Ethics Newsline®

Judges sometimes pass sentence with a heavy heart. They know the crime must be punished, but what if the accused has an exemplary record as professional leader, community worker, or parent? When the violation occurs within an otherwise beneficial life, should good works be allowed to offset bad acts?

When the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) resigned last week after confessing to résumé fraud, those questions bubbled up. Marilee Jones was held in high regard on campus for her efforts to lessen the notorious pressures facing students applying to prestigious colleges. Her 2006 book, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond, written with University of Pennsylvania pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg, enhanced her national reputation as a doyenne of admissions reform.

But when questions surfaced earlier this month about her résumé, she admitted that she had never graduated from college. “I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago,” she wrote in a statement, “and did not have the courage to correct my résumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since.”

So she resigned. Did her punishment fit her crime?

The question centers on integrity, a word more overused than understood. According to my Merriam-Webster, it means two things: “wholeness” or “the state of being complete, unbroken, undivided,” and more narrowly “moral soundness” or “freedom from corrupting influence or practice.” When MIT dean Daniel Hastings explained publicly that Jones’s resignation had been accepted because “the integrity of the Institute is our highest priority, and we cannot tolerate this kind of behavior,” he was pointing both to wholeness and moral soundness.

Too often, in our age of studied leniency, we try to wrench those two apart. We imagine we can take our values piecemeal — that showing tremendous fairness makes up for a lack of respect, or that great compassion overrides the need for responsibility. But there’s no selective admission into moral soundness. A lack of truth-telling can’t be papered over by other virtues. Departing from any core value justifies the adjective “unethical” — as long as the departure is significant.

Then was Ms. Jones’s case significant? When first hired in the admissions program, would she even have needed a college degree? As she rose in the organization, wasn’t she propelled by her talent rather than her credentials? Besides, don’t courts agree on statutes of limitation beyond which cases can’t be tried?

In some contexts, such logic might be appropriate, but not in the nonprofit world, where setting standards for the next generation is often the business at hand. That’s why, in 2001, professor Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, was suspended for a year without pay from his appointment at Mt. Holyoke College after the Boston Globe discovered that he had been regaling students in his course on Vietnam with personal stories about his combat experience, when in fact he never had served in Vietnam. That’s why, in 2002, “Dr.” Sandra Baldwin, then the newly minted president of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), was edged out of office after the discovery that she never had finished her doctoral work and had no such degree.

These two shared with Ms. Jones the irony of notoriety: Only after they found themselves in the national limelight did their pasts come to light. They also provide useful bookends for thinking about appropriate punishment. At one end of the spectrum, Ms. Baldwin’s punishment seemed proper. Her faked degree (unlike that of Ms. Jones) was in daily use as a title to burnish the USOC’s reputation, which rests on helping create events that provide hugely valuable credentials in the form of medals. Lesson: Fake your past, and you get thrown out. At the other end, a repentant Prof. Ellis survived his lies — though his falsifications (unlike those of Ms. Jones) were current, calculated, and brash. Lesson: Fake your past, and you get a second chance.

How, then, should a culture maintain its moral standards? “Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do,” Ms. Jones wrote in her book, “because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners.” But she also worried about “the problem of perfectionism,” writing that “the most worrisome thing about this generation of driven students may be the fear of imperfection … that will stifle their creativity, impede their ability to experience joy, and ultimately interfere with their success.”

Was Ms. Jones a victim, then, of a culture of misplaced perfectionism that overlooked years of excellent performance and focused instead on a single misrepresentation? Or was hers the ultimate in hyped applications, in a department that works hard to uncover such things among its applicants? If her book had won a Pulitzer, would a more Ellis-like punishment have been arranged to save her career? Or was her discontent with perfectionism only a personal effort to discredit academic excellence and, by implication, justify the view that those without degrees can do just as well as those who graduate?

Resigning, she did the tough, honorable thing. Should MIT or some other courageous institution do something equally tough and honorable by keeping her on board and helping her finally earn her undergraduate degree? Can we most benefit the next generation by striving to retain so powerful a voice against the stress, anxiety, and perfectionism they increasingly are feeling? Or must we send them a strong signal that perfection, especially in matters of self-reporting, is never negotiable?

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“A terrible tragedy that might have further undermined support for the war in Iraq was transformed into an inspirational message that served instead to support the nation’s foreign policy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…. The least this country can do for him in return is to uncover who was responsible for his death, who lied and covered it up, and who instigated those lies and benefited from them; then ensure that justice is meted out to the culpable. Anything less than the truth is a betrayal of those values that all soldiers who have fought for this nation have sought to uphold.”

“I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary…. The American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies.”

WASHINGTON
Several ethics-related stories dominated news from Washington last week. Among the big issues:

• The U.S. Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to clamp down on the movements and communications of civilian lawyers visiting their clients at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. According to a report from the New York Times, Justice claims that visits by lawyers and mail between lawyers and clients have caused security problems and that lawyers have leaked information to the media. The Justice Department proposal would limit attorney-client visits to three and have a detainee’s mail to his lawyer screened by a government panel. Lawyers also could be denied access to secret evidence used by military panels. The American Bar Association (ABA) protested the move on Friday, according to the Associated Press, saying that the restrictions threaten what ABA president Karen Mathis said was a “deeply embedded principle of American democracy.” But Justice counters that alien terror detainees have no rights under the Constitution.
• Another Washington insider has been snared in the web of corruption probes radiating from convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff: Mark Zachares, a former congressional aide to Alaska Rep. Don Young, a Republican who chaired the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, became the eleventh person convicted in the investigation when he pleaded guilty last week to accepting $40,000 in gifs and cash from Abramoff, reports Anchorage television station WTUU.
• Arizona congressman Rick Renzi is under fire for alleged involvement in a land deal said to have been arranged to benefit a campaign donor. Renzi told the Arizona Republic that he has no intention of resigning from Congress, but the paper reports that his denial did little to stem rumors that the Republican may not survive the rest of his term. Renzi did step down from his House Committee posts pending the outcome of a federal probe into his finances. According to the Washington Post, Renzi’s case may be linked to another ongoing ethics issue in Washington: Renzi reportedly inquired about his case in a call made by an aide to an Arizona U.S. attorney, who reported the call to the Justice Department as a potentially improper overture. That U.S. attorney, Paul Charlton, would later be axed in the mass firings that Democrats are characterizing as politically motivated. Renzi has denied any wrongdoing.
• The Financial Times reports that the ethics scandal swirling around World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz has prompted the institution’s senior managers to warn that the bank is losing credibility on governance and anticorruption measures. The warning came in a letter to Wolfowitz from 46 senior World Bank officials. Wolfowitz is under pressure to step down after it was revealed that he engineered a major pay raise for his girlfriend when she was assigned to work for another agency in order to avoid a conflict of interest at the World Bank.

JERUSALEM
Israeli police will travel to Australia next week to question an Australian billionaire while pursuing a corruption probe centering on Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

Prosecutors say they want to know if Olmert tried to improperly intervene in the sale of an Israeli bank on behalf of billionaire Frank Lowry, a real estate developer and a friend of Olmert’s, reports the Jerusalem Post.

In an interview published by the Australian Age, Lowry denied any impropriety and vowed that he would be cleared.

Olmert himself has not been charged with any crime and has denied wrongdoing, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

Olmert’s popularity has plunged since Israel’s war against Hezbollah guerillas in Lebanon last summer, with many Israelis sharply critical of his handling of the campaign, notes the Associated Press.

According to the AP, Olmert is facing several allegations involving past real estate deals. Others in the government also have been touched by scandals, including a probe of the finance minister, the arrest of Olmert’s office manager, and sex-crime charges against the nation’s president.

LAGOS, Nigeria
Allegations of fraud in Nigeria’s recent elections are widening political fault lines in a nation already plagued by allegations of widespread corruption and a deteriorating economy viewed by many as the end product of graft.

Late last week, opposition presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari said he would organize protests to block the inauguration of Umaru Yar’Adua, the winner of the April 21 elections, Bloomberg reported.

The election was marred by claims of ballot-box stuffing and falsified results, according to a report from the PBS online publication NewsHour Extra. According to the report, various media also reported cases of voter intimidation and ballot shortages in regions that favored the opposition.

In an interview with CNN, outgoing Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo said that in spite of the controversy, “democracy is very healthy…. If there is no democracy, we would not be talking about allegations [of election improprieties].”

Obasanjo had backed the candidacy of Yar’Adua, who had run on an anticorruption platform.

The Lagos Daily Sun reports that there is widespread criticism of the elections among labor leaders, former military, and pro-democracy groups.

Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka late last week called for the elections to be annulled, the BBC reports.

The opposition is appealing to the court system to throw out the elections, and demonstrations are expected.

Yar’Adua has denied any rigging of the election and says he would be willing to run in new polls, according to late-breaking press reports.

[Ed. Note: Olusegun Obasanjo is a member of the Institute for Global Ethics' advisory council.]

WASHINGTON
As renewed debate takes place in the United States over the ethics of executions, a medical review of dozens of executions added fuel to the dispute last week by concluding that the drugs used in the lethal injection process sometimes do not work properly, causing slow and painful deaths.

Time magazine reports that the study, published in the Public Library of Science online medical journal, claims that lethal injection as currently practiced probably violates constitutional bans on cruel and unusual punishment.

The analysis was based on reviews of executions in California and North Carolina. According to the Los Angeles Times, the study says some inmates feel pain but cannot cry out because of the paralyzing nature of the drugs, and others die of suffocation and are awake enough to realize it.

The study comes in the wake of a botched execution in Florida, where an inmate lived for 34 minutes and needed two doses of fatal drugs because the technicians who inserted the IV tube missed his vein, reports the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

“This raises the possibility people are being tortured and you can’t see it because they are paralyzed,” university of Miami surgery professor Leonidas Koniaris, who led the analysis, told the Washington Post. “I’m not sure a civilized society should be doing this.”

But Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice legal Foundation, an organization favoring capital punishment, argued that the drugs clearly work even if they take longer than expected.

“I don’t think the public worries too much about Jeffrey Dahmer feeling a little bee sting,” he told the Sun-Sentinel.

STRASBOURG
The European Union last week voted to approve new rules for stem-cell research and other new medical therapies, but not without considerable controversy over the ethical implications of the research.

While the new rules provide a mandatory centralized procedure to authorize new medical protocols and products brought to market, the European Parliament, the legislative branch of the Union, said it “will not interfere with the decisions made by member states on whether to allow the use of specific types of cells such as embryonic stem cells in accordance with their ethical choices,” reports the Agency France-Presse.

Earlier drafts of the legislation called for centralized monitoring that would have governed approval of experiments using stem-cell technology to engineer new tissues, but negotiations over that provision broke down after opposition from lawmakers based on religious and ethical objections, according to a report from the Reuters news agency.

Some lawmakers called for an outright ban on stem-cell research, resulting in a breakdown in negotiations that essentially left the issue to the discretion of member states — in effect, not putting stem-cell research directly under the control of the EU but not making it illegal either.

The German news service Deutsche Welle reports that stem-cell research is a highly charged and divisive issue throughout Europe. Research using stem cells is totally outlawed in some EU countries, including Poland and Italy.

The new regulation is expected to come into force by mid-2008 according to the Belgium-based Cordis news service, a publication of the EU.

PALO ALTO, Calif.
In an exclusive interview with Bloomberg, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd says the events surrounding the company’s ethics scandal were “a wake-up call.”

Hurd said, “We can’t afford to have another significant ethics and compliance issue.”

Hurd took the helm six months ago after the company, one of the lions of high tech, was embarrassed by an incident in which the firm hired private investigators to improperly obtain phone records of board members and journalists in an effort to track down leaks to the media.

While the majority of criminal charges stemming from the incident were dropped, company officials were grilled by Congress about their corporate ethics and the case was viewed to have caused significant damage to the firm’s reputation.

Since ascending to the top job, Hurd hired a new general counsel, Jon Hoak, who has doubled the company’s compliance staff to 12, set up a committee to review policies, and traveled to 15 nations to deliver ethics training to various arms of the corporation.

Hoak says the chances for a repeat of last year’s ethics meltdown are “almost nil,” according to the Bloomberg report.

FRANKFURT
The German technology firm Siemens AG disclosed last week that it faces a widening investigation of bribery allegations.

Those charges have prompted the firm’s chief executive, Klaus Kleinfeld, to tender his resignation, effective in September, according to a report from the Associated Press.

Board chairman Heinrich von Pierer also stepped down, effective immediately. Neither man has been formally accused of any wrongdoing.

Siemens’ board forced out Kleinfeld one day after releasing spectacular profit reports, including a 49 percent increase in operating profits, notes BusinessWeek. But the firm’s new board chairman, Gerhard Cromme, says the board decided not to renew Kleinfeld’s contract after a legal briefing.

“Following presentations (by lawyers) on the scope and magnitude of allegations against Siemens and potentially very serious issues facing the company, and after considering advice from the company’s American lawyers on the concerns of U.S. regulators … many members of the supervisory board concluded it was premature to renew Dr. Kleinfeld’s contract at this time,” Cromme said in a statement republished by Reuters.

As of late last week, it had been confirmed that the company is under formal investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the International Herald Tribune. The firm also said it was expecting to report a “significant increase” in the number of potential bribery incidents identified by internal investigations.

Siemens said it may be forced to restate tax and financial statements and could not rule out civil and criminal action, according to the Herald Tribune. Ratings agency Standard and Poor’s indicated that Siemens may be headed for a downgrade.

According to a report from the Times of London, the main investigation involves allegations of a slush fund used to bribe foreign clients in the 1990s.

VARIOUS DATELINES
The ethics of robotics — until recently marginalized as a fringe issue — is increasingly becoming a topic of debate in the mainstream media. Last week saw a series of reports in the world press dealing with the morality of machinery:

• The Economist reports that the U.S. Department of Defense is looking to replace a third of its armed vehicles and weaponry with robots by 2015. The change would save money, the report claims, but also change the political complexion of war, making it less vulnerable “to the politics of body bags…. No one mourns a dead robot.” In addition, scientists, including Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology, are developing a set of rules that amount to a robotic soldier’s code of ethics — factoring in, for example, whether a target was drawing near to a school bus, and therefore deciding to hold fire.
• From London, the Guardian reports that scientists in the United Kingdom are criticizing a recent government report on robot ethics, saying that instead of focusing on long-term speculation over the morals of super-intelligent robots of the future, the public should be worrying now about the ethics implications of robots in the police and military. The Guardian notes that military applications of robotics already are surfacing: Last year, for example, the South Korean military unveiled a robot border guard that can hit targets 500 meters away. One researcher interviewed for the piece claimed that robots will become more widely used in policing and surveillance, but noted that there has been very little public debate on the ethics of these issues.
• The Glasgow Herald and the Belfast Telegraph report that some researchers are concerned about the implications of robots becoming caretakers and companions for the elderly. Professor Noel Sharkey of Sheffield University says prototypes for robot caregivers already are being tested. “The robots are programmed to follow the elderly around and make sure they take their drugs. I find that highly concerning,” Sharkey tells the Herald. “I’m 58 now and I fear that in my future I will be dumped in a home where I am cared for by machines. We need to have a public debate and we need to have it now, before the robots really bore into our society.”

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

“Last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech have had little immediate impact on public opinion about gun control. Six-in-ten Americans say it is more important to control gun ownership, while 32% say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns. Opinion has changed little since 2004, when 58% said it was more important to control gun ownership than to protect the rights of gun owners.

“At the same time, a 55% majority opposes a ban on the sale of handguns, while just 37% favor such a ban. There was greater support for gun control in the late 1990s and in 2000. In 2000, the public was evenly split over a handgun ban (47% favor/47% opposed).

“The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted April 18-22 among 1,508 adults, finds deep public differences about whether mass shootings like those at Virginia Tech reflect broader problems in society or are just the isolated acts of individuals.

“Roughly half (47%) say such shootings are isolated acts, while about as many (46%) say they reflect broader societal problems….

“Those who say the shootings reflect fundamental societal problems offer a variety of explanations. Overall, 37% volunteer problems related to morality or social values, while 23% cite shortcomings in the mental health, legal, or school systems. Just 14% mention gun laws or issues related to gun control.

“There is a sizable gender gap in opinions about whether the Virginia Tech shootings, and others like them, are isolated acts of troubled individuals, or represent broader societal problems. By 55%-39%, men generally believe that such shootings are just isolated acts. By a nearly identical margin (54%-37%), women say shootings like the one at Blacksburg reflect broader problems in American society….

“In recent years, majorities have consistently said it is more important to control gun ownership than to protect the rights of gun owners, although opinions have fluctuated somewhat. Support for controlling gun ownership peaked in March 2000, less than a year after the shootings at Columbine High School. At that time, 66% said it was more important to control gun ownership, while just 29% thought it was more important to protect the rights of gun owners….”

“With lies you may go ahead in the world, but you can never go back.”

– Russian proverb