Ethics Newsline®

On its face, last week’s turmoil in the financial markets was an economic story. It was all about how we understand money. Below the surface, however, it was a moral story. It was all about how we understand home.

The two stories are closely connected. What tipped the markets over the edge were problems in the subprime home mortgage sector. Behind those problems, however, are two deep questions about the ethics of fairness: How do we define home, and who gets to have one?

Nearly a century ago, those questions coursed through Robert Frost’s narrative poem, “The Death of the Hired Man.” Published in 1914, as the United States was emerging from its rural, agricultural past into a more urban, wealth-creating future, it reflects a period before home ownership became the national norm. In Frost’s story, an aging, itinerant farm worker, with no home of his own and nothing left to offer as a laborer, unexpectedly shows up, apparently to die, at a modest family farm where he once worked.

As the farmer and his wife ponder their responses, each articulates a separate definition of home. For Warren, the farmer, home is “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” In his mind, it’s a kind of social backstop, a place of last resort grudgingly provided to those with no other options.

His wife, Mary, has a different view. For her, home is “something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” To her way of thinking, home is a right. It should be available unconditionally to anyone, regardless of any ability to warrant or earn it. What for her husband is an element of obligation is, for her, an issue of compassion.

What unites their two definitions is the unspoken assumption that people in need must be cared for. But as history makes plain — perhaps never more so than in recent days — there are other ways to define home. For some, home is seen primarily as an investment, a kind of live-in 401(k) retirement plan. For others, it’s largely a monument, a showy declaration of personal success deliberately built to be larger than necessary. For still others, home is little more than a mailing address (useful when registering to vote, licensing vehicles, or establishing credit) with a shelter attached.

Given the wealth available in today’s housing market, these recent definitions tend to turn homes into commodities, to be upgraded, downgraded, or traded away under pressure from forces more economic than moral. With handsome returns to be made (at least until recently) in housing, it’s not surprising that lenders have been coaxing risky buyers into subprime mortgages with sometimes dubious deals — and that buyers, intrigued by such opportunities, have snapped them up, only to default later. If all that mattered were the finances, there would be ample blame for this subprime ethics — to lenders for failing to make clear the risks, and to buyers for letting themselves get hooked on irresponsible deals.

But something more is going on. As a nation, we need to come to terms with still another unspoken but dangerous definition of home — not Warren’s grudging backstop nor Mary’s unconditional right, but home as a privilege open only to the deserving. Under this definition, you are only worthy of having your own home if you have the wherewithal to buy it and the income to maintain it. If, however, you are below the middle ranges of middle-class prosperity, you perhaps don’t deserve a home.

Is this, in fact, how we wish to define home? People rightly feel privileged to own a home — but should it be something only available to the privileged? Are we content with a national home ownership rate that, at the end of last year, stood at a healthy 68.9 percent but included significant disparities by race and region? Or should we be doing whatever we can to bring that number — a crucial part of what we’ve long thought of as the American dream — to the higher levels of countries like Iceland, Norway, and Spain? If so, must our national policies encourage new efforts at expanding home ownership — and discourage some present efforts, like irresponsible sub-prime lending? If not, are we at risk of letting home ownership slip further toward the “privileged commodities” category — as, sadly, has happened to some aspects of health care and education?

These are not easy questions. It’s as though these three major but flawed definitions of home — as backstop, right, or privilege — stake out a triangle. Somewhere in the middle, partaking of all three, is a moral core. It speaks of home as a place of affection, a certainty amid turbulence, a center for rest and renewal, and a center for expansive thought. It recognizes the enormous value to society of rising rates of home ownership. And it helps us recognize that as we clarify our definition of home as a moral force, we’ll be better prepared to create policies to govern what the financial markets think they are buying and selling.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“In Texas you have all the elements lined up. Public support, a governor that supports it and supportive courts. If any of those things are hesitant then the process slows down. With all cylinders working as in Texas it produces a lot of executions.”

– Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, talking to the Reuters news agency about how Texas’s execution rate is far outpacing other states’ due to the convergence of “the state’s conservative evangelical Christians and its cultural mix of Old South and Wild West”

SAN FRANCISCO
Barry Bonds broke one of sports’ most prized records last week by drilling his 756th home run, rekindling a bitter ethics debate over what the record really means.

The San Francisco slugger is widely suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs, although he has never failed a doping test and faces no formal charges. He has testified before a grand jury investigating steroid use, reportedly claiming during that testimony that he mistakenly used a cream that contained steroids when it was given to him by a trainer, according to National Public Radio.

On the morning after Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record, the most striking factor in the media coverage was what Newsday sports columnist Neil Best called “the ambivalence of it all.” He notes that many commentators and reporters avoided using the standard phrase home run “king” — except for the Boston Herald, which dubbed Bonds “King Con.”

The San Diego Union Tribune scanned the headlines of the nation’s top sports papers and noted a similar climate of discomfort or derision. The New York Post carried a banner headline of “756″ that was framed by two hypodermic syringes. The New York Daily News played on the “king” moniker on its front page when anointing Bonds “King of Shame.”

Bonds’ biggest hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, which has sometimes covered him harshly, expressed a mixed view in an editorial the day after the record fell: “As we have said many times before, the evidence that Bonds used illegal performance-enhancing drugs is overwhelming. Greg Anderson, the trainer suspected of supplying Bonds with ‘undetectable’ drugs, remains in federal prison for his refusal to testify in a grand-jury investigation into possible perjury by the baseball star.”

“Bonds is now baseball’s all-time home-run king, a remarkable feat even with an asterisk attached,” the editorial opines. “Students of baseball now can spend the next few decades arguing about how Barry’s 756-and-counting compares with numbers from eras before and (hopefully) after chemistry so radically altered physiques and the game.”

OTTAWA
Newly released documents in an ethics investigation roiling Canada’s intelligence sector show that Canada suspected that a Canadian man, deported from the United States to the Middle East as a possible terrorist, was going to be tortured for information there.

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports that a high official in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service wrote a memo on Oct. 10, 2002, describing the possible fate of Maher Arar: “I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him.”

Arar had been sent already to Jordan by the time the memo was written, but was then been moved to Syria, according to the Globe & Mail.

The Edmonton Sun reports that the revelation came in previously unreleased sections of a report into Arar’s imprisonment in Syria. The information, previously suppressed because of national security concerns, appears to show that Canadian officials were aware of the consequences of what has become known as “rendition” of terror suspects — sending them to a third country, in this case a country where torture could be employed.

The practice also has been characterized by critics as “torture by proxy.”

Canadian authorities were contacted by U.S. intelligence officers shortly after Arar, who holds joint Canadian-Syrian citizenship, was detained at New York’s JFK airport, where officials suspected him of links to al-Qaeda.

His subsequent deportation sparked a major investigation, led by Canadian judge Dennis O’Connor, which concluded that Arar was indeed tortured in Syria, as Arar stated. The report also said that while Canadian officials were not directly involved in the actual deportation, they did provide faulty intelligence to the United States and leaked secret details to the media to hurt Arar’s reputation, Bloomberg reports.

O’Connor’s report called for an oversight body to supervise Canadian intelligence agencies. A federal spokesman told the London, Ontario, Free Press that the government already has taken several steps to implement reforms addressing the failures cited in the report.

While Canada has apologized to Arar for its actions, the United States so far has refused.

WASHINGTON
New ethics rules and reaction to a series of scandals figured in recent news from the U.S. Capitol:

• Watchdog groups are speculating that while ethics rules recently passed by the U.S. House and Senate could, in a perfect world, change the way lawmakers make and spend money, there’s no realistic enforcement mechanism. They contend that the lack of a way to identify and punish wrongdoers could render the system unworkable, according to a report from the Washington Post. Skeptics say existing ethics committees would be overwhelmed immediately by the new requirements, such as approval for all congressional travel.
• Lobbyists are fretting that new congressional ethics rules will put them at unacceptable risk. United Press International reports that the heads of lobbying firms will be required to certify the good behavior of their employees or face hefty fines or imprisonment. According to the UPI report, lobbying firms “must certify each quarter none of their lobbyists bought so much as a pack of gum or a bus ticket for someone on a lawmaker’s staff.” One lobbyist quoted in the report characterized Congress as being a spoilsport: “All those people who grew up in the system, who aren’t evil-doers, just good people, used to be able to entertain and have fun.”
• A house ethics panel has suspended its probe into Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) in response to a Justice Department request, reports Congressional Quarterly. Justice said it was concerned that the ethics committee’s activities would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation. Jefferson is under indictment on charges of accepting bribes to use his position to further a number of business ventures. A separate count accuses Jefferson of using taxpayer-funded trips in alleged efforts on behalf of those businesses.
• Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney condemned ethical lapses in Washington, including those by fellow Republicans, when he called for stripping federal pensions from elected officials convicted of using their office to betray the public trust, the Associated Press reports. Romney’s remarks about ethics follow his efforts to cast himself as a Washington outsider and a reform candidate, according to the AP report.

NAIROBI
A media-ethics controversy is flaring in Kenya, where the government is putting forth a bill that requires journalists to identify their sources.

News organizations, church groups, and foreign diplomats have widely criticized the measure, according to the Nairobi Nation newspaper.

The bill, which was passed by Kenya’s parliament, was awaiting presidential approval as this issue went to press. The Nairobi-based East African Standard reports that a group of editors has threatened to sue if the bill is signed into law.

Meanwhile, the government is attempting to downplay the controversy, with the secretary of Information and Communication saying that there is no attempt to gag the media and that the disclosure clause would apply only in cases that go to court.

The relationship between the press and the Kenyan government has been volatile and troubled in recent years. The BBC notes that in 2006 the government shut down a newspaper and a television station for allegedly inciting racial hatred.

Critics of the bill claim that endangering the anonymity of sources would undermine investigative reporting into the types of scandals that recently have been uncovered by the press — scandals that have proved embarrassing to the current government, notes the BBC.

WASHINGTON
A Washington, D.C., federal appeals court last week ruled that terminally ill patients do not have a constitutional right to use experimental drugs that have not passed the full gamut of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety tests and approvals.

The plaintiffs, a group called the Abigail Alliance, argued that forcing dying patients to wait for a new drug to complete the long process of clinical trials erodes their legal right to self-defense and violates Fifth Amendment protections against depriving someone of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, according to the Washington Post.

The lawsuit alleged that “the FDA’s lengthy clinical trials, combined with the ‘FDA’s restrictions on pre-approval availability, amount to a death sentence for … [terminally ill] patients,’ ” reports the Jurist, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh Law School. The plaintiffs also argued that “the FDA’s exceptions to the clinical testing process” do not “provide the terminally ill the access they need.”

But the appeals panel ruled that “although terminally ill patients desperately need curative treatments … their deaths can certainly be hastened by the use of a potentially toxic drug with no proven therapeutic benefit. Thus, we must conclude that, prior to the distribution of a drug outside controlled studies, the Government has a rational basis for ensuring that there is a scientifically and medically acceptable level of knowledge about the risks and benefits of such a drug.”

A dissenter in the 8-2 decision, justice Judith Rogers, argued that it is illogical to assume that access to experimental drugs is not a “fundamental” right as defined in previous cases, according to the Wall Street Journal.

She wrote: “to marry, to fornicate, to have children, to control the education and upbringing of children, to perform varied sexual acts in private, and to control one’s own body have all been deemed fundamental, but the right to try to save one’s life is left out in the cold despite its textual anchor in the right to life.”

The plaintiffs’ organization was named for Abigail Burroughs, who was 21 when she died of cancer in 2001. Her father had said she was denied two anti-cancer drugs that were being tested and were recommended by her oncologist, reports the Los Angeles Times News Service.

The case has wended its way through several layers of the court system, notes BusinessWeek, and almost certainly will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

ANAHEIM, Calif.
Scott Niedermayer, a defenseman for the champion Anaheim Ducks professional hockey team, is coming to the defense of his namesakes, sending a letter to the 50 members of the Chicago City Council that urges them to stand firm in the city’s ban on foie gras.

CBS News SportsLine reports that Niedermayer is joining with an animal-rights group to fight a move to repeal the ban, which was passed in April 2006, making Chicago the first U.S. city to outlaw the substance, which is made from the swollen livers of force-fed ducks or geese.

“As an Anaheim Duck, I hate to see real ducks tortured so that a handful of wealthy chefs can serve their diseased organs,” Niedermayer says in his letter, according to the Toronto Star.

In addition to Chicago, a law banning foie gras has been passed in the state of California, and Pope Benedict XVI has condemned the process. But foie gras consumption worldwide is actually rising because chefs are developing new dishes using the delicacy, according to a report from Bloomberg.

WebMD reports that Chicago also is considering a ban on artery-clogging trans-fats from some public eateries. New York is among the cities that already have passed similar measures.

SEOUL
Several major publications last week carried an update on a story from the far frontier of ethics: the ethics of robots and artificial intelligence.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that a group of scientists called the European Robotics Research Network is taking the question seriously, issuing a report titled “Roboethics Roadmap.” The report predicts that sometime in this century robots will be considered intelligent enough, perhaps even self-aware enough, to be considered a species all their own. The report concludes: “It will be an event rich in ethical, social, and economic problems.”

Nowhere is the issue more time-sensitive than in South Korea, where the government has set an official goal of having a robot in every home by 2013. The Edmonton Journal notes that South Korea, a nation where robots are being developed for tasks as diverse as guarding the border and caring for the elderly, is drawing up a code of ethics for robots.

Forbes reports that Korea’s “Robot Ethics Charter” will be released by the end of this year. The document is expected to include guidelines to keep robots from being used for undesirable purposes or causing danger to humans. The charter also will ensure that humans keep control over robots and that the data gathered by the devices is secured.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Among the top ethics stories from the world of education last week:

• The Los Angeles Unified School District has posted a new $25,000 ethics-training video for employees, reports the Los Angeles Daily News. The 30-minute presentation examines questions that fall into what the producers call a “Gray Zone.” Sample scenarios: Is it wrong for a teacher to accept an after-school tutoring gig from a student’s parent? If a retiring supervisor is asked to join a district vendor’s firm, is that a great opportunity or a conflict of interest? The video will be part of a training program required of the district’s nearly 100,000 employees, according to the Daily News report.
• After weathering a storm of criticism over its lax oversight of the student loan industry — linked to several instances in which kickbacks were given to university officials for steering business to particular firms — the U.S. Education Department is asking educational institutions and lenders to abide voluntarily by new ethics regulations even before they officially take effect. The New York Times reports that the Education Department cannot legally enforce the rules before the federal regulatory review process is complete.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosophy professor at the University of California at Riverside, has studied whether ethics professors are more or less likely than other philosophy professors to steal books from campus libraries. His conclusion, according to the Chronicle: “Ethics professors seem to behave no better than other philosophers. And when it comes to stealing books, maybe a little worse. Schwitzgebel found that modern ethics books (post-1959) are actually 25 percent more likely to be missing than non-ethics books, while classic ethics books (pre-1900) are more than twice as likely to be missing as other classic philosophy books. And when the list was reduced to the ‘relatively obscure books most likely to be borrowed exclusively by professional ethicists,’ ethics books are almost 50 percent more likely to be missing.”

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

“The American public continues to fault news organizations for a number of perceived failures, with solid majorities criticizing them for political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes. But some of the harshest indictments of the press now come from the growing segment that relies on the internet as its main source for national and international news.

“The internet news audience — roughly a quarter of all Americans — tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance….

“The internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to ’stand up for America,’ and political bias. Roughly two-thirds (68%) of those who get most of their news from the internet say that news organizations do not care about the people they report on, and 53% believe that news organizations are too critical of America. By comparison, smaller percentages of the general public fault the press for not caring about people they report on (53%), and being too critical of America (43%).

“The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted July 25-29 among 1,503 adults, finds a continuing pattern of deep partisan differences in public views of news organizations and their performance. Far more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats say news organizations are too critical of America (63% vs. 23%), and there is virtually no measure of press values or performance on which there is not a substantial gap in the views of partisans….

“…Though the numbers have declined in recent years, Americans continue to have more positive than negative impressions of these news organizations, and rate them far higher than most political institutions, including Congress, the Supreme Court and the political parties.

“One factor behind this may be the public’s broad and continuing support for the news media’s role as political watchdog. Currently, 58% say that by criticizing political leaders, news organizations keep political leaders from doing things that should not be done, while just 27% say such scrutiny keeps political leaders from doing their jobs.

“In addition, the public gives news organizations high marks for professionalism and caring about how good a job they do. Two-thirds (66%) view news organizations as highly professional — rather than not professional — up from 59% two years ago and a low of 49% in 2002….

“…Those who cite the Fox News Channel as their primary source of news stand out among the TV news audience for their negative evaluations of news organizations’ practices. Fully 63% of Americans who count Fox as their main news source say news stories are often inaccurate — a view held by fewer than half of those who cite CNN (46%) or network news (41%) as their main source.

“Similarly, Fox viewers are far more likely to say the press is too critical of America (52% vs. 36% of CNN viewers and 29% of network news viewers). And the Fox News Channel audience gives starkly lower ratings to network news programs and national newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

“Politics plays a large part in these assessments — Republicans outnumber Democrats by two-to-one (43% to 21%) among the core Fox News Channel audience, while there are far more Democrats than Republicans among CNN’s viewers (43% Democrat, 22% Republican) and network news viewers (41% Democrat, 24% Republican).

“Not surprisingly, the Fox News Channel audience is far more likely to say that news organizations have been unfair in their coverage of George W. Bush (49%) than those who cite CNN (19%) or network news (22%) as their main news source.

“Further analysis of the data shows that being a Republican and a Fox viewer are related to negative opinions of the mainstream media….

“Two decades ago, public attitudes about how news organizations do their job were less negative, and far less partisan….

“…Partisan differences in opinions about the accuracy of news stories, as well as in other evaluations of the press, have grown. The percentage of Democrats who say that news stories are often inaccurate has declined markedly since 1999 (from 57% to 43%), while this belief has increased slightly among Republicans (from 59% then to 63% currently). The partisan gap on this measure, just two points in 1999, has ballooned to 20 points in the current survey. Over the same period, views of independents have remained more consistent — 56% say stories are often inaccurate, largely unchanged since 1999 (57%)….”

“All human power is a compound of time and patience.”

– Honoré de Balzac (French novelist and playwright, 1799-1850)