they are correct. Reimbursement for income is also income.  Now there’s an interesting scenario. Even if the government mediator paid the fishermen without documentation, said mediator will be filing the required 1099 for the payments doled out, which means that the IRS will know that you received a chunk of change.  Such chunk will unleash a big, “Wait a minute!” even in the least astute agent.  How did you get this amount of reimbursement for lost income  if you never reported income before?  Oh, what a tangled web!   One crafty fellow who was selling hundreds of pounds of cooked blue crab meat each week out of his garage (cash only) explained,  ”That puts you in the system. If the numbers don’t add up, people who have not been paying taxes are going to regret it.” Yes, from that point forward they will need to pay taxes.  They may even often a tad for the years of flying under the IRS radar in the Gulf Coast world of cash. Oh, what times are these when these kinds of requirements are imposed on citizens earning dough.  Wait a minute . . .

An ad for the 1995 movie Seven quoted Entertainment Weekly as calling it a “masterpiece.” The actual review read, “The credits sequence ._._. is a small masterpiece of dementia.”

A movie industry observer stated in response to these examples, “The practice of fudging critics’ quotes [in ads] is common.”  Common, albeit not completely honest.  The medium changes, but the ethical issues remain the same:

1.  Did the person acually see the movie/use the app?

2. Is the person a real consumer or conflicted by loyalty to an employer?

3. Do those reading the reviews understand the true identity, context, and role of the reviewer?

4. There is a false impression!

5. This stuff comes out, sooner or later, and later is always worse because you are then grappling with the porblem as well as the loss of trust.

And the New York Times columnist, Randy Cohen, the ethicist, got it right when he answered a question about this very issue a few weeks back.  There was flak, but Mr. Cohen was correct.  The question was presented because not only is the practice common  but many clients ask the marketing firms to push the envelope in their efforts online.  Somehow the anonymity of the Internet results in ethical slippage.  Mr. Coehn answered the ethical question aptly and, it turns out, the legal question as well. The answer was the same because of FTC guidelines published last year on our blogging, tweeting, posting, etc.  Ads are ads, regardless of the forum and truth in advertising has been with us since, well, merry old England.

 Add to those qualitative surveys this question:

 Describe something that you did at work during the past year that still bothers you.

 The Barometer has run this qualitative survey at a number of companies and in training sessions.  The companies’ numbers on their dashboard surveys are terrific, but when those descriptions of what bothered employees came in, the response from managers was the same, “I can’t believe this is going on at this company.”

 Something is lost in translation between those survey questions and employees’ decisions and actions.  Use this little exercise to zero in on what’s actually happening.

 The “ethics thing” is not a high priority

• The “ethics thing” is not all that clear to them
• The “ethics thing” is not all that important to them
• They may not be a very thoughtful or reflective person
• You caught them off guard, but see the first four bullet points

 Whatever the reason, what a question! One executive shared recently that he interviewed 18 candidates for a position and only one was able to respond with an example of an ethical dilemma that he had faced in his career.  Oh, the insight he gained from that one example.

 The Barometer has always used the question.  In interviewing graduate students for position, the Barometer sprung the question.  Here was one response:

 “I was a TA [teaching assistant] for a science class during my senior year in college.  A really hot freshman offered me [all kinds of things] [this is a family/EEOC-compliant site, so the Barometer has edited mightily] for an “A” in the class.  It was REALLY hard, but I turned her down.”

 Enough said.  He got the job.  Probably the best GA (graduate assistant) the Barometer ever had.

Ah, but generally shifting norms don’t find us denying our adherence to the norm in lieu of, well, in this case, the laws as well as the regs of the sport.

For Mr. Clemens, the Alex Rodriguez story is a study in contrast.  Mr. A-Rod had the smarts when asked to admit that he knew he wasn’t taking “Tic-Tacs.”  A-Rod just hit his 600^th with little note made of his help from steroids along the way.  Congress offered Mr. Clemens a deal before he testified in 2008 – come clean, give us the information, and walk away.  Mr. Clemens went another route that finds him indicated.

For Governor Blago, well, the tapes of his discussions on filling President Obama’s senate seat made our toes curl. As the discerning jury figured, these conversations did not clearly rise to the level of criminal conduct. However, the jury that could not agree on anything else offered a unanimous conviction on Blago’s conduct that was not related to the tapes and all their quid pro quo glory.  Blagojevich was convicted of lying to federal agents when he told them that he did not track campaign contributions personally and that there was a “firewall” between his political campaigns and his government work.  Right! Knowing who contributes to your campaign is not a crime.  Lying about firewalls and what you do with the information is.

Get it out there and take your lumps.  The lumps are smaller and go down more easily when we just ‘fess up.

Oh, but that “should” question is the more difficult question and the one that requires higher quality ethical analysis than it has received.  Rights-based ethical theory is but one view in a constellation of ethical theories, some shedding more light than others. Thoughtful students would then apply a few questions from other schools of ethical thought.

For a utilitarian, the overarching question grapples with whether the placement of the community center/mosque does the most good for the most people.  Students would list here all the information they would have gathered about the effect the building’s presence would have on whom.  The stakeholders are numerous and diverse:

• There are the families of the 9/11 victims.  We often give those with tender feelings a position of dominance in our analysis because they have already carried a burden we can neither fix nor explain.
• Muslims are stakeholders because the construction proposal alone has produced feelings and reactions that will affect public perception of them and their faith. Students are trained to take into account perception, despite firm belief their decision is the correct one for their companies.  Perception, rightly or wrongly, can have a negative effect on their company.
• Contractors and construction workers (unions) are stakeholders in the economic sense because the project brings jobs, but they too will have the risks of negative perception because 70% of the public opposes construction.
• The United States is a stakeholder.  The decision on the proposal carries international weight. Scholars and practitioners express various views on the symbolism that allowing the construction would carry.  To some, its construction symbolizes an olive branch.  To others, its construction would symbolize acquiescence and weakness.   In the United States, we build monuments to honor our dead.  In other cultures, monuments symbolize victory.  This building at Ground Zero carries a possible double meaning and implication for U.S. perception abroad.
• Other religious organizations are stakeholders.  What happens in New York will not stay in New York.  There is precedent for religious construction here (see below on analysis of moral absolutism).

Another ethical theory has religious foundations.  In Islam, the principle is expressed, “ No one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” For the Jewish faith, the expression is, “What you hate, do not do to anyone.” In Christianity, Luke offered, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Even Aristotle picked up on this idea, “We should behave to our friends as we wish our friends to behave to us.” Translated from theory to practice  the simple question here becomes: What if I were in the other person’s shoes?  How would I feel about my decision?  My conduct?  My contract terms?  My proposal? In answering we begin to realize the pain others will experience if we proceed with our plans simply because we have a “right” to proceed.  Those who demand the application of this test to the expansion of international business operations in third-world countries abandon it in their analysis of this tender situation.  Businesses are expected to consider what their presence in a country will do to the standard of living, the health, and the stability of the government there.  The same type of analysis would help in dealing with this Ground Zero proposal.

A final theory asks us to think more universally:  Am I willing to live in a world that is governed by my rules and standards?  This question demands constancy in its adherents.  They do not falter when it is their ox that is gored. Those in this Ground Zero debate who have held firm to a moral absolute of religious freedom must be willing to occupy the same position on all such religious construction proposals, regardless of the nature and tenets of the faith of those submitting the building proposal.  Students would find a flaw in their professed moral absolutism. Such universal principles were MIA when the construction of Mormon temples around the country faced fierce opposition on more than one occasion and in quite nearly every project.  In those battles, protestors chained themselves to the gates of existing temples, not out of a desire to allow the construction to go forward, but to demand its halt because of their strong objections to the policies and tenets of the Mormon faith.  How strangely silent our noble religious rights advocates of today were in the construction projects of a slightly different faith. 

Are you willing to live in a world that follows the moral standards you tout today?  Or will you change those standards when a new set of folks with a construction proposal comes along?  If your support of a moral absolute depends upon the faith, well, logic being what it is . . . there is no absolute and we are back to “should.”  ‘Tis inconsistency that is the hobgoblin of emotional minds.  Those now weighing in on the Ground Zero proposal need to think through carefully the moral absolutes they have imposed upon themselves with their focus on “could.” If they insist on dwelling there, they will miss the depth a “should” analysis can bring.

I parted ways with the two men from Houston when we divided for the scanning part of our security journey. I know they were from Houston because they both spoke loudly on their cell phones as we waited in line. Their origins, companies, golf scores, and places of dining are no longer a mystery to me or anyone else within a 100-foot radius.  As we parted, I ended up in a screening line that was much faster.  I got through quite quickly as my two Texas line-cutters waited and waited.  They had the slow TSA employee this time and there were five people ahead of them before their loafers would enter the tunnel where all things except shoe and underwear bombs and 5 ounces of Oil of Olay are turned back as national security issues. 

I could not resist speaking out against line-cutting, the scourge of our times.  The fabric of society – manners – is lost to people this boorish.  I turned back, caught their Texas eyes, smiled, and said, “I beat you anyway.”  For one brief shining moment, they looked sheepish.

Later I saw them get off at the C gates.  Instead of taking their place in line to get on the escalator up to the gates, the two men were pushing and shoving ahead of men, women, and children.  Their brief shining moment was just that, and only that. 

Those shortcuts we take to reaching goals, whether airplanes or quarterly results, do affect others.  There are only so many shortcuts you can take and so many times you can do it before the rules are changed (or rules are made) to curb your behavior, behavior that has put those of us who believe in the fabric of society at a disadvantage. We can only be stepped upon, passed by, or duped for so long before we demand compliance.  Voluntary action is so much easier, cheaper, and gracious.  Whether in business or in airport lines, getting ahead at the expense of others is and always has been an ethical issue.

1.  Has every male in America forgotten “Fatal Attraction”?
2. There’s a fine line between romance and sexual harassment – a line that becomes noticeably brighter once one party in the romance loses interest, drops out, or quits awarding contracts.
3. Expense reports are tricky things.  Before signing, read.  Actually, follow the academic studies and read The Ten Commandments before filling them out.  The studies show you will submit far less for reimbursement. Submit far less for reimbursement and you can never be sacked for expense account discrepancies.
4. What a country!  To be fired and walk away with $40 million!
5. Everything that ends up being a debacle started with something small.  A marketing consultant for the company who is invited to dinner with the CEO and others is neither unusual nor improper.  Yet, things can go south from there as dinners continue at a rapid clip for no good reason. How many dinners?  Why the dinners? Who else was at the dinners?  Was anybody else at the dinners?  It’s not the first step that is the problem; it is the turn of the road that should give us pause.
6. CEOs should not have time to run companies, have families, be married, and still date (others – those to whom they are not married).
7. If you must date, do so on your own dime.
8. There are bloggers actually finding fault with HP’s board.  We don’t have enough to put all the pieces together, but the board does.  Something was terribly wrong here.  Conduct need not rise to the level of illegality for a board to conclude that bad judgment is bad judgment and bad judgment is not good in a company’s leader.  Since when is a board seeking to avoid bad publicity for a company being wimpy? Turmoil around a CEO wreaks havoc on stock prices as well.
9. No one is irreplaceable.  HP will be fine.  There is depth in the ranks and there has been succession planning.

10.  I suspect the board looks terrific to employees who were aware of the Hurd issues.  Trust the Barometer on this one – there are many who were aware and knew and know far more than we.

11.  Lawyer Gloria Allred calling is akin to having a “Sixty Minutes” camera crew at your door.  It is going to be a bad day. Just ask Tiger Woods.  

12.  One spokesperson for HP said the questionable expense reports for Mr. Hurd “totaled no more than $20,000.”  To some of us, that amount remains a great deal of money.

Anthropologists have plenty of explanations, though the justification debates rage on.  One reason students are so comfortable with the cut-and-paste approach is that they are working from the computer, a tool they have used for years to download copyrighted music, mostly without paying. Other students feel that they are just getting through a course.  That is, they are not interested in setting the world on fire; they just want credit for the assignment.  Processing the work of others and then putting it into the context of their own analyses, insights, and observations is darn hard work.  Yet another reason is the cultural acceptance and tolerance.  Think back over the past few years and the writers who have simply said, “Oh, well,” and marched onward and upward in their careers:  Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, Laurence Tribe, and teen writer Helen Hegemann, who quite nearly got an award for her book. We adults are not doing a crackerjack job on enforcement.

The New York Times ethicist, Randy Cohen, wrote of a fascinating ethical issue on April 12, 2009.  A professor required his student to submit their papers to Turnitin.com, a site that checks for plagiarism.  A mother of one of the students wrote to “The Ethicist” asking whether it was ethical for the professor to require this step without an advance announcement because the students should needed a chance to “clean up their work” before turning their papers in to Turnitin.com.  Funny how cleaning it up with sources is not a given when it comes to assignments!

Ms. Christine Pelton, a former high school science teacher in Piper, Kansas, had warned the students in her sophomore class not to use papers posted on the Internet for their projects.  When the projects were turned in, Ms. Pelton noticed that some of the students’ writing in portions of the paper was well above their usual quality and ability.  She found that 28 of her 118 students had taken substantial portions of their papers from the Internet.  She gave the students a “0” grade on their term paper projects.  The result was that many of the students were now going to fail the semester in the course.

The students’ parents protested and the school board ordered Ms. Pelton to raise the grades.  She resigned in protest. Can’t expect compliance if there is no enforcement! In fact, 90% of students believe that those who do cheat in school are never caught.

 So, we adults may have to work a little harder than just simply providing ways to remove the pink background or change the ink color to purple.  We may have to require students to undertake that difficult struggle of researching, reading, studying, thinking, and THEN writing a piece that provides their unique insight into a question or topic that they have taken the time to understand.  Therein lies the root cause for the cut-and-paste approach – research, analyses, and understanding are hard work.  And therein lies our concern about cut-and-paste:  The hard work of learning has not been done but both student and professor are passing off as if it has.  We thereby deceive those who buy into the imprimatur of completed courses and degrees.  Employers who hire our little cut-and-paste cherubs assume skill sets that may not actually be there.  Sounds a bit like the investment banks who assumed the folks writing the mortgages that they were then bundling had looked into things such as income verification, appraisals, and credit risk.  Oops – they just did a quick look-see and passed it all along to others who were harmed.  Oh, how little missteps hurt so many.

Helen Hegemann is a proponent of a new view of plagiarism, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” or it all depends on the meaning of the words “originality” and “authenticity.”  Oh, what a world this would be sans original thought.  Thank goodness there are those who continue the good fight to preserve it (and it was Paul who first coined the phrase, “Fight the good fight.” 2 Timothy 4:7)  Amen.  (various sources)

Truth does find its way out into the open and when it does, trust is dissipated.  Without trust, well, even when you are telling the truth, no one believes you.  And the next thing you know your campaign is faxing out notes from your mother so that you can be in the Senate.  Never mind the ethics – human dignity demands more!