Ethics Newsline®

For more information, see this week’s Research Report.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week I spent four days in New Orleans, a city in comeback mode two-and-a-half years after the ravages of hurricane Katrina. Traveling as trustees of a charitable foundation, our group met dozens of community leaders, government appointees, business executives, bankers, demographers, environmentalists, and local residents. We saw the gray-brown watermark on the sides of buildings several yards above ground level — evidence of a flood that immersed an area seven times the size of Manhattan, in some places for as long as 56 days. We heard chilling stories of personal loss and social disorganization. Yet we also found evidence that in small but significant ways, a new political and moral order is struggling to be born — one that could shape not only New Orleans but the nation.

If that sounds overblown, consider that New Orleans is the site of one of the two great American stories of this still-young century. If 9/11 represented a major test of the nation’s ability to respond to international attacks, Katrina tested our ability to respond to domestic crises. Both are ongoing stories. Both leave us wondering whether we’re passing or failing. Both mark points of definitive, irreversible change.

You can’t hang around New Orleans for very long without hearing people talk about change — and about the “silver lining” arising from the calamity. Environmentalists see a silver lining in the new concern for the nearby wetlands, which could have significantly reduced the storm surge if they hadn’t already been degraded by decades of commercial development. Community organizers see the silver lining in the sound of once-silent citizens speaking up to save neighborhoods devastated by the floods. Economists see it in the resilience of local entrepreneurs who, working with nonprofit microcredit banks, are reopening day-care centers, driving schools, debris-removal companies, and hosts of other mom-and-pop businesses. Churches see it in once-separate black and white congregations coming together in new forms of collective action.

That doesn’t mean the challenges aren’t severe. New Orleans may never again reach its pre-Katrina population. Nearly 40 percent of the population, according to figures from the Brookings Institution, live below the poverty level. The destruction of 100,000 homes from wind and flood damage has wiped out family investments and pushed rents up by nearly 50 percent. The final bill for repairing present damage and investing in a new future will exceed $100 billion.

Still, the optimism is palpable. Why? Because what’s also being destroyed are some old ways of thinking. The city’s entrenched and infamous public corruption is at last being resolutely challenged. So is the idea that you can build houses safely without stilts — slab on grade, as they say here — on dangerously low land behind a flawed levee system. So is the idea that you can simply reconstruct school buildings in an education system ranked among the nation’s worst before Katrina hit.

But there’s deeper change afoot. To understand it, imagine a horizontal scale with two end points labeled, respectively, Big government will save us and Big government will destroy us. Conventional wisdom puts each of us somewhere along that scale, roughly related to our location along the conservative-liberal spectrum. So you might predict that impoverished, jobless, welfare-dependent communities in New Orleans would cluster toward the liberal end of the scale, while the city’s oil-rich, high-living, internationally sophisticated communities would have little use for government.

Instead, voice after voice last week echoed that of Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network. In the weeks and months following the storm, she told us, “I thought that government agencies would come forth and help us. It didn’t happen.” Yet there is equal skepticism, even from business leaders, about New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s declaration that “market forces” should be allowed to determine the city’s redevelopment.

In an odd way, it’s as though New Orleans finds itself at right angles to that whole scale, its residents distrusting both ends points and shifting instead to live along a different, perpendicular axis. They’re rolling up their sleeves and getting things done themselves, depending less on governments or markets and more on their own self-reliance. Of course they need money and regulations — two things that governments provide. And of course they need financial incentives and economic opportunities, which markets create. But in the new realism of survival, the old horizontal idolatries of either one are collapsing like shotgun houses in a storm surge.

In an election year, that collapse has ramifications for politics just as, in a period of economic uncertainty, it has financial implications. But primarily, in an age groping to understand 9/11 and Katrina, that shift has ethical consequences. In a city called the Big Easy, the easy language of bigness — in praise of big government or in adulation of vast market forces — is losing sway. Instead, in conversation after conversation, you hear the language of individual values. People here talk about responsibility for self and others. They talk about a race-blind respect for everyone’s dignity. They’re demanding public truth telling, a compassion for all who suffer when disaster strikes, and a justice that is incorruptible, swift, and fair.

Will that shift from horizontal to perpendicular thinking reach beyond New Orleans? Will it create a fledgling social order at right angles to the past, equally wary of governments and markets? That may depend on the nation’s youngest voters — the newly energized activists who continue to pour into New Orleans, gravitate toward presidential campaigns, and distrust the politics of polarity. But that’s a subject for another column.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

“The judgment was made by the pharmacokeneticists at the time that in doing the calculation, it was probably appropriate to make that correction. Later on when people looked at it in a different time frame, they concluded that probably the correction shouldn’t be applied.”

– Johnson & Johnson lawyer Bob Tucker, talking to the New York Times in an article examining what should happen when the FDA approves drugs whose flaws were either hidden or unknown during the approval process. Johnson & Johnson is fighting a lawsuit accusing the company of obscuring unfavorable test results while seeking FDA approval for its popular Ortho Evra birth control patch. The drug was approved and now Johnson & Johnson, in a position supported by the Bush administration, says the public should not be able to sue over an FDA-approved drug that only later was shown to be harmful, a standard known as pre-emption. The Times notes that the Supreme Court “is to rule on a case next term that could make pre-emption a legal standard for drug cases. The court already ruled in February that many suits against the makers of medical devices like pacemakers are pre-empted.”

Source: New York Times, Apr. 6.

Stories include calls for full or partial boycotts and the jailing of another Chinese dissident for criticizing government

VARIOUS DATELINES
Ethics in sports remains one of the year’s hottest topics, with lead stories last week focusing on the implications of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games in China, a nation widely criticized for human rights abuses. Among the stories:

• The president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) last week said he sees no momentum among governments for a boycott of the coming Olympics and said the IOC has no regrets about making Beijing the venue, according to reports from the Voice of America and the Sydney Morning Herald. According to the Herald report, IOC president Jacques Rogge maintains that China’s policies toward Tibet have no bearing on the Olympic agenda.
• Hu Jia, an activist widely regarded as a symbol of China’s determination to crack down on pre-Olympic dissent, last week was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for criticizing the government and for speaking to foreign reporters, according to a report from the McClatchy News Service. Critics are characterizing the sentence as the latest sign that Chinese officials see the run-up to the Olympics as a dangerous period in which protest should be harshly dealt with in order to send a signal to dissenters, according to the report.
• On Monday, French security officials “snuffed out the Olympic torch and carried it through Paris in the safety of a bus at least five times … before canceling the final run of a relay” following intense protests against China’s human rights record, notes the Associated Press. That record has been in the spotlight lately amid harsh crackdowns by the Chinese government against protests that began in Tibet, sparking international criticism. Chinese leaders last week called on Tibetan officials to crack down on protestors who may try to disrupt plans to take the Olympic flame to the Top of Mount Everest, Bloomberg reports.
• France is embroiled in one of the most vocal debates over a possible boycott of the opening ceremony, but as the CBC reports an alternative protest is gathering steam: A group of French athletes plans to wear a badge supporting human rights in Tibet. The badge would feature the slogan “Pour un monde meilleur,” meaning “for a better world.”
• A prominent political leader in Britain has called on prime minister Gordon Brown to boycott the Olympics’ August 8 opening ceremony in protest of China’s human rights record, the BBC reports. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said the prime minister could not attend the event “in good conscience.” Brown says he will not boycott the ceremony.
• A new poll in Canada says only one eighth of Canadians favor a full boycott of the Olympics, though a strong majority would endorse some less-drastic form of protest. The survey, conducted by the Canadian Press news service and the Harris-Decima agency, is in sync with the current response from the Canadian government, which steadfastly has avoided discussing a possible boycott.
• Fifteen members of the U.S. House of Representatives last week urged president Bush not to attend the games at all. CNN reports that the call followed an earlier comment from House speaker Nancy Pelosi urging the president to skip the opening ceremony. While Bush has vowed to protest human rights violations with Chinese leaders, he has resisted the notion of a boycott of any portions of the event. On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hilary Rodham Clinton joined the calls for President Bush to boycott the opening ceremony.
• China, meanwhile, continues to tell the United States and other nations to stay out of its affairs and not mix politics with sport. The government-run People’s Daily quotes a high official as condemning House speaker Pelosi’s remarks, urging “political figures in the U.S. to respect the spirit and principles of the Olympic Games, adopt a responsible attitude toward the Games and the torch relay, and not to do anything that is against people’s aspirations.”

Sources: AP, Mar. 7 — AP, Mar. 7 — BBC, Apr. 5 — Voice of America, Apr. 5 — Sydney Morning Herald, Apr. 5 — CBC, Apr. 5 — Canadian Press, Apr. 5 — McClatchy News Service, Apr. 5 — CNN, Apr. 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 24 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 24 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 25 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 18 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 22.

Lee Kun-Hee says he is “ashamed” and will abide by decision of prosecutors, but is not specific about allegations

SEOUL
The head of South Korea’s largest business empire last week said he was “ashamed” and would abide by the results of a high-profile probe into corruption allegations at Samsung.

Lee Kun-Hee made the remarks after emerging from an 11-hour interrogation at a special prosecutor’s office over the weekend, the Agence France-Presse reports.

“I will humbly accept the results of the special probe and do my best not to let this kind of things [sic] happen again,” he said, according to the report.

The Seoul-based Korea Times reports that Lee was not specific about the allegations for which he was willing to take responsibility.

According to South Korean paper Dong-a Ilbo (East Asia Times), investigators are probing charges that Lee was involved in the creation of slush funds, illicit lobbies, and an illegal transfer of managerial control to his son.

Prosecutors have raided several of Samsung’s buildings during the probe, reports UPI.

Ethics questions related to Samsung resonate with a special intensity in South Korea, where businesses and their leaders are often revered.

And, as the Seoul-based Yonhap News agency notes, Samsung’s affairs have a

huge impact on the nation’s economy: The firm is responsible for nearly a

quarter of South Korea’s gross domestic product and a quarter of its total exports.

Sources: Korea Times, Apr. 5 — Dong-a Ilbo (East Asia Times), Apr. 5 — UPI, Apr. 5 — AFP, Apr. 5 — Yonhap News Agency, Apr. 3.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 10 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 22 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 10, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 26, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 13, 2007.

At issue: moral implications of weight-loss surgery, skeletal fashion models, physicians’ ethics beliefs, secret DNA sampling, outsourcing of clinical drug trials, and home testing kits to determine sex of unborn

VARIOUS DATELINES
Controversies in life sciences captured headlines in a variety of venues last week as new technologies continued to push the ethics envelope. Among the stories:

• Ethics concerns surround a new type of elective surgery, reports the Wall Street Journal, as “medical-device makers, venture capitalists, and surgeons are racing to turn a once-controversial weight-loss procedure into the next big thing.” The Journal writes that gastric binding, a surgical intervention to reduce the usable size of the stomach and the amount of food that an obese patient can consume, took off after a firm began directly advertising the procedure to consumers — an unusual and controversial tactic for a surgical device. Surgeons across the country also are pushing weight-loss surgery at free seminars as well as on the Internet.
• In another development related to the ethics of body weight, a British modeling agency called Quintessentially Models recently announced that it will refuse to hire so-called size-zero women — abnormally thin models — and will work with the Britain’s largest eating-disorders charity to promote nutrition, according to a report from fashion-industry publication Vogue.
• Under regulations published last week by U.K. medical authorities, doctors will be required to display posters or hand out leaflets disclosing any ethics objections they may harbor toward abortion or other controversial medical issues. The Times of London reports that the General Medical Council also mandates that doctors must set aside their personal beliefs when the patient wishes a legal medical option with which the doctor disagrees, or refer the patient to another physician who does not hold the same ethical objections. The admonitions are set out in what is characterized as an advisory document, but the council stipulates that “serious or persistence failure to follow this guidance will put your [medical] registration at risk,” notes the Times.
• Civil libertarians are challenging the ethics and legality of a law enforcement practice known as “surreptitious sampling,” in which police gather DNA samples by following suspects and waiting for evidence such as a discarded cigarette butt. “Critics argue that by covertly collecting DNA contained in the minute amounts of saliva, sweat, and skin that everyone sheds in the course of daily life, police officers are exploiting an unforeseen loophole in the requirement to show probable cause that a suspect has committed a crime before conducting a search,” the New York Times writes.
• India has overtaken China as the number-one destination for clinical drug trials, according to the Times of India. The market is lucrative, with up to $2 billion expected to flow into the country annually by 2010, according to the paper. The Times report cites various Indian officials as claiming the nation’s doctors have better reputations than their Chinese counterparts, and that India follows stricter ethics guidelines. But authorities in India acknowledge that there are problems associated with the growing industry, including a shortage of personnel to serve on ethics committees that monitor the safety of participants.
• The Ottawa Citizen examines an ethics issue just beginning to show up on moral radar: the implications of readily available home-testing devices that determine the sex of unborn children. “Some families might use that information for more than just choosing nursery décor,” says the unbylined report. “In India and China, many families actively prevent female births. The combination of sex-testing with the availability of abortion could lead to an abhorrent dystopia — a society that has weeded out one gender.” The report notes, though, that there are instances in which the ethics of sex selection become even more complicated, such as one case in which a couple is suing because their efforts to select the sex of their baby were unsuccessful. The problem: The parents wanted to avoid passing along a genetic blood disorder that affects only males.

Sources: Times of India, Apr. 5 — Ottawa Citizen, Apr. 5 — Wall Street Journal, Apr. 4 — Vogue, Mar. 13 — New York Times, Apr. 3 — Times of London, Mar. 17.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 31 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 24 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 17 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 10 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 10.

Man says the whole thing was made up because he was drunk and prone to “severe exaggeration”

LONDON
In one of the more bizarre media-ethics issues in recent memory, a newspaper journalist in Britain was confronted with the dilemma of whether to use remarks that were made then characterized as “off the record,” and then retracted.

While the basic dilemma of putting something off the record retroactively does surface on occasion, this time it was a murder confession.

And in this instance, reports the BBC, the person who made the confession was a multimillionaire publisher who now denies it all, saying he was drunk at the time.

Felix Dennis, one of the founders of the counterculture magazine Oz, confessed to a murder “about 25 years ago” after sharing several bottles of wine with a Times of London reporter.

He told the Times’s Ginny Dougary that he pushed a man off a cliff in Connecticut because the man had been harassing a female friend of his. Dougary says that despite her repeated warnings that such a story would be “awkward” if it appeared in print, he stuck to the statement. The next day Dennis asked that the statement not be used, the Times reports.

In a follow-up communication, Dennis said his “severe exaggeration” was brought on by mood swings and interaction between medicine and alcohol.

Dougary, though, went ahead with the original story.

A spokesman for Dennis, when contacted by the London Daily Telegraph, claimed the story was “ridiculous” and declined to discuss it. Police in various locales, including the supposed Connecticut venue of the supposed murder, told the Telegraph they may investigate the claims, though no decisions had been made as of late last week.

The London-based Guardian published an analysis of the ethics issues surrounding the interview, noting that journalists have faced dilemmas about whether to quote remarks apparently made on the record but later retracted by interviewees.

“We’ve been here before,” writes the Guardian’s Chris Tryhorn. “Just last month an aide to U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama quit following an interview in the Scotsman which reported a disparaging remark about Hillary Clinton she claimed was ‘off the record.’”

Sources: BBC, Apr. 4 — Guardian, Apr. 2 — Times of London, Apr. 2.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 10 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 10 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 3 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 25 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 28.

In some of the more unusual news from the ethics file, good-guy hackers receive advanced training, farmers face increasing scrutiny by those who keep ethics scorecards, and a businessman who wants to promote education about the works of Ayn Rand hits some resistance at colleges

VARIOUS DATELINES
Ethics dilemmas involving some unusual scenarios made last week’s news from the business world. Among the stories:

• The Scripps News Service reports on an unusual education program in Redwood City, California, that teaches computer professionals how to infect computers with viruses, steal information, and freeze programs — but only if they pledge to use their powers for good and not evil. Students who pass the course, according to the report, are certified as “ethical hackers,” who then are paid to probe corporate and government networks and look for flaws before the bad guys find them. But the Scripps report notes that the bad guys, known as “black hats,” still hold the upper hand, with more than 5.5 million destructive software programs loosed on the Internet in 2007.
• Farmers, who often are drawn to their business because of its independence, increasingly are finding that they are subject to ethics oversight — something many regard as the imposition of a corporate Big Brother — according to an analysis from the Winnipeg Free Press. Some livestock producers have been under scrutiny for a decade or so because of animal-rights activities, according to the report. But increasingly, concerns over the environment are affecting producers of other agricultural goods. Many companies now check whether agricultural producers are using environmentally sustainable practices and providing good working conditions for laborers.
• A prominent businessman who wants to donate money to several colleges is attaching some strings to the gift and prompting an ethics debate. The Charlotte Observer reports that banker John Allison was captivated by the works of Ayn Rand as a college student at the University of North Carolina — and now wants to give cash to several institutions as long as they include Rand’s controversial novel Atlas Shrugged in the curriculum. Many campuses are balking, reports the Observer, saying that such an agreement would compromise academic integrity. Atlas Shrugged is viewed as a tribute to capitalism and is predicated on Rand’s philosophy that individuals have the right to guide their lives by their self-interest.

Sources: Scripps News Service, Apr. 5 — Charlotte Observer, Apr. 6 — Guardian, Apr. 4 — Winnipeg Free Press, Mar. 29.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 3 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 14 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 10. 2007 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 29, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 18, 2006.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the hammer fell harder on most other market segments, making SRI funds a comparatively attractive option

BOSTON
For the ethically minded, recent bad news contains a kernel of good news, according to a report from the Christian Science Monitor.

First, the bad news: Socially responsible funds took a beating in the first quarter of this year, as did the rest of the mutual-fund market.

But the ethical sector appeared to fare a little better than the rest of the market, according to the paper. “Socially responsible (SR) funds, which bring moral values to bear on stock selection, on the whole suffered slightly less in the first quarter than their unscreened peers, according to data from fund tracker Morningstar. Domestic SR equity funds performed better than 56 percent of peer funds in their respective categories,” the Monitor reports.

Part of the reason, according to experts interviewed by the Monitor, is that some socially responsible funds may be benefiting from the fact that recession-wary investors are shying away from cyclically sensitive stocks, such as defense contractors, which SR funds routinely avoid.

But MacDonald notes that many funds that specialize in alternative energy got clobbered in the first quarter because investors do not regard them as safe havens.

Source: Christian Science Monitor, Apr. 7.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Feb. 18 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 11 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 28 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 10, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 24, 2007.

“But majority of Americans support the government helping people stay in their homes,” Gallup says

From Gallup:

“A new Gallup Poll, conducted March 24-27, shows that 6 in 10 Americans oppose the federal government taking steps to help prevent major Wall Street investment companies from failing.

“On March 13, Bear Stearns told the Federal Reserve it would file for bankruptcy the next day and as a result, the Fed voted on March 14 to extend the investment company emergency credit to keep it from failing. On Sunday, March 16, the Fed, with the support of the U.S. Treasury, extended a $29 billion loan against Bear Stearns assets to facilitate its merger with JP Morgan.

“On Wednesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke defended this highly unusual emergency action by stating, ‘Given the current exceptional pressures on the global economy and financial system, the damage caused by a default by Bear Stearns could have been severe and extremely difficult to contain.’…

“While the Fed’s effort to maintain financial stability is clearly justified when viewed in economic terms, it is opposed by a surprisingly uniform 6 in 10 Americans across a wide variety of demographic groups: men (61%) and women (60%); those in the East (55%), Midwest (60%), South (64%), and West (62%); those with annual incomes of less than $35,000 (61%), of $35,000 to $74,999 (59%), and of $75,000 or more (62%); and even those affiliated with political parties (or with no party): Republicans (61%), independents (64%), and Democrats (57%).

“In sharp contrast to their opposition to helping Wall Street investment companies, Americans — by a margin of 56% to 42% — support having the federal government take steps to help prevent people from losing their homes because they can’t pay their mortgages….

“While federal officials, the president, and the Congress may act against public opinion to preserve global financial stability, it seems hard to believe they will not also respond to help American homeowners. In fact, swooping in to rescue struggling homeowners could be crucial in offsetting consumer resentment toward the Fed over its Wall Street bailout….”

For the full Gallup press release, Apr. 3, click here.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 17.

“There is not lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him.”

– John Steinbeck (U.S. writer, 1902-1968)