Business & Commercial

Ethics Quiz: Is This Racism, or Just Business?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The Mother Jones headline is designed to provoke a gasp: George Lucas: Hollywood Didn’t Want To Fund My Film Because Of Its Black Cast.

The headline is literally accurate. Lucas tells the magazine that he had trouble finding backers for “Red Tails,” his upcoming film about the fabled Tuskegee airmen, because the studios told him that films without white protagonists didn’t draw a wide enough audience, especially overseas, to make his film a good investment for them. Presuming that the film-makers know their business—and presuming their real reason for rejecting Lucas was not that the movies he’s produced lately were god awful, —Lucas’s story raises this Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz Question, which you may answer if you dare:

Is a studio that refuses to fund a movie with an all-black cast engaging in racism, or just practicing business responsibly? Continue reading →

Economists Start Getting Serious About Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Charles Fergusen’s documentary about the 2008 financial collapse, “Inside Job”, chronicled the maze of deceit, conflicts of interest, greed, recklessness and self-serving maneuvers across multiple professions and sectors of the economy that led to the meltdown. Among the professions that were implicated in the account was that of economists, who in many cases advised Congress and others regarding economic policies without disclosing their own ties to special interests and various players in the drama. The debacle was a severe blow to the credibility of economists as a group and economics as a discipline. Many have since called for the profession to put in place conflicts of interest rules to guide practitioners and to build public trust.

For my part, I was surprised to learn that there was not such a code already in place. As a lawyer, I am  spoiled—the legal profession, as with judges, doctors, researchers, psychiatrists, accountants, legislators and government workers, has recognized the need for formal ethics guidelines for a very long time. The number of fields without ethics codes continues to amaze me, although one of those professions is…ethics.

Economics, however, is making strides. At its annual meeting in Chicago last week, the American Economic Association  issued  principles for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest and conflicts related to published academic papers. Here they are: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Google

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Yesterday, Google demoted its own Google Chrome homepage in pagerank for at least 60 days following the revelation that the browser’s online advertising campaign violated Google’s policy banning the use of paid links. Google had contracted with an outside firm to handle Chrome’s the campaign, and it mutated into a scheme where bloggers were paid to link to a video that extolled the virtues of Chrome to small businesses.

Thus Google was violating its own policies, the stated punishment for which is demotion in search results. Google says that it didn’t know that its sub-contractor was doing this, but nonetheless issued this statement:

“We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote http://www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.”

Today, if you do a Google search for “browser,” Chrome doesn’t appear on the first page of results.

Living by your own rules is the mark of integrity. This time, Google delivered.

Liar, Liar, Volt on Fire

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Not a hotcake. Definitely selling like a hotcake.

There are times when I miss the David Manning Liar of the Month, a regular feature on my old Ethics Scoreboard reserved for flagging a breed of lie that I find the most annoying of all. These are the lies that even the liars know are unbelievable from the moment the dishonest statements leave their mouths. Then, when they are inevitably caught, the liars argue that the lie wasn’t really a lie because nobody believed it in the first place. Such lies tell us that the liar doesn’t think lying is anything to be ashamed of. Beware such people, especially when they dwell in high places. The lie may be trivial, but the attitude toward lying is not.

Spared the indignity of being a David Manning Liar by the Scoreboard’s dormant state is Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, who took umbrage at Mitt Romney’s statement that the Chevy Volt was “and idea whose time has not come.” Dingell protested, isssuing a press release that said, Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Rep. Ron Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Warren G. Harding, the patron saint of "Nobody's perfect!" presidencies.

“I don’t think anybody in the world has been perfect on management, everybody that’s ever worked for them. So, yes…  it’s a flaw. But I think it’s a human flaw… I admit that I’m an imperfect person and didn’t monitor that as well.”

––GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, responding to ABC’s Jake Tapper’s question about whether his accountability for racially inflammatory statements made in his name in newsletters published by him 20 years ago raise legitimate doubts about his management abilities.

Anyone who’s read this blog much knows what I think of the “nobody’s perfect” excuse for misconduct. To be precise in this case:

1. Nobody said you weren’t human, Ron. Humanity is a rather low bar for a presidential candidate, don’t you think?

2. There is a lot of territory between “perfect” and “letting people write racist and homophobic content under your name in a for-profit newsletter.” For example, the rest of the Republican field is as far from perfect as one could imagine, yet none of them have done that.

3. People who fail to fulfill core management functions when they oversee a project are imperfect, flawed and human, and also called “inattentive and incompetent leaders.” Imperfect, flawed and human individuals can be good and effective Presidents of the United States. Inattentive and incompetent leaders, however, cannot.

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Yes, it was Joe Paterno's year, all right.

Welcome to the Third  Annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the Best and Worst of ethics in 2011!

This is the first installment of the Worst; Part 2 is here. And the Best is here. 

2011 prompted more than 1000 posts, and even then I barely scratched the surface of all the ethical dilemmas and unethical conduct swirling around us. If you have other choices for the various distinctions here and in the subsequent Awards posts, please make them known.

Here are my selections:

Unethical Community of the Year:  Huachuca City, Arizona. Leading the way among American communities that believe, in their hysteria, that former sex offenders who have served their sentences are nonetheless fair game for persecution and the denial of basic rights as citizens and human beings, Huachuca County passed an ordinance that bans registered sex offenders from the use of all public facilities, including parks, school and libraries.  Runner-up: Obion County, Tennessee. Last year, Ethics Alarms gave the county runner-up status as “Unethical Community of the Year” for sending its volunteer fire department to watch a man’s house burn down because he had failed to pay a $75.00 fee. In 2011, it did it again. I swear: if Obion County hasn’t come up with a better system and this happens again in 2012, Obion County will get the title no matter what some other unethical community does.

Most Warped Ethical Values: The Penn State students who protested the firing of football coach Joe Paterno, because, you know, he was such a great football coach that a little thing like allowing a predatory child molester to run amuck on campus shouldn’t be blown all out of proportion. Runner-up: Ron Paul supporters.

Unethical Website of the Year: Lovely-Faces, the anti-Facebook stunt pulled by Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, media critic and editor-in- chief of Neural magazine, to show how inadequate Facebook’s privacy controls were. To do it, they stole 250,000 Facebook member profiles and organized them into a new dating site—without the members’ permission. The site embodied “the worst of ethical thinking: taking the identities of others for their own purposes (a Golden Rule breach), using other human beings to advance their own agenda (a Kantian no-no) and asserting that their ends justify abusing 250,000 Facebook users, which is irresponsible utilitarianism.” Continue reading →

Happy 2012! Your New Year’s Ethics Quiz: “Firing Super-Clerk”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Last week, convenience store clerk Eric Henderson was confronted by two female robbers in Pensacola, Florida who demanded that he hand over the cash in his Circle K register.  Henderson  grabbed the gun pointed at him by one of the women, slammed her to the ground, and then chased the two into the street where they fled in a getaway car.

Henderson was promptly fired by Circle K  for violating a company policy that forbids heroics by employees in the middle of attempted robberies. Now Henderson has gone to the media, which is pointing out that he had been unemployed for two years (Occupy Circle K! But how long he had been out of work should have no bearing on the decision whether to to fire him) and that according to Henderson, the unarmed robber was urging her armed companion to shoot him. (Aside: Some of the news accounts also included this hilarious line: “The 30-year-old grabbed the gun pointed at him by one of the alleged robbers…“ Alleged robbers? Can we all agree that when there is an actual  gun to be grabbed, the term “alleged” is idiotic? What else is someone who points a gun at a convenience store clerk? A practical joker? Some one who wants to trade a Glock for Twinkies?)

Your New Year’s Day Ethics Quiz: Was Circle K right to fire Eric? Continue reading →

The “Your Right To Engage in Ignorant and Dangerous Speech Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Unethical For Me To Help It Be As Loud As Possible” Dept.: ABC Full Circle and WordPress

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Defending free speech doesn't mean you have to put dangerous speech where it will do the most damage...like 100 feet tall in Times Square.

As the New Year dawns, we see two companies in the communications business, and two situations raising the question, is it ethical or unethical to allow someone to use your product or service to broadcast harmful speech?

They took different paths, and both are being criticized. One company is ethical, the other is not.

The ethical company is WordPress.

A few days ago it took down one of its sites, Bare Naked Islam, after The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) complained that the site promoted violence against Muslims, which it surely did. When Muslims placed comments on the site, Bare Naked Islam published the IP and e-mail addresses of the commenters and suggested reprisals. Nonetheless, because it was CAIR’s complaint that triggered the removal, WordPress was criticized mightily in the conservative blogosphere for doing a Comedy Central—censoring legitimate free speech out of fear of Muslim violence. There is a very large distinction, however, between abandoning free speech in response to threats, as Comedy Central did in the infamous “South Park” incident, and responding responsibly to a legitimate complaint. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Case of the Fake But Accurate Social Security Card”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

My ethics conundrum regarding the fake but accurate Social Security card solution—the Dan Rather approach, if you will— continued to garner a wide range of responses. Rick, as usual, has delivered one of the most thoughtful and provocative, and it is a worthy Comment of the Day.

Here is his comment on “Ethics Quiz: The Case of the Fake But Accurate Social Security Card”:

It strikes me that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—ethics is on a continuum. There’s the truly ethical, the not unethical, and the unethical, with many finer distinctions to be made.

I don’t running screaming into the night at the idea of faking a card, under the circumstances. Still, the truly ethical thing to do in this situation is to tell the prospective employer the truth. And the availability of all those other possible means of identification is indeed relevant. Provide one of the non-Social Security card alternatives and whatever other documentation is available. Importantly, if the employer, for whatever reason, is unwilling to accept this legally sufficient documentation, you don’t want to work for this person, no matter how much you need a job. Continue reading →

The Drunk, the Bar and the Missing ID

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I’ve been considering starting a continuing category for unethical law suits, but what interests me about this story is that it coincides with a sudden flurry of new comments on the Shannon Stone post. That concerned the man who fell to his death at a Texas Rangers game last summer after lunging to catch a foul ball for his son. My post argued that when someone does something unequivocally reckless and foolish that leads to his injury and death,  it may be legally advantageous to sue third parties for not anticipating the situation and providing prophylactic safety measures, but is unethical to do so.

It was not one of my more popular posts.

This story, from South Carolina, raises a similar issue. Paraplegic Chelsea Hess is suing Jock’s Sports Grill  because the bartender failed to check her ID and didn’t determine whether she was already intoxicated when, at the age of 20 (in 2009), she drank, drove, and crashed her car, causing her current condition. Hess is also suing the state Department of Transportation, saying the agency failed to properly maintain the shoulder of the road where her car crashed. Continue reading →