by Rushworth M. Kidder

Given the way Capt. Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III retired from US Airways, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that pilots land airliners in the Hudson River every day.

It’s been a little over a year since a flock of geese knocked out both engines of his Airbus A320 during its ascent from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, giving him and first officer Jeffrey Skiles only minutes to choose a plan, put it into action, and glide the plane safely into a splashdown with no loss of life. Earlier this month, after 30 years with his company, Capt. Sullenberger wrapped up his career with a distinct lack of fanfare. In an age starved for heroes and stark mad for celebrity, he refused to be lionized or put on a pedestal. That day, he simply commanded a final flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Charlotte, walked off the plane into a brief news conference, and joined a private farewell party in the crew room.

But then, that’s been his point all along: If need be, the kind of thing he did on January 15, 2009, should be just a part of a day’s work for a true professional. Learning by flying crop dusters as a teenager in North Texas, he’s been studying his profession ever since. He’s deeply concerned at what he sees as the declining standards in his industry and the lack of experience among newly hired pilots. For him, the competencies and standards that come from time-on-task practice are crucial. “There’s simply no substitute for experience in terms of aviation safety,” he said after his final flight — a point he drives home in his recent book, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters. “My message going forward,” he told the media in Charlotte, “is that I want to remind everyone in the aviation industry, especially those who manage aviation companies and those who regulate aviation, that we owe it to our passengers to keep learning how to do it better.”

Good points, but there’s more to his story than simply experience. Some people have had 30 years of experience; others have had one year of experience 30 times. What makes the difference? In this case, I’d chalk it up to his moral courage — his willing endurance of significant danger for the sake of principle. Without that, no mere tallying of years and skills could have produced that life-saving performance.

But wait! the cynics bluster, Anyone in that situation, if they knew enough, would have done what he did. He’s not a hero, and there’s no special morality to his act. He’s just a guy pressed to the wall who figured out how to save his own skin.

I disagree. Lots of people “know” what to do, but in the heat of the moment, they lose their focus, surrender to fear, and either freeze up or panic. Of course training helps. Of course experience is essential. But unless we marry the experience gained from steady, repetitious practice to a willingness to address danger in the service of our values, we’ve missed the point. Sullenberger grasps this values component. He understands that when serving as a commander in charge of others, he has the moral responsibility for their safety and security.

Here at the Institute, our research on morally courageous individuals tells us that the key to standing for conscience can be articulated in a single word: trust. If you have no trust — no confidence that things just might work out for the best — you’ll never take a stand for courage. Why would you, if you’re absolutely convinced that everything is futile and all hope is gone? It’s hard to see how, if that had been Sullenberger’s mental state, he could have used those tense minutes over New York for such good decision making, rather than falling into despair or surrendering to doubt. What mattered about his experience is not just that he had it but that he trusted it.

What Sullenberger’s example teaches us, then, is that in training future leaders we’ve got to build not only experience but courage. For that, we need to help them cultivate trust and confidence. We need to build in them a settled habit of grace under pressure. And we need to help them develop an irreversible sense of responsibility — not only for themselves but for those within their radius of concern and control.

Looking at what might have become of Flight 1549 that winter day, I’m immensely grateful for Sullenberger’s decades of experience. But I’m even more grateful for his level-headed confidence, his conviction that failure wasn’t an option, and his willingness to endure danger for the sake of principle — in short, for his moral courage. That, for me, is what makes him a real hero.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

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by Rushworth M. Kidder

Want a barometer of a nation’s moral concern? Check out how frequently the word ethics appears in the news. Last Thursday, anyone counting would have scored a hat trick. On the New York Times front page that day, above the fold, were two sad and tangled tales of ethical lapses. In one, New York Gov. David Paterson quit his re-election campaign. In the other, New York congressman Charles Rangel relinquished the chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. A third piece, appearing in a box at the bottom of the page, involved Eric Massa, a freshman congressman from upstate New York, who resigned his position because of an ethics investigation.

Some readers rightly see these stories as additional nails in the coffin of our collective moral sense — proof that integrity is dead. Other readers, also right, see them as encouraging evidence that iniquity can’t be hidden — that the public cares enough about integrity to demand such exposure of unethical behavior.

But there’s a deeper significance here. Each of these stories is about conflicts of interest — which, simply defined, arise when people seek to exploit public positions for private benefit. The fact that these three public figures fell so easily into such conflicts reminds us that we’re not very good at training our leaders about ethics and integrity. Simply put, we give them few tools to defend themselves against three of the most corrosive influences in human experience — power, fame, and wealth.

These influences, if left uncontrolled, will generate an almost infinite number of conflicts of interest. But our public figures don’t necessarily come into their jobs prepared to deal with these conflicts. By the very nature of the democratic process, we push ordinary people into extraordinary positions — too often without the moral headlights to illuminate the approaching dangers. For all of the leadership training we do, we devote hardly a moment to discussing the conflict-of-interest issues that most easily could wreck their careers. Should it surprise us, then, that they run into the ditch or over the cliff with disturbing regularity?

Notice how it happens. Rep. Rangel did it merely by accepting personal gifts, including Caribbean travel, in situations apparently meant to influence his votes. Gov. Paterson accepted free tickets to the World Series, and tried to squelch an investigation of a top aide in a domestic violence case. Rep. Massa resigned after being accused of sexually harassing an aide. In each case, the positions these men held required of them an impartiality, a loyalty to the office rather than to the self, a judicious use of their influence for the common good. They were, in other words, trusted to do the right thing. When that trust evaporated, their reputations were shattered. It no longer matters that they are smart, savvy, sophisticated, or experienced. Being untrustworthy, they no longer are valued as leaders.

What lessons can we learn? Four come to mind:

• These men each came to grief over issues that, in the grand scheme of things, were pretty small: a few days’ vacation, a couple of phone call, several free tickets, some suggestive language. Conflicts of interest rarely involve high-stakes gambits. Instead, they usually hinge on activities that seem, to the person doing them, to be innocuous, commonplace, even trivial.

• Because of that apparent triviality, the last person to spot a conflict of interest is often the person engaged in it. Conflicts that are perfectly obvious to colleagues, friends, and acquaintances remain shrouded from the view of the actor himself. Such is the power of self-interest that we can see others’ faults far more clearly than our own.

• Conflicts of interest come in two flavors: actual and perceived. The perception of self-dealing can be just as damaging to a reputation as the real thing. That fact can be a curse if the perception is false and the accusation unjustified. But it also can be a benefit if it warns a public figure of a pending conflict and gives her time to avoid it.

• Conflicts of interest are inevitable. The people most suited to public leadership have extensive experience and wide personal networks, so they unavoidably will encounter situations where loyalty comes into conflict with truth. They’ll face dilemmas where their duty of fidelity to others stands at cross-purposes with their duty of integrity to their position. It’s not shameful to find oneself in such dilemmas. The goal is not to avoid conflicts of interest, but to manage these truth-versus-loyalty dilemmas so they do no harm.

How can they be managed? What’s needed is moral courage. To resist the seductive influences of power, wealth, and fame, our leaders obviously need to develop the moral courage to say no to temptation. More important, they need to encourage such courage in others. They need to surround themselves with colleagues who can point out the danger frankly and candidly before an apparent conflict becomes a real one. If Paterson, Rangel, and Massa simply had taken that last step, they might have remained effective leaders.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

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by Rushworth M. Kidder

“Acting is all about honesty,” said comedian George Burns. “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” According to recent research, however, his punch line is all wrong. It should be, “If you can fake that, you become a fake yourself.” Not as witty, I grant you, but it’s borne out by an intriguing experiment involving 85 college students, fake $300 sunglasses, and some simple arithmetic.

When these students (all female) showed up at the Center for Decision Research at the University of North Carolina, they were told they’d be part of a marketing study evaluating different pairs of sunglasses. They also were told that, in addition to receiving their $1 participant’s fee, they could earn up to $24 more. They started by looking at pictures of a range of products — some counterfeit, some real — and answering questions about them.

Next, a computer assigned them to two groups. Those in one group were told that, based on their answers, they had “a relative preference for counterfeit products.” So they were sent next door, told to pick up a pair of glasses from a box marked “Counterfeit Sunglasses,” and asked to wear them for the rest of the session. The other group got sunglasses from a box of designer eyewear made by Chloe, valued at about $300, which they also wore for the day. In fact, however, the computer had been programmed to deceive. It utterly ignored the students’ answers on the first task, and instead assigned the students randomly.

The groups then were given worksheets covered with little boxes. Each box was a matrix holding 12 double-decimal numbers (like 1.48, 7.37, or 4.96), only two of which added up to an even 10. Their task: Solve as many matrices as they could before the bell rings by circling the two numbers that sum to 10. For every matrix they completed, they’d get an additional 50 cents. When the bell rang, each woman was asked to write down on a collection slip the number of matrices she’d solved, throw her worksheet away in a recycling box, and turn in the slip.

It was a set-up that clearly invited cheating. Without the accompanying worksheet, who knew how many you’d really solved? Why not push your self-reported score a little — and make a bit more money? What the students didn’t know was that the researchers, by analyzing their “thrown away” worksheets, could easily see who had cheated.

Result? Among those wearing the real sunglasses, 30 percent cheated. Among those wearing fakes, 71 percent cheated. That’s an astonishing difference. Put someone knowingly into counterfeit eyewear, in other words, and their propensity to cheat more than doubles.

But was the experiment skewed? Were those fakes so bad that they’d give you a headache and warp your judgment? No. In fact, all of the glasses were real — though the students were led to believe some were fakes. Then did the researchers plant the idea of a “relative preference for counterfeit products,” making the students believe they really did have such a penchant? No. In further tests, the same pattern prevailed even when the wearer was not told she liked fakes, but instead was told she’d randomly been assigned to wear the counterfeits.

The conclusion is inescapable: If you know you’re wearing knock-offs, you’re more apt to cheat. Summarizing their findings for a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science, researchers Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton, and Dan Ariely conclude that wearing counterfeits signals “an aspiration to be something one is not.” What’s more, it generates in those wearers “a feeling of a ‘counterfeit self’ that leads them to behave unethically.”

A counterfeit self. It’s a chilling phrase. Clearly this research isn’t about sunglasses. It’s not even about fashion in general. It’s about the impact on oneself of knowingly participating in fraudulent activity. In fact, it’s about what psychologists describe as “self-alienation” versus “authenticity.” When people report that they don’t feel they know themselves very well or are out of touch with the “real me,” they don’t feel a sense of authenticity. That was the basis of a final experiment: The participants assessed themselves through a series of well-tested questions designed to probe self-alienation. Those who responded while wearing fake glasses reported feeling less authentic and more self-alienated than those wearing the real thing.

The lesson? Even the most seemingly innocuous activity — dressing in phony designer jeans, sporting the street-corner Rolex, carrying the knock-off purse — can have a moral impact. While we may believe, in these researchers’ words, that we are “simply getting similar products for less money,” we in fact “may be paying a price in terms of [our] long-term morality.” Put simply, counterfeit selves do counterfeit things, and fakery breeds more fakery.

So what? Well, if that’s what happens when you buy your Gucci loafers from the back of a van, what happens when you look the other way and invest in, say, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme? Deep down, you sense something’s wrong: Nobody gets this kind of return year after year. But the view is great, even if the sunglasses are fake. And the next time you’re invited to cheat — well, why not?

In a nation awash with counterfeits, that’s a powerful reason for seeking out the real thing — in art, politics, finance, relationships, and everywhere else — even when the phony seems so harmless. Fakery degrades integrity. Authenticity preserves it.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

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by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last Wednesday, at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn won the gold in the Alpine Skiing Ladies’ Downhill event. But on Saturday, in the Ladies’ Super-G course, she had to settle for bronze. She blasted down Whistler Mountain in a red-hot time of one minute and 20.88 seconds — a sizzling performance, but not good enough to beat Austria’s Andrea Fischbacher (1:20.14) or Slovenia’s Tina Maze (1:20.63).

These three now go down in the history books as the 2010 medalists for this event. Meanwhile, Italy’s Johanna Schnarf, who finished fourth, returns home to her career as a police officer with no prize and hardly a nod of recognition. Why? Because her time was 1:20:99 — 11 hundredths of a second behind Vonn.

I haven’t timed myself with a stopwatch, but I’ll bet you can’t say the word Schnarf in 11 hundredths of a second. Yet that’s the razor-thin edge that separates the rich and famous (as these medalists often become) from the also-rans who weren’t quite good enough. We excuse that oddity, of course, by noting that unless we use double-decimal accuracy, we can’t tell the best from the rest.

Okay, I’ll grant that when athletes are this good, measuring in mere minutes and seconds doesn’t cut it. We need greater accuracy. And in some sports — swimming comes to mind — such accuracy is fair. Why? Because the race environment remains essentially identical for each athlete. When swimmers compete side by side in an indoor pool, you can see instantly who wins — and if you can’t, the electronic touch pads tell you. And when the next group steps to the starting blocks, the water hasn’t been damaged or degraded by the first lot. Everything else, too, is pretty much constant, including the water temperature, the light, and the wind. Result: Double-digit accuracy makes sense in swimming, since you’re comparing apples to apples.

But comparing skiers on a changing track is about apples and oranges. When the Super-G began at 10 o’clock on Saturday morning, the sun hadn’t yet risen on some parts of the course. Some of the early skiers, apparently unable to see some of the bumps, were knocked flat and didn’t finish. By the end of the race, the sun was fully up and visibility was better. But by then the icy slickness of the early morning had given way to a softer surface toward the bottom.

But race organizers say, hey, that’s alpine skiing. True enough, so let’s be honest about it. Let’s admit that Fischbacher “beat” Vonn, who in turn “beat” Schnarf, not because any of them were hundredths of seconds better. They won or lost because each was assigned a different starting time. Let’s admit that, unlike swimming, part of their winning resembled a gambler’s lucky streak in a casino. Let’s admit that the claim of double-digit accuracy is disingenuous, even dishonest, and that frankly we can’t tell who deserves the gold.

That, of course, is a deeply unsettling proposition to sports enthusiasts, who insist that every competition must have winners and losers. So here’s a solution. Let’s bring together all of the Super-G leaders who finished within a second of each other — adding in the fifth finisher, Austria’s Elisabeth Goergl, because her time (1:21.14) was exactly one second longer than Fischbacher’s. Then we have a choice: We can award gold medals to all of them. Or we can try to prove the impossible — namely, that conditions on the slope couldn’t possibly affect any skier’s time by less than one second, and that the times really do tell us who’s best.

You can almost hear the gnashing of Olympic teeth at this proposal. But look at what’s at stake. This problem of accuracy goes to the heart of the basic Olympic ideal of fairness. Should we sacrifice that ideal for a system of measurement that, in other professions, would be seen as highly unprofessional? In public opinion polling, you’re expected to state your margin of error — often plus/minus 3 percent. In engineering, you can get into deep trouble by claiming a greater accuracy than your instruments can deliver. False precision, it’s called. It happens when we report data to more decimal points than we can justify.

If there’s an answer to this gold-muddle conundrum, it lies in full disclosure. A gold in swimming probably means you’re the best. In skiing, it only means that, more or less by accident, you happened to get the best time. But nobody wants to add footnotes to Lindsey Vonn’s medals that say, “Winning times accurate within 3 percent.” Given our fascination with celebrity, we demand winners so we can make them famous — and fame doesn’t mix well with nasty little footnotes.

So should we reward team averages rather than individual performances? Should we hand out dozens of medals? However we do it, we should be honest enough to stop rewarding what we can only pretend to measure.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

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by Rushworth M. Kidder

One day a few winters ago, I plucked a beautiful orange from a tree in an Arizona hotel courtyard and bit into it. It was without doubt the foulest fruit I’d ever tasted. When I asked what was wrong — how such a gorgeous, plump, and unblemished specimen could be so bitter — the bellman explained that there was nothing wrong at all. It was a decorative tree. The oranges were only for show and weren’t meant to be eaten. The only thing wrong, apparently, was that I’d just devoured one of the hotel’s stage props.

Arborists and landscapers know all about this phenomenon. They distinguish between ornamental trees, used to beautify yards and gardens, and crop varieties, intended for harvesting. The two look pretty much the same, especially to the non-specialist eye, but while one is useful, the other is merely for adornment. There’s a whole field of science, in fact, devoted to creating plants that produce nothing while looking great.

Somewhere here there’s a metaphor for our age. It’s beginning to appear, for example, that we have an ornamental Congress. It looks like the real thing: It campaigns, gets elected, convenes hearings, holds press conferences, and proposes legislation. But in the end, it produces no useful fruit. That’s how at least one insider, Sen. Evan Bayh, sees it. “For some time, I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should,” the Indiana Democrat said this week as he announced that he would not seek a third term. “There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress. Too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem solving.”

That’s also how the public sees it. Reading the latest survey on voter attitudes from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, you find that nearly one-third of voters don’t want to see their own representative re-elected. That, say the Pew researchers, is a “level of anti-incumbent sentiment which is as extensive as it has been in 16 years” of Pew survey work.

Why? One cause is partisan gridlock — the inability of an ornamental Congress to bear practical fruit. When each of the 1,383 adults contacted by phone in early February for this survey was asked what “makes you angry” — with a separate category for what “bothers you but doesn’t make you angry” — partisan gridlock loomed large, angering 39 percent and bothering an additional 35 percent.

Behind this gridlock lies a failure of compromise. When Otto von Bismarck famously defined politics as “the art of the possible,” he had in mind the art of compromise. These days, say Pew researchers, far fewer Republicans (52 percent) than Democrats (71 percent) favor compromise on important issues — down from 63 percent among Republicans just three years ago.

Nor is public frustration limited to politics. In the wake of the recession, banks and financial institutions also appear strangely fruitless — looking good, but contributing little to the general well-being. The Pew survey found 86 percent of the public angry or bothered by Wall Street bonuses and the banking bailout.

Behind this frustration, I think, lies a kind of creeping moral ornamentalism. From where we sit in our Institute, we see that decorative tendency among some corporations that adorn themselves with the appearance of integrity but pay scant heed to its substance. Educational institutions, too, can post impressive codes of ethics on their walls, only to ignore them in day-to-day activities. Churches also can fall victim to a glad-handed emotionalism that produces little real fruit — or, more perversely, can maintain the décor of piety while permitting sexual abuse within the ranks, as has happened most recently in some Catholic communities in Germany and Ireland.

Why should this be? Perhaps because we live, as never before, in an age of exteriors. The dominant media of the day all rely on moving images, which quite literally are nothing but images of light bouncing off of surfaces. In the news media, where print and the spoken word can plunge to the depth of a subject with a few well-chosen words, television struggles to penetrate beyond superficialities — and often gives up. Yet in the past few years, the growth of the cell phone and iPod markets has been largely driven by the addition of video screens to these devices. Think, too, about the vast market for clothing, accessories, and jewelry — and for cosmetics, which in the original Greek meant “skilled in adornment” and now, tellingly, means both beautifying and superficial when used in the singular.

In other words, we’re besieged by ornamentation. I’m not calling for a return to industrial ugliness or the drab dailiness of peasant cultures. I too watch television, wear new clothes, and love ornamental shrubs. But I’m increasingly aware of how readily mere ornamentalism can take us in, how easily we find ourselves wondering whether how I look is beginning to trump who I am.

Is there a cure? Not within the confines of this metaphor. As your local nursery staff will tell you, an ornamental orange can never be changed into the real thing. All you can do is dig it up and replace it, or graft on real fruit-bearing stock. Voters may do both with Congress in this November’s midterm election, and for good reason. If we really want to build a productive, fruitful nation out of the rubble of the recession, we need to start by replacing the merely decorative with the truly substantive.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last Saturday, my wife and I happened to bicycle past an elegantly designed and immaculately landscaped car dealership, a usually thriving place that’s been selling Toyotas in South Florida since 1968. That afternoon it was packed with vehicles — and empty of customers. On a patch of grass under a palm tree near the entrance, a lone salesman, sleeves rolled up and tie slightly askew, sat atop a picnic table, his feet on the bench. As we passed by, he slowly opened his cell phone and stared dejectedly at the screen as though seeking a sign that something — anything — was happening. Apparently, there were no messages.

As the nation awaits this week’s congressional hearings, the non-message that’s slowly building is one of distrust and dismay that Japan’s sterling automotive manufacturer — the envy of the world, really, and the benchmark that Detroit sought madly to match — could have fallen into such confusion. Last fall’s recall focused on accelerator pedals that get caught under floor mats. The current recall centers on accelerator pedals that stick. A lawsuit from Michigan contends that the 77-year-old driver of a 2005 Toyota Camry was killed when, in 2008, her car suddenly accelerated out of control and hit a tree — a pattern similar to that of a Lexus that raced uncontrollably into a crash in San Diego in August. Now comes word that the company’s signature green car, the Prius hybrid, has braking problems in its latest models and will need a recall as well.

To the public, all of this smacks of a pattern. It’s not as though one recall were for transmissions, another for headlights, and a third for suspensions. Toyota’s problems are all of a piece: They each involve uncontrollable speed. Yet the company seems to be approaching them piecemeal — and reluctantly. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda, grandson of the founder, has been nearly invisible in the entire process. Nor have his executives telegraphed a clear, forceful message that recognizes the appearance of a pattern and either confirms or dispels that interpretation. As a result, it appears that some root cause, as yet undiscovered, may be lurking beneath the surface.

Little wonder customers are wary. Their concerns go beyond the obvious questions about whether their car can be fixed. They’re asking whether Toyota really understands what’s happening — and whether the company truly is serious about fixing not only its cars but its reputation. In effect, they’re asking the ultimate — and fundamentally moral — question: Who are these people, and what kind of company is this?

This week’s hearings, done right, can raise some important questions:

• When did Toyota first know about these problems, and did they act immediately and forcefully to remedy them? Problems requiring a recall sometimes come to light slowly, of course. But given the mission-critical nature of this problem — uncontrollable speed — did they get out ahead of it fast enough? Or did they respond only because U.S. Transportation secretary Ray LaHood and his National Highway Traffic Safety Administration arm-twisted them into action?
• What should a Toyota driver do with his or her car? Last Wednesday the blunt-spoken Mr. LaHood gave a congressional panel an answer: “Stop driving it,” he said, “and take it to a Toyota dealer.” When that answer sent shares of Toyota stock spiraling still further into decline, LaHood recalibrated his remarks. But his answer may have been the most honest advice so far, inconvenient though it was.
• What if someone keeps driving an unrepaired Toyota and gets into an accident involving an acceleration problem: Will they be liable for ignoring warnings and driving an unsafe vehicle? How serious, in other words, is this issue — and who bears responsibility for it? Will Toyota step forward and own the problem? Or will they let some of their customers take some of the blame?

In the end, questions like these will help us understand Toyota’s corporate culture. Are they committed to integrity or simply to excellence? The former is a moral and ethical position that has to do with their views of responsibility, fairness, and honesty. The latter is an economic and strategic position that focuses on beating the competition. The two are intertwined, but where, in this company, does the primary weight fall? Does it seek integrity only as a pathway to excellence and the competitive advantage that brings? Or does it seek excellence as an essential expression of its true integrity?

Congressional questioners would do well to ask Toyota executives the following question: “We know you are committed to maintaining an excellent, competitive company with a strong bottom line, but not at the expense of X. In your company, what is X?” Where, in other words, will Toyota not go — where will it draw the moral line in the sand? — in pursuit of its goals? The company’s answers — or, perhaps, lack of answers — may send the clearest message yet about who Toyota really is.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

If you’re a parent, you may think your kids spend their whole lives surfing the web, watching TV, or listening to their iPods. Turns out you’re right. A recent report from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, based on its 2009 survey of media use by children from ages 8 to 18, finds that:

• Kids today average 7.5 hours a day with some form of media. That’s more time than “in any other activity besides (maybe) sleeping,” Kaiser’s research team notes — “almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five.”
• Add to that number the time spent multitasking — listening to music while visiting Facebook, thumbing through magazines while watching TV, texting a friend while playing a video game — and the hours run even higher. By this count, kids are exposed to 10.75 hours of media each day — a three-hour increase from 1999, when Kaiser launched its media surveys.
• The researchers deliberately excluded school-related use of the media, as well as time spent phoning or texting. So you can add in another 56 minutes to cover kids who talk on cell-phones during a typical day, as just over half do. What about those who text? They send an average of 118 messages a day.

These are jarring numbers. Yet it’s all too easy for parents to tumble into the ain’t-it-awful syndrome, writing off every encounter with the media as a corrupting and unethical force. But parents themselves use a lot of media — listening to radio news, watching sports on TV, using the web to plan trips. If media isn’t automatically unethical for their parents, why should it be so for kids? Even multitasking may have a silver lining: Children accustomed to multiple inputs may learn to work comfortably in environments that, for adults, would be impossibly distracting.

Still, the report (“Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” by Victoria Rideout, Ulla Foehr, and Donald Roberts) hints at enormous ethical issues behind these findings. The video-gaming 14-year-old who shrinks inward and loses human contact with his peers, the 13-year-old who sends a nude video clip of herself via cell-phone to a friend and finds it lodged forever on YouTube, the heavy TV user who searches out ever more violent and abusive programming to satisfy his thirst for excitement, the texting teenage driver who kills herself and others on the highway — all of them cry out for attention. What can parents do?

First, be alert to heavy use versus ordinary consumption. The Kaiser report finds that heavy users of media — the one-fifth of all kids who are exposed to more than 16 hours of media content each day — get lower grades in school and report lower levels of personal contentment. (A caution, however: This report doesn’t examine whether kids perform poorly and feel discontented because they immerse themselves in media, or whether they seek solace in media because they aren’t happy and can’t hack the schoolwork.) By contrast, the survey suggests that “heavy readers” who “spend an hour or more a day with print media” are more likely than light readers to get good grades. Wherever media and children interface, it seems, lighter correlates with better.

Second, recognize that while you can’t turn back the clock to a simpler age, you can manage this interface. Kids raised in homes where parents leave the TV running in the background all day (45 percent of all households) or turn it on during mealtimes (64 percent of all households) become much heavier users than other children — as do children whose parents let them have TVs in their bedrooms. By contrast, “children whose parents make an effort to limit media use — through the media environment they create in the home and the rules they set — spend less time with media than their peers,” report these authors. Although the Kaiser study doesn’t say so explicitly, setting such limits probably affects children’s performance in school. Nearly one-third of these kids admit they multitask while doing their homework, a habit that rises in proportion as kids have easier access to electronic devices.

Conclusion? “Kids whose parents don’t put a TV in their bedroom, don’t leave the TV on during meals or in the background when no one is watching, or do impose some type of media-related rules spend substantially less time with media than do children with more media-lenient parents.”

Media-lenient parents. The phrase ought to send a shiver down the parental spine — in part because becoming “media-lenient” is so easy to do these days. Parents don’t usually see media as a conditioner of life or a moral influence. Media is just … well, there. Like a morning drizzle or the sound of distant traffic, it’s a fact of life — a mild annoyance at times and a slight comfort at others, but nothing you can do much about.

Or so we often think. As it turns out, it’s more than a mere annoyance — and it’s not beyond our control. The increasing willingness of young people to marinate themselves in the media reminds us that parents have a moral obligation to help them resist the stuff they’re soaking up.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

The U.S. Supreme Court last week overturned a campaign-finance restriction that dates from the Roosevelt era — Teddy, not Franklin — and opened the door to virtually unlimited spending by corporations in federal campaigns. It’s expected that the ruling, which insists that corporations are like people and have protected First Amendment rights to political speech, will be interpreted to apply to unions and other organizations as well.

While there are many aspects of the ruling, it raises two interesting ethical questions. First, while most of us agree that people should enjoy a high level of freedom of speech, who or what constitutes the “people” who are granted that right? Second, how much should the government involve itself in the mechanisms of granting free speech? Does government have an obligation to mute the more powerful speaker in order to ensure that the little guy can be heard?

A note about the first question: The term “corporation” comes from the Latin word for body. A corporation is a body of people granted some of the same rights and responsibilities as its flesh-and-blood components. A corporation can take out loans, can sue and be sued, can be tried for crimes, can earn an income, and can pay tax.

But corporations enjoy some super-human capabilities as well. They can live forever, they can confer limitations in liability to their members, and they enjoy certain financial and tax privileges not available to mere mortals.

Should corporations enjoy the same rights as their flesh-and-blood components when it comes to donating to political campaigns? Teddy Roosevelt didn’t think so. Alarmed by corporate abuse and the monopolization of capital and power, he convinced Congress in 1907 to bar corporations and national banks from contributing to candidates for federal office. Similar strictures were extended to labor unions after World War II, and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (known as McCain-Feingold) added new restrictions on the use of so-called soft money — funds controlled by political parties, not individual candidates. McCain-Feingold also limited the airing of issue advocacy ads during certain time periods before primaries and general elections.

Last week’s Supreme Court decision swept away many of those provisions, although prohibitions against direct contributions to candidates or parties will remain in force. Now, corporations — and presumably unions and other interest groups — will be able to funnel unlimited amounts of money into advertising that backs any candidate or issue.

The sharply divided opinions in the court’s 5-4 ruling speak directly to the ethical question of whether free-expression rights granted to an individual apply to a corporation, and if so, whether the judiciary should put itself in the business of attempting to balance the power of the individual versus the corporation.

“The government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity,” justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority’s opinion.

But a 90-page dissent written by justice John Paul Stevens maintains that rights granted to the individual do not necessarily apply to the corporate body. Stevens predicts the ruling will “cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress and the states to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process.”

Which course serves the public good? I’m going to invoke an easy answer and declare that there are no easy answers.

On one hand, it’s obvious that money talks, and opening the floodgates of corporate money carries the risk of distorting the ideal of democracy. What’s good for corporate America is not necessarily good for the body public. Also of concern is the fact that multinational corporations inevitably will have a far greater say in U.S. politics, effectively diluting the citizenry’s control of its government.

On the other hand, corporations are comprised of taxpaying stockholders who “speak” with their investments and have a say in the governance of the entity — and thus may argue that keeping corporations out of the political process is de facto censorship.

Chief justice John Roberts invoked this line of reasoning when he commented, according to the Los Angeles Times, that unless a broad free-speech ruling was granted in this case, the law would “would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern.”

With some trepidation, alluded to earlier, I side with Roberts. Clearly, a civil and civilized society cannot allow entirely free expression (think copyright, harassment, and libel), but every restriction relating to expression carries a risk of diminishing commerce in the marketplace of ideas.

In fact, you can make the case that some well-intentioned restrictions on the flow of campaign money actually backfired and cut off the blood supply to the central players in politics — the candidates, who face not only sharp limits in the amounts that can be raised but also intricate requirements on where and how they can raise money. Those strictures, imposed in the 1970s, generally are thought to have increased the power of political action committees. Years later, McCain-Feingold left open a legislative door for the proliferation of so-called 527 Groups (the type of organizations that begat the infamous Swift Boat ad campaign).

The ultimate impact of both reforms has been to force candidates to expend more time and effort in the increasingly complex fundraising process and to inadvertently increase the importance of fringe players by granting more power to certain special interests who exploited the loopholes.

Maybe Milton had a point when he wrote, “We do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting [Truth's] strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

Or perhaps Montgomery Scott, chief engineer or the Starship Enterprise, put it best in Star Trek III, when he grumbled about complex machinery in a line that the New York Times borrowed and dubbed “The Scotty Rule of Campaign Finance”: “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

For more information, see: Washington Post collection of essays on the decision, Jan. 24 — The Thread, a blog of the New York Times, Jan. 22.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

In a fine think-piece on the underlying causes of Haiti’s tragedy, New York Times columnist David Brooks begins with a simple comparison. In 1989, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the Bay Area of Northern California, and 63 people died. Last week a magnitude 7.0 quake shattered Haiti, and as many as 200,000 people died.

His point, paraphrased, is that Haiti’s tragedy was not seismic but economic: It was abject poverty, not plate tectonics, that caused so many deaths. Nations that can afford thoughtful zoning, good engineering, and quality construction can build to last and withstand such shocks. Nations forced by demographics and penury into haphazard sprawl must build for the moment and can’t survive natural disasters.

All of that is true, as far as it goes. But behind poverty lies a deeper cause: corruption. If we’re to compare Haiti and the Bay Area, let’s add one more set of facts. On the latest Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International, the United States stands among the world’s least corrupt nations — 19th of the 180 countries ranked. That’s not as high as it should be, but it’s leagues apart from Haiti, which stands at 168, down there with Afghanistan and Somalia.

How is that relevant? Take the construction trades. In a culture where bribery, fraud, and extortion are endemic, it would be bizarre to imagine that you could build a five-star hotel or a slant-sided hovel without paying off somebody. Some of those payments help you get permits to build in unsafe areas. Some insure that building inspectors don’t look too closely at how much cheap sand you’re mixing with expensive cement to dilute its strength or how much steel you’re selling off under the table rather than using to reinforce your concrete. And some bribes go for protection, to keep thugs — or public officials — from attacking your building site, your home, or your business.

Corruption, say those who study it, is one of the world’s most regressive taxes, slamming the poor far harder than the rich: The poor pay more bribes, and the percentage of their income going to bribery is higher. Whether the corrupt cop stops the driver of a Lexus or a motor scooter, the sum he extorts will probably be tolerable for the former — and potentially disastrous for the latter.

If Haiti’s fatal poverty is a function of corruption, the question is what to do about it. Anti-poverty efforts alone, as Brooks points out, have been disappointingly ineffective. The reason, I suspect, is that they have too often accepted corruption as part of the embedded cultural landscape rather than as an imposed and correctible offense. It may be that you simply can’t defeat poverty without erasing corruption.

But how can you erase corruption in a place like Haiti? An encouraging hint comes from Hong Kong, which 35 years ago was arguably as bad as Haiti. Riddled with corruption, it was so rancid that the police superintendent himself kept meticulous hand-penciled notebooks detailing every street-corner business that had paid him off so that his officers would leave it alone. The notebooks are now on display at the new headquarters of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), founded in 1974 to clean up Hong Kong.

The turn-around wasn’t pretty, involving public protests, police strikes, and the extradition of the superintendent, who had slipped away to England. Nor was it inexpensive: The ICAC, whose 900 investigators have the power to arrest, detain, interrogate, and bring to trial those suspected of public- or private-sector corruption, currently absorbs $800 million a year, or 0.3 percent of Hong Kong’s budget. But look at the results. Hong Kong, this year, sits in 12th place on Transparency International’s scale, well above the United States, Great Britain, and much of Europe. It’s a thriving financial center, where global investors trust that their funds will be safe. What’s more, as Hong Kongers will happily tell you, it essentially has no poverty.

I’m not saying that Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, will become the next Hong Kong. There’s a world of difference between the entrepreneurial culture of southern China and the slave-trade colonialism of the Caribbean. But there’s also a powerful similarity that binds people everywhere: a set of shared moral values that includes honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion. Ask people which values most matter to them, we’ve found, and even in the deepest cultures of corruption, this list emerges — not as a description of their circumstances but as a testament to their aspirations. Do they experience corruption? Yes. Do they like it? No. Do they want something better? Absolutely.

Could an anti-corruption agency work in Haiti? Maybe not in the past. But if there’s any blessing lurking in last week’s awful tragedy, it’s that the past has ended. Old habits die hard, of course. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, graft flourished, and it may do so again in Haiti as millions of dollars pour in. But we also may see a new determination to link corruption to poverty — and to fight both. If so, the global community may find that 0.3 percent of the budget is a modest price for cleaning up, permanently, the mental and moral rubble from this disaster.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

When Haisong Jiang crossed a security line at Newark Liberty International Airport on January 3, the 28-year-old Rutgers University graduate student thought he was simply kissing his girlfriend goodbye. As it happened, he shut down the terminal for six hours, inconvenienced thousands of passengers, and incurred untold costs in time and treasure.

Mr. Jiang was arrested days later, and his case is still to be adjudicated. But one thing is certain: He’ll be the delight of ethicists for years to come. Why? Because his story raises some of the key moral concerns of our age, including security, terrorism, immigration, and international education. It pits individual freedoms against national interests. And it demands that we reconsider the ways in which the punishment fits the crime.

But what’s the crime?

One interpretation sees it as nothing more than the misplaced ardor of a romantic — a word Jiang’s friends use for him. From Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Rodin’s “The Kiss,” the passions of love have trampled caution and wisdom underfoot — generally to the delight of Hollywood and the public. In this interpretation, Jiang is a molecular biologist within months of completing his doctorate who, after years of rational detachment and laboratory precision, finally falls hopelessly in love. Far from family in China and studying under a student visa, he’s in his first real relationship, say his friends. She’s a former Rutgers student now living in California, and with the holidays over, she’s headed back home to her work as a statistician.

After sending her through security, he hovers by the rope separating screened from unscreened passengers, hoping for one last glimpse. Beside him is the stool for the security guard, whose task it is to prevent outsiders from sneaking through the doorway that disgorges arriving passengers. The guard, however, has left his post. So Jiang, bearding the lion of airport security in its den to prove how much he loves her, ducks under the rope and kisses her one last time. Twenty minutes later he leaves the airport.

So what if he was reported to officials by a bystander? So what if the police who swarmed into the secure area couldn’t find him? So what if every passenger had to be herded out and rescreened before the flights could leave? In this interpretation, it was all for love. No doubt he did something wrong, but only to telegraph his devotion.

But there’s another interpretation. A man who looks like a foreign national is reported to have broken through airport security — at a point where, suspiciously, the security camera happens not to be working and the guard happens to have vanished. The breach doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Four days earlier, a well-educated Jordanian doctor slipped through security to kill eight people at a CIA post in Afghanistan. A few days before that, a young Nigerian carried explosives through security and tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit. At Newark, when back-up cameras operated by the airlines finally provide pictures, the man is shown hovering furtively in the area and finally slipping through.

That’s when a woman in a long white coat approaches. On camera, they’re seen to be kissing. But is the man, who turns out to be a well-trained scientist, actually transferring weapons or explosives to her bulky coat? Or is he planning to board a plane and commit mayhem, taking advantage of American ignorance of the gender of Asian names to use her ticket? With all these earmarks of a sophisticated plot, do the police have any alternative but to drain the entire secure area?

What, then, about punishment? Is Jiang a hopeless romantic or a would-be terrorist? The distinction is one of intent: Did he plan to kiss a girlfriend or destroy a plane? Was the former only a cover for the latter? Suppose, after she was herded out of the secure area, she disposed of whatever he gave her before she submitted herself for rescreening. Was this, in fact, the perfect fail-safe plot, which works if you’re not caught but leaves no clues if you are?

Good investigative work will answer the romantic-versus-terrorist question. Let’s assume he’s the former. Should he be punished for what he intended to do (there’s been talk of a $500 fine for “defiant trespassing”), or for what he did do (a million-dollar fine, perhaps, to partially defray the cost of thousands of extra hours of time spent by investigators, police, screeners, flight crews, and the public), or for what he might have done (a prison term for breaching security and endangering the public by exposing loopholes that real terrorists then can exploit)?

Or should he go unpunished? Shocking as that sounds, think of the context. A rope line signals something important but not unbreachable. The same ropes festoon airport check-in counters, and nobody goes to jail for ducking under them when there’s no line. To signal full security, put up glass walls and one-way turnstile doors. Hire guards who don’t leave their posts. Make sure security cameras are working.

You can send a strong signal to the public by hammering Mr. Jiang. But you might send an even stronger signal to airport security by letting the punishment fall on them rather than him. And you could do a bit of both.

What’s right?

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

What’s surprising about the story of Reverend Tim Jones is not that, in his pre-Christmas sermon, he urged the poor in his parish in York, England, to go forth and shoplift. In the ethics trade, after all, one of the oldest chestnuts is the Jean Valjean question: Would you, like the hero of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, steal bread to feed your starving family? That query provokes lively conversation in even the dullest ethics classroom, as Rev. Jones found out when he baldly stated, “My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.”

Nor is it surprising that he chose the Christmas week to launch his mandate. He was perhaps courting a replay of his 2008 news-making effort, when he garnered attention by going into a local stationery store and throwing Playboy merchandise on the floor. This year, in a season when serious news is in short supply, his message was quickly picked up by BBC editors and put into reverb mode by the British commentariat.

Nor is it surprising that his “Thou shalt shoplift” sermon (as the BBC headlined it) drew both official outrage (”highly irresponsible,” said the North Yorkshire Police) and ecclesiastical hand-wringing (”shoplifting is not the way,” said the Archdeacon of York). That was expected and obligatory.

Nor is it surprising that he evoked the language of impassioned social reform. Echoing the social-welfare tradition of such icons as Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, and the Fabian Society, he even sought to imbue his social proposition with economic theory. “I would ask that they do not steal from small, family businesses,” he counseled, “but from large, national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.”

No, what’s truly surprising was the befuddled moral reasoning that caused even some ethicists to equivocate on the morality of his proposition. What’s surprising is why we, and he, found it so uncomfortable to say flatly, “This proposition is unethical.”

I’m not an anthropologist, but my understanding is that “Don’t steal” is a universal moral prohibition, shared in some form by societies everywhere. There are, of course, certain approved forms of sharing — as in communal societies that hold property in common, or in agrarian cultures where the poor glean grain left behind by harvesters. But these are consensual arrangements, agreed upon in advance. Did Rev. Jones go first to “national businesses” and get a green light for shoplifting?

If so, he might have escaped moral sanction, though he would have faced fierce pushback from retailers. In the United States, retailers lost $12.7 billion to shoplifting, according to the 2009 National Retail Security Survey. That number, equaling half of 1 percent of sales, may sound small. In an industry employing 24 million people, however, that loss potentially puts 120,000 people out of work. Suppose these newly jobless all arrived in York, drank Jones’s elixir, and went forth to shoplift. How much additional joblessness would they create? Where would the cycle end?

But even this argument is a symptom of the deeper conceptual problem. Why? Because its logic is all ends based, focusing only on outcomes and consequences. Do A, this logic insists, and B inevitably will follow. Under such a consequentialist ethic, if B turns out to be good, then you made an ethical choice. Looking at “Thou shalt shoplift” from this perspective, it’s easy to see that the situation of a few poor families in York would be immensely improved if they shoplifted, while the probability of 120,000 unemployed Americans flocking to York is vanishingly small. The flaw, here, is that this logic skates perilously close to the moral bankruptcy of “the end justifies the means,” which would argue that (since outcomes alone determine ethics) any bad policy is acceptable if only it can be seen to benefit the poor.

In fact, however, most people encountering this case don’t think outcomes determine ethics. Instead, they’re outraged — a response they’re likely to explain not on the basis of consequences but of principles. While they may never have heard of Immanuel Kant, they instinctively turn to his rule-based ethic, which asks us to obey only that principle we’d like everyone in the world to obey. For Kant, consequences were unimportant: How a thing turns out, he argued, tells you nothing about whether it was right. Do you want a world where people always shoplift whenever they feel poor or a world where the principle of property rights is always respected? Get the principle right, Kant argued, and the long-term result will be the most ethical, just, and fair society.

These two propositions divide even the ethicists. If you yearn to justify shoplifting as an immediate boon to the disadvantaged, you equate ethics with outcomes. But if you yearn to outlaw shoplifting for the long-term benefit of the world, you equate ethics with principles. In this debate, it appears that the public has sided with the latter.

But most surprising, perhaps, is the absence in this debate of a third ethic — the care-based principle of the Golden Rule. What’s the impact of stealing on the shoplifters? How does it degrade their self-respect, harden their sentiments, and increase their distrust of others? Is that degradation what we desire to give them? The truly surprising thing about Rev. Jones’s proposition is that he’s calling on poor parishioners to surrender their dignity — one of the things they presumably go to church to find reaffirmed. Promoting shoplifting may make Rev. Jones feel better, but it neither creates a better world nor inhabits it with fully dignified people. That’s a hard price to pay for having a moral leader who gets his ethics so muddled.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

HONG KONG

Last week, when Iceland’s chief financial regulator told an audience of anticorruption officials that “fraud and corruption are heading for the North Pole,” he wasn’t being merely metaphoric.

Tracing the impact of the global recession on his country, Gunnar Andersen, director general of his nation’s Financial Supervisory Authority, zeroed in on October 2008. That’s when, in a single week, Iceland’s three top banks collapsed.

As their losses mounted to $182 billion, markets in Reykjavik dropped 76 percent. Given a national population of only 320,000 people, he said, Iceland’s implosion was “the equivalent of 300 Lehman Brothers going bankrupt” in the United States. Had such a thing happened in the United States, he noted, “it would have needed 290 TARPs [the Troubled Asset Relief Program enacted by Congress in October 2008] to protect against the collapse.”

Iceland’s loss was the worst endured by any nation during the recent recession. Listening to Andersen, I expected that, as the new broom appointed last spring to help clean up the mess, he would be urging broader regulation and tougher legislation. Instead, painting a grim picture of the greed and cronyism underlying this collapse, he called not only for changes in the law but for a “change in attitude.” What went wrong in Iceland, he concluded, “has little to do with the regulatory framework.” Instead, it was a matter of “serious and massive fraud,” to be addressed not so much by rules as by values.

Frankly, that caught me by surprise. Fighting corruption typically centers on legislative, investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial efforts. But last week, at a three-day conference cosponsored by Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) and OLAF, the European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office, something else was afoot. To be sure, there was plenty of talk about legal measures. But there also was an unmistakably strong focus on ethics and values, articulated not by social activists or global academics (not one of whom was on the roster of speakers) but by the cops, regulators, auditors, bankers, and judges who actually fight corruption on a daily basis. Here’s a sampling:

• Richard Alderman, director of the Serious Fraud Office in the United Kingdom, called for “a modern, ethical, anticorruption culture in business.”
• Ng Peng Khian, chief audit officer of the Bank of China, argued that “good corporate governance cannot rely solely on regulation” but needs “strong ethical culture” as well.
• Timothy Flynn, chairman of KPMG International, insisted that the first line of defense against corporate corruption “is to make sure we create highly ethical cultures grounded in integrity.”
• François Vincke, chair of the Anti-Corruption Commission of the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce, observed that “compliance and integrity are a good investment.”
• Akere Muna, vice-chair of Transparency International’s board of directors and former president of the Cameroon Bar Association, noted the importance of whistle-blowers, whose motivation is “very much related to personal ethics.”

All of which fits well with the work of the ICAC, widely regarded as the world’s premier anticorruption agency. Back in 1995, ICAC started its own Ethics Development Centre to help educate business leaders on the topic. Prior to the conference, I sat down with ICAC’s commissioner, Dr. Timothy Tong Hin-ming. He’s well placed to comment on an organization that, during the past 35 years, has taken this former British colony from one of the most corrupt jurisdictions in the world to one of the cleanest.

Over tea in his agency’s new Centre of Anti-Corruption Studies, Dr. Tong pointed to a shift in ICAC’s efforts. As they expand beyond political corruption into private-sector investigations, they’re also showing increased interest not only in offenses that are specifically “indictable” (his word) but in those that are more broadly unethical. What troubles him, he told me, was the number of executives in Hong Kong public companies who had “attempted to take advantage of the financial tsunami — people who had helped cause the crisis, but what they did could not be brought under the enforcement umbrella because it wasn’t illegal.”

“We take such offenses very, very seriously,” he said, “because if we don’t, how can we claim to be the world’s financial center?”

How, indeed? What draws people to invest in a financial center is trust, a quality that can’t be legislated and enforced but must be valued and earned. The recession has exposed deep levels of corruption, and tighter regulation is in the offing. But the real remedy, according to these experts, appears to lie not in more compliance but in the creation of ethical business cultures.

As U.S. regulators busy themselves building new layers of enforceable regulation, they need to pause for a moment to listen to the message from Hong Kong. Regulate, yes. But remember that beyond the enforceable lies the broader realm of integrity. Build cultures of integrity, and you finally address the corruption that was an undeniable factor in creating the ethics recession.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

I saw the argument between Tiger Woods and his wife, Elin Nordegren, and watched her chase him down the driveway with a golf club. Actually two million other people (and still counting) saw it too — thanks to a “re-enactment” on YouTube.

And while it looks more like the Sims than news footage, the piece, confected by a Chinese video-animation company, has become a media sensation, offering what the New York Times notes may be “the future of journalism, tabloid division.”

The Chinese firm churns out 20 or so digital animations a day, most dealing with local stories and Taiwan news. Animators record movements of live human models resembling the subjects, animate digital figures to resemble the real people, and then program their software to depict movements according to a scripted storyboard.

While it’s unlikely that anyone could mistake the animation for real-life video (even the animation company admits it didn’t do a very good job depicting Tiger Woods’s features), this very well could be the Next Big Thing in media ethics.

And that’s troubling for several reasons:

• Although the depicted actions are based on pure guesswork, the technological nature of the “re-enactment” lends a spurious precision to the presentation. Garbage-in-garbage-out transactions are decorated by the veneer of technology, mutating into what I call “precision garbage.”
• Video and digitized re-enactments of crimes and crime scenes are beginning to be admitted as evidence in courtrooms, and according to a recent book on the subject, are proving to be more persuasive to juries than oral presentations. Even if we assume that digital animations admitted in court pass expert scrutiny, we’ve moved the medium of digital animation into the presumed category of a depiction of truth.
• The “public mind” is not always adept at sorting through its contents and determining which parts of what we “know” came from fact and which from fiction. An inventory of “facts” from urban legends and forwarded internet propaganda bounces around the jumbled neurons of the public mind, and we know (we all know, personally) that there are many people who can’t tell fact from fiction or just don’t want to make the effort.

Sometimes the lapses between reality and media depiction are amusing: British actor Sir Alec Guinness regularly received sacks of mail seeking his wisdom — mail written by people who confused him with his Star Wars character Obi-Wan Kenobi.

But often the confusion is nothing short of sinister. Yes, there are people who believe that Lyndon Johnson conspired to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Some were directly persuaded by a preposterous film scenario, though I have encountered people who never saw, or don’t recall seeing, Oliver Stone’s JFK but assume the concoction to be real because they’ve either “seen something” or “heard about it.”

The problem from a media-ethics point of view is that you can’t really embrace a zero-tolerance policy on altering images. The word image itself come from the Latin for “a likeness” and descends from the same root as imagine.

Video has to be edited — the image altered — unless we want to watch every occurrence in its entirety, and even then the image is not a pristine specimen of reality. Former U.S. House speaker Tip O’Neill demonstrated that in his famous confrontation with cable TV network C-SPAN, in which he forced a cameraman to zoom back from a close-up of a congressman giving a speech to show the virtually empty room. Either way — the close-up or the long shot — the medium changed the message.

Images have to be cropped and the colors adjusted, a problem dating back to the first color-film cameras that could not register blue very well, so skies were often hand-painted in (which might lead to a silly but nonetheless logical suspicion that the weather was better back then, because few bothered to paint in the clouds).

Visual journalists long have grappled with the reality problem. Is allowing someone to pose for a picture, rather than just taking it, a distortion of reality? (Which of course raises another intriguing question about the nature of reality when the posing is done in relation to a pseudo-event like a press conference or ribbon cutting.) Is Photoshopping wrinkles from a subject’s face a distortion, or is it a correction of a distortion caused by harsh artificial light from the flash?

The news industry always has grappled with the uneasy mixture of fact and image. When videotape first came into widespread use, networks and local televisions stations bombarded viewers with frequent reminders that programs or portions of programs were recorded earlier “for presentation at this time.” There was a real worry that time-shifting could distort reality, deceiving viewers into thinking something was happening now when it happened in the past. (Not such a terribly quaint notion: Last month, Fox News was forced to apologize twice for failing to disclose that it used canned footage of older, better-attended rallies in its coverage of the current days’ events with smaller crowds.)

And how do we draw the rules for depicting reality for the rest of television programming? Clearly there are different standards for entertainment and news, but what about all of the stuff in between, such as true-crime shows and the semantically challenged category of “reality” programming? Does a parenthetical graphic stating “re-enactment” or “simulation” absolve the producers of all culpability for errors and omissions?

Those are questions we still haven’t figured out, despite decades — even centuries — of wrestling with the complex issues involving photography, cinema, and TV. So maybe we’d better start thinking about the computer animation issue sometime before the next century.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

Rushworth Kidder will return to this space next week.

For more information, see:  Connecticut Law Tribune, Nov. 6 – Los Angeles Times, Dec. 9 – New York Times, Dec. 6 – Vancouver Sun, Nov. 14.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Suppose you were the devil, and you were determined to thwart president Barack Obama’s newly announced strategy for Afghanistan. What would you do? Build up the Taliban? Wear down U.S. forces? Provoke protests in Washington? Destabilize Pakistan? Send in droughts, plagues, and earthquakes?

These would all help. But if I were the devil, I’d want an overarching plan, elegantly simple but devastatingly effective, that could undermine every effort the president could make. For that, I’d turn to the perfect poison: public and private corruption.

Like the fabled universal solvent of the alchemists, corruption knows no limits. It dissolves every aspect of a nation’s life. When you unleash fraud, bribery, extortion, and cheating — when every decision can be bought, every fund embezzled, every census padded, every election stolen — then no institution, structure, or motivation is free from the frenetic immorality of putting self above community. Want to maintain a strong army? Fine, until someone pads the regimental rosters with names of the dead in order to pocket their wages. Want to fund a school or hospital? Fine, until contributors realize that their money is being skimmed off before it reaches its target. Want to prepare an audit for a donor nation? Fine, until it becomes obvious that most of the numbers in the report have been made up.

In Afghanistan, it seems, corruption is having a heyday. The 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), produced by the global nonprofit Transparency International, appeared just weeks before President Obama’s West Point speech last week on Afghanistan. That index ranked 180 countries according to their levels of perceived corruption. Afghanistan sat at 179, displaced only by Somalia as the most corrupt nation on earth.

You wouldn’t know that, however, from the president’s speech. True, he promised to “support Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders that combat corruption.” He also said he would “expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable.” But many of those officials owe their position to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whose reelection may have been one of the most blatant thefts in the history of election monitoring. Describing the Karzai government as “legitimate,” Obama noted only (and almost parenthetically) that it was “marred by fraud.” Beyond that, corruption received little mention — as though it were merely an annoying nuisance, like mosquitoes or potholes, that you must simply put up with.

Now, that might be an adequate response if Afghanistan were only ordinarily corrupt, like Saudi Arabia (ranked at 63), China (79), or Mexico (89). But Afghanistan wallows in industrial-strength, weapons-grade corruption. If the country really is that deep in the mire, what’s the probability that anything the United States does will be effective? What’s more, if the Afghan government’s own accounting is fraudulent, how will we even know where our dollars actually went?

To his credit, Obama is proposing, along with the military surge, a “civilian surge that reinforces positive action” in Afghanistan. That effort, to be successful, will need to focus first on fighting corruption. How? In releasing the CPI report, Huguette Labelle, chair of Transparency International, set out her own formula. “Stemming corruption,” she noted, “requires strong oversight by parliaments, a well-performing judiciary, independent and properly resourced audit and anticorruption agencies, vigorous law enforcement, transparency in public budgets, revenue and aid flows, as well as space for independent media and a vibrant civil society.” Each of these items is essential, and each will take funds, time, energy, and moral clarity. Without those things, there will be no real reform, just a long pause. The ringleaders of corruption, having an enormous vested interest in preserving the current system, will simply hunker down until the troop pullout.

With a “civilian surge” effort, however, Obama has a chance to reset the course of history. As he told the West Point cadets last week, the world has changed. “Unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the twentieth century,” he said, “our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies.” Those are exactly the circumstances that, according to the CPI report, breed corruption. “Countries which are perceived as the most corrupt,” the report notes, “are also those plagued by long-standing conflicts, which have torn apart their governance infrastructure.”

As the global economy becomes more interlocked, great-power conflicts may lie largely behind us. From now on, warfare will occur largely within failed states. That will require our civil-society organizations to battle corruption just as skillfully as our military forces battle insurgents — lest the entire resources meant for warfare get siphoned off into Swiss bank accounts held by people far more clever at fraud than we are. Afghanistan is handing us the opportunity to develop effective anticorruption strategies, which could so change the face of twenty-first-century warfare that world peace actually might be within reach. Devilishly hard to do, perhaps, but nothing less will be successful.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week in British Columbia, someone asked me how, with the world collapsing into moral fragmentation, anything could give us hope. Ever the optimist, I pointed to greater transparency as a force for moral improvement.

The words were hardly out of my mouth when the European football (soccer) circuit delivered up a pair of appalling stories. So let me explain why I’m still sticking to my view.

Story 1 concerns French football player Thierry Henry. Last week, in a match with Ireland to determine which country would go to South Africa for the World Cup finals, Henry was caught on video using his hand to manipulate the ball in a play that set up the French team’s winning goal. The referee didn’t see it, and Henry didn’t call a foul on himself.

The Irish team’s demand for a rematch was overruled by FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the sport’s global governing body), which explained that “during matches, decisions are taken by the referee and these decisions are final.” Henry’s own statements did little to burnish his case. “I will be honest, it was a hand ball,” he said, according to the Toronto Globe & Mail. “But I’m not the ref. I played it. The ref allowed it.”

Henry now faces blistering criticism from, among others, the leading union for physical education teachers in France itself. Concerned about the brazen lesson Henry sent to French youngsters, the coaches’ statement noted that “the France team will go to South Africa courtesy of indisputable cheating, which highlights the downward spiral affecting football today.”

In light of Story Two, the coaches proved prescient. This second item concerns the bust-up of a European soccer gambling ring. According to German police, its several hundred members bribed referees, coaches, and players to fix some 200 matches (including three in the Champions League) this year in nine countries. “Without question, this is the biggest betting scandal in the history of European soccer,” said Peter Limacher, the head of discipline for European soccer’s governing body, according to the New York Times.

You don’t have to be an arch-pessimist to let these stories get you down. Their message upends the trust of millions of fans who expect sportsmanlike teams to play fair. It points to a culture of calculated deception that infects not only sports but financial institutions and legislative bodies. It gives rise to a cynical vision of a world where getting a goal is indistinguishable from getting away with a goal — a world whose credo is “don’t get caught” rather than “don’t do wrong.”

Go deeper, however, and you’ll spot an encouraging trend. In both these cases, what broke open the story was transparency. In the end, there was simply too much light — no place for the scammers to hide. Henry was done in by the technology of instant replay: Twenty years ago, few would have seen the wrong, and proving it would have been nearly impossible. The gambling ring was done in not only by wire taps and cell phone intercepts, but by computer analyses of betting patterns that highlight unusual gaming activity in real time.

Are these technologies an unmitigated blessing? No. There’s a moral case against each one. If instant replay becomes the standard for refereeing sports, high-stakes games could last days instead of hours — either that, or a video record everyone knows is available would be ignored in deference to the merely human abilities of a referee. And if cell phone intercepts and wiretaps are so successful at solving economic crimes — and if economic crimes really do lie at the heart of the current recession — then why not throw privacy to the winds, authorize these technologies at every juncture, and always put the good of the community above the rights of the individual?

Transparency, then, sets up profound right-versus-right issues. Yet its presence is far better than its absence. The history of recent anticorruption efforts suggests a simple rule, which is that in proportion as you shine in the light and wipe out the dark corners, corruption withers and honesty takes root.

So is transparency the saving radiance that will return us to moral probity? Not without two powerful caveats:

• Don’t confuse transparency with technology. The latter powerfully increases the former. But transparency is a condition, not a technique. It involves minds, not machines, and it depends more on values than on rules. Used properly, technology not only will allow better enforcement of rules but will create cultures where it’s easier to obey the core values of honesty and fairness.
• Remember that transparency depends on consensus. Without a public willingness to label corruption as wrong, exposed evil merely will be shrugged off, miscreants will feel no shame, and wrongdoing will become the new normal. What makes transparency work is outrage. Maintain that, and transparency will continue to make strides against corruption.

Which brings me back to my reason for hope. So far, the world is genuinely upset with Henry. Very few thoughtful observers applaud him for befooling the refs. And fewer still are willing to agree that football is happily corrupt and that every game is satisfactorily predetermined. Transparency, it seems, is alive and well and living (for the moment) in Europe.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

If you’re in search of scurrilous, spiteful, and vilifying prose, the nation’s archives of political writing are a fine place to start. In the eighteenth century, the framers of the U.S. Constitution faced all manner of calumny in the newspapers of their day. The slavery debates of the nineteenth century were rancid with verbal abuse. By the early twentieth century, yellow journalism was as drenched in vituperative accusation as it was devoid of verifiable accuracy.

But I suspect that none of this holds a candle to today’s nastiness. What surfaces in commentary programs on cable television and talk radio is just a hint. The mother lode of negativity surely lies in the blogosphere. Hour by hour, it seems, the postings by bloggers — and especially the responses from their readers — are laying down sedimentary layers of unverified and anonymous attack that will provide sobering core samples for future historians.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. We’re living through an unprecedented period in which every citizen can be a “published” commentator. If you want your voice heard, you no longer need to buy a printing press, create a distribution network, and build a corral of writers — or win the approval of those who have such things. In the web’s great democratization of information, you simply go online and articulate your views for the world. And in response, your readers offer their views, which often garner responses themselves — creating vast threads of conversation that range from constructive commentary to blistering negativity to poisonous inanity.

All of this has caused me to be deeply grateful for the readers of Ethics Newsline®. In our decade of existence, we’ve attracted exceptionally thoughtful letters. Our readers bring to the table high standards of values, ethics, and character. They expect such standards in our writing, and they return it to us in the civility of their comments.

And that set me thinking. What if we could capture and codify those standards? Could we begin to make a difference to blog postings — and readers’ comments — everywhere?

Since we’ve recently added a reader response function to Ethics Newsline, it made sense to start at home by setting out the standards we expect. We’re not seeking to correct past problems — as I say, happily we’ve been mostly free from the blogosphere’s excesses. But we do want to emphasize our commitment to solution-oriented journalism. We want to invite into the conversation those who care more about progress than blame. And we want to reinforce our purpose, which is to elevate awareness of and support for the ethical principles that underlie civil society.

So here’s a draft of “A Blog-Poster’s Code of Ethics”:

As a resident of a global community of engaged thinkers, I agree to abide by the five shared values that create and sustain communities everywhere:

RESPECT. Communities depend on mutual respect. In my posts, I will respect the dignity, motivation, and intelligence of others at all times. I will neither engage in personal attacks or derogatory comments, nor tolerate those who do. While I welcome vigorous and strong debate, I will nevertheless strive to maintain civility in the face of disagreement and reasonableness in the presence of polarization.

RESPONSIBILITY. Communities comprise identifiable, recognizable individuals. I will take responsibility for what I write, using my own name rather than hiding behind the anonymity of an avatar or pseudonym. If I absolutely must remain anonymous, I will consult the editors to ensure that they know my identity and that readers know why I am not using my name.

HONESTY. Communities thrive on transparency. I will strive for candor, openness, and truth telling in my posts. I will avoid gossip, innuendo, unsourced data, and deceptive spin, but will seek to reflect accuracy, completeness, and relevance — the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — in my comments.

FAIRNESS. Communities require the even-handed application of justice. I will seek always to represent issues as fairly as possible, honoring arguments on both sides even as I seek to persuade others to choose my side. But I will strive to avoid bias, discrimination, and misrepresentation, and will courageously expose bigotry and prejudice where I find it.

COMPASSION. Communities prosper through mutual caring. I will strive to use my posts to elevate and ennoble, rather than to lambaste, tear down, or harshly criticize others. Seeking to promote kindliness and good will, I will treat other people and their ideas with the same sense of caring attention I would want from them.

We’d like to feature this code as a standing part of our response page, asking readers to click the “I agree” box before posting a comment. And we’d like to see this code, or something like it, taken up by other blogs. But first we’d like to hear from you. So please tell us what you think.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

“Who’s to blame?”

So common is that question today that you’d think Americans were about to carve it into the presidential seal or stamp it onto our coinage. Who got us into Afghanistan? Who are Wall Street’s worst chiselers? Who blew Philadelphia’s chances in the World Series? Who’s at fault for passing (if you’re a Republican) or nearly derailing (if you’re a Democrat) the latest healthcare bill?

As the party out of power, Republicans seem particularly consumed with blaming. Last week’s special election in a longstanding Republican district in upstate New York, where a Democrat won, prompted a spate of frenetic finger pointing. Some blamed the party’s vociferous right wing, since it was their attacks on the moderate Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, that drove her out of the race at the eleventh hour, replaced by an arch-conservative whom voters couldn’t stomach. But national right-wingers are castigating the district’s Republican elders for picking Scozzafava in the first place, arguing that if a real conservative had been allowed to campaign from the beginning, the race would have been theirs.

This, of course, is simply a cameo of the GOP’s big-picture debate, where moderates blame conservatives for welcoming only hard-right voters while conservatives lambaste moderates for diluting true conservative principles. The problem isn’t peculiar to Republicans: Think about the infighting among Democrats in past decades about who is a real liberal. At the moment, however, the fratricidal blame seems particularly virulent.

Why should that be? Are today’s issues so serious that we’ve finally decided to figure out, once and for all, who’s to blame? No, we’ve had serious issues for years. Is it possible, then, that the penchant for blaming is driven not by the issues but by the atmosphere? Could it be that blaming begets more blaming? Is blame contagious?

That last point is the intriguing thesis of a scholarly article published in the October 17 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Titled “Blame Contagion: The Automatic Transmission of Self-Serving Attributions,” it reports on four recent experiments conducted by authors Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California and Larissa Tiedens of Stanford University.

By “blame contagion,” these researchers don’t mean simply that if you blame me, I “catch” that habit and blame you back. Nor do they mean that, after being blamed, I’m more apt to blame others. They’re saying something more subtle. Apparently we soak up a propensity to blame, which they define as “the act of attributing a personal failure to another person or event,” from any atmosphere where people are busy casting blame, even when the issues have nothing to do with us.

To test their hypothesis, Fast and Tiedens asked two groups of students to read slightly differing versions of a news story about California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Each version described a special election he called in order to pass four propositions. The propositions were defeated, and the whole process cost the state $250 million. In one version of the story, the governor took full moral responsibility for the costly failure, saying that “the buck stops with me.” In the other, he blamed political partisanship and special-interest groups.

The students in the experiment, after responding to some other, unrelated questions, were then asked to write about a failure in their own lives and to explain what had caused it. Those who had read about Schwarzenegger casting blame were significantly more likely to explain their own failure by blaming others than were those who read about him taking responsibility. Similar effects arose in two later experiments. In one, students read about other students blaming the university for their failures to find jobs after graduation, rather than taking responsibility themselves. In the other, students read about a foundation program officer making an unsuccessful grant and blaming the grant recipient, rather than blaming his own lack of judgment. In each case, the blaming contagion carried through to the students: Asked to write about a failure of their own, those exposed to the blame were more apt to blame others.

Why do people blame? Largely, these researchers suggest, to protect their own threatened self-image. If I see situations where people save their skins by blaming others — even if these situations are wholly unrelated to me — I pick up that same behavior. And here’s the scary part: I do it, as they say, “automatically.”

How’s that relevant to our world? Well, here’s a little test of your own. Keep a pad and pencil handy as you watch the news, listen to talk radio, or surf the blogosphere. Jot down every instance where you encounter someone — a politician, coach, corporate executive, educator, commentator, or celebrity — blaming others for failure rather than accepting responsibility. If blame really is contagious, is it any wonder we’re such a blame-ridden society?

Yet there’s also a signal of hope in Fast and Tiedens’ research. When students who’ve read about blame are asked to write about one of their own core values before writing about their own failures — affirming what matters to them from within, as it were — the contagion effect vanishes. Citing earlier research, the authors note that “affirming core values leads to feelings of love, which could, in turn, explain why threatened individuals no longer behave in a threatened manner.”

What can we do to help a culture caught in a contagion of blame? Three things. First, realize that blaming others for our failures, far from being a victimless crime or a bad but unimportant habit, is caustic and catching. Second, make sure our personal default position is set to take responsibility rather than to blame. And third, regularly reaffirm our own core values.

Can we make blaming so entirely shameful, unfashionable, and unpopular that it withers away? Probably not. But whatever we can do to stem this contagion helps create a more civil world.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Several years ago, visiting New York City, I became a statistical anomaly. It started when I got out of a cab in Manhattan and unknowingly dropped my wallet on the sidewalk. It ended several hours later with a call from an executive in a midtown office tower, saying he’d found my wallet and would return it to me if I stopped by. I did so, offering profuse thanks and a reward, which he good-heartedly declined as he wished me well.

According to a new poll on community trust from Gallup, New York is not a good place to lose your wallet. Surveying some 170,000 Americans since January 2009, Gallup asked, “If you lost a wallet or a purse that contained $200, and it was found by a neighbor, do you think it would be returned with the money in it, or not?”

Now, pause here and jot down three things. First, what do you think — yes or no? Second, in which of the 50 states do you think people would be most apt to answer yes? Finally, in which state would they be most likely to say no?

Got it? Okay, here’s what Gallup found. The top 10 most trusting states cluster in the northern tier of the West and Midwest, but they also include Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Utah and South Dakota lead the pack, with 85 percent expressing great trust in their neighbors. The top tier also includes Idaho, Montana, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wyoming. In the bottom tier are 10 states that are either large (New York, California), southern (Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana), or both (Florida, Texas). But even in Nevada — the lowest of the bottom 10 — some 60 percent of the public still think the wallet would be returned. So here’s the first key point: Most Americans, wherever they are, trust their neighbors.

Or at least they do in statewide averages. But there seems to be a deep distinction between urban and rural populations. In Washington, DC, which Gallup also surveyed, only 43 percent of respondents express this kind of social trust. Why? The speculation is that the District of Columbia, unlike any of the 50 states, is entirely urban — and that the anonymity of city living makes it harder to know your neighbors, never mind trust them. As the Gallup researchers point out, three of the least trusting states — California, New York, and Texas — are home to seven of the nation’s largest urban population centers. Meanwhile, six of the 10 most trusting states (Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Montana) are among America’s least populous. So here’s the second point: Urban living inhibits social trust.

Which explains why my New York visit was a statistical anomaly. Most people, I suspect, would say that my wallet wouldn’t have been returned. New Yorkers statewide are more than twice as likely (35 percent) as South Dakotans (15 percent) to take a cynical view of their neighbors — and probably even more so in the city. So here’s a third point: If a tally of the naysayers constitutes a kind of cynicism index, then cynicism more than doubles as you move from state to state — and may increase dramatically as you move from rural to urban.

Why does all of this matter? Because since the ethics recession began in 2008, trustworthiness and its twin, trustfulness, have loomed larger than ever in public consciousness. If we can chart a shift from trust to cynicism across U.S. regions, I suspect we can spot a similar decline across time as well. The real issues of trust today relate not to wallets but to houses, jobs, retirement accounts, banks, insurance companies — the whole bonfire of issues that underlie the recession. The real question is not, If some poor Joe lost his wallet, and someone saw what was happening, would they intervene to help him? That’s a surrogate for a deeper question: If some poor sucker signed up for a subprime mortgage and his bankers knew what was happening, would they intervene to save him?

Gallup never asked that question. But we can guess at the levels of cynicism it would provoke. The U.S. public, appalled at the deception and greed underlying the current recession, has lost enormous trust in institutions that are meant to exercise “fiduciary” responsibility — a word which comes from the Latin word for trust. Fourth point, then: The institutions in our culture that we should hold in high trust are provoking instead the greatest cynicism.

So the Gallup survey is not only about whether Sioux Falls is less cynical than Baton Rouge. That’s just a placeholder for a larger discussion: What happens to a nation as its reservoir of trust drains away? If it’s fair to say, by extrapolation, that less than half of the nation’s urban populations believe they would ever see a lost wallet again, how do they feel about the savings accounts, pension funds, and home mortgages they’ve figuratively dropped on life’s sidewalk?

Did we really expect Americans to start investing and consuming again until someone returns their lost wallets — until the institutions they thought they could trust prove trustworthy?

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week, the Obama administration proposed significant cutbacks in executive pay for bailed-out financial institutions — a move that produced some curious ethical responses.

On one hand, some who support pay czar Kenneth Feinberg’s work would have us believe that high pay is by definition unethical — a reasonable point, but only if you think free enterprise is intrinsically evil and success should be penalized.

At the other extreme, a bizarre philosophical position surfaced during a London debate on morality in the marketplace. The British public, said Goldman Sachs vice chairman Brian Griffiths, should “tolerate the inequality” inherent in executive bonuses “as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all.” (See our lead report, below, on executive pay.)

When well-meaning people suggest that prosperity is immoral but inequality is ethical, there’s a deeper confusion at work. So step back for a moment and consider a popular but untested assumption, which is this: If you constrain executive pay, corporate excellence will be damaged because current talent will leave and top talent can no longer be recruited.

True, if you want the smartest guys in the room, you have to pay handsomely. But do such high fliers always produce corporate cultures that build a better world? Or are they just as apt to create cultures that degrade ethics? Will top pay guarantee the strongest possible financial sector?

During game five of the American League Championship series last week — stay with me, here, I’m not changing the subject — the Los Angeles Angels leapt to a 4-0 lead in the first inning. Their early advantage held for six innings, which for them was a very good thing: This game, if lost, would end their bid to play in the World Series. But in the top of the seventh inning, the Yankees mounted a massive rally. As it grew, Angels manager Mike Scioscia pulled out his pitcher and brought in a reliever. And that’s when everything came unglued. By the time the Angels came to bat, the tide had turned to a 6-4 Yankee lead.

The Angels later won that game. But what if they’d lost? And what if we later learned that the Angels’ manager was on the take? What if he’d secretly been paid an enormous amount to throw the game to the Yankees? What if his change in pitchers was designed to make sure he’d lose?

Now, there’s not a shred of evidence for what I’ve just said. But what if, in place of the real Mike Scioscia, you’d had his evil twin? What if the man in the dugout that night had immense leadership talents, deep experience, a sixth sense for the right move — and no moral sense whatever? His lifelong quest (which he’d never shared with the team that hired him, of course) had always been to make himself rich by any means possible. If at times he sounded and looked ethical or even based an occasional decision on principle — well, that was all part of the show. Give him a once-in-a-lifetime choice between retiring rich or honest, and there wouldn’t even be a question: Go for the green.

There’s not a baseball fan in the world who would want that guy as their manager. Sure, the credentials look great. But if it’s all about self and in the end he can’t be trusted … get rid of him as fast as you can.

Which brings us back to pay packages. What if companies cut compensation and lots of well-credentialed executives leave? Is it possible that might be the healthiest thing that could happen for the financial sector? Sure, it’s possible that future historians, studying this recession, will tell us that the companies paying the largest bonuses:

1. Engaged in the fewest deceptive mortgage practices,
2. Invented the least number of complex, hyper-risky products, and
3. Were hardly ever inclined to think government should bail them out if things turned sour.

I can already hear our readers snorting in derision. What brought us into this recession, many would say, were just the opposite characteristics: deception, irresponsibility, and calculated greed. Do we really want to preserve the talent that did that to us?

But what about attracting the best talent for the years ahead? Won’t we be in danger on that front? Well, which sounds more logical: (1) that massive compensation frees executives from concern about making money, making them less egocentric and more focused on others, or (2) that enormous pay packages reinforce their desire to make even more money, leading them to become even less interested in the moral sense? There’s extensive, if still controversial, behavioral research suggesting that when you replace intrinsic motivation with monetary reward, the quality of work goes down. Called over-justification theory, it seeks to explain why three-year-olds who are promised rewards are less engaged in their play activities — do a poorer job playing, really — than those who are rewarded unexpectedly after the fact.

It’s hard to see why such promises wouldn’t change the mindset of adults, too. I’m not saying there’s a necessary connection between high pay and low ethics. There are lots of people of great integrity who are very well paid. I’m arguing a different point, which is that there’s no guarantee that high pay brings high ethics with it. We know it will bring you all of the other credentials of the evil twin. But will it bring you the manager you really want in your dugout during life’s playoffs?

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

by Rushworth M. Kidder

LAKE WORTH, Florida

“What do you think of ethics awards?”

The question popped up at a meeting of community leaders here in Palm Beach County the other day. If each year we recognized an individual or organization of outstanding integrity, I was asked, wouldn’t that help promote ethics, especially when our community needs visible moral role models?

The questioner was right about the need. Headlines in the local paper, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, sadly refer to this place as “Corruption County,” and for good reason. Five local politicians — three former county commissioners and two West Palm Beach city commissioners — have been sentenced to prison terms recently, brought down by an FBI operation launched several years ago. The area’s former congressman, six-term Republican Mark Foley, left office in 2006 over a sex scandal involving teenage pages working at the Capitol.

What’s more, convicted financier Bernie Madoff played out his giant Ponzi scheme on investors who lived in the same exclusive Palm Beach neighborhood where he had a home. And last week Florida governor Charlie Crist called for a statewide grand jury to investigate what he called “a culture of corruption,” predominantly in South Florida. At his press conference, he noted that he has suspended or fired 31 public officials since he took office early in 2007.

To their credit, the citizenry here is exercised over these matters — part of the reason this community meeting was convened. Are they fighting a hopeless battle? I don’t think so. History is on their side. In the nineteenth century, when New York City fell into the clutches of Tammany Hall, it took 80 years to break the corruption of the Democratic Party’s political machine. By the end of the twentieth century, Hong Kong took only several decades to do it: After a siege of corruption so notorious that firemen at burning houses refused to turn on the water until the owners paid a bribe, an Independent Commission Against Corruption, set up in 1974, helped Hong Kong become one of the cleanest jurisdictions in the world. And just this year, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was thrown out of office in a matter of months over his efforts to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama to the highest bidder.

All of which should make the case for ethics awards. Shouldn’t the investigators, reformers, and leading citizens in these cases be honored? Shouldn’t those with the moral courage to stand up and fight be celebrated? Shouldn’t a thoughtful award committee be able to determine the best candidates?

In theory, yes. But before rushing into it, the good citizens of Palm Beach County might look across the state to Hillsborough County and its county seat, Tampa. There, a moral courage award sponsored by the county commissioners and named for Ralph Hughes, a prominent local anti-tax campaigner, has just come a cropper. After his death, the IRS billed his estate for nearly $70 million in unpaid levies, and the U.S. Department of Justice is suing the company he owned to recover $300 million in back taxes. Perhaps because this embarrassing story was featured in a page-one Wall Street Journal story several weeks ago, the county won’t be making an award this year.

The problem with such awards is that ethics is not an inoculation, but a process. It’s something you measure over time. And that measurement can be difficult. To be sure, community leaders may engage in specific acts of undeniable moral courage. In a given instance, they can speak truth to power, defend noble but unpopular causes, or publicly announce their own mistakes. But what if, after they do so, they descend into blatant moral idiocy? Does their later history invalidate their earlier integrity? Not unless new facts have come to light. Then don’t they still deserve the award? That depends on the purpose of the award. If the honoree is plagued by subsequent moral failings, how effective will the award be in inspiring a new generation? Should we hold up as a moral exemplar someone who, one cold winter night, stood up for the homeless — only later to become a notorious wife-beater?

The problem is that we can’t — and shouldn’t — compartmentalize ethics. There’s no such thing as “political ethics” that is separate from personal ethics or business ethics or legal ethics. There’s only ethics. It’s part and parcel of everything we do. Most awards in the business or community arenas don’t have to rise to that high standard. They can focus just on leadership or excellence in innovation or skill in athletics or the arts. Yet even there, ethics is inherent in every award. Should a baseball Hall of Fame recipient be removed if future investigations discover that he excelled only because he used illegal steroids? Should we honor a CEO of the Year if we later learn she cooked the company’s books to win the prize? Should a highly praised new author be admired if he’s later found to have plagiarized? No in each case, we say — not because these people didn’t have outstanding records, but because the ethical lapses compromised everything they did.

Ethics awards are inviting, to be sure. And I suspect, with immense care, they can be properly done. But I have one request of any award committee. First, go see the movie The Informant! (the punctuation is part of the title), based on the true story of Mark Whitacre, a top corporate executive at agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. Was he a whistle-blower and a reformer — or a mole and a con man? When lying becomes so subtle, what does it mean to say, “There stands a noble life”? If you’d given him an award, at what point would you wish you hadn’t?

In questions of awards, the old Russian adage still rings true: “Trust, but verify.”

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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