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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

I still don’t know Michelle’s last name. Somewhere in Green Bay that late Wisconsin afternoon, as she was listening to the car radio, she pulled over to the roadside and called the station. Then, in a voice edging into tears and freighted with meaning, she provided one of those glistening, rare, and reassuring moments in the nation’s ethical life.

That afternoon, Ben Merens and I had been talking about the ethical issues behind the current financial crisis. Ben hosts a highly regarded daily talk show, “At Issue,” on Wisconsin Public Radio, and he had invited me on to talk about my new book, The Ethics Recession. Our callers already had raised questions ranging from the morality of derivatives and credit default swaps to the outlawing of religious teaching in schools. They’d wanted to know what could be done about the corrupting nature of financial short-termism. They had wondered how to make it easier for people to recognize unethical behavior — and harder for them to lack shame and guilt.

Then Ben took Michelle’s call.

“Y’know, I had this whole conversation I was going to have,” she said, starting out bravely enough on what sounded like a slightly crackly cell phone. “But I have been so touched by the things that you’re saying, I’m — I’m sitting here in my car in tears. Because I have felt like I’m the only one who feels like this, and everybody else in the entire world is so morally bankrupt!”

In the instant’s pause before her next sentence, it dawned on me that what was breaking up was not her cell-phone signal. It was the deep emotion in her voice. But she struggled onward.

“And, y’know,” she continued until she could go no further, “it’s like I have hope now — and I just want to thank you…!”

I assured her she was not alone, that there were plenty of others in the world who also longed for this kind of integrity. Ben waited patiently for me to finish, and then he gave her the answer she really needed.

“Michelle,” he said, in a voice as sincere as hers had been troubled, “I am touched by callers all the time. But it’s been a while since someone touched me as deeply as you just did. And if we are giving you hope, please know that your call gave that right back — to me, to Rush, and to a lot of people listening to this program!”

He was right. But why? Why does it matter so much that a woman calls up in tears? Yes, this was talk radio in America, a phenomenon that sometimes attracts anonymous emotional venting. But Ben isn’t the kind of high-decibel ranter who whips his audience into an emotional froth every afternoon. He manages a thoughtful, intelligent conversation about current events and hard news. Nor are his public-radio listeners given to outbursts of illogic, rage, or despair. I could think of nothing in the preceding minutes that had cranked our discourse to a fevered pitch. We hadn’t been rooting around among dark scandals or ain’t-it-awful outrages. We’d simply been talking about ethics, character, and responsibility.

What moved Michelle, then, was not so much what we were saying as the fact that something was being said at all. I suspect that, if Ben could track her down and quiz her, she wouldn’t be able to point to this or that exact sentence as the place where the dam of her composure came unstuck. I also suspect that if Ben’s talk show had been like so many others — where callers secretly hope that if they seethe with enough indignation, someone will throw a chair at someone else — she would have turned away in dry-eyed disgust. Nor were her tears prompted by sentimentality, tragedy, patriotism, or the rest of the kit bag of tricks well known to speechwriters and actors. They were tears of relief. She found she wasn’t a lonely thinker plagued by weird thoughts no one else shared. She was part of a widening conversation among rational people caring deeply about values and integrity. That gave her hope. And as Ben so elegantly noted, she gave it right back to us and to the other listeners.

So thanks again, Michelle. I think you’re out there by the hundreds of thousands, yearning to know that the ethical life is more than a myth. You’re reminding us that we have an obligation to care for one another, especially during the moral midnight of an ethics recession. And you’re telling us that we build hope and nurture engagement simply by keeping the ethics discourse alive and timely — and that our very willingness to get into the conversation can sometimes be more meaningful than the things we say.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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

“How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat? This isn’t just a matter of dollars and cents. It’s about our fundamental values…. This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed.”

– President Obama, denouncing insurance giant AIG on Monday following news that the bailed-out firm is planning to dole out $165 million in bonus payments to its executives. To date, the government has pumped more than $170 billion into AIG, a firm deemed too important and too interconnected to fail despite its blunders and bad decisions.

Despite the massive infusion of cash, AIG reported this month that it lost $61.7 billion in the fourth quarter last year, reports the Associated Press.

Obama, members of Congress, and pundits from across the broadcasting spectrum all took aim at AIG on Monday over the planned bonuses, pledging to try to block the payments through legal tactics and/or shame.

The company over the weekend wrote a letter to Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, saying the “bonuses were legally binding obligations and the firm’s ‘hands are tied,’” notes the AP.

Source: AP, Mar. 16.

Sidebar: At business college near Madoff’s old stomping grounds, ethics is now the topic on everyone’s mind

NEW YORK and WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.
Bernard Madoff last week entered a guilty plea to charges that he masterminded one of the biggest swindles in history, and appears likely to spend years — possibly the rest of his life — in federal prison.

The presiding judge has not yet indicated what kind of sentence he will impose, but experts interviewed by Reuters said Madoff faces up to 150 years behind bars, and it is likely that any sentence handed down will span decades.

Madoff told the judge that he was “so deeply sorry and ashamed” as he pleaded guilty and was sent to jail to await sentencing, the Financial Times reports.

“I felt compelled to satisfy my clients’ expectations at any cost,” the once-revered New York broker told the packed courtroom, according to the FT. “When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients.”

Now the focus is shifting to whether Madoff acted alone, reports the Times of London. Because Madoff entered a guilty plea without making any sort of sentence-reducing deal, he is not obligated to cooperate with investigators.

Madoff has said consistently that he acted alone, but prosecutors are setting their sights on others who may have helped in the massive fraud, including his wife, sons, and brother, according to CBS News. None yet has been charged.

As a sidebar to the scandal, MSNBC reports from Florida’s West Palm Beach, a community where Madoff did much of his recruiting of investors. At Northwood University, a local business college, the Madoff story was topic number one in every class and every conversation.

“There’s that huge attitude that people have that it’s okay until I get caught,” Dr. Cheryl Pridgeon, who founded the Center for Ethics and Business on campus, told MSNBC.

The Madoff scandal is resonating with students, Pridgeon added. “A lot of people want to teach ethics from the back end: This has gone wrong, this is what you don’t do,” Pridgeon said. “But the trick is to know before you get into the situation, that you are in gray area.”

Every student at Northwood is required to take an ethics course, notes the report.

Sources: Times of London, Mar. 15 — Reuters, Mar. 14 — MSNBC, Mar. 13 — Financial Times, Mar. 13.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 2 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 2 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 26 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 26 — Related Newsline Commentary, Jan. 19.

Latest U.S. federal spending plan criticized for earmarks; New York Times covers China’s spending spree on gifts for high officials; China’s official news agency frets over graft related to new spending plan; Mexico’s president, stung by accusations that corruption is hindering drug war, lashes out at United States

WASHINGTON, BEIJING, and MEXICO CITY
Ethics in government was a theme is several major stories last week. Among the coverage:

• President Obama last week signed a mammoth spending bill that contains, according to U.S. News & World Report, about 9,000 earmarked spending programs. The pet projects of lawmakers account for between $11.6 billion and $18 billion of the bill’s $410 billion total, notes the Washington Post. The action prompted some criticism from the press, as various reports contended that Obama had backed away from his campaign promise to crack down on pet projects often characterized as “pork.”
• China’s annual meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People Political Consultative Conference apparently had a significant impact on the economy of that nation, reports the New York Times: The events kicked off an annual spending spree on gifts for senior government officials. David Barboza, filing from Beijing, writes: “While here, the delegates also seek to curry favor with their superiors, the nation’s top leaders, often by showering them with expensive gifts: Gucci handbags, Hermès scarves, Montblanc pens and $30,000 diamond-studded Swiss watches….Though sales spike in March during the national congresses, executives of luxury goods companies say that lavishing government officials with such products is a year-round practice that reflects China’s culture of gift-giving and tradition of basing business decisions on personal relationships. They admit to having special accounts for government officials, their relatives and even their mistresses, often with code names like Dr. No and Miss K.”
• China’s official news agency, Xinhua, reports that there’s concern over possible misuse of funds and corruption in the massive economic stimulus package prepared by the government. While officially sanctioned news from the government in China typically is not critical of the government itself, China’s central leadership, alarmed by widespread graft, has launched an anticorruption campaign focused mainly on local officials
• Mexican president Felipe Calderón, bristling at accusations that the flow of drugs into the United States is aided by Mexican corruption, last week alleged that some media are lying and that U.S. officials are the corrupt ones, according to a report from Bloomberg. “How can you explain a drug market so large in the U.S.– the largest market in the world — without the corruption of certain U.S. authorities,” Calderón charged.

Sources: New York Times, Mar. 14 — U.S. News & World Report, Mar. 13 — Xinhua, Mar. 14 — Bloomberg, Mar. 12 — Washington Post, Mar. 11.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 2 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 16 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 19 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 10, 2008.

Controversial status coined by Bush administration allowed indefinite detention without charges; new administration says it will develop different set of standards

WASHINGTON
In the latest salvo over one of the most prominent international ethics issues, the Obama administration last week announced that it was dropping the phrase “enemy combatant” from rules under which terror suspects can be detained.

Determination that a suspect was an “enemy combatant” had allowed the Bush administration to hold suspected terrorists at length without criminal charges.

CNN reports that the Justice Department will develop new standards for holding terror detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.

At the same time, notes the Washington Post, the Obama administration did retain a broad right to detain those who provide “substantial” assistance to al Qaeda or associated forces.

The change was outlined in a Justice Department memorandum filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, which is hearing challenges filed by Guantánamo detainees, reports Congressional Quarterly.

Sources: Washington Post, Mar. 13 — CNN, Mar. 13 — UPI, Mar. 13 — Congressional Quarterly, Mar. 13.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 9 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 26 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 29, 2008 — Related Newsline story, June 23, 2008 — Related Newsline story, July 23, 2007.

At issue: Should questions of scientific ethics be left to scientists?

WASHINGTON
The recent decision by President Obama to reverse federal policy and allow embryonic stem-cell research prompted a variety of ethics analyses in the world and national press last week.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, who had argued that national policy should be extended to allow federal funding for research on embryonic stem-cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics, wrote in a piece carried by RealClearPolitics.com that, “While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned — and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived — human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.”

Obama actually denounced such prospects last week, saying the new stem-cell policy is designed so that it “never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction,” notes the Associated Press. Such cloning, Obama said, “is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society or any society.”

Also disputed in the press was the question of who should make moral decisions involving technology. Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman contends that society should not automatically defer to scientists on matters of scientific ethics. Responding to an Obama administration claim that decisions should be based on “sound scientific practice … instead of dogma,” Chapman wrote: “But one person’s dogma is another one’s ethical imperative or moral principle. Science can tell us how to build a nuclear weapon. But science can’t tell us whether we should use it.”

“Just because research may be useful in combating disease,” Chapman argues, “doesn’t mean it’s ethically acceptable. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment — in which the federal Public Health Service secretly withheld treatment from infected black men to learn more about the disease — might have yielded valuable data. But no scientific discovery could possibly have justified it.”

Melody Barnes, Obama’s domestic policy adviser, wrote in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that the administration will move forward in a “in a responsible, respectful manner. Stem cell research is the subject of diverse, deeply held views. While we will not always agree, the president respects these views. The Obama administration will support stem cell research only when it is scientifically worthy, and carried out responsibly. Our administration will ensure stem cell research is never taken lightly, conducted unnecessarily or abused.”

An Economist editorial argues that while “reasonable people will continue to disagree about what sort of research is moral,” debates will continue, with nuanced arguments being reduced to convenient slogans.

Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 13 — Chicago Tribune, Mar. 13 — Economist, Mar. 13 — RealClearPolitics.com, Mar. 12 — AP, Mar. 9.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 9 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 16 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 9 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 8, 2008 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 29, 2008.

If proven, it could be one of biggest cases of medical research fraud in history

SPRINGFIELD, Mass.
A prominent Massachusetts anesthesiologist, whose research has been influential in the course of many treatments, has been accused of fabricating data.

The Boston Globe reports that physicians and journal editors say that the allegations, if proven, could add up to one of the biggest cases of medical research fraud in history.

Dr. Scott Reuben, from Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, had been credited with revolutionizing the way physicians provide pain relief to patients undergoing orthopedic surgery, reports Scientific American. But an investigation purports that many of his papers were fiction, and that the pain drugs he touted actually may have slowed the healing process.

Trade journal Pharma Times reports that an attorney says Reuben “regrets that this happened” and is fully cooperating with a peer review committee probing the allegations. The attorney said there were mitigating circumstances, but did not elaborate.

Boston radio station WBUR notes that the case is expected to fuel criticism that drug companies should not be involved financially with testing of their drugs.

Reuben’s research led to the sale of billions of dollars of drugs made by firms that provided research grants, according to various press reports.

Sources: Boston Globe, Mar. 13 — Scientific American, Mar. 13 — Pharma Times, Mar. 12 — WBUR, Mar. 11.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 9 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 23 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 26 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 17, 2008 — Related Newsline story, July 7, 2008.

Producers wanted to show how easy it is to establish an illicit network of zombie computers — but some security experts say they went too far and may have broken the law

LONDON
The BBC stirred up an ethics controversy after airing a documentary that involved researchers gaining access to a “botnet” — an illicit network of hijacked computers.

According to a report from the U.K. Guardian, BBC’s popular “Click” technology program showed how networks of compromised, remote-controlled PCs are used to send spam and attack websites.

But some security experts are saying the BBC went too far and actually broke the law when staging the demonstration, reports trade journal ComputerWorld.

BBC producers purchased a botnet in an Internet chat room and used the 22,000-strong zombie network to attack a website, with the owner’s consent, and to spam email accounts created by the BBC.

But the computers used in the demonstration attack were owned by private citizens who did not opt into the experiment.

Owners of the compromised computers were warned that their computers were infected by an on-screen message from the BBC, which explained how to clean the machines, according to the tech network CNET.

An analyst for a computer-security firm told industry publication eWeek that the stunt was “not even a gray area; it is flat out unprofessional.”

John Pescatore tells eWeek: “”It is like paying an arsonist to burn down an abandoned building to get good footage of flames. They could have gone to any one of several security vendors who could have demonstrated the severity of the bot problem.”

Legal experts contacted by the Register, a technology publication, said the BBC may have violated U.K. law.

The BBC has stated that it received legal advice before staging the demonstration, notes the Register.

Sources: CNET, Mar.13 — Guardian, Mar. 13 — Register, Mar. 13 — eWeek, Mar. 12.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Nov. 17, 2008 — Related Newsline story, May 5, 2008 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 1, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Jun. 4, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 12, 2007 — Internet video of the BBC program, Mar. 12.

Says it’s a symptom of the economy

NEW YORK
The Wall Street Journal last week analyzed ads that used numbers and concluded that advertisers often take some liberties with the truth.

In an article titled, “In Ads, 1 out of 5 Stats is Bogus — Actually, It’s Misleading, Incomplete, or Obscured in Fine Print that Few People Read,” writer Carl Bialik, who writes a Journal column under the title “The Numbers Guy,” analyzed ads that essentially dealt with matters of taste — who preferred the advertiser’s burger over a competitor’s — but cloaked the results in numbers.

According to experts cited in the article, numbers are very effective advertising tools. But those numbers often are arrived at through some dubious research are or used to imply a conclusion that doesn’t necessarily follow. One commercial, for example, showed 27 of 30 on-camera taste testers saying they preferred one chain’s hamburger over another, but gave no indication whether those responses were cherry-picked or explicated the overall margin of “victory.”

When it comes to research, advertisers do the bare minimum to avoid litigation, alleges Bialik.

While TV networks sometimes require the use of superimposed disclaimers to clarify any potentially misleading interpretations of the statistic, an anonymous advertising worker who helps advertisers meet network standards adds his own clarification: “We all know people don’t read supers because they go by too quickly.”

There’s a current surge in the use of number-comparison ads, according to the Journal analysis: Since the market is not likely to grow during an economic downturn, it is essential for companies to poach market share from competitors via advertising.

Source: Wall Street Journal, Mar. 13.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Feb. 23 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 24, 2008 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 27, 2008 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 20, 2008 — Related Newsline story, July 14, 2008.

“52 percent support easing Bush-era restrictions or lifting restrictions entirely,” poll finds

From Gallup:

“A majority of Americans likely support President Barack Obama’s executive order Monday doing away with the rules on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that were in place under the Bush administration. In a Gallup Poll conducted last month, 38% of Americans said they support easing those restrictions and another 14% said they favor no restrictions at all. About 4 in 10 Americans favor keeping the Bush restrictions or eliminating federal funding altogether.

“President Obama’s executive order overturns George W. Bush’s 2001 decision to restrict government funding to stem cell lines created before Aug. 9, 2001. Bush’s order left scientists to rely on private donations to work with the hundreds of lines created since then….

“Americans’ views on government funding for stem cell research have remained fairly stable since 2004, with the majority consistently supporting fewer restrictions on funding, rather than maintaining or strengthening the current restrictions.

“Views on government funding of embryonic stem cell research are, of course, highly political. While a strong majority of Democrats support fewer or no restrictions (64%), a majority of Republicans support keeping the Bush administration restrictions or not funding the research at all (57%). Notably, relatively few Americans of any political background favor the more extreme positions: no restrictions on government funding or not funding stem cell research at all….”

For the full release from Gallup, Mar. 9, click here.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 9 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 9.

“We always weaken whatever we exaggerate.”

– Jean-François de La Harpe (French playwright, writer, and critic, 1739-1803)