Ethics Newsline®

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

PALO ALTO, California
At a conference here in Silicon Valley last weekend, I heard two predictions that fell together for me like tumblers in a lock. The first came from Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, who pointed out that “only about 2 percent of the world’s data is digitized.” In other words, only a tiny fraction of our knowledge is currently available for use on computers, DVDs, or iPods. He expects that number to double in the next four years — a period during which, he says, there will be “more data created than in the history of the planet.”

Much of that information will be in video formats, which require immense amounts of data compared to print or audio. Hence the second prediction. It came from Google vice president Marissa Mayer, a self-professed geek who years ago was hired on as the infant company’s first female engineer. For her, the future lies in developing smaller, higher-capacity discs to store all of this data. She predicts that by 2015 you’ll be able to “carry on an iPod more video than you can watch in a lifetime.”

Taken together, those comments paint a heady future for the students at this conference, which was convened to honor the hundredth anniversary of the Castilleja School. By 2015, many of them will have graduated from this prestigious independent girls’ school and finished college. At that point, iPods in hand, they will come thundering into a workforce awash with moving images. How will this newly dense video culture impact their lives?

Some of the impact will be positive. They’ll have access to troves of video information unavailable to today’s graduates. At their fingertips they’ll find everything from sophisticated training manuals to classic Shakespeare performances. And when every cell-phone call is a video conference, they’ll be more in touch with family and friends, locally and globally, than any generation in history.

But what of the downside challenges? First, of course, are the ethical issues. One is pornography, which is already so pervasive that many corporations have developed tough and toothy sanctions to counter its corrosive effects on gender relations at work and at home. Put it all on iPods, and the evil expands exponentially. Another danger arises from abuse by those who use video to instruct viewers on everything from building nuclear weapons to cheating on tests. These ethical threats aren’t new; they existed in print as well. But the speed with which they can be communicated so vividly in the YouTube era is unprecedented.

The second downside is the sheer glut of information. Even if every iPod user had an hour a day for viewing, how would they know what to watch? The answer may lie in some yet-to-be-invented datavisory services. By providing customers with their own personal video broker or byte guide, they’ll help us sift through what’s available and extract the worthwhile.

More likely, however, tomorrow’s students will simply listen to their friends, either in person or through such sites as FriendFeed or Iminta that help them see what their acquaintances are watching. The result: The much-vaunted openness of the new video world will quickly become elitist. In television’s early days, everyone watched the same thing, making it hard for cliques to develop among those who had special access to the coolest stuff. That’s all changing: The new social stratification will depend on whose friends recommend the coolest stuff — and on who spends the most time watching what those friends are watching, for fear of missing something vital. What if that cuts into family or homework time, plunging students into lonely, screen-staring vigils in place of face-to-face conversations with real people? Is that too high a cost to pay for being on the edge?

And that raises a third video-culture challenge. Call it the silent scream, where the medium itself prevents those who use it from being heard. Like Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting “The Scream” — an iconic depiction of a desperate-looking, open-mouthed woman whose cry, by the very nature of oil on canvas, will never make a sound — the new video culture may actually be the medium that reduces human interaction. Those most yearning to be heard in the video marketplace will find themselves jostling for attention among a million other expressions. Their voices effectively will vanish, lost under a torrent of competing presentations.

And that raises one of the most subtly ethical challenges of our day: the marketing of new communication technologies as though they could actually democratize access to information. The central point of democracy isn’t that everyone gets to speak. It’s that others listen, that everyone’s voice matters, that every vote is counted. The grandly democratic promise of YouTube and its ilk — that they allow everyone’s work to be posted and shared — may ironically have the opposite effect. It may end up burying each individual work under so many gigabytes of other data that it stifles, not amplifies, the identity yearning for recognition and response.

This is not a plea to turn back the clocks or shoot all the programmers. It’s a plea for exercising our moral futurism, our capacity for over-the-horizon, predictive ethics. As we dash to develop ways to pack lifetimes of video onto credit-card-sized devices, we need to ask why we ought to do so — and what kind of moral world we are creating. If we’re smart enough to compress a whole Blockbuster store into a few digital-processing centimeters, surely we’re smart enough to foresee and mitigate the moral consequences of doing so.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

Last week’s commentary by Rushworth Kidder, which examined a parent’s decision not to tell her son’s teachers that the boy had been treated for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), drew an unusually high number of responses.

The moral question at stake involved a parent’s belief that her son, now no longer taking the drug Ritalin, would be labeled as academically and behaviorally deficient if teachers knew that he previously had been treated. The parent based her view on a prior encounter when, she said, a glowing progress report during a parent-teacher conference suddenly went sour after she disclosed that the boy had been prescribed the drug. She decided to conceal the prior diagnosis when moving to a new school.

Several of those who wrote to us echoed the views of a reader from Arizona who maintained that the son’s prior diagnosis of ADD was simply none of the new school’s business.

Many also shared the view of an Indiana reader who maintained that educators may label a student, consciously or unconsciously, if the teachers know of a prior ADD diagnosis: “I think it is fair to give the student a chance to succeed on his own without any of the preconceived burdens associated with this unless problems surface. Otherwise this could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy situation.”

Others, including several educators, contended that it is a stretch to assume that all teachers would react in the same manner as the one who immediately shifted gears when learning of the past diagnosis. But while teachers by and large are capable of seeing past labels, argued another reader, prior diagnoses have a way of coloring their views and might tempt them to stop looking for other reasons behind a student’s problems.

A reader from Canada maintained that “stereotyping a kid does make it easier to justify not solving his or her problem.”

And a reader from Illinois added this thought: “Our systems of education should be celebrating the energetic [students like the one described in the commentary], realizing he is capable of making better choices, and employing new methods to hold his attention, rather than retreating to the read-and-regurgitate, sentences-on-the-board-in-detention, and “grounded for life” mentality of years past. Behavioral problems are best handled by reasoning students, compassionate teachers and school administrators, and actively involved care-givers. Without the understanding of right behavior, we graduate smart young adults without the character to show up for work or too greedy to say no to creative accounting.”

– Compiled by Ethics Newsline® editor Carl Hausman

“FDA’s working hypothesis is that this was intentional contamination, but this is not yet proven.”

Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the drug center at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in written testimony provided last week to the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The House committee is investigating allegations that a Chinese company deliberately adulterated a crucial blood thinner, heparin, with massive amounts of a substandard but cheap chemical in order to save costs. The contaminated end product, distributed by Baxter International, has caused 81 deaths, reports the New York Times. Chinese officials have disputed the FDA’s contention, notes the paper.

Source: New York Times, Apr. 30.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 21 — Related Newsline Commentary, Aug. 20, 2007 — Related Newsline story, July 16, 2007.

Measure designed to deter growing practice of people avoiding testing due to fears of effects on jobs and insurance

WASHINGTON
The U.S. House of Representatives last week passed a bill that would bar companies from firing, refusing to hire, or otherwise discriminating against workers based on their genetic profiles.

UPI reports that the measure also would apply to group health plans and individual health insurance carriers. Plan administrators would be prohibited from determining eligibility or premiums based on genetic information.

According to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle, supporters of the bill described it as the first civil rights legislation of the twenty-first century.

“By freeing people from fear of genetic discrimination, we can unlock the tremendous life-saving and cost-saving potential of genetic research,” Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.), one of the chief sponsors of the bill, told the Chronicle. “More Americans will participate in genetic clinical trials, and more Americans will use these technologies to improve their health.”

Language in the bill describes the measure as establishing “a national and uniform basic standard … necessary to fully protect the public from discrimination and allay their concerns about the potential for discrimination, thereby allowing individuals to take advantage of genetic testing, technologies, research, and new therapies,” reports the Jurist.

The Senate previously approved the bill, and President Bush has indicated he will sign it into law, the Chicago Tribune notes.

Some representatives of business and industry have argued that employers have an ethical obligation to test for certain genetic predispositions, contending that the knowledge could prevent, for example, workers with a disposition to cancers caused by certain substances from exposure to those specific toxins.

But critics countered that the net effect of genetic testing was to dissuade the susceptible from taking advantage of the new technology because they feared the information would be abused by employers or insurers.

Sources: Jurist, May 1 — Congressional Quarterly, May 1 — San Francisco Chronicle, May 1 — UPI, May 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 7 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 25 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 22 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 14.

Siemens whacked with huge loss in wake of corruption probe; oil and gas companies are not forthcoming on extraction rights, according to TI report; a tourism group tries to reduce industry’s carbon footprint; and executive resigns after lying on résumé

VARIOUS DATELINES
Several angles on business ethics were featured in reports from the world press last week. Among them:

• German engineering giant Siemens last week announced a 67-percent slump in second-quarter net profits, a loss apparently linked to the aftershocks of a huge corruption scandal, reports the publication Spiegel Online. On Wednesday of last week, a law firm hired to probe Siemens’ problems found evidence of compliance violations in all of the parts of the conglomerate that it examined, Spiegel reports. The scandal centers on an estimated $2.1 billion in dubious payments, suspected to be bribes used to secure business for the engineering colossus in various nations, according to the BBC.
• Many oil and gas companies do not fully disclose the fees they pay to governments for extraction rights, creating opportunities for corruption, the watchdog group Transparency International claims. The anti-graft group claims that ExxonMobil is as secretive as Russian rival Lukoil and Chinese firm National Offshore Oil Corp. when it comes to reporting extraction-rights payments, according to a report from Forbes. Transparency International chair Huguette Labelle told Forbes: “The tragic paradox — that many resource-rich countries remain poor — stems from a lack of data on oil and gas revenues and how they are managed. Companies must do more to increase transparency.”
• Tourism executives are trying urgently to shrink the industry’s oversized carbon footprint, according to a report from the Associated Press, which covered the Pacific Asia Travel Association meeting in Bangkok. “There are no simple solutions,” Anna Pollack, head of a British tourism consultancy, told the AP. “Tourism is both a victim of and a contributor to climate change,” she said. “We’ve had a free lunch so far,” she added. “The industry hasn’t paid for the water it’s taken for golf courses, for emissions into the air, or the unique cultural and natural attractions tourists experience.” Participants spoke about various efforts to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint, including biofuel for airplanes, resorts built “green from the ground up,” and even recyclable golf tees made from bamboo.
• Bloomberg repots that Gregory Probert, the chief operating officer of nutritional supplement maker Herbalife Ltd., resigned last week after reportedly faking an academic degree. He had claimed a master’s degree from a program he never finished, according to Bloomberg, which notes that Probert joins a growing list of executives from major firms who have been booted after lying on their résumés.

Sources: Spiegel Online, Apr. 30 — Forbes, May 1 — AP, May 1 — Bloomberg, May 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Nov. 13, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 5, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 27, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 20, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 8, 2007.

At center of controversy is how much an employer may intrude on home life

OTTAWA
The ethical question of how closely an employee should be electronically tethered to the boss and the office emerged as a labor negotiation problem last week last week as a union representing government workers in Canada said it will confront use of BlackBerrys in its next round of collective bargaining.

According to reports from the Toronto Globe & Mail and the National Post, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) says use of the devices will be part of the next contract.

“For some people, having a BlackBerry is like, ‘We own you. You are our person, 24 hours, seven days a week,’” PSAC regional vice president Ed Cashman told the Globe & Mail. “Our members are running into situations where they’re not compensated properly for having to do work at home.”

But a report from the Agence France-Presse notes that some are skeptical about requiring that BlackBerry users be compensated for the time they spend online with the devices. They fear that by officially making BlackBerry use part of the job, such a stipulation will open the door to mandatory assignment of on-call devices and a further erosion of home and family life.

“That’s only going to legitimize its use,” Carleton University business professor Linda Duxbury told the Ottawa Citizen. “What they are trying to say is that an hour is worth ‘X’ amount of time. But, it’s not. It’s worth way more…. These people are interrupting their lives…. I wouldn’t want to legitimize it by [having employers] say, ‘We are entitled to send them messages because they are being compensated for it’,” she said.

Sources: Globe & Mail, May 1– Ottawa Citizen, May 1 — National Post, May 1 — AFP, Apr. 30.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Sept. 17, 2007 — Related Newsline story, June 25, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 6, 2006 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 6, 2006 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 27, 2006.

Law professor sues students for defamation; two Illinois professors settle suit over mandatory ethics test; Florida House passes tough educator-ethics bill

VARIOUS DATELINES
Interesting intersections of education and ethics were featured in the U.S. press last week. Among the stories:

• A University of Arkansas law professor has sued two of his students, claming they defamed him by calling him a racist, the New York Times reports. Richard Peltz, an authority on freedom-of-speech issues, filed the suit against two third-year students after a long-simmering debate about Peltz’s classroom remarks about affirmative action. According to the Times, Peltz, who is white, displayed what some of his black law students claim was a belittling satirical article about affirmative action. Peltz denies he is a racist and says he took part in a legitimate academic debate in which he questioned the effectiveness of affirmative action. “The Arkansas case could do more than give law students practical experience before they take the bar; it could also renew debate about free speech on campus and academic freedom,” the Times notes.
• Two professors at Southern Illinois University Carbondale have settled a lawsuit they brought after the state flunked them on a mandatory online ethics test, claming they finished too quickly, reports the Springfield State Journal-Register. Marvin Zeman and Walter Wallis will get credit for completing the test, which they took in 2006. The state invalidated their results, along with those of more than 250 others, saying it was impossible for them to have completed more than 80 pages of online coursework during the brief time they were recorded as being logged into the website. Zeman, among others, refused to retake the test, saying that doing so would be a tacit admission that he was guilty of misconduct on the first one. State officials would not comment on the settlement.
• Florida’s House last week unanimously passed a bill imposing harsh penalties for teachers who abuse students. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports that the Ethics in Education Act would classify certain teacher offenses as a “breach of public trust,” meaning that the state would be prohibited from paying retirement benefits. In addition, reports the Herald-Tribune, the bill would ban settlements that keep accusations against teachers secret if they leave the school district without challenging their firing. The measure also requires the state to help public and private schools develop ethics codes for teachers. The bill, which previously was approved by the Senate, now goes to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who is expected to sign it.

Sources: New York Times, May 1 — Springfield State Journal-Register, May 1 — Sarasota Herald-Tribune, May 2.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 31 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 8 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 12, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 12, 2004 — Related Newsline Commentary, June 30, 2003.

In the end, they decide it’s not a good idea to take control of other peoples’ computers, even if their intentions are good

SAN FRANCISCO
Computer security specialists are facing a difficult ethical dilemma: They have discovered how to remove a spam-spewing program from a network of machines surreptitiously captured by malicious software — but should they clean the machines of people they don’t know?

The London Register reports that about 25,000 machines are believed to be infected by a particular “botnet” — a program that turns computers into zombies that churn out spam without their owners knowing it. Most of the infected machines are believed to be owned by home users who are connected to the Internet via broadband.

Researchers at a company called TippingPoint Technologies have found a way to infiltrate and control the botnet, according to reports from Wired and the trade journal eWEEK. But in doing so, they would have to invade users’ computers.

“This is where we got into the ethical discussion,” researcher Cody Pierce said, according to a report from ComputerWorld. He and a fellow programmer wanted to seize control of the robot network and wipe out infected computers, but their boss disagreed, citing possible corporate liability.

Most comments on the company’s electronic bulletin board sided with taking out the botnet, but some agreed with the boss: “You not only face a moral dilemma, but updating a computer without authorization is illegal in the U.S.,” said one user, according to ComputerWorld. “I fall on the side of proactive patching, but there is more than just the moral decision to decide upon before taking action.”

Computer trade journal Information Security Magazine notes that the ethical dilemma has been around for a while. Editor Dennis Fisher observes: “The idea of writing code to automatically patch machines against a specific vulnerability or to disable existing malware is by no means a new one. Security specialists and researchers have been toying with the notion for years, and it has produced almost as much inflamed rhetoric as the arguments for and against full disclosure.”

“Many security experts have argued that regardless of the good intentions people have when releasing code … the idea of issuing commands to PCs owned by other people is not a good one,” he concludes.

Sources: eWEEK, May 1 — London Register, May 1 — Information Security Magazine, May 1 — Wired, Apr. 30 — ComputerWorld, Apr. 30.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Oct. 1, 2007 — Related Newsline story, June 4, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 23, 2006 — Related Newsline story, July 17, 2006 — Related Newsline story, May 22, 2006.

Committee to Protect Journalists lists places where murders of reporters go unsolved; journalists cry foul in Australia after police raid a newspaper; Italian government website publishes income tax data for all to see

VARIOUS DATELINES
Issues in international media ethics made headlines last week. Among the stories:

• A report on nations that fail to capture and prosecute those who murder journalists puts Iraq at the top of the list, but also cites several democracies, including India, the Philippines, and Russia. The report, compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), ranks 13 nations that each have at least five unsolved cases involving the killing of a journalist, according to Editor & Publisher. While the top five countries are in actual or virtual war zones — Iraq, Sierra Leon, Somalia, Columbia, and Sri Lanka — the CPJ maintains that most of the cases are reporters singled out for assassination, not accidental victims of war. India, the Philippines, and Russia are dangerous primarily because of the prevalence of organized crime and corruption, the report claims.
• A police raid on a newspaper in Perth, Australia, has been roundly condemned by the paper’s owner and other journalists, who claim it was politically motivated. The Australian Age reports that 16 police officers raided the offices of the Sunday Times, seeking the source of a government leak that was cited in a story claiming the Western Australia government was funding political advertising. Police blocked all of the exits to the building and subjected staff to searches of their bags when they left, according to the Age. Government officials did not immediately comment on the raid.
• Many Italians were outraged — as well as uncontrollably curious — last week when the government published tax-return data on a state website. ABC News reports that the site was taken down later in the day after a complaint from the nation’s privacy agency, but not before Italians had overrun the site, looking for data on how much money other people had earned. The government said it made the data public as part of a crackdown on tax evasion, according to ABC.

Sources: Editor & Publisher, May 1 — Australian Age, May 1 — ABC News, May 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 21 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 1, 2007 — Related Newsline story, May 2, 2005 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 21, 2003.

Christian Science Monitor reports on movement that is trying to clip the wings of frequent travelers

BOSTON
Christian Science Monitor correspondent G. Jeffrey MacDonald reports that a series of demonstrations last week across Britain is highlighting a global movement to reduce air travel.

“Behind this action lurks an ethics-based argument that’s trying to shame routine fliers in developed nations into flying less,” MacDonald writes. “The nub: The planet should not have to suffer the consequences of a fast-growing (if now troubled) air-travel industry. Hence, the argument goes, an ethical consumer should think twice before buying plane tickets.”

Fueling the debate are estimates that leisure travel may almost double by the year 2020, with most of those travelers expected to take to the skies.

Some scientists estimate that airplanes currently account for about 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Still, MacDonald notes, there are several ethical angles to the dilemma: “That flying has a detrimental effect on the environment is widely accepted. The ethical debate hinges instead on such questions as: How much damage is acceptable? When is a flight justified? And when do the benefits of cross-cultural interaction, made possible by flying, outweigh the costs borne by the environment and those who live near runways?”

Spokespeople for the airline industry added one other contention, according to the Monitor report: Employing more than 11 million people worldwide may have some ethical value in its own right.

Source: Christian Science Monitor, May 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Feb. 11 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 28 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 29, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 24, 2006 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 23, 2006.

“The currently hard-pressed put a higher personal priority on being wealthy than do the well-to-do,” survey finds

From the Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends project:

“Who says Americans worship at the feet of the almighty dollar? Not the American public. Only 13% of adults say it’s ‘very important’ for them to be wealthy, ranking this personal priority far behind six others measured in a new survey by the Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends project.

“But don’t get Americans wrong — a majority certainly wouldn’t mind being rich. According to the survey, another 43% of adults say being wealthy is ’somewhat important’ to them, while about the same proportion say it’s ‘not too important’ (33%) or ‘not important at all’ (10%)….

“Four times more people say ‘doing volunteer work or donating to charity’ is a very important priority than say the same about being wealthy (52% vs. 13%). And about five times more Americans (67%) say it’s very important to them to have enough free time, the top-rated value in this survey….

“Who most wants to be rich? Those who aren’t, this survey suggests. Fully 22% of those with family incomes of less than $20,000 a year say it’s ‘very important’ for them to be wealthy. That’s more than double the proportion of adults who earn $100,000 or more a year.

“Paradoxically, while the least affluent are the most likely to value wealth the most, they’re also among the most likely to value wealth the least. Fully 13% of those in the less-than $20,000 income category say becoming wealth is ‘not important at all’ to them, nearly double the proportion of those in the $100,000 or more category who hold this view. As it turns out, there’s an age-related explanation for these seemingly inconsistent results. Those in the lowest income tier contain disproportionately large numbers of adults under the age of 30, a group that most values wealth, but also a heavy share of retirement-age adults, a group that values wealth the least….

“Wealth holds a great attraction for the young, this survey finds. Fully 20% of all adults under age 30 say being wealthy is a top priority — easily the largest proportion of any age group. Another 42% say it’s at least somewhat important to them. But the dream apparently diminishes with age. Only about 14% of adults between the ages of 30 and 49 place a high premium on being wealthy. And by the time adults reach their 50s, just one-in-ten place a similarly high priority on riches.

“Minorities also are significantly more likely than whites to value wealth. More than a quarter (26%) of all blacks says that it’s very important to them to be rich, nearly three times the proportion of whites (9%). Hispanics are more than twice as likely as whites to rate wealth as a top priority (21% vs. 9%). Overall, first-generation Americans are twice as likely as subsequent generations to say it’s important to them to be rich (25% vs. 12%).

“Education follows a similar pattern….

“Being wealthy tends to be highly valued by many whose current circumstances suggest they face long odds of ever becoming well-off….”

For more information, see: Full press release, Apr. 30 — Full poll results from Pew.

“Genius is childhood recalled at will.”

– Charles Baudelaire (French poet, critic, and translator, 1821-1867)