globe.

MINNEAPOLIS
German pharmaceutical giant Bayer last week denied any wrongdoing after reports surfaced indicating that the company’s senior executives continued to market the cholesterol-lowering drug Baycol even though they knew it could cause dangerous side effects.

The allegations appeared in the New York Times, which said a series of internal documents indicated that Bayer executives were warned that Baycol could cause severe damage at higher doses.

After Baycol was released, studies found that it was less effective than competitors unless taken at greater doses than originally studied. At larger doses, however, Baycol was found to trigger a rare muscle disease more often than similar drugs, according to the Times.

After being notified of concerns by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Baycol was pulled from the market in 2001. The drug has been blamed for roughly 100 deaths and 1,600 injuries worldwide.

More than 10,000 patients who took Baycol, as well as the families of those who died, have filed approximately 7,800 lawsuits against Bayer and U.K. firm GlaxoSmithKline, which helped market the drug.

So far, more than 400 cases have been settled for individual pay-outs ranging from $200,000 to $1.2 million, reported the Associated Press. Roughly half of the remaining suits have been consolidated in a class-action case headed to trial in Minneapolis.

Philip Beck, a lawyer representing Bayer, denied that company executives knowingly imperiled the public, insisting that the company monitored doctors’ reports, shared information with regulators, and repeatedly amended the drug’s warning label when warranted. “We did what companies should do,” Beck told the Times.

LONDON
Britain’s House of Lords last week ruled that the nation’s teachers were acting within their rights when they refused to teach two students expelled for violent behavior.

The 3-to-2 decision came in a case pitting the teachers’ right to a safe work environment against the students’ right to a standard education.

In the cases at hand, both students were expelled for violent and disruptive behavior. After their parents appealed, they were returned to school, but taught in isolation from other students — treatment the students and their parents argued was unfair and illegal.

Last week, the House of Lords ruled against that appeal, saying the teachers’ union agreement allowed them to refuse to teach students they believed posed a continuing threat, reported the Guardian.

The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), one of two unions supporting the teachers’ case, welcomed the ruling.

Noting that violent student behavior was the second leading cause, after workload, cited by teachers abandoning the profession, NASUWT general secretary Eamonn O’Kane said last week’s ruling “will give heart to every teacher in the country.”

The decision comes during the same week the NASUWT released a list of the 39 worst-behaved schoolchildren in Britain, citing physical beatings, property destruction, and death threats by pupils.

Altogether, teachers at 27 schools in England and Wales have taken industrial action against such students, voting to refuse to teach the pupils.

The legality of the teachers’ decisions was apparently affirmed by last week’s ruling, noted the BBC.

SEATTLE
Consumers hoping to dispose of their computers and televisions in a responsible manner have long had little option but to take the outmoded machines, filled with plastics and toxic metals, to the local landfill.

There, the machines have been destroyed or exported to foreign countries, where toxins including arsenic, barium, beryllium, lead, and mercury leach into the earth and ground water, contaminating the environment and killing workers.

Last week, three Seattle-area companies agreed to tackle the problem locally, announcing programs to recycle the hazardous materials present in computer components, reported the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The firms, RE-PC, Total Reclaim, and PC Salvage, will recycle some items for free and charge small fees for others.

Such recycling programs are standard practice in Europe, where manufacturers are legally required to provide end-of-life programs for computers and other components, instead of dumping them or exporting them to poorer countries for disposal.

While the United States is slowly considering a similar approach, “a federal solution [is] five or seven years away,” warned Sego Jackson, a solid-waste worker in Washington who also serves as one of 15 negotiators working on the nationwide plan.

Last week’s action addresses the dilemma at the local level, allowing residents to return old or broken machines to the three firms, which have agreed to safely and ethically dispose of the hazardous components.

“Finally we are able to tell consumers it is safe to take that old computer and monitor out of the closet, attic, or garage, and send it to a company that has agreed to be among the most responsible recyclers in the entire industry,” Jim Puckett of the international environmental group, the Basel Action Network, told the Post-Intelligencer.

Sego Jackson last week said he was “thrilled” by the deal, saying the nation’s stockpile of toxin-laden electronics is “a huge problem for local governments” operating landfills.

The Post-Intelligencer report also notes that at least two electronics companies, Epson and Hewlett-Packard, have begun recycling programs that allow consumers to return devices for a fee.

From the Gallup News Service:

“According to the latest Gallup Poll, a majority of Americans perceive the news media to be acting responsibly in their handling of the recent threats of terrorism in the United States. But the poll also shows that, more generally, Americans are skeptical about the accuracy and objectivity of the ‘fourth estate.’ Almost six out of 10 Americans say that news stories are often inaccurate.

“While Americans are roughly as likely to say that the media’s news coverage favors the Republican Party as the Democratic Party, 45 percent say that the media are too liberal, while only 15 percent say the media are too conservative. Perceptions of inaccuracy are not strongly related to party or ideology, but perceptions of partisan bias, predictably, are related to partisan orientation. Conservatives and Republicans are highly likely to say that the media have a liberal and Democratic bias, while liberals and Democrats say that the media show a bias for conservatives and Republicans.

“The poll … finds that 57 percent of Americans believe that the news media have acted responsibly ‘in handling the recent threats of terrorism in the United States,’ while 40 percent say the media have acted irresponsibly. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the public was more positive. By a margin of 86 percent to 12 percent, Americans said the media provided responsible coverage. Fifty-seven percent of Americans also said the media handled the sniper shootings last fall in a responsible manner.

“Despite this positive assessment, Americans express skepticism that the news media routinely provides accurate and objective coverage. The poll shows that 58 percent of Americans believe news organizations’ stories ‘are often inaccurate,’ while just 39 percent say they ‘get the facts straight.’

“Gallup has taken only a few readings over the past 18 years, but the results show that the public’s evaluation of the media has varied considerably. In December 2000, in the wake of the controversy over the Florida election results, the public took a dim view of media coverage. By a two-to-one margin, Americans were more likely to say the media were often inaccurate than to say the media got the facts straight.

“During the 1988 election campaigns, Americans seemed ambivalent, leaning toward a negative assessment in January, a positive one in May, and a negative one again in August. During ‘normal’ coverage of the nation’s politics during the less confrontational years of 1985, 1989, and 1998 — the public leaned toward a more positive view of media coverage.

“The relatively negative assessment measured in the current poll could well be related to the intense opinions that Americans have about a potential war in Iraq. Usually, the more intense people’s views, the more critical they tend to be of the media for not adequately covering their point of view.

“About half of all Americans believe the news media generally favor a political party, while the other half believes the media favor neither party. Those who perceive a bias divide about evenly between identifying a Republican (20 percent) or a Democratic (23 percent) tilt.

“These views are somewhat changed from December 2000, when Americans were more likely to say the bias was in favor of Democrats over Republicans, by 29 percent to 15 percent….”

“Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.”

– William Hazlitt (English essayist, 1778-1830)