Ethics Newsline®

Should a medical school award a posthumous degree to a student who, having fulfilled all of the academic requirements, kills himself while making a pipe bomb in his garage — apparently in connection with a homegrown militia group?

That was the gist of the dilemma I shared with you in last week’s column, “The Medic and the Militia.” In a final question, I asked you whether, as dean of the medical school, you would have awarded the degree — and how you would have explained your decision to others?

In emails to me, you said, “No way!” by a six-to-one margin.

The author of the dilemma, Tom Allen, was in the majority camp as well. As the dean of a medical school when this issue arose in 1995, he saw it as an individual-versus-community dilemma. In his view, the “concerns and emotions” of the family asking for the posthumous honor were pitted against the “community impact of awarding the degree to someone who failed to meet the professional and ethical standards required of a physician.” For Tom, the latter outweighed the former. In the end, he wrote, “We did not award the medical degree.”

That theme — the importance of requiring ethical standards for physicians — echoed widely in many of your comments. “To award him the degree with knowledge of this activity in the public consciousness would send a very wrong message,” writes a reader who heads an ethics program in an academic medical center in Indiana. A college counselor at an independent school in Missouri notes that “the ethical and caring behavior of a medical professional is integral to that person’s effective professional functioning,” adding that such an attitude “aids healing in many subtle ways.” Another reader, pointing to the Hippocratic Oath (as several of you did) and to its requirement to “do no harm,” wryly observes that “I am not aware of a beneficial use for a pipe bomb.”

Coupled with that theme was a concern, widely expressed in your responses, about the effort in contemporary culture to separate competence from ethical probity. “We are living in a world that recognizes classroom accomplishment far more readily than the development of courage, honor, and ethical maturity,” writes a mortgage underwriter in Utah. She adds that “lacking a moral compass is for a physician a handicap that cannot be overcome by competence.”

Many of you set aside the fact that the student had been killed as irrelevant to the decision: As one of you noted, are we going to “rescind the indictment of [former Enron CEO] Ken Lay because he is no longer alive?” Some of you, expanding on the analogies and what ifs raised by this story, raised potent speculative dangers. “How about a student who, following completion of all of the academic and clinical requirements, goes on a rampage, kills four other students and then himself,” asks an international business executive in California, “Does he qualify [for the degree]?”

For a former New York Police Department detective, however, the speculation need not go that far to establish criminality. “Preparing and possessing a pipe bomb is a felony,” he writes. “It is a completed act and a completed crime.”

Your comments would seem to make this a slam-dunk for the no-degree side. Yet the speculative thinking favored the other side as well. Several of the most impassioned and thoughtful responses came from readers who, while their gut said no to awarding the degree, concluded that justice would not be served by such a decision.

“If a young person bought illegal firecrackers and exploded them in the garage, and also happened to have a friend who was into firearms,” writes a staffer in the governor’s office in Albany, New York, “is that a ‘homegrown militia’ link? Would that be enough to say, Sorry, no medical degree?” She goes on to make a strong argument that “we haven’t had a trial of any kind” and that in this country we believe in “being innocent until proven guilty.” After several closely reasoned pages, she concludes that “the degree should be awarded.”

Joining her opinion is a longtime writer and educator in Maine. Conceding that the student’s “apparent intended activities” in making the pipe bomb were clearly inconsistent with “the stated ethical standards for physicians,” she notes that the real issue is “whether there is a certainty that what the student apparently intended to do is actually what he intended.” She goes on to say that “it is strong circumstantial evidence, but I don’t find it sufficient,” and that it would “not be right for the dean to draw a conclusion about guilt or innocence.”

She argues for awarding the degree, but she concludes by posing a kind of “trilemma” option, finding a middle course between the two polar arguments in this dilemma. Given that there was a continuing investigation, she argues that “a decision about the degree should have been postponed” — as it would have been, she thinks, had the student survived the accident.

A similar trilemma was posed by the head of a professional training company in Massachusetts. While he says he “wouldn’t have hesitated to deny the degree,” he asks us to imagine that “the student had been trying to defuse his kid brother’s pipe bomb when it exploded.” Given that possibility, he says that the school could consider awarding the degree “later, after all the facts were in.”

Is there a pattern here? Arguments for awarding the degree lean heavily on a Kantian perspective, requiring us to hold to a standard that, however tough it may seem, we want to see universalized. In this case, the standard concerns due process: Is the student really guilty, and do we know all we need to know to make that determination? On the other hand, arguments for withholding the degree rely on the impact of the message sent by university officials who, if they made the award, would be pilloried for doing so.

But as for being pilloried, perhaps a reader in a government office in New Zealand got it about right. “Either way Tom goes,” she writes about the dean’s choice, “people will disagree with him.” She’s right. Welcome, Tom, to the right-versus-right world of tough choices.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics

“Coming straight after a threat from the Saudis to withdraw from future business, this completely undermines the U.K.’s reputation on good governance. How on earth can we lecture the developing world on good governance when we interfere with and block a criminal investigation in this way?”

– Norman Lamb, a member of the U.K. Parliament, criticizing the dropping of a criminal investigation into alleged bribery between British defense firm BAE and the government of Saudi Arabia. The investigation was shut down last week at the request of prime minister Tony Blair and other government officials who concluded that “the wider public interest” “outweighed the need to maintain the rule of law,” reports the Guardian.

The forced shutdown of the Serious Fraud Office probe into alleged BAE bribery comes shortly after the Saudi government reportedly issued a 10-day ultimatum, warning that it would cancel a lucrative BAE contract if the investigation was not stopped.

While BAE’s stock prime had plummeted 10 percent in the last month over concerns about the criminal probe, it shot back up upon last week’s news.

Tony Blair last week denied that economic interests played a part in his push to abort the probe. Instead he implied that pursuing the criminal matter might cost Britain the cooperation of the Saudi government. “Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country in terms of counterterrorism, in terms of the broader Middle East, in terms of helping in respect of Israel and Palestine. That strategic interest comes first,” Blair said, according to the BBC.

While the Saudi government no longer needs to worry about the criminal investigation, BAE is not yet in the clear. Investigations have not been blocked into alleged BAE wrongdoing involving business dealings with Chile, the Czech Republic, Romania, South Africa, and Tanzania, notes the Guardian.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. and SACRAMENTO, Calif.
In a resurrection of what had become a fairly dormant ethical debate in recent months, capital punishment blinked back on the radar last week after Florida governor Jeb Bush suspended executions in his state after an apparently botched lethal injection there. In a separate case, a federal judge in California last week temporarily halted lethal injections on the ground that the method may constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

Florida will empanel a special commission to review lethal injection procedures after a medical examiner determined that a convicted killer took 34 minutes to die, more than double the average, as he grimaced and opened his mouth, the Miami Herald reports.

The medical examiner, while refusing to speculate on whether the inmate was in pain during the execution, did note that the needles had pierced completely through the veins, causing the poisonous chemicals to dissipate through his tissues rather than going directly into his blood stream.

Errors figured prominently in the controversy over Florida lethal injections even before lethal injections were implemented. Florida banned the electric chair after two inmates actually caught fire in the 1990s, the New York Times reported.

In California, U.S. district judge Jeremy Fogel last week placed a moratorium on executions after hearing the case of a convicted murderer who appealed his death sentence, claiming that there were questions about whether inmates remained awake when they were injected with the lethal drugs, the Sacramento Bee reports. Lawyers for the convict also argued that inmates may have felt enough pain during the process to violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Fogel cited a variety of problems with California’s process, according to a report from NPR, including poor training and supervision of staff performing the executions, as well as failures to follow directions on using the drug that anesthetizes inmates before two more drugs are injected to stop the heart.

Critics long have argued that the methods commonly used for lethal injections may cause an agonizing death because the first drug, intended to render inmates unconscious, may only paralyze them and mask their pain.

WASHINGTON
Fallout from the battle for the U.S. Congress, largely waged over ethics issues, remained prominent in U.S. headlines last week:

• After winning control of Congress on a promise to hold lawmakers to a higher ethical standard, House Democrats last week decided not to reappoint Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) to a major committee until a federal investigation involving him concludes. The Associated Press reports that incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says Jefferson will be kept off the influential Ways and Means Committee pending the outcome of the probe. Democrats, with Pelosi’s backing, removed Jefferson from the committee in June after the FBI said they had found $90,000 in alleged bribe money in Jefferson’s freezer.
• The controversial concept of turning over House ethics enforcement to an outside agency stayed alive last week as Pelosi created a special panel to study the idea, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Democratic leaders have been ambivalent about the notion of outside enforcement, and it was unclear whether the idea under study — should it materialize — would involve an independent agency with investigative, subpoena, or punishment powers.
• The Senate ethics panel last week concluded that the incoming majority leader, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), did nothing wrong in accepting free tickets to boxing matches at the same time he was sponsoring legislation relating to the governance of the sport. TV station KRNV of Reno, Nevada, reports that while Reid denied any conflict of interest, he has admitted that accepting the ringside seats gave the appearance of impropriety and that he would not do it again.

LONDON
British prime minister Tony Blair last week was questioned about an ethics scandal in which it is alleged that the government sold appointments to the House of Lords and other honors in return for political contributions.

The Times of London reports that Blair became the first serving prime minister to be questioned as part of a criminal probe when he underwent a two-hour grilling by the Metropolitan Police.

Blair’s office noted that he had been interviewed as a witness, not as a suspect, and was not read his rights, a process the British call being “interviewed under caution,” suggesting that he is not facing criminal charges, according to reports from the BBC and the Los Angeles Times.

The British press crackled with charges and countercharges related to the ethics scandal. The Daily Telegraph reports that Blair’s party views the inquisition as a politically motivated dirty-tricks campaign and released a statement strongly denying any impropriety.

At the same time, the Independent and the Scotsman both report that the Blair administration has been accused by political rivals of attempting to bury the story by releasing the long-awaited report on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, one hour into Blair’s interrogation.

TOKYO
Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, has apologized and agreed to forfeit three months’ pay after it was revealed that he helped rig dozens of “town meetings” in which supposedly spontaneous comments and questions were rigged.

While the prearranged questions and comments occurred during the administration of former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, Abe served during that period as chief cabinet secretary, the post supervising government-organized events, reports the Tokyo-based Daily Yomiuri.

An investigation determined that the posers were paid about $40 to ask simple, leading questions that would allow government spokesmen to promote government plans to overhaul the country’s educational and legal systems, according to the Times of London, which contends that “the town meetings were supposed to inject grassroots democracy into a political system driven by backroom deals and an old guard ruling party that has held power for decades.”

The Tokyo-based Japan Times blasted the affair in a weekend editorial, noting that some of the 174 rigged meetings cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each to produce.

In related news, one of the policies promoted during the meetings, enforced study of patriotism in public schools, was passed last week by the Japan’s parliament.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the law represents the Abe administration’s desire to eliminate taboos against expression of nationalism, characterized in the Times report as “a conservative volley in a cultural war over Japanese values. The education revisions … mark a victory for conservatives like Abe over what they view as a school system dominated by left-wing teachers unions.”

The new laws mark the first significant changes in such policy since World War II, when U.S.-influenced policy mandated that schools avoid the type of virulent nationalism that was apparent in the run-up to the war.

NEW YORK
Members of Congress received dismal rankings in the annual Gallup/USA Today survey of how the public ranks members of various professions in terms of “honesty and ethical standards.”

About 14 percent of respondents rated the ethics of congressional representatives highly, and only 15 percent gave high rankings to senators, reports USA Today.

Both rankings are down from 25 percent in 2001, when members of Congress received their highest scores since the survey began in 1976.

“It’s not surprising that in a year of huge scandals, people’s faith in government has fallen,” Peggy Kerns, director of the Center for Ethics in Government at the National Conference of State Legislatures, told USA Today. “This is a big concern,” she told the paper, and makes some people less likely to seek office or even vote.

For the eighth straight year, nurses led the list, receiving “high” or “very high” marks from 84 percent of those surveyed, according to UPI. Pharmacists, veterinarians, doctors, and dentists also finished near the top, followed closely by engineers, college professors, clergy, and police.

Journalists again received mediocre marks, reports the trade journal Editor & Publisher, with 26 percent of respondents giving them a high ethics rating.

Car salesmen are at the bottom of the list with 7 percent of respondents rating them highly. HMO managers are rated highly by 12 percent, and insurance salesmen by 13 percent.

WASHINGTON
In a media-ethics case some say is reminiscent of the 1971 Pentagon Papers incident, the U.S. government is seeking the return of a classified document leaked to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

According to the New York Times, federal prosecutors are using what legal experts call a “new extension” of the Bush administration’s legal strategy to restrict access to national security information.

The novelty in the technique, the Times reports, is the use of a grand jury, which normally seeks to collect evidence, but this time is demanding “any and all copies” of the material that was emailed to the ACLU in October, effectively confiscating the document and preventing any dissemination.

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said the subpoena is part of the government’s “very conscious efforts to suppress its critics,” UPI reports.

But John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University, disagreed, saying the government is “bending over backwards to accommodate the ACLU rather than pulling the trigger in prosecuting them.”

According to the Associated Press, the ACLU says the three-and-a-half page document relates to anti-terrorism efforts, and has filed a request in federal court seeking a judicial order allowing it to retain the document.

The ACLU did not reveal the contents of the document but said that it relates to issues of “long-standing concern” to the organization, noting that those concerns have in the past included the government’s policies and practices regarding torture and compliance with the Geneva Conventions.

Critics were quick to compare the government’s action with the Nixon administration’s efforts to suppress stolen documents known as the Pentagon Papers, which painted a bleak portrait of America’s prosecution of the Vietnam War.

In an editorial, the Washington Post, a central player in the 1971case, argued that the government is abusing the legal process in an attempt to quash dissent.

“The grand jury is an important tool for prosecutors to investigate wrongdoing — not a vacuum cleaner for material the government wishes hadn’t gotten out,” the editorial reads. “The government is seeking to abuse the grand jury process to do an end run around the constitutional prohibition against prior restraint enshrined in the Pentagon Papers case.”

“In that 1971 ruling,” the editorial continues, “the government wanted to stop the New York Times and the Post from publishing classified documents about the Vietnam War; the Supreme Court said no. What if the government, instead of suing to block publication, had simply issued a grand jury subpoena demanding that the newspapers return the Pentagon Papers? If the ACLU, which advocates and litigates on issues of public policy, can be forced to comply with such a subpoena, news organizations would be similarly at risk.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan had no immediate comment other than to acknowledge the ACLU’s filing.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that the government abandoned its subpoena on Monday following a closed court hearing that “suggested the government was going to lose.”

The judge hearing the arguments expressed doubts about the government’s tactic. “There seems to be a huge difference between investigating a wrongful leak of a classified document and demanding back all copies of it, and I’m old enough to remember a case called the Pentagon Papers,” federal judge Jed Rakoff said, according to a transcript of the closed hearing quoted in the Times.

Withdrawing their subpoena, federal prosecutors said they were acting “in light of changed circumstances” and their determination that “the grand jury can obtain the evidence necessary to its investigation from other sources.”

[updated Dec. 19, 9:14 A.M.]

OTTAWA
A report into an ethics scandal that has dominated Canada’s headlines for months and led to the resignation of the head of the elite Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) recommends sweeping overhaul of Canada’s national security network.

According to the Toronto Star, the recommendations offered by Justice Dennis O’Connor call for the Mounties to be more tightly supervised by a civilian watchdog agency with the power to probe into top secret operations.

The O’Connor report comes in the wake of an earlier government finding that Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria, was tagged as a possible terrorist by the RCMP, which used faulty intelligence data, and was deported from the United States to Syria, where he was tortured.

In addition to concerns that Canadian officials mishandled the U.S. request for information on Arar, who was taken into custody in a New York airport, Arar’s case raised charges that the United States and Canada engage in torture by proxy, extraditing terror suspects to countries where they know it is likely that information will be extracted under torture.

U.S. officials last week said Arar is still considered a threat and will remain on a security watch list. David Wilkins, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, said that the decision to deport Arar in 2002 was based on an independent assessment and not entirely on Canadian intelligence, the Globe & Mail reported.

According to reports from the CBC and the National Post, three similar cases are currently under investigation. Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin, and Ahmad El Maati, all Arab-Canadians, claim they were arrested and tortured in Syria as a result of incorrect intelligence provided by Canadian authorities.

WASHINGTON
Executive compensation practices, often at the root of legal and ethical disputes involving corporate finance, will be made more transparent under new regulations enacted last week by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The Washington Post reports that the new rules are partly in response to the growing use of incentive pay, such as cash bonuses, stock options, and other mechanisms that make it difficult for investors to calculate the total compensation for top executives.

According to a report from UPI, companies now will be required to list all compensation, including stock options as well as certain perks, such as use of the corporate jet.

Stock options have turned into “corporate America’s scandal of the year,” according to the Associated Press, with more than a hundred companies currently under investigation by the SEC or Justice Department for allegedly backdating stock options.

A stock option is an offer made by a company to allow someone to buy shares of stock in the future at a predetermined price. The predetermined price often is set as the market price of the stock on the day the option was granted, making the stock option an attractive commodity because stock prices in expanding firms usually are expected to rise quickly.

Because they promise great future value but involve little immediate outlay of money, stock options are a popular recruiting tool for cash-strapped startups.

Investigators are probing cases in which they allege that companies backdated the granting of options to times when prices were very low. While that practice is not illegal, hiding the details and the profits are.

The changes will go into effect in the coming crop of 2006 annual reports to be issued early next year.

Also last week, the SEC voted to allow firms to post their statements and annual reports on the Web, rather than mailing printed copies to investors, according to the Reuters news agency.

Other proposals before the SEC, which will require further review before taking effect, would simplify compliance methods under Sarbanes-Oxley and allow foreign companies doing business in the United States to more easily escape SEC oversight if their daily U.S. trading volume is less than 5 percent of total trading volume, Reuters reports.

CHICAGO
Students at an unusual academy in Chicago graduate with a certificate in “ethical hacking” and are thus prepared to think like computer hackers in the effort to combat them, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

Monitor staff writer Amanda Paulson notes that the Hacker Academy is part of a trend in training programs that teach the advanced techniques used by hackers so that companies can protect themselves against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

“Those attacks can range from indiscriminate globe-trotting viruses — like the ‘I love you’ virus that racked up billions of dollars in damages several years ago — to corporate spying and targeted efforts to gain sensitive data from banks, credit card companies, or individuals,” Paulsen writes. “Massive, headline-grabbing viruses seem to be waning, experts say, but lower profile targeted attacks are on the rise, making it ever trickier for companies to secure their networks.”

The academy’s “ethical hacker” certification is backed by an industry council, and courses are offered in Chicago, Orlando, Seattle, and Washington.

The academy’s founder and its lead instructor both tell the Monitor that they do not worry about students using the coursework for nefarious hacking, saying that hackers with evil intent do not need help. But they admit that it is important to maintain contact with the “black hat” world in order to learn new techniques and occasionally “turn” one to the ethical side of hacking.

From the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

“Despite deep public dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, the highly anticipated report by a bipartisan panel proposing new policy options for Iraq did not register strongly with most Americans. Only about half say they heard even a little about the report released last week by the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, while about as many (47%) say they heard nothing at all about the group’s recommendations.

“The panel’s major proposals have won fairly broad acceptance among those familiar with them. Six-in-ten of those who have heard at least a little about the Baker-Hamilton report say they mostly agree with its major recommendations. There also is majority support for several of the specific steps proposed by the group, including launching talks with Iran and Syria to encourage their cooperation in Iraq (69%) and shifting the primary mission of U.S. troops from fighting insurgents to supporting the Iraqi army (62%).

“However, the public is highly dubious that the study group’s recommendations will be accepted by the Bush administration….

“At the same time, the public has grown more negative about the situation in Iraq and President Bush’s handling of the war. Half of Americans now believe that the war in Iraq will turn out to be another Vietnam, while just a third think that the U.S. will accomplish its goals there….

“The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press … finds that 52% currently describe the violence in Iraq as ‘mostly a civil war,’ rather than an insurgency against the U.S. and its allies. While this is largely unchanged from September, it represents a major shift from a year ago. In December 2005, just 30% viewed the violence in Iraq as mostly a civil war while 58% said it was an insurgency aimed at the U.S. and its allies….

“As public perceptions of the situation in Iraq have deteriorated, so too have views of the situation in Afghanistan. Americans are divided about whether the war against terrorist organizations in Afghanistan has been mostly a success (45%) or mostly a failure (42%)….

“Support for the decision to use force in Afghanistan also has slipped. About six-in-ten (61%) endorse that decision, down from 69% in January. Nonetheless, many more Americans feel that the use of force in Afghanistan was the right decision than say the same about using military force in Iraq (61% vs. 42%)….

“The number of Americans who believe the U.S. should set a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq is at an all-time high (58%)….

“Most of those who favor withdrawal believe it should be done on a gradual basis rather than immediately….

“Despite increasing sectarian violence in Iraq and growing frustration with the war in the U.S., most Americans (57%) believe the Iraqi people are better off now than they were when Saddam Hussein was in power….

“When respondents are asked whether the Iraqi people will be better or worse off in ‘the long run’ than they were under Saddam Hussein’s rule, optimism increases significantly; 71% say Iraqis will be better off in the long run, while just 18% say they will be worse off….”

“The habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.”

– George Washington (1st U.S. president, 1732-1799)