conflicts of interest

Baseball’s Free Agent Follies: Dumb Clients, Conflicted Agent

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Baseball’s super-agent Scott Boras has his annual off-season conflict of interest problem, and as usual, neither Major League Baseball, nor the Players’ Union, nor the legal profession, not his trusting but foolish clients seem to care. Nevertheless, he is operating under circumstances that make it impossible for him to be fair to his clients.

This year, Boras has three aging outfielders in his stable, all with some Hall of Fame credentials, all with fading skills, and all without jobs. Their names are Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon and Andruw Jones. Thanks to a glut of unsigned hitters still on the market, the price for each of these three—once, when they were young, in the 8-figures a year range—is falling fast. According to an analysis by ESPN, only six, and possibly as few as three, possible teams are still looking to fill slots on their rosters suitable for Ramirez, Damon, and Jones, and none of them will sign more than one, if any. Continue reading →

Do Economists Need A Code of Conduct?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

We can learn a lot about the discipline of economics, the thinking of its practitioners and the limitations of ethics codes by reading the various reactions of economist to the question, “Do economists need a Code of Conduct?” The responses range from “yes” to “sure, but it won’t do any good” to “no.”

You can read all about it here.

The Second Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2010 (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Happy New Year, and welcome to the Second Annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the Best and Worst of ethics in 2010!

This is the first installment of the Worst; the rest will appear in a subsequent post. (The Best is yet to come.) Continue reading →

Observations on “The Psychic’s Code of Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I was surprised to find a long dissertation about ethics posted on a website for self-designated psychics. [UPDATE: The link that I originally supplied here no longer works.] The post itself was also full of surprises, such as the revelation that there is a “Tarot Certification Board of America’s Client Bill of Rights,” which declares, among other things, that…

“Tarot readers are not qualified to give medical advice unless they are physicians. Tarot readers are not qualified to give financial advice unless they are qualified financial advisors. Tarot readers are not qualified to give legal advice unless they are attorneys.”

This is all good ethical advice. Notably missing, however, is the statement that “Tarot readers are not qualified to tell individuals what the future holds in store for them since it is impossible to discern this from reading novelty playing cards.” Continue reading →

GlaxonSmithKline Inspires a Fun Game For Your Holiday Party: “Forcast That Ethics Scandal!”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Almost all ethics scandals and examples of outrageous unethical conduct are thoroughly predictable, whether they involve individual, organizations or institutions. The most obvious proof of this is in politics. Once we consider past patterns, current conditions, institutional habits and what we know about human nature, the question when a new political party takes over isn’t whether there will be instances of bribery, influence peddling, self-enrichment, and conflict of interest, but only which elected leaders will be caught at it. Sometimes even that part is easy: everyone should have been able to guess, long before they occurred, that Tom DeLay’s ethics-free philosophy of politics as warfare would lead him to commit serious misdeeds, just as the odds against former Florida Rep. Alan Grayson running a fair or civil campaign for re-election were prohibitively high. Similarly, sports scandals can usually be seen coming a long way off. Once New England Patriots coach Bill Belichik was caught making surreptitious videos of his team’s opponents’ practices, it was easy to guess that he wasn’t the only one, and that since both he and his team were so successful, it would be only a matter of time before a similar incident came to light. And it did, last week.

As I look through various Ethics Alarms posts, it is striking how many of them could have been written in advance, in fill-in-the-blank format. All you need to do is identify an industry with a history of ethics problems, a weak ethics culture, a trusting, under-informed audience, the potential for increased profit, power or influence, and a large population of corruptible, lazy, incompetent, venal, ambitious or cowardly allies. I’m sure a computer program could be developed, but for this holiday season, why not forecast next year’s ethics scandals as a party game? Challenge your guests: Which TV reality show will be shown to have completely manipulated “reality”? Which revered sports figure will be disgraced in a sex or drug scandal? Which Wall Street firm will be caught violating the “sacred principles” posted on its website? Which school will suspend or expel a student for violating the letter of an overly broad and horribly-written rule without actually doing anything wrong? Which universally accepted scientific research will turn out to be the result of manipulated data? Which embarrassments of the Obama Administration will only be reported by Fox News, and which outrages committed by Republicans will the same network ignore?

And, of course, where will TSA employees put their hands next?

This occurred to me as I read about the recent Big Pharma-manipulating-medical-practice scandal, involving drug giant GlaxonSmithKline, while slapping my forehead and shouting, “Of course! This was the logical next step!” Continue reading →

CREW Gets Hoisted: For Ethics Watchdogs, Integrity’s a Bitch

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

CREW—Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—is one of the most active and fairest of political watchdog groups. It has a definite liberal bias, for approximately twice as many Republicans as Democrats manage to attract CREW critiques, but that’s all right: plenty of elected officials from both parties have had their shady dealings exposed by the group, which is notable for its lack of sympathy for Washington’s traditional myths and excuses to allow guilt-free corruption.

An ethics watchdog, however, can never engage in the same conduct it criticizes in others. The reason for this is as much practical as ethical. A group that made a strong case that certain behavior shouldn’t be tolerated by the public in its elected champions doesn’t diminish the validity of its arguments by violating its own principles, but it does symbolically consent to accepting the same standard of review for its own actions that it demanded for its targets. This is what Will Shakespeare called being hoisted by your own petard—blowing yourself up with a bomb of your own construction.

As Shakespeare also noted, the previous quarry of the one who is thus hoisted just love to see this happen. It doesn’t really make what they did any less wrong or the ethics watchdog any less right to have condemned it, but when the critic gets caught doing something similar, it can make the conduct seem less wrong. This also will often guarantee that future criticism by the watchdog will be greeted with more suspicion than respect.

Salon has a posted a well-researched account of how CREW hoisted itself recently, and the prospects for the organization maintaining its previous level of respect and credibility are not good. Continue reading →

No-Integrity Government: The U.S.D.A.’s Two-Faced Cheese Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A question: How can Americans trust a government that preaches at them to eat healthily, avoid fat and lose weight, all while promoting the consumption of a food that is infamous for its saturated fat content?

Dairy Management, a cheese and dairy promoting entity under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, works with American companies to help them promote products, like Domino’s pizza, which are slathered in cheese and thus help raise the profits of U.S. dairy farmers. At the same time, the U.S.D.A. is spearheading an anti-obesity drive that cautions against eating high-calorie foods…like cheese. The New York Times has published a thorough report that tells of confidential agreements under the Bush and Obama Administration in which the U.S.D.A. pledged to push cheese consumption on the public. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Teacher-Student Facebook Friending

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Sometimes what appears harmless and benign at first glance starts looking inappropriate and unethical after we learn more about it. Social networking media has been teaching this lesson with alacrity over the last year, and we now have another example that will be making some friends of mine re-evaluate their Facebook friend list…I hope.

The New York Post has reported that least three educators from New York City  public high schools have been fired in the past six months for having inappropriate exchanges with students on Facebook, including one of which culminated in a sexual relationship. Continue reading →

A Real Estate Appraiser Discovers “the Appearance of Impropriety”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

You won’t find a better example of the ethical breach known as “the appearance of impropriety” than this, a question from a real estate appraiser posted on appraisersforum.com. (Note: This is one of the infuriating websites that won’t allow you to post a reply or a comment until you register, and then informs you that it may be a day or more before the registration is approved, so you still can’t post a comment. Yes, the site is so crucial that I will hold my comment…or maybe write it down and save it in a file labeled “pending Appraisers Forum comments”—and wait with palpitating anticipation while my plea to be allowed to interact with a bunch of real estate appraisers is evaluated for worthiness. )

Here is the question: Continue reading →

Unavoidable Bias in the Embryonic Stem Cell Research Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In the embryonic stem cell research ethics debate, I come out on the “pro” side. Nonetheless, a New York Times article this morning shows clearly how thoroughly and unavoidably biased scientists and researchers in the field are, leading to the conclusion that the decision whether stem cell research is ethical or not, and whether, or to what extent, it should be permitted, cannot be left to them.

The article, by Amy Harmon, begins,

“Rushing to work at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center one recent morning, Jason Spence, 33, grabbed a moment during breakfast to type “stem cells” into Google and click for the last 24 hours of news. It is a routine he has performed daily in the six weeks since a Federal District Court ruling put the future of his research in jeopardy. “It’s always at the front of my brain when I wake up,” said Dr. Spence, who has spent four years training to turn stem cells derived from human embryos into pancreatic tissue in the hope of helping diabetes patients. “You have this career plan to do all of this research, and the thought that they could just shut it off is pretty nerve-racking.” Continue reading →