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Volume 3 Number 14 June
3, 2005 |
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Misplaced allegiance People are often confused about who
deserves their support and protection The news this past week that the Deep Throat" of Watergate fame was actually Mark Felt, second in command at the FBI, brought some closure – although not quite the Hollywood ending some were expecting – to that 30-year-old sordid drama. However, the follow-up raises at least one ethical question worth pursuing: To whom do we, as employees, owe our allegiance? I never for a moment believed anything other than that "Deep Throat" provided a valuable service to a country under attack from within. So, you can imagine my astonishment when I began hearing news that some people were questioning the ethical propriety of Felt's actions, with some people going so far as to call him a traitor and others claiming that he was responsible for genocide in Cambodia or Laos. The claims would be nonsensical if it weren't for the notoriety of those making the claims. The fact that some people, despite their criminal past, are regarded as credible "spokespeople" for anything never ceases to amaze me, although I guess it's just another sign of how celebrity-crazed our culture has become, where people are famous for being well-known. The Felt-as-cause-of-genocide
argument is silly on two counts. The basic proposition is that if Felt hadn't
"brought down" Richard Nixon, Nixon would have ended the war and
the tragedies in The first notion to dismiss is that Felt – or even the Washington Post – brought down Nixon single-handedly. While the Post and its hagiographers would like you to believe that, there were other forces at work. Nixon was, perhaps, his own worst enemy. And the most damning piece of evidence was the 18 and one-half minutes of missing tapes, something uncovered by just plain hard work by Congressional investigators. It's also important to remember that in those days there was a Congress, which, despite its flaws, had some members of conscience and character, and the media, while far from a liberal hotbed, as propagandists would have you believe, was still fairly diverse and responsive. Corporate consolidation was still in its infancy. Neither of those two conditions pertains today. Congress has become pretty much a rubber stamp, and media concentration has put news dissemination in the hands of a tiny group of powerful corporations. The zeitgeist of the media-administration relationship has also changed dramatically. Were a Deep Throat to emerge today, the media companies would call the White House and tell them what they had learned. The White House would say it was wrong. And the story would die. Nixon was merely 30 years ahead of his time. Under today's conditions, he would have served out his full term. Second, it's a real stretch
to say that had served out his term he would have ended the war, and had that
happened, there would have been no mass killings in For those who haven't had freshman logic – and those that have will recognize the fallacy immediately – post-hoc ergo propter-hoc refers to the proposition that because Event B follows Event A, B is somehow caused by A. In the absence of any other proof of causality, this is a fallacy. The fact that I stand in front of an ugly downtown building and bellow "Mr. Mayor, tear down this building" doesn't mean that I caused the building's demise when the demolition team shows up a week later to take it down. The outlandish statements about Felt and his role as Deep Throat will resonate most clearly with members of the fringe elements, who are fairly immune to any logic, so trying to refute the statements may be a futile gesture. However, one charge against Felt may have more traction because it sounds plausible and is the source of confusion for many. This is the idea that he had some duty to the FBI, to his superiors there, to FBI rules, and perhaps even to Nixon – and that he violated that duty by revealing the details behind the Nixon gang's assault on the Constitution. So, the question becomes whether Felt had such obligations, how strong those obligations were, and under what circumstances, if any, he could ethically breach them – assuming they existed. It's a question many people face daily – although not quite so dramatically – in the workplace. If you work in a corporate environment, is your primary loyalty to your supervisor, your supervisor's manager, the CEO, the board of directors, the corporate "person," the stockholders, or the customers? Or is your primary responsibility to yourself – to your own ethical code? If you're a die-hard consequentialist, the question is moot. You define the right action as that which brings about the greater amount of good. Obligations and duty don't enter into it. You merely assess the amount of good to be achieved by speaking out and the amount of good (or evil) achieved by keeping quiet, do the math, and it's a slam dunk. That's an oversimplification, of course, but consequentialists aren't big on the "duty" theory. That's the work of deontologists, who often cast their ethical theory as a complicated system of duties, obligations, and even rights. So, a deontologist -- and deontologists don't all follow the same formula -- might say that an employee has a special obligation to his or her employer. And, that obligation might be stronger in cases where the employee has taken some kind of oath of office or has agreed upfront to keep certain things confidential. The question becomes how strong these obligations of "loyalty" are, what they entail, and under what circumstances they can be overcome. An absolutist will say that the obligation, once taken, is, well, absolute. This is part of the reason I don't cast my lot in with absolutists. Most people think that we live entangled in a web of competing obligations and that, at different times and under different circumstances, our obligations have different relative weights vis-à-vis other obligations. I think this is a more reasonable view, despite the fact the absolutists will sneer at this approach and call it "ethical relativism," as if that were a bad thing. Employers, of course, like to think our obligations of loyalty to them are stronger than they actually are. As employees, we might be all over the place on that, depending on how well the relationship with our employer is going. Still, I think it seems safe to say that, even if we don't agree with our boss, by taking our paycheck we tacitly agree not to reveal anything that will damage the business. In the simplest cases, the obligation is fairly straightforward. I go to work for Joe, who owns his own business. Joe expects some loyalty from me, and that's a reasonable expectation. However, as the situation becomes more complex, it's less clear to whom I owe my allegiance. If Joe hires Harry to manage a branch office, and Harry hires me, do I owe my allegiance to Joe or to Harry? If Harry is doing something inimical to Joe's interests, where does my duty lie. In the case of large corporations, is my duty of allegiance to my supervisor, his/her boss, the CEO, the board of directors, or the stockholders? If I see the CEO doing something that will hurt the company do I, as a low-level employee, have an obligation to contact the board and tell them? Or do I, as a lowly peon with a welter of conflicting allegiances, just keep my mouth shut? The stakes are even higher when we talk about illegal behavior. Does my obligation to report illegal behavior trump any obligation of loyalty I might have to anyone in the chain of command? The easy answer, as you might guess, is that I'm duty-bound to report illegal behavior despite any allegiance I feel or any confidentiality that my boss expects. But that's less clear than it may, at first glance, appear. Let's take a really trivial example. I'm out driving with my boss. He runs a red light. No other cars are around. No damage is done. Am I obligated to call the police and report it (ignoring for the moment that the police would be polite, but unresponsive)? Most, if not all, people would say no. Suppose now that I learned that my boss had driven drunk the night before. He left a party barely able to walk and then made it home unscathed, again with no damage done. Am I now obligated to call the police and tell them because of the seriousness of the offense? Again, most people would say no. I know these examples are trivial, but I'm trying to establish that illegal behavior, by itself, does not outweigh our obligation to our boss to keep our mouths shut. The calculus changes, however, with the outcome of the behavior. If I learned that my boss had been involved in a hit-and-run accident while driving drunk, then my obligation to report the crime outweighs any obligation of allegiance I have to my boss. But what about white-collar crime? When my boss takes some shady tax deductions, do I have an obligation to tell someone? Must I go to the IRS? When my boss is double-billing the company for "expenses," should I go over his or her head to report this? When the company is engaged in clearly unethical business practices, how strong is my obligation to "go public," to become a whistle-blower. The Enron case is a textbook example of how misplaced loyalty to the company and the individuals within the company allowed grossly unethical and illegal behavior to flourish. Enron was cooking the books to make the company look profitable when it was really wallowing in debt. A lot of people knew this -- including people outside the company. Meanwhile, the cooked books led investors, many of them employees, to invest heavily in the sinking company. Enron traders were scamming the energy market, deliberately telling power generators to take plants off-line merely to create an artificial shortage and drive prices through the roof. Inside the company, this wasn't a secret. In fact, the traders bragged on tape about "sticking it to Grandma Millie." Yet, in this whole sordid mess, there was only one whistle-blower and she blew the whistle only to Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay. No one went to the feds or the DA. Talk about misplaced loyalty. The whole study of ethics, especially business ethics, is about how we balance off these competing obligations we all feel. When does our obligation to come forward outweigh our obligation of allegiance to our employer? There is no easy answer. I wish I had one. I could become a millionaire. Each one of us has to find our own tipping point. The problem is that we all have an incredible capacity to delude ourselves in ways that dull our ethical sense. Often, we step onto the slippery slope easily, and then, when we reach a place we don't like, find it difficult to step off. We lie to ourselves, which, it turns out, is much easier than lying to other people. We are all our own most gullible audience. And I can tell you from personal experience that trying to fly the flag of ethical behavior is not something that will catapult you into the executive suite. You end up being "too negative," or "not a can-do guy." My own personal favorite (from the boss who was asking our advice, despite the fact he had already decided what he wanted to do): "I don't want you to tell me why we can't do this. I want you to tell my how we can do it." Many people are lucky, the unethical behavior is trivial enough, and the need to make a decent living important enough, that the latter clearly outweighs the former. For some people, however, the balance is in the other direction. For those who feel they must speak out or act. the decision of when and how is always difficult -- and fraught with danger. It's even harder if you've been on the slippery slope and have been a party to previous behavior, which taken as a whole is unethical or illegal. Speaking out then takes real courage. But, when all is said and done, our primary ethical obligation is to ourselves -- to do the right thing. There comes a moment when everything else becomes secondary. Mark Felt apparently reached such a moment. I won't contend that his motives were 100 percent pure, simply because I don't know. But even if he were grinding some other axe, the service he did to the country far outweighed whatever obligation he had to keep quiet. The disappointing thing in the Watergate case was not that Mark Felt spoke out, but that so few other people did. One thing to remember when discussing Felt's situation and his obligations to the president, his superiors, or to the FBI is that public servants really have one overriding obligation and that is to the people and the Constitution of the country. Obligations to agency bosses, and even the president (who is a temporary employee of the country), pale in comparison to that. |
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© Copyright 2005 Carlton Vogt |