Ethics Newsline®

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

The other day someone asked me how good people could come to such different judgments on the major ethical issues of the world. Before I could stop myself, I was quoting a nifty little apothegm penned by the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope in his “Essay on Criticism”:

‘Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

That was in the age of wind-up pocket watches — before the Greenwich Mean Time beeper on the BBC, or atomic clocks synchronized by satellites, or www.time.gov. Yet Pope’s metaphor is timeless: Given our different rhythms and singular experiences, we each think our judgments are right. When his couplet crossed my mind, it so exactly answered my friend’s question (or so I fancied) that I had no choice but to blurt it out.

Or blurt it out almost. I think I turned around the first sentence, putting “watches” before “judgments.” And I know I said “goes,” silently bringing Pope’s grammar into line with niggling twenty-first-century standards. Only later did I search out a copy of Pope’s poem on the Web in preparation for writing this column.

But why did this couplet cross my mind in the first place? Because somewhere in my high-school English classes we committed it to memory. I can’t recall whether we were required to or thought it would be an amusing challenge. Either way, there it was — and decades later, here it still is.

The question is, Will it be there in the minds of today’s children when they grow up? Or will the constant immersion in the Web, with its dazzling glut of information on every conceivable topic, have dulled their mnemonic capacities? Will they laugh off memorizing as some outmoded form of mental gymnastics? After all, if every scrap of public information and every verbal artifact of our culture is there for the Googling, why memorize anything? Why develop something our ancestors revered — a well-stocked mind — if you have instant, searchable access to the Web? Why bother to know stuff when you can look it up?

One answer lies in an object that provides a telling metaphor for our age: random access memory, or RAM. As a set of integrated circuits in your computer, RAM lets you access information in any order. It’s not like a videotape, which you must tediously rewind to the precise place you want. With RAM, you get any bit of data as quickly as any other bit, regardless of its relationship to other bits and despite its location. Hence the word random.

Like RAM, the Web treats every bit of information as equivalent to every other. It passes no judgments nor creates any priorities unless you direct it to. Only when you ask to know, say, the year that Pope published his “Essay” will it pluck his name from millions of others, link it to publish rather than hundreds of other possible verbs, and deliver the answer (1711). It never comes back to you with a pop-up to say, “Yo, nobody reads Pope anymore. Everybody’s asking for Harry Potter or the latest Botox book. May I redirect your search toward these more timely bits?”

That kind of prioritizing would strike us as ludicrous, yet we’re doing exactly that when we memorize. If you say, “That’s an amazing poem — I think I’ll memorize it,” you’ve imposed a radical hierarchy on your information. You’ve said, “This matters more than nearly every other poem in the world.” When something triggers the memory of its lines, as the question about matters of conscience did for me, the relevant passage swims into view.

Just because it came into view, of course, doesn’t mean I had to blurt it out. I probably struck my friend as a walking bit of arcana or a traveler from an antique land. She was gracious enough not to stare. Perhaps she’s right: Maybe tomorrow’s adults won’t trot out accumulated knowledge in this way, but will be much quicker than we are to find it on the Web.

But the question is, How will they know what to look for? Where will they form the taste for words, the relish for deftly expressed ideas and pithy epitomes of wisdom that help shape thought? And if they find such treasures, will the insistent bleating of the email grant them enough leisure, combined with enough concentration, to memorize anything?

This is not a diatribe against the modern: As I said, I couldn’t have written this column (or not nearly as efficiently) without help from Google. It’s more an observation about a right-versus-right matter of conscience, which is that our access to the world’s RAM is, morally, both a blessing and a curse. It either holds open the possibility of a fundamental change in the way we use our minds, or it foretells the greatest degradation our culture has ever had in its collective memory.

Which is it? That depends. “‘Tis with our judgments as our watches….”

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

“Had the toxic waste been cleaned up, the contaminated groundwater would not have happened. Dow was the first crime. The second crime was government negligence.”

– Dr. Mira Shiva, speaking to the New York Times in an article chronicling the groundwater contamination — and severe birth defects — near Bhopal, India, where a pesticide plant owned by U.S.-based Union Carbide released 40 tons of poisonous gas into the air in 1984. That dawn-time disaster killed more than 3,000 people immediately and an estimated 8,000 people within two weeks.

The site has never been cleaned up and is suspected of contaminating the local groundwater, crippling children and poisoning residents in the process.

Michigan-based Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide seven years after the accident, paid the Indian government $470 million to compensate residents, and maintains that it has no responsibility to clean up the contaminated land. “As there was never any ownership, there is no responsibility and no liability — for the Bhopal tragedy or its aftermath,” Dow spokesman Scot Wheeler told the Times. The paper reports that Wheeler “went on to say that Dow could not finance remediation efforts, even if it wanted to, because it could potentially open up the company to further liabilities.”

The article notes that the Indian government expended the original settlement to compensate victims, and now lacks the funds to clean up the site. It fears that pursuing Dow aggressively would harm its chances to attract foreign investment, reports the Times.

Source: New York Times, July 7.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, July 26, 2004 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 24, 2003 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 9, 2002.

Among the stories: Google sued by company seeking identities of YouTube viewers; data breaches on the rise, often due to loss of laptops and insider theft; audit says State Department does a poor job of securing private passport information

VARIOUS DATELINES
The uneasy balance between advancing technology and diminishing privacy was the subject of several major stories last week. Among them:

• Two of the most salient ethical issues related to high tech — privacy and intellectual property — were debated last week after a U.S. federal judge ordered Google, owner of YouTube, to turn over records of videos viewed by users. Reuters reports that while the action comes as part of a showdown over video piracy, with Viacom requesting the information as part of a $1 billion copyright infringement suit, privacy advocates are crying foul, claiming that the data could be used to finger individual users. Representatives of the privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation say the decision threatens to expose “deeply private information.” Attorneys for both YouTube and Viacom say they are attempting to work out a way to keep the identities of individual users private, reports Reuters.
• Privacy advocates in the United Kingdom are protesting the arrival of Google’s Street View, an adjunct to the search firm’s popular mapping service that shows a driver’s view, from ground level, of streets, buildings, and people. The BBC reports that privacy groups are claiming that U.K. laws, which are more stringent than those in the United States, would prohibit the photography of people on the street without their explicit permission. Google, which began limited street mapping in France several weeks ago, responded to protests there by blurring the faces of passersby and car registration numbers, reports MacWorld UK. The service, which collects the images with specially equipped camera mounts on cars, caused similar concern in the United States when some people protested that the company invaded their privacy by putting their movements on display for a worldwide audience.
• Businesses, governments, and universities reported a 69 percent increase in data breaches during the first half of 2008 compared to the same time period a year ago, according to a survey by a nonprofit group, the Washington Post reports. The survey, conducted by the Identity Theft Resource Center, found that about a third of the breaches stemmed from businesses. Rates of breaches among health care providers and banks increased, according to the survey, but decreased among educational institutions, government agencies, and the military. The leading identifiable cause of data breaches: lost or stolen laptops and other digital storage media. According to a summary of the report from Forbes, the second-leading factor in loss of sensitive data is insider theft. Researcher Linda Foley tells Forbes that insider theft is “the path of least resistance. As in retail, it’s much easier for a cashier to steal money out of the till than for a robber to come in with a mask and a gun.”
• Government workers repeatedly snooped on the private details of high-profile passport records, according to a report from the U.S. State Department Inspector General. According to UPI, the Inspector General claims there is a lack of control over the data of the 127 million Americans with passports. The audit was undertaken after news reports revealed that three contract workers had accessed private passport files for three of the U.S. presidential candidates. In addition to politicians, UPI reports, workers seemed fascinated by entertainers, with one unidentified celebrity’s file accessed 352 times by 72 people.
• Two civil rights groups have filed a federal lawsuit asking the U.S. Justice Department to turn over records related to claims that the government uses people’s cell phones in order to track their movements, reports technology trade journal InformationWeek. The suit, jointly filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, claims that the government used cell-phone information to track users’ locations without any court oversight.

Sources: MacWorld, July 5 — BBC, July 5 — UPI, July 5 — Reuters, July 4 — InformationWeek, July 2 — Washington Post, July 1 — Forbes, June 30.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, May 19 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 21 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 31 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 24 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 10.

Analysts predict the ruling will open a legal and ethical Pandora’s box of future problems for Internet commerce

PARIS
In an evolving legal and ethics dispute that could have wide implications for online commerce, a French court last week ordered eBay to pay $63 million for failing to prevent counterfeit goods from being sold via its massive auction site.

According to the Financial Times, the court also ruled against eBay on a claim that it breached distribution arrangements for luxury perfumes, which were supposed to be sold only in limited quantities by certain vendors.

eBay said it will appeal the verdict, calling the ruling in favor of luxury firm LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA products an “anti-competitive overreach,” reports Bloomberg.

LVMH internal counsel Didier Malka told the Wall Street Journal that the importance of the decision lies in the fact that “companies like eBay are not simply hosts and, therefore, passive, they are also brokers.”

TIME magazine reports that the issue goes beyond the question of counterfeiting and enters the complex territory of exactly who controls the Internet.

“The problem eBay faces is that that battle is taking place in France, where rules pertaining to the Worldwide Web can seem downright provincial,” writes TIME’s Bruce Crumley, reporting from Paris. “In the late 1990s, for example, judges began ruling that French Internet service providers were legally and financially responsible for objectionable content published by sites they hosted — cases usually lodged by celebrities angered at finding scantily clad paparazzi photos of themselves posted by anonymous (and less than affluent) webmasters. And in 2000, Paris courts ordered Yahoo! to comply with a national law prohibiting the sale of hate crime memorabilia by blocking French access to all its international sites auctioning Nazi paraphernalia, most of which were in the U.S.”

Analyst Daniel Altman, writing in the International Herald Tribune, notes that the prospect of government and businesses worldwide pursuing Internet firms poses a wide range of difficult scenarios. “What if,” Altman asks, “countries around the world sued — and fined — Amazon for selling books they considered libelous or blasphemous? How about if they went after YouTube for broadcasting videos they thought were indecent? There are no rules pertaining to this stuff. For now, many countries, especially in the Middle East, simply block the sites they don’t like. Yet there’s little to stop them from suing, especially when the corporations that own the websites do business inside their borders. I think we’re going to see more of these cases. Do we need a global authority to deal with them, or shall we leave it to the national courts?”

Sources: Financial Times, July 1 — International Herald Tribune, July 1 — Wall Street Journal, July 1 — Bloomberg, June 30 — TIME, June 30.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Aug. 6, 2007 — Related Newsline story, June 18, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 20, 2006 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 22, 2005 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 4, 2002.

Accounting rules, credit ratings, and low-price high fashion figure in headlines

NEW YORK and LONDON
The way profits are tallied and the methods in which prices are slashed were viewed through the ethics lens last week in several press reports. They include:

• U.S. officials say they will propose changes in accounting regulations in order to make U.S. businesses a more attractive investment overseas, but critics say the move could water down ethics regulations passed in the wake of the Enron collapse, according to a report from the New York Times. The Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing a timetable that will allow U.S. companies to shift to international accounting rules, a move that may allow for computation of higher rates of earnings, according to the Times. Critics warn that some provisions of international rules are weaker than U.S. regulations, allowing, for instance, sketchier disclosure about mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and other complex investment vehicles at the vortex of the current housing crisis.
• Credit-rating agency Moody’s announced last week that some employees had violates its code of ethics by ignoring a “modeling error” that allowed several low-performing investments to receive much higher ratings than they deserved, according to a report from Fortune. The company did not identify the investments or the people responsible for the error, Forbes reports, noting that the disclosure comes at a bad time for credit-rating firms, which have suffered damage to their reputations in the aftermath of the subprime meltdown.
• British discount clothing firm Primark is facing a PR problem after a recent documentary alleged that the firm used child labor in India. According to reports from the Edinburgh Evening News and the London Independent, the fashion industry is seeing a backlash. “There has definitely been a shift and I think the media awareness surrounding the way these clothes are made has helped a great deal,” high-powered clothing buyer Sarah Murray told the Evening News. “A couple of years back it was almost cool to reveal just how little your outfit really cost when someone commented on how great you looked, but actually it’s not cool — especially when you realize that a child working in horrific conditions made it.”

Sources: New York Times, July 5 — Forbes, July 5 — Independent, July 4 — Edinburgh Evening News, July 4.

For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, Feb. 18 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 11 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 7 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 22, 2007.

But there’s a problem with ancient Chinese ‘traditional’ medicines: exotic herbal and animal concoctions can sometimes trigger a positive test result

BEIJING
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says it will wage an unprecedented battle against doping at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

According to a report from the Associated Press, the IOC will conduct 4,500 doping tests in Beijing, almost a thousand more than in Athens four years ago and a 90 percent increase from the rate of testing at the 2000 Sydney games.

In related news, the Chinese government last week banned eight athletes allegedly caught doping in a massive nationwide swoop, reports the Melbourne Herald Sun. The sacked competitors include wrestler Luo Meng and men’s swimmer Ouyang Peng.

Authorities also have turned their attention to medical institutions, with China’s Ministry of Health conducting a nationwide check of whether public and private hospitals and clinics are following regulations about performance-enhancing substances, the state-run media news service Xinhua reports.

China’s situation is complicated by the widespread use of “traditional medicines” — remedies, some bizarre by Western standards, that may contain substances that would yield a positive result on a doping test. The London Daily Telegraph notes that several doping scandals related to traditional cures occurred in the 1990s, when a group of runners tested positive after being given a concoction of turtle’s blood and caterpillar fungus.

Sources: AP, July 5 — Xinhua, July 4 — Telegraph, July 4 — Melbourne Herald-Sun, July 3.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, May 27 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 17 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 25 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 18 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 22.

In other medical and bioethics news, Nobel laureates call for change in intellectual property law for medical research, and British physician pioneers new embryo screening process

VARIOUS DATELINES
Stories at the intersection of medicine, biology, and ethics were featured in the world press last week. Among them:

• The German upper house passed a measure tightening restrictions on assisted suicide after a bizarre case in which a politician helped a healthy 79-year-old woman end her life. According to a report from the Agence France-Presse, Roger Kusch, a former senator who is now a right-to-die campaigner, showed Bettina Schart how to prepare a lethal drug cocktail. Schart was not suffering a life-threatening illness, reports the AFP, but had no family and did not want to spend the end of her life in a nursing home. Kusch, a lawyer, did not violate any laws and kept a camera running during the entire suicide to prove that he was not legally culpable. It is not illegal in Germany to advise someone on suicide as long as there is no physical assistance to the person committing suicide. The proposed law would make it a crime to offer advice on how to commit suicide, according to the AFP.
• Out-of-date intellectual property laws are no longer suited to modern science and can “impede innovation, lead to monopolization, and unduly restrict access to the benefits of knowledge,” according to professor Sir John Sulston and professor Joseph Stiglitz. The two Nobel laureates, writing in the Times of London, contend that intellectual property law in Britain and elsewhere increasingly is being manipulated to stanch competition and direct research toward profits rather than humanitarian goals. The call comes as the University of Manchester convenes a conference of scientists and bioethicists to draw up a manifesto for changes in intellectual property law, reports the Times.
• A London physician recently used a new genetic screening process to ensure that a baby was free of a gene that could lead to a rare hereditary cancer. According to ABC News, the process — an innovation in Britain — involves screening an embryo before implantation, with only embryos that pass the test actually being implanted. But ABC notes that some doctors worry that the process could someday be used to screen for traits like intelligence or attractiveness, and quotes University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan as saying the procedure puts medicine on a moral slippery slope: “Where is this going to take us in the future? How far will we go in letting people decide their babies?” Caplan said.

Sources: AFP, July 5 — Times of London, July 5 — ABC News, June 30.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, June 23 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 24 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 10 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 28 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 17, 2007.

Issues include corruption in Russia and Vietnam, and the aftermath of the presidential election in Zimbabwe

VARIOUS DATELINES
News concerning the effects of corruption and violence was featured in reports from three continents last week. The stories included:

• Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last week unveiled a sweeping plan to curb corruption, which he said has become “a way of life” in Russia. According to the English-language daily Moscow Times, the plan involves tougher penalties for corrupt officials and better screening for judges and civil servants. His strategy also includes giving more enforcement authority to regional governments, according to the report.
• Australia is coordinating a program to fight corruption in Vietnam. Radio Australia reports that Vietnam, a lucrative trading partner for Australia, faces a serious economic threat from graft. Australian foreign minister Stephen Smith has pledged about half a million dollars for anticorruption education and investment in renewable energy.
• Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell is considering pulling out of Zimbabwe, according to a report from Radio Netherlands. The action follows a call by British prime minister Gordon Brown for major firms to reconsider their presence in the country after a disputed election in which strongman Robert Mugabe was returned to office after his opponent, citing violent attacks on his supporters, withdrew from the race.

Sources: Radio Netherlands, July 6 — Moscow Times, July 5 — Radio Australia, July 5.

For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, June 30 — Related Newsline story, June 30 — Related Newsline story, June 16 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 18 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 22.

Survey of 19 countries finds widespread pessimism about state of modern ethics

From the Wall Street Journal:

“Europeans say cheating in business, sports and even love has become more prevalent over the past decade. Whether this phenomenon is real or perceived — actual cheating is hard to measure — people say the world has become a more ruthless, dishonest place.

“To study the issue, The Wall Street Journal asked market-research firm GfK to poll almost 20,000 people in 19 countries — 16 European countries, plus Russia, Turkey and the U.S. GfK asked whether cheating had become more common and whether it was a major problem. They also asked people to describe their own cheating habits. The survey covered a range of issues: taxes, business, academics, sports and romantic relationships.

“The results weren’t pretty.

“Different cultures have different definitions of cheating: A merchant haggling over a carpet in a Turkish bazaar might offend a Dutch banker’s sense of business propriety. A student who uses material from a Web site for an essay might be punished at one school but not another. But even with such shades of gray, cheating across a range of countries and disciplines — from boardrooms to bedrooms — is a growing source of concern, most people say.

“This sentiment reflects widespread anxiety about competition, according to ethicists. The proliferation of new wealth and the growing gap between rich and poor in many countries have spurred fears about being left behind. This worry, in turn, makes people suspect that others who appear to be getting ahead, making good grades in school or driving expensive cars, aren’t always playing by the rules. In some cases, this worry might be justified….

“Others say the media have increased coverage of cheating scandals that once might have escaped public attention….

“When it comes to cheating, in business deals, on taxes or on the playing field, people often point a finger at Italy. European survey respondents (10%) most commonly named Italy as the country that cheats the most in business. Italians themselves (40%) also said they were the worst nationality when it comes to honesty in business.

“According to the GfK study, 91% of Italians described cheating on their taxes as a major problem in their country, the highest level among the 16 European countries surveyed….

“Broadly speaking, 48% of respondents around the world said cheating on taxes was more common today than 10 years ago, while 10% of respondents said it was less common.

“Business transactions were a matter of concern among most survey participants. Across the 19 countries included in the poll, 55% of respondents said cheating in business deals was more common than 10 years ago, while only 7% said it was less common….

“When asked which country cheats the most in business dealings, 7% of total survey respondents said Russia, the highest level in the survey. Italy (5%) was the second most common answer….

“Cheating at school is more common than a decade ago, according to 42% of survey respondents. Only 9% said it had decreased….

“Cheating at sports has become more common over the past 10 years according to 48% of those surveyed….

“When it comes to romance, 42% of those surveyed said they think cheating is more common than a decade ago. Only 10% said it had become less frequent….

“The survey didn’t ask people why they cheat, but ethicists said widespread worries about cheating and the sense that cheating has become more common in romance and other areas could create a self-perpetuating problem. ‘It seems pointless to keep your promises if no one else is keeping them, and the reasons for being honest fall apart if a significant number of other people … aren’t abiding by these moral rules,’ said Alex Voorhoeve, a philosophy lecturer at the London School of Economics….”

For more information, see: Full release from the Wall Street Journal, June 27 — Snapshot illustration of survey results.

“Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.”

– W. H. Auden (U.S. (English-born) poet, 1907-1973)