Ethics Newsline®

The other day I stopped by our local garage, a trim, gray-stained, three-bay affair hugging the verge of Route 1. With the Maine winter not far off, I needed Mike to put the snow tires on my car. I’d also run over a parking-lot curb one misty night the week before, so I thought I’d talk to him about an alignment.

I pulled around to the side where he keeps his 55-gallon waste oil drums, painted in different colors and lined up like a rank of pudgy toy soldiers, and recalled that I used to see Mike a lot more often. Back in the 1970s, our family owned a succession of station wagons that regularly went out of alignment. You’d touch a curb or hit a patch of potholes, and the front end would immediately develop a case of the wobbles. If you didn’t visit Mike pretty regularly, you’d soon be looking at some oddly worn treads and a bill for two new tires.

But for years I hadn’t thought about alignments. Why not? Maybe, despite my recent nocturnal encounter, I was driving better. Maybe there were fewer potholes — though you couldn’t prove that by the road up to our house. Or maybe the cars we’d owned recently were better engineered. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t recall when I last had to change tires because of those lopsided bald patches.

I went inside, and Mike and I set a time for an appointment. As I was leaving his sign caught my eye. “Mike’s Align & Repair,” it said, offering customers a distinction I hadn’t focused on before. When something’s damaged or broken, you fix it. But when something’s in fine shape but a bit out of whack, you bring it back into line. Mike knows the difference between aligning and repairing, and he won’t charge you for a replacement when all you need is an adjustment. That’s what has earned him so many loyal customers over the years.

As I drove away, reflecting on the success of small-business integrity in rural America, I recalled a workshop we’d just conducted on moral courage. At one point, discussing the opposite of courage, we asked the participants to identify the qualities that go along with cowardice. In a few minutes we’d filled a flip-chart with words like fearful, defensive, self-centered, indifferent, sullen, inconclusive, fretful, mean, removed, cynical, passive, and fractured. Any business that merits this description will never come close to building the loyalty that Mike has. But does that mean the business is broken? Or are things simply out of line?

You hear a lot these days about the need for organizational alignment. It’s not something you do in a three-bay garage, but it’s a good analogy. Organizations, like cars, can get botched up. They hit economic potholes and flip off their wheel weights. They bounce hard over hidden regulatory curbs or cross ditches of morale at odd angles. And before you know it, they start to wobble. That’s when they lose confidence, muffle their moral courage, and settle for a fuzzy pragmatism that borders on deceit. Mistaking bluster for integrity and stubbornness for fortitude, they slip into the moral cowardice described on our flip-chart.

When that happens, what they need is the managerial equivalent of Mike’s Align & Repair. Too often, however, what they get is either Slick Willie’s Fix-It-Cheap or the Royal Reconstruction Service. Though the price is different, each one’s got the same answer: Things are really messed up here, so let’s gut this puppy and do a total makeover.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of organizational cowardice. But most of the time I suspect that what a cowardly organization needs is not repair but realignment. The thing still runs, after all: It’s not as though the front wheels are at right angles to the chassis. They’re just off by a few degrees. Sure, that’s a key divergence, enough to keep you from running up to speed. But all it needs is someone with the right equipment and the skill to set it right.

Why? Because a lot of what seems to be cowardice isn’t the opposite of courage, but the counterfeit of it. It’s not that employees have set themselves deliberately at variance with moral courage. They don’t hate putting integrity into practice or bringing values into action. They’ve just drifted off into something that looks like courage but isn’t. They don’t like feeling fretful and defensive, but they don’t quite know where they went wrong. It won’t help to tell them, “Okay, let’s tear it out and start over.” Nor will it do to fall back on that shallowest of excuses, “Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Those words are perfectly true in theory — and frightfully harmful in practice. Lots of things that aren’t broken still need alignment.

Mike knows that. He doesn’t give you a new front end, nor does he walk away saying, “Nothing’s busted, so I can’t help.” He rolls you into the bay and tweaks your camber and toe adjustments until everything comes into line. He knows you’re made of good stuff. His job is just to point all your parts in the right direction.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“We have so many examples like this of people on relevant committees receiving these contributions from people who are under their jurisdictions. It’s sad to say, but it is pretty much business as usual in Washington. And it shows why so many Americans just shake their heads over the way Washington works.”

– Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, talking to the New York Times about phone company contributions to senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.V.), one of the primary supporters of retroactive immunity for phone companies that have cooperated with the Bush administration in possibly illegal surveillance of their customers.

The Times, covering figures first reported by Wired, notes that from 2002 through 2006, Sen. Rockefeller received only $4,050 from AT&T and Verizon. But between only last March and June — as lawsuits against the companies were being threatened or filed — that figure skyrocketed to $42,850. A spokeswoman for Sen. Rockefeller dismissed as “patently false” the suggestion that he would “make policy decisions based on campaign contributions.”

McGehee says that even if the companies’ donations have not influenced Rockefeller, they — and the myriad like them — leave the door open to doubt in the public’s mind, creating conflicts of interest that “corrode public confidence.”

WASHINGTON
Two ethics issues appeared likely to complicate what was expected to be a smooth confirmation process for U.S. attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey.

The most controversial matter centered on Mukasey’s stance on harsh interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists. According to the International Herald Tribune, some Democratic senators suggested publicly for the first time that they might oppose Mukasey if he does not clarify his stance on water boarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

And, reports UPI, a prominent Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, also expressed dissatisfaction with Mukasey’s testimony.

Saying he did not know the precise details of how suspects were questioned, Mukasey was vague in his responses about whether water boarding constitutes torture, his critics charge.

Early in his confirmation hearings, Mukasey was pressed on whether water boarding was unconstitutional. His response — “If it amounts to torture, it is unconstitutional” — was criticized by one Democrat as a “purely semantic” equivocation, reports Congressional Quarterly.

In another controversial statement, Mukasey said he does not believe the Constitution prevents the president from wiretapping suspected terrorists without a court order. In a written response reprinted in the Baltimore Sun, Mukasey maintained that “foreign intelligence-gathering is a field in which the executive branch is regulated but not pre-empted by Congress.”

OTTAWA
A proposed law in Canada would require all voters to show their faces before being allowed to vote, including Muslim women who, in conformity with their beliefs, wear veils.

The issue has evolved into a sometimes bitter national controversy after a recent ruling from Canada’s elections board allowed Muslim women to vote in three recent Quebec contests without lifting their veils, reports the CanWest News Service.

In the most recent Quebec provincial election, the veil issue ratcheted up debate over how far the province should go in accommodating immigrants, according to the Globe & Mail, with one local leader’s popularity surging after he suggested the province had gone too far in “catering” to newcomers.

House leader Peter Van Loan told the Toronto Star that requiring voters to show their faces when presenting identification for admittance into the voting booth would reduce fraud and is “necessary to maintaining public confidence in … the electoral process.”

Opposition parties and some Muslim groups are suggesting that the new law will inflame anti-immigrant sentiment, reports the Globe & Mail.

The only exception to the rule would be for voters who have bandages covering facial wounds, reports the Times of India.

CHICAGO
Former Illinois governor George Ryan last week was ordered to begin serving a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence on November 7, but his lawyers hope to keep him free while he takes his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ryan, who was convicted of soliciting state contracts for friends, siphoning tax money to fund his campaigns, and covering up bribery in the state’s drivers license agency, will ask a federal appeals court to stay the court order for him to surrender, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Ryan’s lawyers are claiming that a variety of irregularities in the trial may interest the nation’s highest court.

If the stay is not granted and the Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal, the 73-year-old Ryan will reach what his lawyer called “the end of the line” and will have to report to state prison, reports the Associated Press.

Chicago TV station WBBM visited Ryan’s hometown of Kankakee, Illinois, and quizzed residents about the former governor’s impending sentence. Neighbor Virginia Gordon said, “Frankly I don’t think that anything that’s gone against Gov. Ryan isn’t anything that hasn’t happened in politics for a long, long time … but this was time that he got caught up in it.”

WBBM reporters found fewer sympathetic citizens at the local barbershop. “I hate to see a man of his age go to jail, anybody of that age go to jail,” resident Tom Carroll said. “But I guess the people have spoken — he had his day in court.”

In addition to the corruption scandal, Ryan gained national attention for one of his last acts as governor: commuting all death sentences in the state to life in prison over concerns that the death-penalty process in Illinois was gravely flawed.

LONDON
The agency that awards the Britain’s coveted “organic” status to food says it will strip that label from products flown into the United Kingdom unless producers meet stricter ethical standards.

The BBC and ITN report that the Soil Association, which certifies most of the $3.8 billion organic food sector, says importing firms must show that the trade brings tangible benefits to farmers in the developing world.

Last week’s announcement represents a compromise between conflicting ethical standards because some environmental organizations had complained that shipping food in by air freight harmed the environment because of carbon emissions from airplanes. Others countered that withholding certification from companies using air freight could harm farmers in poor countries and slow economic development, according to the Reuters news agency.

In order to receive the organic label, firms flying food into the United Kingdom must begin, by 2009, to invest in local communities, allow their workers to unionize, and fund local education efforts, according to the London Daily Telegraph.

LONDON
Controversial new guidelines in the United Kingdom specify that nurses will now be able to decide if a dying patient should be resuscitated.

London’s Evening Standard reports that until now only physicians were allowed to determine whether there was any point in continuing to save a patient,. That responsibility now can be extended to “suitably experienced nurses” under the guidelines published by the British Medical Association.

Critics denounced the change as a threat to the safety of elderly patients, implying that it was another way of distancing doctors from a patient’s death, reports the Daily Mirror.

But Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, told the U.K. Guardian that the revised rules “should help spare patients and their families the heartache and indignity of repeated and sometimes unnecessary resuscitation attempts. It will also mean that when a suitably experienced nurse believes that CPR will not be successful, they will be able to respond appropriately without having to wait.”

According to a report from the London-based Independent, the medical association says families often are given false hope by television dramas that depict many successful revivals of patients undergoing CPR, when in reality the success rate is much lower.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Several stories dealing with the intersection of ethics and genetics were featured in the world press last week:

• The French parliament has approved a volatile measure requiring immigrants who want to join their families in that nation to undergo mandatory DNA testing to prove that they truly are blood relatives. Swiss Radio International notes that the uproar over the measure may prompt renewed attention to similar laws, such as those in Switzerland, that are currently — but quietly — in effect.
• Britain, which allows widespread use of DNA testing by law enforcement, is starting to take a hard look at the scope of such efforts, reports Reuters. “The scale of the forensic revolution is causing unease in Britain,” according to the report, “where the government is considering casting the DNA testing net wider by allowing police to take swabs from people committing minor crimes, like dropping litter.” Even Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA fingerprinting, is worried about the ethics implications of increased genetic forensics, noting that safeguard legislation is lagging behind as use of the national DNA database, which holds information on more than 6 percent of the population, expands rapidly.
• James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist famous for his role in decoding the structure of DNA in the human gene, resigned last week from his position at New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the wake of recent remarks questioning the intelligence of Africans, reports Newsday. While Watson was no stranger to controversy — he had been blasted for past comments about women, various ethnic groups, and overweight people — the president of the laboratory said that the latest series of remarks were “the last straw.”

VARIOUS DATELINES
A university journalism professor from North Carolina says that officials from the presidential campaign of former Sen. John Edwards tried to kill a story prepared for a student newscast.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the flap centers on a story, prepared for the newscast and circulated on the Web, questioning whether it was appropriate for Edwards to base his operations in an affluent part of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when one of his main campaign themes is fighting poverty.

University of North Carolina broadcast journalism professor Charles Tuggle says Edwards’s campaign demanded that he pull the story, which was prepared by graduate student Carla Babb.

Tuggle told local television station WITN that the Edwards campaign charged that the student reporter had misrepresented the purpose of the story.

According to the Washington Post, a campaign spokeswoman would not comment on Tuggle’s accusation other than to label it as “silly.”

“Was it what the campaign was expecting it to be? No. But I don’t know that we’re obligated as journalists to tell that the focus of a story has changed,” Tuggle told the Associated Press.

In another journalism-ethics story from last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was blasted by reporters and the White House for holding a news conference that was actually staffed by FEMA employees asking suspiciously soft questions of the agency’s deputy director as he was quizzed about the response to the California wildfires. What initially appeared to be a successful event in the administration’s effort to prove it could efficiently respond to a disaster turned sour, reports the Los Angeles Times, when the agency admitted it had used employees to ask the questions when no actual reporters showed up for the hastily arranged news conference.

FEMA officials said the incident reflected a “lapse in judgment,” but denied that there was an intent to deceive.

On Monday, the FEMA official who staged last week’s phony press conference felt further heat after a pending job offer was revoked, notes the AP.

MILAN
The ethics implications of how museums acquire and display possibly plundered antiquities are an increasingly common challenge to the institutions’ stewardship, according to a report last week from the New York Times.

Reporting from Milan, Elisabetta Povoledo reports that ownership issues are messy, noting that “even when museums draw up codes of ethics to help ensure that they won’t abet the plunder of another nation’s cultural heritage, the measures are not legally binding.”

Povoledo notes that many museums drafted codes and guidelines that mirror a 1970 UNESCO convention prohibiting illicit trade in cultural property. The International Council of Museums adopted a professional ethics code in 1986, revised in 2004, that insists on due diligence for every item brought into a collection.

But some say strict regulations have actually encouraged smuggling. The Times report quotes several officials who claim that complex laws applied to any object more than 50 years old — including the “drawing your sister did in kindergarten,” contends one — result in a brisk trade of items exported illegally or under false pretenses.

Giovanni Nistri, head of the art-theft squad of Italy’s military police, told Povoledo that from 1970 to 2006 more than 858,000 art objects originating in Italy were stolen, and only a third have been recovered. He said his squad has reclaimed nearly 700,000 illegally excavated archaeological objects, but has no reliable way of knowing how many more have been looted.

Further complicating the issue, writes Povoledo, is this ethical dilemma: “Does a country that produced cultural property have the right to it, or museum visitors around the world who get to appreciate it?”

From the American Bar Association (ABA):

“The American Bar Association today released the findings from their three-year study on state death penalty systems and called for a nationwide moratorium on executions. Based on a detailed analysis of death penalty systems in eight sample states, the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project identified key problems common to the states studied, including major racial disparities, inadequate indigent defense services and irregular clemency review processes — making their death penalty systems operate unfairly….

“While the ABA takes no position for or against the death penalty itself, since 1997 it has urged a moratorium in each jurisdiction that provides for capital punishment until the state conducts a thorough and exhaustive study to determine whether its system meets legal standards for fairness and due process.

“For the past three years, teams of local legal experts have assessed their states using 93 protocols developed by the ABA as measuring points of the due process and fairness the state provides….

“Several serious problems were found in many of the states:

• “Every state studied appears to have significant racial disparities in imposing the death penalty, particularly associated with the race of the victim, but little has been done to rectify the problem….
• “Most states have had at least one serious incident of mistakes or fraud in crime laboratories. They often do not require that crime laboratories and medical examiner offices be accredited, or that crime laboratories make their standards and procedures public. The laboratories are often seriously underfunded and do not use the most sophisticated testing procedures.
• “With respect to collection, preservation and testing of biological evidence, most states do not require preservation of the evidence through the entire legal process until the accused is either released from prison or executed. As scientific testing capability advances, evidence that could prove innocence may be destroyed. Testing statutes create onerous procedural hurdles impeding the ability of convicted persons to file for and obtain DNA testing.
• “States do not require law enforcement agencies to adopt procedures comporting with national best practices on identification and interrogation, and most states do not require law enforcement agencies to videotape or audiotape custodial interrogations in murder cases….
• “Some states fail to provide for appointment of defense counsel in post-conviction proceedings, and all states fail to provide for appointment of counsel in clemency proceedings. Capital indigent defense is generally significantly underfunded, and compensation paid to appointed capital defense attorneys is often inadequate. Many states require only minimal training and experience for defense counsel in capital cases.
• “Some states do not require a meaningful proportionality review to determine whether death sentences are imposed on similarly situated defendants and few, if any, maintain databases adequate to achieve such a review.
• “With respect to post-conviction review, many states provide unreasonably short time periods in which to petition the courts for review, and most states allow judges in such proceedings to adopt findings of fact and conclusions of law proposed by one party, potentially undermining the judge’s exercise of independent judgment. Some states assign post-conviction review of whether errors were made at trial to the same judge who presided at trial, and many states make it difficult to obtain discovery, or evidentiary hearings….

“With more than 413,000 members, the American Bar Association is the largest voluntary professional membership organization in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law.”

“Three things too much, and three too little are pernicious to man: to speak much, and know little; to spend much, and have little; to presume much, and be worth little.”

– Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright, 1547-1616)