Thinking Ethics

Firing on ethical grounds

Today's New York Times carries an article entitled On Wall Street, a rise in dismissals over ethics, listing several companies who have fired employees for actions that are potentially illegal or conduct that is unseemly. The article, mostly about the case at Bank of America,  cites such companies as Boeing, Citigroup, Wal-Mart Stores, and American International Group. I think this can be seen as part of the trend towards increased reputation management.  When will we see hiring on ethical grounds ?

Whistleblowing - a civic duty ?

Some of the results of the Thinking Ethics Seminar seem to indicate that as reputation management and trust become more important for organisations in the next 10 years, they will be spending more time trying to raise the awareness of ethical issues amongst their employees. Individual integrity will be key, as one person can destroy the reputation of the whole organisation. Whistleblowing, as a means of self-regulation, will increase and organisations will have to find ways to deal with whistleblowers. Advanced signs of this trend can be seen at the integrated risk management company and insurance broker AON: Aon Asia is now operating a regional toll free hotline to allow all employees as well as those doing business with Aon to access a confidential channel for the anonymous reporting of business activities suspected of being unethical, illegal and /or in violation of their business conduct guidelines.

Online ethical help for engineers and scientists

The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science at Case Western Reserve University was established in 1995 under a grant from the National Science Foundation to provide engineers, scientists and students with resources useful for understanding and addressing ethically significant problems in their work life. They even offer a help line cosponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the National Institute for Engineering Ethics (NIEE)

Do you need integrity to be a successful leader ?

A new study carried out by IMD Professor Robert Hooijberg and Research Associate Nancy Lane looked at the impact of integrity on leader effectiveness. The results show that different groups associate different values with integrity: managers associate honesty, merit and fairness; direct reports associate honesty and fairness; peers and bosses associate honesty and merit. Apparently, behavior is more powerful than values.

Values in hard science

From this article in USA today , it appears that some universities are now introducing environmental ethics courses in their science studies. This matches up to one of the conclusions of the ethics and knowledge workshop in the thinking ethics seminar. We might have reached the limits of specialization, that has permitted science to make great leaps forward in the last 300 years. Between the need for a cross-disciplinary approach to complex problems, there is also a need to add some teaching of the humanities (philosophy and ethics) to science education.

Ethics of outer space ?

I was on the UNESCO site, and given my bias for anything cross-cultural, got intrigued by a mention of ethics around the world and decided to check it out. And then I got sidetracted by a program on the ethics of outer space... You can imagine my excitement - how were they going to connect with other life forms and get them to share some forms of standards or agreements ? No such luck, it is all about the peaceful uses of outer space. Important, but not nearly as exciting...

Yes. It is your fault.

Looks like UK businesses have figured out where to dump responsibility for corporate ethics: in the IT department. An interesting survey of CIOs and CTOs from Silicon.com (part of US tech media giant CNET.com) shows that IT bosses are already fed up with being asked to police corporate ethics.

1st Annual Business Ethics Summit

Buisiness Ethics Magazine is organizing the first annual business ethics summit at the Helmsley Holel in New York on April 21, 2005 (for more information or registration check in out on Business Ethics Online). It will cover topics like Corporate Scandals, Corporate Responsibility and the Media: who should we believe?

Technology in society

I love this book: John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information. It's one of the best books about technology and society I've read and I return to the essays it contains regularly. Seely Brown is (was?) Director of Xerox's legendary PARC and Duguid works in the faculty of Social and Cultural Studies at Berkeley. Their book is a reassertion of human values, a profoundly anti-reductive, anti techno-centric (but pro technology) appeal for sanity in technology planning and discourse. Sophisticated, inspiring and properly ethical stuff. Incidentally, Seely Brown and Duguid provided the best argument I saw against Bill Joy's nanotech hysteria (picked up by Crichton in Prey) in an essay called Don't Count Society Out. I can't find Don't Count Society Out online but I did find this long and beautifully argued reply to Joy: Coevolution as a constraint: How society tempers technological trajectories at Seely Brown's web site.

Where has the moral compass gone?

Emily pointed out this very current piece in today's New York Times about business school students following instructions on how to hack into business schools  admission procedures (in this case it was Harvard) to see the status of their application. The schools have excluded the students on grounds of lacking ethics, and some of the students still don't get it...