On the pop-culture front, it’s been quite a month. Every way you turn you’re hit by news of former Playboy playmate and celebrity Anna Nicole Smith, who died of what many suspect was a drug overdose at a Florida hotel and casino. Her story quickly eclipsed headlines of astronaut Lisa Nowak, arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder, kidnapping, and battery after driving 900 miles to attack her love-triangle rival. But even Anna Nicole’s story couldn’t trump the antics of pop star Britney Spears, who shaved her head, checked into a California drug detox center, exited less than 24 hours later, then reentered the same rehab facility, preempting custody hearings in court with her estranged husband.

Through the month, the supermarket tabloids have been gurgling with delight. The cable news networks — even those with a serious bent like CNN and FoxNews — followed suit, whipping themselves into a lather of wall-to-wall coverage. Never mind that the month also brought us three serious news stories that could change the course of history: chemical warfare erupting in Iraq, Iran forging ahead with its nuclear program, and scientists reaching unprecedented agreement on the dangers of global warming. This month, the bizarre and sorry tales of these three women topped the headlines despite the newsworthiness of the competing stories.

Or perhaps because of it. Why, after all, do we watch? Is it in spite of, or as a result of, the rest of the news?

Some say it’s the former. As a populace (so this argument goes) we’ve developed such an addiction to lurid spectacle that we’ve lost our taste for serious news. Lacking any collective sense of proportion, enthralled by a childish delight in the freakish and spine-tingling, we’re busy doing what media scholar Neil Postman famously described as “amusing ourselves to death.”

Others, however, argue that the very grimness of today’s important news has driven us into the arms of tabloid tales. We are (according to this line of thought) so appalled by the enormity of world events that we escape into sensational scandals, seeking a soporific to keep us from brooding on dangers beyond our control.

I suspect it’s not that simple. The lust for the sensational is neither new to our age nor fatal to the cultures it attacks. It shows up in ancient tragedy, where in some productions the characters the director wanted killed off were played by slaves who were actually murdered on stage. A similar appetite was evident in the yellow journalism of the late nineteenth century, where the demand for gossip, scandal, and libel entirely trumped any desire for truth-telling.

On the other hand, the argument for escapism suggests a kind of communal wimpishness, an inability to address tough realities. That, however, doesn’t square with the can-do philosophy of the nation’s culture. Our ancestors wouldn’t have crossed oceans in hundred-foot sailboats or raised families in sod houses on the frontier unless they had a willingness to endure adversity. These days, you don’t risk your future developing entrepreneurial businesses, or holding down two jobs to support the family, or standing up to political corruption or ecclesiastical tyranny unless you’ve got significant moral courage.

So why do we watch? If the above reasons don’t quite work — if we don’t relish being called addicts but don’t want to admit to escapism — what keeps our attention?

Charge it up to a failure of thoughtful non-consent. It’s not that we deliberately consent to be sucked into these stories. Instead, by refusing to object, we allow ourselves to be engulfed by narratives that gratuitously expose the worst of human nature. These narratives often have little redeeming purpose: We don’t learn much that helps us advance in our understanding of how to build a better world. Quite the opposite, in fact. Such stories effectively replace our efforts to learn about more meaningful events in the world.

Don’t misunderstand this as a call for prudishness or intellectual isolationism. To be ignorant of the Anna Nicole story is to miss dangerous social trends concerning drugs, inheritance, fame, policing, and international justice. Intelligent awareness, like a balanced diet, is essential. It’s the uncontrolled immersion that, like addictive gluttony, is so dangerous.

What separates the two is a capacity for thoughtful non-consent. Refusing to be hooked, we recognize that the talent for using our minds in constructive ways is perhaps our most valuable human quality. Defending that talent, refusing to surrender to whatever wants to invade and drag down our consciousness, takes deliberate effort. In a video age awash with advertising dollars, enormous resources are devoted to breaking through, making us watch, and taking control. Defense requires more discipline than it once did.

Thoughtful non-consent isn’t simply a midpoint between extremes. It’s like joy, which the poet E. E. Cummings once defined as “a mystery at right angles to pain & pleasure, as truth is to fact & fiction.” Non-consent inhabits a moral scale at right angles to the line from ignorance to immersion. It’s less a matter of finding an exacting balance than of rising above the entire scale and looking down on it from above.

But that doesn’t make non-consent intangible or abstract. We can daily measure our non-consent against the five core moral values. Is our attention to a particular news narrative making us more compassionate, respectful, responsible, fair, and truthful? Or does it cause us to become more cynical, less willing to respect others and ourselves, and feeling slightly tarnished and irresponsible for having paid so much heed?

In the end, the lesson of the Anna Nicole story is simply this: Just because something is on offer doesn’t mean we have to buy in. For us as viewers — as for her in her life — the risk is always of a failure of non-consent. In the end, the moral choice is ours.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

A reader responds to last week’s commentary in which Rushworth Kidder examined the recent meltdown of JetBlue, maintaining that customer pressure on firms to act ethically and responsibly is a better option than layers of government regulation:

While I agree that another bureaucracy laid on top of a failing one would be pointless, I think it’s also been proven that the so-called “free market” isn’t doing a very good job. In situations where failure causes instant negative outcomes, there is no preexisting monetary reason to take precautions and be, as you say, prudent. As long as everything’s going smoothly, there’s no reason to pay for the extra heft in the business.

Many people died in senseless railroad accidents during the nineteenth century partly because the railroads wouldn’t invest in safer equipment, accepted a certain amount of danger as a cost of doing business, and concentrated on collecting dollars instead of satisfied customers. Regulation had to be forced upon them.

Now that we’re returned to the robber-baron way of things, simply going out of business isn’t good enough reason to change, and screw the customer for being stupid enough to buy.

Profit-at-all-cost must end, and I’m afraid it’s definitely a right-wing point of view if you think the “free market” fixes all or, worse, that we have a free market.

– Rob Oakley
Rockland, Maine

“We believe Americans are starting to be more conscious of the environment. Our objective is to get people to really think about the impact of the bags which are strangling the planet.”

– IKEA spokeswoman Mona Astra Liss, announcing last week the international furniture giant’s plans to start charging customers five cents per disposable plastic shopping bag. The company presently provides roughly 70 million free bags to its U.S. customers, reports the Reuters news agency.

Such plastic bags, an estimated 100 billion of which are thrown away by the U.S. public each year, take about 1,000 years to degrade. “Last June, IKEA began charging its U.K. customers for plastic bags, and has reduced its bag consumption by 95 percent,” notes Reuters.

FROM VARIOUS DATELINES
The ethical and legal implications of the death penalty figured prominently in news from across the United States last week. Among the top stories:

• An ethical Gordian knot has entangled the process of executions in North Carolina after a federal judge ruled that a doctor must monitor inmates during an execution to assure they do not suffer pain, while the state medical board — ethically opposed to the participation of physicians in executions — has threatened to punish physicians who attend a lethal injection, according to reports from the Fayetteville Observer and WSOC-TV in Charlotte. Raleigh-Durham television station WRAL reports that governor Mike Easley has suspended executions in the state, bringing North Carolina in line with 11 other states that have placed the death penalty on hold. WRAL quotes Dr. Mark Heath, a medical professor from Columbia University who has studied lethal injection across the nation, as noting, “It’s an inherent flaw of lethal injection, that in order to be reliably humane, it requires the participation of a group of people who are under ethical constraints and considerations.”
• The Montana State Senate last week gave preliminary approval to a bill abolishing capital punishment there. According to a report in the Gazette of Billings, Montana, the 27-to-21 vote came after an emotional debate in which death penalty opponents argued that it was morally justified to end capital punishment even though polls show most Montanans support it. Supporters of capital punishment countered that only an execution could provide suitable closure for victims’ families, while opponents insisted that executions were unjustified revenge and that the poor were disproportionately sentenced to death.
• Maryland governor Martin O’Malley last week urged state lawmakers to repeal the death penalty, saying that execution is “inherently unjust,” is not a deterrent, and drains resources from other aspects of law enforcement, the Washington Post reports. An analysis by Baltimore Sun reporter Jennifer Skalka notes that Maryland’s death penalty controversy echoes a larger debate that has “emerged nationally as among the most challenging issues, falling at the sometimes hazy intersection of politics, public policy, and religion. In light of increasing evidence of wrongful convictions and, in the case of Florida, a botched execution, at least a dozen states have imposed moratoriums. New Jersey is moving toward a repeal.”
• Utah, though, is considering toughening its death penalty laws, with the state’s Senate last week passing a bill that would make the killing of a child a capital offense even if the perpetrator had no intent to kill, a requirement for imposing the death penalty under current law. Salt Lake City television station KUTV reports that governor Jon Huntsman said he has not decided yet on whether he would sign such a bill.
• Calling the pattern of executions in Indiana “seemingly random,” a report from a panel run by the American Bar Association has recommended that the state halt executions until it improves the fairness of its systems. “The seemingly random process of charging decisions, plea agreements, and jury recommendations is just part of a death penalty system that has aptly been called Indiana’s ‘other lottery,’ ” the report states, according to an Associated Press report appearing in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.
• In Florida, the St. Petersburg Times reports that a panel reviewing the state’s execution procedures has heard testimony that, according to a report from staff writer Chris Tisch, is “part spy novel and part horror film…. Anonymous executioners have testified over speakerphone with their voices electronically disguised. Some have refused to say much about their backgrounds out of fear they will be identified. Doctors have revealed details of lethal injection executions gone awry, including one expert who showed grisly photos of inmates whose deaths did not appear to come smoothly.” The 11-member commission, appointed by former governor Jeb Bush, is not probing whether capital punishment should continue, but rather the method by which it should be implemented. It was an incident in Florida — an execution by lethal injection that lasted twice as long as it should have — that helped spark a nationwide legal and ethical debate over whether the method constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

WASHINGTON
The jury in the perjury and obstruction trial of former vice-presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby was set to resume deliberations this week in a case that has continues to provoke debate over the ethics of reporters, government, and what happens when the two sides interact.

As Associated Press reporter Matt Apuzzo notes, one side-effect of the case is an increasing skepticism of the reliability of notes — not only those of reporters, but of FBI agents, and White House aides. Jurors are being asked to decide how much weight to put on notes that are often sloppy or inconsistent.

“That’s a somewhat disconcerting thought,” Apuzzo writes. “People are charged, front-page articles are written, and public policies are decided in part based on those notes. If they are flawed, whose can be believed?”

A major disagreement about the facts of the case centers on the recollections of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, whose notes — depending on various interpretations — suggest that Libby told her that the wife of a prominent critic of the administrations’ Iraq War policy was a CIA agent. Miller admitted that she could not be certain whether an entry in her notebook, “Wife works for bureau?” was a record of what Libby told her or information she already knew and wanted to verify, according to the AP report.

Libby is charged with lying to investigators about his role in the release of the name of the name of the agent, Valerie Plame, allegedly in retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the administration. No charges have been brought over the leak itself.

Also at issue are the ethics of journalists who granted anonymity to administration sources who, critics charge, used the veil of secrecy to plant allegedly misleading and politically charged information. Media ethics specialist Jane Kirtley, interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, argues that “this question is going to come up more and more: Was this source worthy of giving this degree of confidentiality?”

“Some would say the confidentiality rule applies whether the source is sleazy or not. But if you are going to argue for protection for journalists, isn’t there some obligation to ask questions about whether it’s justified?” Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota journalism school, added.

Also weighing in was Edward Wasserman, Knight Professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, who criticized “the cream of the profession” for spilling the details of confidential conversations under threat of prosecution.

“To be sure, honoring confidentiality agreements is not a duty of such transcendent importance that it must be served at all costs. Other obligations may matter more,” Wasserman wrote in an opinion piece that appeared first in the Miami Herald and was later reproduced in several other papers.

But what happened in the Libby case, Wasserman concluded, “is that these journalistic heavyweights — and their employers — just didn’t have the stomach for a fight.”

PHOENIX
An airport scanner that some critics liken to a “virtual strip search” made its debut at a Phoenix, Arizona, airport last week, causing a mixture of consternation and resignation.

Time magazine reports the so-called backscatter technology produces an image that sees through clothes and shows the contours of the body with what the magazine called “blush-inducing clarity.”

According to a report from the New York Times, the machine, designed to scan for weapons, explosives, and other contraband, will be rolled out later in airports in Los Angeles and New York, and initially will be used only on volunteers — passengers who fail the first initial screening and elect not to undergo a traditional pat-down.

Airport officials want to ensure that the devices are reliable and don’t provoke too many protests, the Times reports.

The Tucson Citizen notes that the national Transportation Security Administration says it has worked hard to address privacy concerns, modifying the images so that they don’t provide too candid an image while still providing the necessary level of security.

While some passengers said they would feel violated by the search, others said they were reconciled to invasions of privacy because of legitimate security concerns.

A single staffer in a closed booth 50 feet away from the actual checkpoint will monitor the images.

The machine cannot store or transmit the images, according to the Reuters news agency.

OTTAWA
Canada’s Supreme Court last week struck down a controversial law allowing the federal government to detain terror suspects without specific charges and without releasing full details of the case to suspects or their lawyers.

The court ruled that the system, implemented by what are called “security certificates” — assurances from agencies that the detainee is a terror suspect — violates Canada’s constitutional guarantees, the CBC reports.

Saying the measure does not “conform to fundamental justice,” the Supreme Court’s nine members ruled unanimously that the law must be scrapped within a year, giving the Parliament time to rewrite it, according to a report from Bloomberg.

In an analysis of the case, Canadian Press reporter Jim Brown notes that one of the most divisive aspects of the Security Certificate system is that suspects sometimes face deportation to countries where torture is used to extract information. The Supreme Court did not specifically address that issue, which is being litigated in other venues.

CBS and the Associated Press report that the three men central to the case, natives of Syria, Morocco, and Algeria who have been held on allegations that they have ties to Al Qaeda, have claimed that they are likely to be tortured if sent back to their native countries.

That scenario is a particularly sensitive one in Canada, as the government there has recently apologized to Maher Arar, a joint Canadian-Syrian citizen, who was tortured after being deported to Syria by the United States on the basis of apparently faulty Canadian intelligence.

WASHINGTON
In a decision following what are essentially ethical arguments about how much risk unsophisticated investors should be allowed to assume in pursuit of high profits, the U.S. federal government last week concluded it will not impose new regulations on the often-risky investments known as hedge funds.

Regulators did urge investors and creditors to tighten up on due diligence in the hedge fund industry, but the move appeared designed to head off any further calls for regulation, the Financial Times reports.

President Bush’s Working Group on Financial Markets concluded that while hedge funds “present challenges for market participants and policy makers,” the risks can be minimized through a combination of “market discipline” and limiting access to hedge funds to wealthy investors, UPI reports.

Hedge funds operate under light control compared to highly regulated vehicles such as mutual funds. Hedge funds typically are more complex and risky than mutual funds, and in most cases are open only to accredited, wealthy investors or institutional investors. But because returns can be high, many smaller individual investors and pension funds clamor to join in the profit.

The decision to stave off regulation drew immediate criticism from Massachusetts secretary of state William Galvin, who said the decision to leave hedge fund risks to “market discipline” is the wrong approach.

“Hedge funds may be appropriate for the sophisticated investors — though we have seen such funds cross that line — but increasingly the money these unregulated and almost anonymous funds deal with are the pensions and retirement accounts of those who are not these sophisticated investors,” Galvin said in a statement.

“It is the money of those who do not realize the extent to which their life savings are at risk in a highly speculative environment,” he added.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to hold hearings in the spring on the need for more hedge fund regulation, Reuters reports.

SYDNEY
Australia’s chief financial official last week proposed regulations that would allow companies to sue groups that organize boycotts on ethical grounds.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that federal treasurer Peter Costello says he wants to give the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) the legal muscle to seek compensation on behalf of companies targeted by boycotts.

Costello’s proposal was in reaction to a call from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for an international boycott against Australian wool, the Australian Broadcasting Company reports.

PETA is protesting a process called mulesing, in which lambs have a section of wrinkly skin surgically removed, without anesthetic, in order to prevent illness caused by insect infestation.

While the move against boycotters was predictably welcomed by the nation’s sheep industry, members of PETA and others charged that that proposal would inhibit free speech, the Canberra Times reported.

Costello denied that it would muzzle protest, telling the Australian Age, “There is no law that is going to stop ignorant commentary but there will be a law that will allow the ACCC to stand up for Australian farmers when they suffer from a boycott.”

NEW YORK
A group of students at New York University (NYU) staged a game called “Find the Illegal Immigrant” last week, prompting protests from hundreds of students who claimed the event was racist.

The event, sponsored by the campus Republican club, involved students pretending to be immigration agents looking for a student posing as an illegal immigrant by wearing a name tag identifying him as an illegal, reports the NYU student paper the Washington Square News.

The first contestant to find the “illegal immigrant” was to win a $50 prize.

Sarah Chambers, the president of the NYU College Republican club, told the New York Times that the hunt was “not a racist event, first and foremost. Just because we don’t want illegal immigrants being able to completely disregard the laws of our country doesn’t make us racist.”

New York Radio station WNYC quoted Chambers as saying the group would be handing out literature and that the event was designed to promote discussion.

Newsday reports that hundreds of students turned out in Washington Square Park to protest the event, chanting and holding signs that said “spot the ignorance.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg told Newsday he believed “we all spend too much time, I think, worrying about what college students do. Sometimes, and this is clearly a case, they do something that is not only distasteful but just downright stupid.”

BOSTON
Ethics training in education and business is a burgeoning industry, but the jury is still out as to whether it will translate into the real world, according to an editorial last week from the Christian Science Monitor.

Among the statistics cited by the Monitor:

• A recent study of the world’s top 50 business graduate schools shows a five-fold increase in the number of ethics courses in the past 20 years.
• Half of those schools make completion of an ethics course a requirement for graduation.
• Programs in “sustainable” development are particularly popular, as climate change and other environmental issues have made many businesses sensitive to the issue and eager to find employees who can address it.
• About 70 percent of U.S. employers have implemented ethics training, an increase of 14 percentage points since 2003.

But the Monitor editorial concludes that research has shown that ethics training by itself does not seem to produce a major change. Rather, what makes the difference is “how much ethics awareness and enforcement permeate corporate culture. A policy alone, or a training session alone, doesn’t cut it. “

“Same in business school,” the editorial continues. “Even as schools elevate the standing of ethics, they need to make sure they don’t ghettoize it from other key faculty or courses. Ethics is more than a business foundation, it’s a life foundation. It can’t be compartmentalized.”

From the Conference Board:

“Americans are growing increasingly unhappy with their jobs, The Conference Board reports today. The decline in job satisfaction has occurred over a period of two decades, with little to suggest a significant reversal in attitudes anytime soon.

“Today, less than half of all Americans say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent twenty years ago….

“Today’s newest entrants to the workforce are the least satisfied with their jobs. Less than 39 percent of workers under the age of 25 are satisfied with their employment situation.

“The decline in satisfaction is not just concentrated among younger workers. Satisfaction levels among all workers, regardless of age, income or even residence, have deteriorated in recent years. Says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center: ‘Although a certain amount of dissatisfaction with one’s job is to be expected, the breadth of dissatisfaction is somewhat unsettling, since it carries over from what attracts employees to a job to what keeps them motivated and productive on the job.’

“Job satisfaction levels, however, tend to rise as hours worked per week increase, but begin to recede at 60 or more hours…

“Consumers rated bonus plans and promotion policies as the least satisfactory benefits of employment, with less than 23 percent claiming they are satisfied with their company’s policies. Satisfaction is also low for performance review processes, workload, work/life balance, communication channels and potential for future growth….

• “Less than two out of every five workers under the age of 25 are satisfied with their jobs. This segment of the population has the lowest level of satisfaction and the lowest level ever recorded in the nearly 20-year history of this survey.
• “Workers age 45-54 expressed the second lowest level of satisfaction with less than 45 percent content with their current job.
• “At the other end of the scale are workers 55-64 and 65 and over. Nearly half of all workers in these age groups are satisfied with their employment situation….”

“Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids.”

– Aristotle (Greek philosopher, 384-322 B.C.)