“Does ethics really make any difference?”

It was a heartfelt question. The questioner, a corporate finance executive from England, didn’t strike me as cynical, ignorant, or confused. Over dinner in Vienna with his colleagues from Germany and South Africa several weeks ago, he was recalibrating his thinking in light of a two-hour ethics workshop earlier that day.

He’d been an active participant in that session. He liked the ideas. Working in finance, he knew the enormous value of honesty. Working internationally, he’d seen that ethics has cross-cultural validity. Working in a team atmosphere, he realized that responsibility and trust are crucial to corporate efficiency. He wanted ethics to matter. But did it?

I could see his point. Corporate executives so often get nailed in high-profile cases — corruption, fraud, sexual harassment, or whatever — only to bargain their way back to freedom and business as usual. Politicians of scant means, earning modest salaries, retire to millionaire settings. Students plagiarize, get caught, confess, and receive the faintest of reprimands. Is anyone really paying a price for unethical behavior? Is anything changing? Does anybody care?

I was thinking about my friend’s concern as the news rolled in last week. It featured two high-profile cases from the sports world that may give him a ray of hope:

• Floyd Landis, the 2006 Tour de France champion, was found guilty by an arbitration panel of using performance-enhancing drugs. After an extensive series of hearings, charges, and countercharges, Landis was at last stripped of his title and barred from the sport for two years. Because doping among competitive cyclers has been such an open secret — causing the sport to lose considerable cachet, and some of its public base — the panel’s decision was praised by (among others) Travis Tygart, the chief executive for the United States Anti-Doping Agency, who called it “a victory for clean athletes and for those who value clean and honest competition.”
• Barry Bonds, the baseball slugger who in August surpassed Hank Aaron’s record for career home runs, revealed that his team, the San Francisco Giants, did not plan to renew his contract, which this season is paying him $15.8 million in salary. One likely reason: persistent suspicions that Bonds used steroids. The distrust has become so strong that Bonds has been booed regularly wherever the Giants travel — a distraction that to an otherwise solid team may have become insurmountable.

To be sure, each of these cases has complications. Both athletes insist on their innocence. Landis has one more chance to appeal, though the expense may be prohibitive. Bonds has not been formally charged, though his name is often mentioned in connection with steroids distributed by the former Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO).

Even so, these cases tell us something. Taken together, they remind us that crime still doesn’t pay, that celebrities can’t hide, and that even hot-shot public relations advice can’t undo the weight of public opinion.

And it’s the public opinion itself that most matters here. Apparently the public does care. Fans aren’t shrugging off these victories. They’re not inclined to applaud a win-at-all-costs attitude or tolerate a whatever-it-takes mindset. They’re not buying the simplistic argument that man is no more than a cellular machine, to be redesigned and strengthened in any way possible by whatever drug comes along. They don’t see steroids as progress, but as artificiality.

Why are they so clear? Because, at its core, these two cases are almost perfectly unethical. Of the five core values that define an ethical mindset — fairness, responsibility, respect, honesty, and compassion — the cases of Landis and Bonds strongly call into question the first four. Using illegal substances is unfair, tilting the playing field and disadvantaging those who play by the rules. Such use is irresponsible, not only to one’s own body but to fans, fellow team members, and young people who see athletes as role models. It is disrespectful to the sport itself, and especially to former stars whose records get shattered by artificial means. And it is dishonest, not only in prompting the dozens of daily deceptions required of any cover-up, but in publicly agreeing to one set of rules while privately playing by another.

Where does that leave my English questioner? No doubt (he might say) a few like Landis and Bonds do take a hit — but many don’t. Agreed. But there’s a larger point here. What matters is not the number who get caught but the public desire to catch them. What we’re seeing is a longing for a world of integrity. Without that longing, who boos a home-run champ? Who banishes one of the world’s fastest cyclers?

Does ethics make a difference? It certainly did to those two, and to huge numbers of fans. Those fans aren’t prudish puritans. They’re ordinary folks who care enough about the ordinary ethical values to say, “That’s not right — you don’t play the game that way!” I find that encouraging.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“It is particularly disturbing that while so many of our military personnel are fighting and dying in Iraq, a few have apparently taken the opportunity to unlawfully enrich themselves. Their greed is unconscionable….”

– Charles Beardall, chief criminal investigator for the Pentagon inspector general, in a statement discussing ongoing criminal proceedings against military officers accused of corruption and graft in procurement contracts. The New York Times reports that military contracts worth $6 billion are being investigated by the Pentagon. “The inquiries have resulted in charges against at least 29 civilians and soldiers, more than 75 other criminal investigations and the suicides of at least two officers,” notes the paper.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Corruption issues from around the globe dominated the headlines last week. Among the top developments:

• Chile’s Supreme Court last week approved the extradition of Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru, on charges of corruption and human rights abuses. Fujimori has been living in Chile in exile since 2005. Legal experts told the New York Times that the ruling may set an important precedent for similar cases in which heads of state have sought refuge in other countries and avoided or delayed extradition.
• Taiwan vice president Annette Lu and two other members of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party were indicted on corruption and forgery charges last week. Lu is accused of claiming reimbursement for millions in expenses using more than a thousand phony receipts, reports the Jurist, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Her codefendants face similar charges.
• The White House briefly addressed the lingering issue of corruption in Iraq, but only to say that prime minister Nuri al-Maliki was “working hard” to fight corruption. The Agence France-Presse notes that White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined to speculate on whether those efforts had been successful. The issue of alleged corruption also surfaced in the recent controversy involving the private security contractor Blackwater USA, embroiled in controversy after the deaths of at least 11 people in Baghdad last week: The Reuters news agency reports that Blackwater officials have denied press reports that the firm has been importing illegal and unlicensed weapons into Iraq.
• Thousand of Filipinos joined mass demonstrations last week to protest alleged corruption and political violence. According to the International Herald Tribune, protestors claim little has changed since the rapaciously corrupt Marcos era, and they denounced current president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for alleged involvement in politically motivated killings and abductions.
• The public mood has soured considerably in Thailand in the year since the bloodless coup overthrowing the allegedly corrupt prime minister, reports BBC correspondent Jonathan Head. When former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in a bloodless coup, the incoming military government promised quick reconciliation, but Head reports that today’s “newspapers are full of commentators wringing their hands over the military-backed government’s many failures. One paper described the past 12 months as a ‘lost year’; another said that all the hopes raised by the military’s intervention were now futile — that Thailand’s democracy had been sent back into a ‘Jurassic Age.’ “
• Chinese officials, in the midst of a massive anticorruption drive, last week announced that in the past five years, more than 146,000 Chinese officials have voluntarily surrendered bribes they have accepted. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, reports that the government is urging officials who have traded power for bribes to confess their crimes, turn in the money, and receive lenient treatment. About $18 million worth of bribe money has been turned in, according to the Xinhua report.

SAN FRANCISCO
In a not entirely unexpected coda to the continuing refrain of scandal surrounding home run record-holder Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants last week announced they would not renew his contract next year.

“It’s always difficult to say goodbye,” Giants owner Peter Magowan told CBS Sports. “It’s an emotional time for me. We’ve been through a lot together these 15 years. A lot of good things have happened. Unfortunately a lot of bad things have happened. But there comes a time when you have to go in a different direction.”

Bonds says he will continue to play baseball for another team, reports USA Today, and while he said he was disappointed in the team’s decision, he said he held no “ill feelings” toward the Giants.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Henry Schulman notes that even though Bonds leaves the team as the all-time home-run leader in professional baseball, controversy surrounding him eventually wore out his welcome with team management: “The last four years were Bonds’ most controversial in San Francisco, as he became a central figure in baseball’s steroids scandal. A federal grand jury reportedly continues to hear evidence in a bid by prosecutors to indict Bonds for alleged perjury in connection with the BALCO case, and many believe his single-season home run record of 73, set in 2001, and his all-time record are tainted by drug use.”

As ESPN reports, Bonds, who has not been convicted or formally charged in any steroid-related case, has been dogged by fans who argue his historic 756th home run should be highlighted by an asterisk in the record books.

In a related development, ESPN reports that the person who bought Bonds’s record-setting baseball has set up an online poll to determine the ball’s fate: blast it into space, donate it to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, or donate it to the Hall of Fame with a branded asterisk to denote the steroid suspicions.

Just how strongly the steroid issue figures in Bonds’s departure is a matter of speculation, according to press reports. The 43-year old Bonds, while playing well lately, suffered a recent foot injury and the Giants, who have had an undistinguished season, are beginning a rebuilding program reportedly focusing on younger players.

MUNICH
Siemens, the giant German engineering and electronics firm, last week hired a new general counsel to help deal with the ethical and legal fallout from a series of bribery probes.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Peter Solmssen, the general counsel at General Electric’s health-care division, will become Siemens’ top compliance official, a newly created post with overall responsibility for all legal and compliance issues.

Siemens’ board also appointed Andreas Pohlman as the new chief compliance officer, CNN reports.

Both appointments come as investigators in Germany, Italy, and the United States are probing bribery and corruption charges against the firm, according to an analysis from BusinessWeek. Employees of the firm are alleged to have taken millions in bribes from companies hungry to land telecommunication deals with Siemens, one of Europe’s biggest conglomerates.

Bloomberg reports that the appointments were part of an effort to tighten anticorruption rules and improve the company’s image. Various ethics issues prompted the resignations of former CEO Klaus Kleinfeld and supervisory board head Heinrich von Pierer.

Siemens’ new CEO, Peter Loescher, who joined the company in July, has made ethics reform one of his top priorities.

LOS ANGELES
Ethics considerations are becoming increasingly important in investment decisions, according to a variety of recent reports and studies.

In one recent survey, 76 percent of respondents said they would pull their investment money from a company if they learned it was engaged in unethical behavior — even if that behavior were technically legal.

The study, conducted by a group called Opinion Research Corporation, in cooperation with Pepperdine University’s School of Business, also found that investors would yank their funds even if the unethical behavior resulted in a greater return on investment, according to a summary of the study in the newsletter of the Investment Program Association.

Overall, investors continue to show increasing interest in “ethical” and “green” investments, according to an official of the U.K. Social Investment Forum. Adam Ognall, quoted in the official publication of the London Stock Exchange, says the last 18 months have shown “huge growth” in such investment.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the trend toward ethical awareness has had a strong impact on mutual funds, with so-called ethically managed funds outperforming the general market in the past year. The development, according to the Herald report, appears to disprove conventional wisdom.

“There’s been an impression that if you invest ethically you must sacrifice returns, but I think that’s been eroded,” Ross Knowles, founder of the ethical financial planning firm Ethinvest, told the Herald. “Now there’s a belief that you can get market returns and invest ethically.”

BEIJING
In a strange twist to one of the most visible international ethics stories in recent months, an executive of the Mattel toy company last week issued an apology to China’s top product safety official.

The incident revolves around the recall of more than 17 million Chinese-outsourced toys for loose magnets that could pose a swallowing hazard, and two million toys with high levels of lead. The Chinese government has claimed that the extent of the recalls were excessive and that Mattel’s designs were at fault.

The Washington Post reports that the meaning and motives behind the apology seem to differ according to who is viewing the incident and who is doing the translating. Mattel insists that its executive vice president for worldwide operations, Thomas Debrowski, went to Beijing to repeat what the company already had said in Europe and the United States: that it apologized for the recall of millions of toys and that it was diligently trying to correct the problem.

But the Post reports that versions of the event relayed by the official Chinese news agency say that Debrowski “apologized personally Friday to a senior Chinese official for the massive recall of made-in-China toys due to design flaws committed by itself.”

According to the U.K. Guardian, the precise wording of Debrowski’s statement struck a balance: “It’s important for everyone to understand that the vast majority of those products that we recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel’s design, not through a manufacturing flaw in Chinese manufacturers.”

The latest incident in the scandal over Chinese-made toys shows the ethical complexities of laying blame and assuming responsibility, according to an analysis from Newsweek’s Daniel Gross: “When Mattel recalled lead-tainted toys in August, and earlier this month, the company was quick to blame its suppliers in China. It was as if Mattel weren’t responsible for the quality of products sold under its name.”

But last week’s apology, Gross maintains, is a sign of the shifting balance of power between U.S. companies and Chinese suppliers: Today, U.S. firms need cheap Chinese suppliers just as much as those suppliers need U.S. corporate buyers.

While the apology drew immediate fire from critics who said Mattel was kowtowing to suppliers of cheap products and labor, some analysts welcomed the statement as a refreshing change in the blame game that typically follows product recalls.

In an opinion piece from U.S. News & World Report, Rick Newman writes: “The Chinese toy recalls have highlighted many of the things that Americans find scary about the so-called global economy: It’s hard to know where products come from or what’s in them, and it turns out that government and industry both aren’t paying enough attention to the safety of imports. But the recalls are also an opportunity to help explain and clarify how products get from far-flung factories into the homes of Americans. Mattel messed up, but now the company is bringing a welcome degree of transparency to an issue that seems complex and murky to most of us.”

TORONTO
A group of scientists predict that within five years individuals likely will be able to have their entire personal genome sequence downloaded to a miniature hard drive, presumably providing a mechanism for customized health care and disease prevention.

The CBC reports that because of the lighting speed of advances in genetics research, physicians soon will have the capability to provide a computerized data profile of genetic information identifying anything from a high risk of cancer to a genetic mutation that could be passed along to children.

But some ethicists, including Canadian researcher Timothy Caulfield, are raising red flags about the idea, saying it opens the door to abuse, reports the Edmonton Journal.

Caulfield warns that the presence of a particular genetic marker does not always predispose someone toward development of a disease, but could result in discrimination by health insurance companies as well as in a fatalistic attitude by patients who, assuming they are predisposed to early death, give up on healthy lifestyles and choices, according to the Journal.

Caulfield is one of several co-authors who raised ethical questions in an article in last Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Another issue raised in the piece: the lack of qualified genetic counselors to help people make sense of the avalanche of questions that will follow widespread genetic profiling, according to a report from the Canadian Press wire service.

In a related story, disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk, accused by the South Korean government of fabricating his results, is relocating his research base to Thailand to avoid ethics disputes in his home nation, the Associated Press reports. Hwang is periodically returning to Seoul, however, to attend court hearings in an ongoing fraud trial.

WASHINGTON
Recently enacted ethics rules in the U.S. House of Representatives, specifying that the ethics committee investigate any member arrested or indicted on criminal charges, apparently will result in an inquiry into an alleged assault by Rep. Bob Filner (D-Calif.).

The San Diego Union Tribune and CNN report that the five-member investigative subcommittee will not begin its inquiry until court actions in the case are concluded.

Filner is scheduled to appear in court on Oct. 2 to answer charges that he shoved a baggage worker at Dulles International Airport in August, reports San Diego television station KGTV.

The Hill, a publication covering Congress, reports that some ethics specialists are warning that the wording of the new House policy requiring action if someone is “charged with a crime” is vague and could result in a flood of inquiries based on relatively minor incidents, including speeding tickets.

NEW DELHI
Journalism ethics is the topic of the week in India, and it’s a high-stakes affair involving a woman beaten by a mob apparently enraged by a false TV report.

The Associated Press reports that a television “sting” report claimed that a New Delhi math teacher had turned her classroom into a brothel, forcing her students into prostitution. A television reporter allegedly taped a conversation in which he posed as a customer. After the report aired, a mob dragged the teacher outside and beat her.

She was later arrested on the basis of the TV report.

But there’s a problem, reports the AP: Police think the whole event was made up, a stunt to garner ratings in the hypercompetitive world of Indian media, where there are more than a hundred 24-hour news channels.

One young woman, who herself is an aspiring journalist, initially said she was a student forced into prostitution by the teacher, but later told the Hindu newspaper that she lied after being threatened by the reporter if she refused to cooperate with the fabricated story. She claimed the reporter promised she could be credited as “an associate crime reporter” if she fabricated the details, but would be portrayed as a villain if she did not cooperate.

The woman, Rashmi Singh, told the Times of India that the reporter who constructed the piece “trapped me by threatening to air footage portraying me as a prostitute.”

“He told me that the sting was being done for a greater social cause,” Singh told the Times. “After a while, I started having my doubts so I recorded my conversations with him. I have given these recordings to the police.”

The reporter who allegedly fabricated the story, along with Singh, have been charged with criminal conspiracy, according to the AP. The teacher has been released from jail.

From the Conference Board:

“What happens when an employee’s freedom of religion crosses paths with a company’s interests? A recent article in The Conference Board Review looks to answer this question. In ‘Workers’ Rites,’ TCB Review explores how expression of religion in the workplace often challenges businesses to find appropriate solutions to employees’ requests.

” ‘Obviously, you can’t fire someone just because her faith differs from yours,’ writes associate editor Vadim Liberman. ‘But what happens when you face situations that aren’t so black and white — when the beliefs and practices of customers and co-workers come into play, not to mention the intricacies of employment law?’ As religion increasingly collides with corporate policies and practices, companies are asking what is and isn’t permissible behavior — for workers and for themselves.

“Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 2,541 claims of religious discrimination in the workplace — almost 50 percent more than a decade ago. And according to the New York-based Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, 66 percent of employees report ‘evidence of religious bias at work.’

“So what’s a company to do when it finds itself in a thorny predicament?

“To find out, the article examines numerous real-life scenarios of corporations struggling with how to balance an employee’s religious beliefs with their own goals. Each case was presented to diversity consultants, employment attorneys, and representatives from religious organizations for their recommendations in order to show what companies did right, did wrong, or what they didn’t do at all. For example:

“…What if … you run a tech-support company, and a technician refuses to provide help to a client that manufactures violent computer-software games? A devout Christian, she claims that servicing the customer would violate her faith. You explain that no other accounts have available openings, but she still objects.

“…What if … you have a contract agreement with a union that stipulates that all your workers must become members of the union, but one recently hired employee refuses to join? He says doing so would violate his religious beliefs.

“What if … a group of Christian employees objects to your company’s portion of diversity training dealing with gays and lesbians? To protest, they silently read the Bible when homosexuality comes up during a training session.

“Each of the above was an actual court case, and the article outlines how each case uncomfortably twisted its way to a conclusion.

“…In the end, just remember: ‘religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit protection,’ according to the law. As more workers assert their religious rights at work, that very well may be corporate America’s new golden rule….”

“People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy after.”

– Oliver Goldsmith (Irish writer, poet, and physician, 1728(?) – 1774)

When Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick died last week, her meteoric career was widely celebrated. And rightly so. She opened her first cosmetics shop near Brighton, England, in 1976, when the concept of “ethical business” was in its infancy. Now, 31 years later, that idea is so embedded in corporate culture that no multinational can afford to ignore its social and moral footprint.

To be sure, some companies still seek an ethical posture through smoke, mirrors, and spin. But a great many others play it straight, demanding ethical business practices not only of themselves but of their franchisees, their advertising firms, and their suppliers in third-world countries. The Body Shop didn’t make that happen, but Dame Anita and her husband Gordon were among the first to ride the curve of ethical consumerism. They built their business on the premise that customers increasingly were concerned about the nexus of environmental protection, human rights, and corporate integrity that has come to be known as corporate social responsibility.

That Dame Anita was such a blazing personality was no detriment to her success. Vociferously importing the hippie, anti-establishment values of the 1960s into the driven and entrepreneurial 1990s, she insisted that the role of business was not to amass wealth but to improve the world. Traveling the world in search of natural cosmetics, she presaged the globalism of the twenty-first century, in which consumers know — and care — where in the world their products originate and who has been harmed or helped through their sourcing. To buy Body Shop products was to support the World According to Anita. It was to vote with your pocketbook, to purchase your way to a more just society, to feel that you too were making a difference. Never outgrowing her penchant for joining protests, circulating petitions, fighting animal testing, and supporting the marginalized, she created a very public record to show that by doing good you also could do well.

But meteors blaze because they fall. Beneath the brilliance of that public record — and brilliant it was — lie some persistent and well-researched accusations that some of her company’s success was built on hypocrisy. Jon Entine’s 1994 article in Business Ethics — “Shattered Image: Is the Body Shop Too Good to be True?” — as well as his later writings suggest that the company owed its early success not to her genius but to a deliberate plagiarism from a small but successful company in San Francisco that in the early 1970s had exactly the same name, color palette, product line, and marketing approach. Equally critical is a 1998 paper from London Greenpeace (not to be confused with Greenpeace International) detailing, among other things, the wholly synthetic ingredients of some Body Shop products advertised as “natural” — written by the same English environmental activists who fought McDonald’s to a standstill in the famous “McLibel Case” that was decided finally in the activists’ favor in 2005. In 2006 a lather of public disappointment frothed up when the Body Shop was sold for $1.3 billion to L’Oreal, the French cosmetics giant whose values on issues like animal testing appear to be at right angles with those professed by the Roddicks.

Which is the real story — the Body Shop’s own earnest protestations or the fulminations of its detractors? The truth probably lies somewhere in between. That fact raises the central ethical question: What are we to make of Anita Roddick’s example?

To assert that all she accomplished was built on sand, undone by a deep-seated hypocrisy that made the company look far better than it was, is to ignore the transformative influence she exerted in creating the current culture of ethical business. Yet to assert that she was (as some recent press coverage suggests) a kind of secular saint, blasting new channels of probity through the hard rock of multinational capitalism, is to ignore the compromises and opportunism that sometimes accompany a great entrepreneurial flair. If her company’s success came only because of its subtle deceptions, that fact needs to come out — even if only to help the world understand that running ethical businesses is harder than it seems. But if corporate social responsibility has been significantly enhanced by her proof that consumers want to support companies that they see as ethical, that fact must not be overlooked — even if only to credit her remarkable vision in identifying a newly discerning customer base.

The Body Shop, in other words, may be one of the most important case studies of our time. It reminds budding entrepreneurs of the need to keep ethics and creativity in balance. It traces the growth of corporate social responsibility and helps explain the role of charismatic leaders in creating new movements. It raises endless questions about being green versus appearing green. And it reminds us that as the world stumbles forward into greater ethical awareness, even flawed characters can make significant contributions.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“Many men and women of the church, bishops as well, have come to agree with my way of looking at the reality of the church’s role. We have much to be sorry for.”

– Argentine priest Rev. Rubén Capitanio, speaking last week to a panel of three judges weighing the fate of Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former police chaplain accused of complicity in the country’s “Dirty War.” Capitanio is among a growing group of people both inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church who say the church needs to answer for its role in abetting the crimes of the military junta that seized power from 1976 until 1983, suppressing dissent by killing and “disappearing” between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Father von Wernich is accused of “involvement in seven murders and 42 cases of kidnapping and torture,” reports the New York Times.

WASHINGTON
President Bush last week signed into law a measure that will require lawmakers to disclose more fully their involvement in funding pet projects as well as their efforts to raise money from lobbyists.

The Associated Press reports that members of Congress who are seeking specially targeted projects, known as earmarks, will be required to publicize their efforts before the measure reaches the legislative floor.

Other provisions of the new law require members of Congress and political committees to identify publicly lobbyists who raise more than $15,000 for them during a six-month period.

Also, reports the Hill, a publication covering Congress, the legislation will limit privately funded travel and ban lawmakers from accepting gifts and meals from lobbyists.

It also bars members of Congress convicted of felonies from receiving congressional pensions.

Although backers of the measure claim it represents sweeping ethics reform, critics say it still leaves gaping loopholes, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.

President Bush signed the measure without fanfare and said he worried that it did not go far enough in cracking down on abusive earmarks, says the Times. Others object to provisions that make lobbyists for public universities and state and local governments exempt from the gift-giving provisions.

BOSTON
Another ethics scandal rocked professional sports last week after Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots — the man regarded as the mastermind of pro football play calling — was fined $500,000 for videotaping an opposing team’s sideline signals.

The team also was fined $250,000 by the NFL, and will forfeit a draft choice.

The incident came to light after the Patriots’ opening-day rout of the New York Jets. USA Today reports that a video camera wielded by a Patriots employee was confiscated after a security officer noted that it was continually focused on Jets defensive coaches as they relayed their signals along the sidelines.

As reported by the Boston Globe, the disgrace of being accused of stealing signals, an action specifically prohibited by the league, is a particularly sharp blow to Patriots fans, who lionized their Super-Bowl winning team.

The incident, notes the Globe, follows recent accusations that a Patriots player used a banned performance-enhancing drug and an incident in which the beloved Belichick allegedly shoved a photographer.

In the immediate aftermath of the revelation surrounding the surreptitious taping, fans and sports columnists began wondering if the practice had been long-standing — and whether other teams were cheated by the Patriots in the past.

Newsweek sports columnist Mark Starr ponders: “Are stolen signals at the heart of Belichick’s legendary brilliant halftime adjustments?”

“We’ve seen the coaches on the sidelines shielding their faces and trying to cloak their signals — I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Seattle coach Mike Holmgren’s mouth — but regarded it largely as a byproduct of the obsessive behavior that is the coaching norm,” Starr writes. “Now it appears they may not have been sufficiently paranoid.”

Others wonder where the line is drawn between smart, aggressive play and outright cheating.

Chicago Tribune sports reporter Melissa Isaacson notes that there is even some disparity between how different sports regard signal stealing: “Baseball seems to have a more casual attitude toward espionage. The White Sox never seemed concerned with punishment in the years they employed crafty Joe Nossek as a signs-stealing bench coach. And the late Bill Veeck feigned both ignorance and insult when asked about stationing a spy in the center-field scoreboard at the old Comiskey Park to eavesdrop on the signs opposing catchers flashed to their pitchers and tip off Sox hitters.”

“But technology,” she writes, “in the form of the video camera confiscated from Patriots employee Matt Estrella, apparently crosses the ethical line.”

VARIOUS DATELINES
Recent developments in medicine, biology, and life sciences are triggering a variety of ethics dilemmas. Among last week’s top stories:

• The senior science adviser to the British government last week proposed a universal code of ethics for scientists. According to reports from the BBC and the U.K. Guardian, Sir David King characterizes the code as the equivalent of a Hippocratic Oath. It contains seven principles: “Act with skill and care; keep skills up to date; Prevent corrupt practice and declare conflicts of interest; respect and acknowledge the work of other scientists; ensure that research is justified and lawful; minimize impacts on people, animals, and the environment; discuss issues science raises for society; do not mislead; present evidence honestly.”
• Ethics programs have been ramped up throughout South Korea’s scientific community in the aftermath of last year’s stem-cell research-fraud scandal. The Korea Times reports that 96 public and private laboratories throughout the nation have set up verification programs for their research and development programs. Only 15 institutions had mechanisms to fight fraud or fabrication before the scandal broke.
• Genetics tests that can be administered at home are raising moral concerns, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. A growing number of start-up firms offer a service in which a small sample amount is collected and sent back to the lab. Chewed gum, a shirt containing perspiration, or a hair from a comb will suffice. Among the expanding suite of tests: a determination of an unborn baby’s gender and paternity. The paternity test raises some particularly troublesome questions because it allows mothers to conduct the test without the suspected father’s knowledge, reports the Chronicle.
• The Holocaust Museum is preparing an exhibit on the role of doctors in the Nazis’ attempt to engineer a “master race,” reports the Houston Chronicle. A new exhibit and lecture series, titled “Medical Ethics and the Holocaust,” recounts physicians’ participation in murder and gruesome experiments. The goal, according to the Houston physician who designed the exhibit, is to explore whether modern developments in genetics could lead to a new eugenics movement. “It’s a warning shot across the bow,” Dr. Sheldon Rubenfeld tells the Chronicle. “There’ll always be a push for individuals, nations, or races to dominate others — coming genetic capabilities will give them that potential more than ever before.”
• In Atlanta, researchers at Emory University are planning to launch a program to screen healthy patients for genetic clues indicating that they may be predisposed to future illnesses. But as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the program also poses some ethical dilemmas, including what information could or should be kept from insurers and employers. “It’s not only about health and health insurance,” Eric Meslin, director of the Center for Bioethics at Indiana University, tells the Journal-Constitution. “It’s about life insurance. It’s about employment…. It’s pick anything where society is making judgments about who is fit to … get entitlements.”

LONDON
One of the top stories in the worlds of finance and ethics continued to reverberate worldwide last week, as aftershocks from the U.S. subprime-lending shakeout crossed the Atlantic.

The Bank of England provided emergency funding to mortgage lender Northern Rock PLC after the bank, pummeled by the subprime mortgage crisis, said it was having trouble finding short-term loans from other institutions to keep itself afloat, reports BusinessWeek.

According to a report from the London Daily Telegraph, police were called to keep order at some Northern Rock branch after lines of panicky customers, hoping to withdraw their funds, formed at many of the branch’s 72 locations. A spokesman for the bank told the Telegraph that customers should remain calm and that adequate funds are available to cover their accounts.

The subprime crisis continued to dominate financial headlines through the week, including a revelation by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who admitted that he underestimated the damage that could result from widespread defaults on adjustable-rate mortgages.

Timothy Otte, a columnist for the investment site Motley Fool, observed that Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, has promised to “act as needed” but not bail out investors or lenders.

Otte writes that the basis of Bernanke’s policy is based on the concept of moral hazard: “In short, moral hazard arises when a party believes it will not have to face the full consequences of its actions, giving it an incentive to act in ways that may be inappropriate.

“Moral hazard can rear its ugly head all over the place,” Otte writes. “Recent history is full of examples, from Third World countries borrowing money and then defaulting on the debt, to the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. In the subprime world we are seeing moral hazard effects relating to both borrowers and lenders. Borrowers take on more credit than they can handle, believing it’s not their money at risk, and bankruptcy is a reasonable out. Lenders offer credit to high-risk customers, with the intent of packaging the loans and selling the paper to other lenders who will bear the risk of default.”

In related news, a research paper by Katherine Porter, a law professor at the University of Iowa, claims that the bankruptcies expected in the subprime shakeout might not be such bad news for the credit industry after all. In her paper, featured in a recent Salon analysis, Porter writes that “creditors repeatedly solicit debtors to borrow after bankruptcy. Families receive dozens of offers for new credit in each month immediately after their bankruptcy discharge. Some offers specifically target these families based on their recent financial problems, using bankruptcy as an advertising lure. Other credit offers emanate from the very same lenders that the families could not repay before bankruptcy. While not every lender will accept a ‘profligate’ bankrupt as a customer, debtors report being overwhelmed after bankruptcy with a variety of credit solicitations from many sources. Lenders offer families most types of secured and unsecured loans.”