Is it ever right to break promises? If I don’t keep our lunch date because my neighbor’s house catches fire and I’m saving her pets, I doubt you’ll call me unethical. But what if there are no such extremities?

Last week I was scheduled to deliver a daylong ethics training workshop in an office park near Washington’s Dulles Airport, where I’ve been several times before. On an earlier occasion I’d been stood up by a taxi-company dispatcher who, after I’d waited 45 minutes for the cab to the airport, admitted she couldn’t find one and told me I was on my own.

So I’m understandably cautious about cabs in this part of the country. My hotel, a trusted national brand, was three miles from the office park, so I called the front desk the night before to order a taxi. The next morning a black SUV showed up, unmarked and without a meter. The price for the three-mile trip, $15, seemed high but not outrageous, and the driver’s GPS took us right to the door of my building.

So I asked if he could pick me up after the meeting and take me to the Metro station 20 minutes away. He was free and eager, so we agreed on the fare ($40) and confirmed the time (4:30 P.M.). We also exchanged cell-phone numbers, though I told him my phone would be switched off during the meeting.

Turning on my phone at 4:30, I get his message saying he’s tied up but has given “a friend” my phone number, and I’ll be picked up in a black sedan. Seeing no car outside, I call my driver, who says his friend will be there in 10 or 15 minutes. Calling back a quarter-hour later, I’m told his friend is now “two or three minutes” away. After five minutes — it’s now 4:55 — I’m about to call him again when two of our workshop participants walk out of the building. They’re surprised to see me, so I explain the delay.

“Where are you headed?” one asks.

“The Metro station in Vienna,” I reply.

“I live right near there,” he says. “Come on — I’ll drop you off.”

And there I stand, staring down the barrel of a right-versus-right, truth-versus-loyalty dilemma that, seconds before, I did not have.

On one hand, I’ve given my word to meet someone, and I have an obligation of loyalty to my promise. Yes, he’s late, but he seems to be well on his way to meeting me. No, I didn’t demand a metered taxi, but my trust in that hotel’s recommendation has helped me more than my trust in licensed cabs in this neighborhood. And yes, I’m annoyed, but is that sufficient reason for breaking a promise?

But look at the countervailing truths. I have a schedule to keep — another promise, in fact, for dinner that night in D.C. And it was the driver, not I, who first broke the deal. Would I be justified in accepting Plan B if he were only five minutes late? Probably not. But what if it were five hours? Of course I’d be gone. So is length of time the determinant? If so, what makes 25 minutes the magic number?

Then there’s the question of which facts carry ethical significance and which are irrelevant. Does it matter that I’m not pressured for time, since my dinner doesn’t start until 6:30 — or does that have no bearing on the driver’s promises? Does it matter that my original driver has reconfirmed his friend’s arrival, or are his reassurances perhaps based more on wish than reality? Does my disappointment with a cab dispatcher some months before carry any weight, or should that not be held against these drivers? And does it matter that Plan B requires an immediate decision, or is that urgency just an excuse for abandoning my promise (and saving money) in the heat of the moment?

“Look, the guy stood you up,” you may be thinking. “He needs to be taught a lesson. Just bail into Plan B and get on with your life!” But is it that simple? Is tit-for-tat a sound ethical principle? Does somebody wronging you justify your doing wrong in return?

If so, we’ve got a long and troubling period ahead of us. It’s called the campaign season. As it develops, lots of people are going to promise lots of things. There will be times when even the best of promises are overtaken by events, or when small promises are swept away by larger extremities. But two things remain true. First, we can’t live in a world without the lubricant of promise-keeping — not in politics, not in business, not in families. Second, we can’t always keep the promises we make.

Our goal is not to abandon the former — to refuse to make any promises lest we destroy our integrity. Our goal must be to get better at keeping the promises we make. The worst of all worlds arises in the cynicism of deliberate promise-breaking: the candidates who say, “I’ll do it,” knowing they can’t deliver; the campaign volunteers who say, “I’ll be there,” adding under their breath, “if nothing better comes along”; the drivers who say, “4:30, yes,” and immediately calculate a fall-back position; the customers who say, “Come pick me up,” while fully prepared to take another offer. All of us — drivers, customers, candidates, volunteers — need a right-versus-right framework to use not only for the big extremities but especially for the small commonplaces of our lives.

In my case, I bailed into Plan B. Ten minutes later, as we were driving to the Metro station, my cell-phone rang. It was the second driver, who was at the building and couldn’t find me. I had to tell him he was 35 minutes too late, and I couldn’t wait.

“You said that very kindly,” my friend remarked as I hung up.

“Thanks,” I replied, “but he was counting on my business, and I wasn’t really in that great a hurry. Did I do the right thing?”

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

Rushworth Kidder’s column last week on cell phone ethics connected with a lot of readers, who speed-dialed us with comments and suggestions for a Cell Phone User’s Code of Ethics.

Before moving on to the code itself, it’s worth noting that while many readers addressed the basic point that proper public cell phone use is a matter of civility, others raised some deeper and unexpected issues.

One, for example, contended that cell phones have become an “instrument of control” — control of the user’s immediate environment as a result of the infliction of the conversation on everyone nearby, and as a method of controlling the recipient of the call:

“I have friends who have provided all their children with cell phones under the guise of giving them ready access to call Mommy or Daddy in case of an emergency. Very responsible, eh? In practice, however, I have found these parental friends of mine are more interested in knowing where their children are every waking moment of the day, calling them 10 to 15 times per day. Now think about it, how would you have felt at 12 years old receiving a call from your Mommy 15 times EVERY day?”

Another reader observed that careless cell phone use has ripple effects, and once handed a thoughtless cell phone user this note: “Anyone who was sitting near you at the airport in Oklahoma City this afternoon overheard your many telephone conversations and would probably think that you are a friendly, intelligent, and successful individual. Your clients, on the other hand, might not appreciate knowing that others knew about the personal business you conducted.”

Another reader picked up on this angle: “Superior officials tend to become indispensable and underlings get all too few opportunities to learn to pick up responsibility. In the old days, when the boss was away, someone else was in charge, made decisions when needed. Today that happens less and less because the phone-carrying boss is always available. I think there will be a price to pay for that down the road.”

Taking these and other factors into account, what, then, should be written into a Cell Phone User’s Code of Ethics? Here is a first draft, extracted from your suggestions. Let us know your reactions and revision suggestions, and over the next couple of weeks we can craft a final version.

As a responsible cell phone user, I promise to:

• Limit any conversation that is audible to others to short and concise moments.
• Make every effort to move to a private place if I do have to take or make a call.
• Turn my phone ringer off when at public events or meetings.
• Refuse to discuss private matters when others can hear. 
• Not talk on my cell phone while driving, because doing so endangers others.
• Not disrespect my friends and co-workers by interrupting our conversations to take a call.
• When in the presence of others, never use a louder voice on the cell phone than I would in a normal conversation.
• Show, by example, that being respectful helps everyone and hurts no one.

“You people are really nuts. There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

– Iowa waitress Anita Esterday, talking to a reporter about the press ruckus over whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign had left a tip after eating at the Maid-Rite diner where Esterday works

WASHINGTON
In the aftermath of an incident that raised ethics questions about the responsibilities of U.S. Internet firms operating overseas, Yahoo executives were hammered by members of the U.S. Congress last week over the company’s cooperation with Chinese law enforcement officials, who used information from the company to track down and jail a pro-democracy journalist.

USA Today reports that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and general counsel Michael Callahan apologized to the House Foreign Affairs Committee for Yahoo’s role in helping the Chinese government make its case against the journalist.

But the executives refused to commit to any specific changes of policy, reports Wired. Nor did they endorse a bill pending before Congress that would prevent companies like Yahoo from supplying overseas law enforcement with information that would personally identify users.

The controversy revolves around a demand by Chinese officials for user information that eventually led to the arrest of Shi Tao, who was sent to jail for 10 years after Yahoo furnished information about his online activities.

According to the Associated Press, Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan insisted that his company did not know the real nature of the Chinese investigation and said he “cannot ask our local employees to resist lawful demands and put their own freedom at risk, even if, in my personal view, the local laws are overbroad.”

Committee chairman Tom Lantos bristled at the characterization. “Why do you insist on repeating the phrase ‘lawful orders’? These were demands by a police state,” Lantos said.

“While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” Lantos also said, according to the AP report.

Family members of Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning, another cyber-dissident jailed in a separate case, told the Wall Street Journal that they hoped the hearing would help motivate action for their release.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Corruption issues figured in world headlines last week:

• Weekend protests against emergency rule in Pakistan ratcheted up tensions there as ex-premiere Benazir Bhutto protested the emergency crackdown by president Pervez Musharraf. CBS News reports that Bhutto addressed a rally of about 200 journalists protesting recently imposed media restrictions. Bhutto was sacked in 1999 amid widespread allegations of corruption, and recently returned to Pakistan in what appeared to be a power-sharing agreement brokered with Musharraf. Musharraf’s popularity has plummeted in recent months, and his government has been under pressure because some in the judiciary say that his reelection was invalid.
• In Bangladesh, a top aide to the nation’s former prime minister has been arrested and charged with breaking emergency laws and assaulting a dissident. Retired brigadier general ASM Hannan Shah, an advisor to the now-detained prime minister, was arrested late Wednesday during a police raid on his home, according to a report from the Agence France-Presse. Bangladesh is being ruled by a military-backed emergency government after elections were cancelled last January amid charges of poll rigging.
• A coalition of groups from across Nigeria last week called for “zero tolerance” toward corruption in every facet of society, reports the Day of Lagos, Nigeria. The activists, attending an anticorruption forum organized by a group called the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, declared that “corruption is fundamentally an economic and political question which is continuously fertilized by poverty and can only be effectively addressed by a progressive, legitimate, and people-driven government.”
• South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal last week ruled that warrants authorizing the seizure of documents from former deputy president Jacob Zuma were lawfully obtained and could be used against him if a corruption case makes it to court. Prosecutors allege that Zuma received bribes from an arms manufacturer, reports the Jurist, a site from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Zuma has indicated he may run against South African president Thabo Mbeki in the 2009 presidential election.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.
Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, previously nominated to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has pleaded not guilty to 16 felony charges unsealed last week.

Kerik, formerly in charge of 40,000 police officers, is accused of shaking down a company suspected of mob ties, accepting illicit payments, failing to report income, coercing witnesses, and lying to the White House when he was being considered to head the Department of Homeland Security, reports New York City radio station WNYC.

As Newsday notes, Kerik had built a national reputation on September 11, 2001, when he led the police department’s response to the terror attacks on the World Trade Center, gaining a high profile that nearly brought him one of the nation’s top federal law-enforcement positions.

Kerik’s nomination unraveled as various allegations against him surfaced, and the issue has gained new life because his mentor, Rudy Giuliani, who also nominated him for the Homeland Security post, now is running for president.

The Washington Post reports that Giuliani moved into the crosshairs of his opponents immediately after the indictments were unsealed. Fellow GOP contender Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) criticized Kerik’s performance as a contractor in Iraq.

The Giuliani camp fired back immediately, reports the Post, invoking McCain’s involvement in the Keating 5 scandal in the 1980s.

GOP contender Mitt Romney, campaigning in New Hampshire, avoided direct criticism of Giuliani, but had his aides issue a compendium of archived speeches and news articles in which Romney called for a higher ethical standard in Washington, the Boston Globe reports.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Allegations of improper fees and payments and a gigantic lawsuit over the effects of a once-popular drug made headlines worldwide last week:

• As home foreclosures mushroom, the New York Times reports that questionable legal and ethical practices on the part of companies instigating the foreclosures are coming to light. According to the Times, because there is little oversight of foreclosure procedures and attendant fees, some analysts claim that consumers may be losing their homes unnecessarily or are being charged improper fees by mortgage services trying to profit from the foreclosures. Katherine Porter, a law professor at the University of Iowa, told the Times that questionable fees had been tacked on to almost half of the loans that she examined, and in many cases the fees were cloaked in vague language.
• Siemens, the German engineering and technology giant mired in a bribery scandal, last week said that an internal probe had uncovered about $1.9 billion in “questionable transactions,” according to the Berlin-based news service Deutsche Welle. And according to a report from SpiegelOnline, the dubious payments, which are suspected of being used for slush funds and bribery in countries outside Germany, appear to come from divisions of the company not previously implicated.
• South Korea has been rocked by allegations that Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee was at the heart of a scheme of bribery and illegal transactions, according to a report from the Korea Times. A group of lawyers and civic groups last week filed a request with state prosecutors to open an official probe into allegations made by a former Samsung attorney who claims he was complicit in the wrongdoing and now wants to repent and blow the whistle, BusinessWeek reports.
• Grocery chain Whole Foods has changed its corporate ethics policy and now will ban company leaders from posting anything about the company online. The policy follows a controversy over postings by CEO John Mackey, who anonymously bashed his competitors and talked up his own company’s stock, ComputerWorld reports. Critics claimed he was surreptitiously trying to influence circumstances surrounding his firm’s proposed takeover of another company.
• Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. last week agree to pay up to $4.85 billion to settle lawsuits involving the company’s drug Vioxx, which plaintiffs claim is linked to strokes and heart attacks. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the settlement, offered in order to close out more than 26,000 state and federal cases, was lower than what most analysts had expected. Merck took a hard line, threatening to fight every case individually, and admitted no wrongdoing in proposing the settlement, which must be approved by at least 85 percent of the plaintiffs by next March.

FORT COLLINS, Colo.
A request for a new trial in a Fort Collins, Colorado, murder case is raising a variety of ethics issues, including a controversy about whether it’s proper for police to plant false or misleading stories in the press in order to further an investigation.

The Fort Collins Coloradan reports that some law enforcement officials and media experts are criticizing the planting of a story that implied that progress was being made in a murder case, when in reality the investigation was stalled. The story, says the Coloradan, was aimed at putting pressure on Tim Masters, the prime suspect, who was later convicted and imprisoned.

Masters was observed to see if he did anything suspicious, such as visit the victim’s grave or the crime scene.

A memo obtained by the Coloradan said that the technique was suggested by FBI behavior scientists. The FBI declined comment.

Bob Steele, an ethicist at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism education program, told the Coloradan that such tactics raise troubling ethics issues.

“It is exceptionally rare to have a law enforcement agency or government agency try to plant a patently false story in order to then generate a specific action, in this case on the part of a crime suspect,” Steele said. “It can corrupt and corrode the essential trust that must exist between law enforcement and journalism, even while there are different values and different purposes for the professionals involved.”

The controversy centers on the 1988 murder of Peggy Hettrick. Masters, now serving a life sentence, is seeking a new trial based on alleged missteps on the part of prosecutors, reports CNN.

Among the allegations made by Masters’ attorneys is that the prosecution concealed details of the false story during trial, according to the Rocky Mountain News.

The request for a new trial also hinges on allegations that the prosecution concealed the existence of another suspect, notes the Denver Post.

LONDON
A trend of healthy people taking pills to boost their mental performance is raising some ethics concerns, say British doctors.

The Reuters news agency reports that the British Medical Association last week called for a public debate over the implications of using drugs to improve memory and concentration.

According to the BBC, scientists in Britain are worried that the same type of people who are willing to undergo the risks of plastic surgery in search of the perfect body also may subject themselves to dangers in order to increase their brainpower.

BBC health reporter Clare Murphy writes: “Scientists are painting a picture of a time when toddlers pop pills on the way to playgroup while employees are forced to quaff various cocktails to boost their productivity. But sinister as that may sound, the benefits could be immense. A world where everyone is that much brighter might not just make for more enlightened conversation, it could accelerate the quest for a cure for cancer or an end to famine.”

The Irish Independent reports that the medical association’s ethics panel is concerned by evidence that more consumers are using drugs to increase cognitive function. A 2006 U.S. study, for example, found that of more than a thousand students questioned, more than 16 percent used prescription drugs as “study aids.”

London’s Daily Mirror reports that drugs often used to treat attention deficit disorder, such as Ritalin and modafinil, are being bought online by consumers who do not have those impairments but believe that the pills will enhance their mental ability.

From CareerBuilder.com:

“Is the cough on the other end of the line real? According to CareerBuilder.com’s annual survey on absenteeism at the office, 32 percent of workers said they have called in sick when they were well at least once in the last year. And while the majority of employers (75 percent) said they typically believe excuses given by employees, 35 percent reported they have checked up on an employee who called in sick and 16 percent said they have fired a worker for missing work without a legitimate excuse….

“Twenty-seven percent of workers said they consider their sick days to be equivalent to vacation days and one-in-ten admitted to playing hooky three times or more even though they were feeling well. One-in-five workers (23 percent) said they took the day off simply because they just didn’t feel like going to work that day. Fifteen percent missed work because they needed to relax, 11 percent had a doctor’s appointment, 9 percent wanted to catch up on sleep and another 9 percent had plans with family and friends.

“More than half (52 percent) of employers say Monday is the most popular day for employee absenteeism, followed by Friday at 24 percent and Saturday at 9 percent….

“While some employers are more skeptical of certain absences, others are incorporating more flexibility into their sick day programs. Sixty-nine percent of employers said they allow their team members to use sick days for mental health days.

” ‘Employers are placing a greater emphasis on work/life balance, offering more opportunities for employees to recharge and return to the office more productive,’ said Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder.com. ‘Your best bet is to be honest. If you’re a strong employee and you’re truthful about the time you need off, your employer is likely to give it to you. Lying about it, on the other hand, can have a lasting, negative impact on your credibility and job tenure.’

“When asked to share the most unusual excuses employees gave for missing work, employers offered the following real-life examples….”

“There is an old saying, The harder you try the luckier you get.”

– Gerald Ford (38th U.S. president, 1913-2006)