“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)