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Be Wary: Ethicist at Work
May 23, 2013
Are ethicists more ethical than their peers in other disciplines? It’s an interesting question. A recent study published in the journal Metaphilosophy provides a limited data point, but the news, at least if you’re an ethicist like me, is not good. Comparing how university professors engage students, the researchers found no difference between ethics professors and other faculty. Even though the ethics experts set an ideal, and acknowledged that not following through on that standard was morally wrong, in action, the experts in ethics were indistinguishable from fellow academics.
Are you surprised? I’m not. But I am distressed.
I’m not surprised, because ...
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February 4, 2013
Among history's toughest test of leadership - and of personal character - is one’s response to crisis. In the last two weeks, internal documents released as part of separate legal actions - on behalf of child sex abuse victims against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and by investors claiming fraud against J.P. Morgan Chase - have shown bishops of the Catholic Church to be as self-interested, and ethically fallible, as bankers.
Both bishops and bankers were entrusted as executives to oversee vast operations. And both were elevated to the pinnacle of their respective hierarchies to strategically foresee, and responsibly forestall, the ...
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July 20, 2012
Transgender and intersex athletes have faced numerous obstacles as a result of misunderstanding or prejudice. Many have taken on enormous personal risks to find acceptance in sport. The task now is to transition sport in its culture and practices. Sport is for everyone, and at its best, sport works to bring down any of the barriers that exclude persons from participation.
Working with the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, and representing the rich input from a dialogue involving experts from a host of disciplines, John Dalla Costa of the Centre for Ethical Orientation has produced a framework for fostering greater inclusivity ...
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June 1, 2011
“Austerity” was recently called the word of the decade in the Wall Street Journal. From the perspective of business the primary deficits to be tamed are those in public spending, but the truth is that our economy and consumer culture are as over-extended as our public purse. In fact, we face multiple deficits simultaneously.
In The Sustainability Revolution, systems-learning pioneer Peter Senge explains that stabilizing “CO2 in the atmosphere at levels that minimize catastrophic consequences will require 60 percent to 80 percent reduction in emissions in the next two decades.” Michael Pollan, who writes about the culture and the environmental costs ...
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May 28, 2011
Either as deliberate policy or by necessity, governments and companies are almost everywhere adopting austerity measures. The stringency in spending is required for the simple reason that debts aggregating over decades cannot be sustained. As it happens, economists, politicians and chambers of commerce have focused their austerity demands on public spending, were deficits have become particularly onerous. Mostly forgotten in this rush to cut spending is any acknowledgment that the current ballooning of public expenditure was in large part caused by having to extend trillions of dollars of liquidity, bailout and stimulus support for the economic crisis unleashed by the ...
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May 16, 2011
Let’s do a thought experiment. Focus group moderators will often ask participants to anthropomorphize a company or brand. For example, to probe aspects of corporate character or brand personality, researchers will ask: “If BMW were a person, whom would that person be?” Many companies today have officers or functions for overseeing ethics or compliance, so for this thought experiment, I would ask: “If current business ethics functions were a person, who would that person be?” In such exercises, experts tell us to go with our first impression, trusting what immediately comes to mind as representing some kind of subconscious truth. ...
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July 30, 2010
I for one am the disappointed that BP CEO Tony Hayward has been fired. From press reports about his response to the oil-spill disaster it is hard to argue against cause. Clearly overwhelmed by the emergency, Hayward committed numerous personal and corporate miscues during BP’s efforts to deal with the human, social and environmental fallout of the oil well explosion. He must have been a smart guy to earn the top-job at BP, however, when it counted most in crisis, he displayed much more insensitivity than intelligence. While I’m all for the principle of accountability, I can’t help feeling that ...
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June 25, 2010
Among its many missteps in the Gulf, BP has now hired public relations executives to pose as journalists along the beaches besmirched by its oil spill. With so much incompetence and deception on display, it is hard to believe that only recently BP earned recognition from corporate social responsibility innovators as the most accountable large corporation in the world. BP won the Account Ability Rating™ award outright in 2004 and 2005, and came in second in 2006. With such credentials we need to ask some tough questions. Is it that the corporate culture that earned kudos somehow turned 180˚ in ...
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June 12, 2010
With the world’s attention focused on BP’s troubles, the news that the Indian government this week convicted seven former employees of Union Carbide for “death by negligence” slipped under the radar. In fact, the Bhopal gas plant leak that killed thousands of people in 1984 deserves both the dignity of recognition, and respect for being a cautionary tale about what is unfolding in the Gulf. Critics such as Amnesty International have described the long-delayed legal convictions in India as “too little, too late”. Forty tons of toxins released from the plant killed 3000 people at the time of the accident, ...
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June 9, 2010
With our recent history of corporate scandals, financial meltdown, and environmental disasters, one would think that “crisis-management” would be high on the competence list for leadership. Painfully, this expectation has proven false. Tony Hayward is now called the “Bumbler from BP” for his leadership during the oil spill. Wall Street CEOs made every misstep imaginable before, during, and after the crisis they caused. And Toyota’s executives showed as little sensitivity to public anguish as their car company colleagues who two years ago flew separate corporate jets to Washington to petition lawmakers for public bailout funds.
Business schools have been teaching crisis ...
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