Putting ethics into technology
By SALLY PRASKEY
Fall, 2003
Imagine a time, perhaps five or 10 years from now, when you can track the buying habits of every customer, thanks to the emerging technology of the electronic product code (EPC). But who in your store should have access to that information, and what should you do with it? Are your customers going to be delighted with your ability to micro-market to them, or outraged at the intrusion of privacy
These are just some of the kinds of ethical questions that grocers will have to wrestle with as technology continues to advance at an exponential pace, says Dr. Rushworth Kidder, president of the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden, Maine. “You have a situation where a single unethical decision can now create world-class disaster in ways that were simply impossible 30 years ago,” he says. Witness the Chernobyl nuclear explosion, the Columbia space-shuttle disaster, the widespread damage wrought by the Love Bug virus, and, in the grocery industry, the accounting irregularities that scandalized the U.S. Foodservice unit of Ahold N.V. Even though our sense of ethics is gradually improving – slavery has been abolished, women can vote – “the technology is progressing far more rapidly than our ethics,” says Kidder. “And it’s in the gap between those two things that the problem lies.”
It’s not difficult to envision a scenario whereby a single unethical decision could cast a pall over the entire grocery industry. “That industry is particularly dependent on trust,” says Kidder. “The kind of stuff that we as consumers are ingesting day by day, we are doing so largely because we have vast amounts of faith in what you folks are producing. But what happens if the unethical behavior of a few terrorists gets itself leveraged through this vast system that you folks have created? It is one of the most amazing distribution systems in the world, operating with split-second timing and providing immensely complicated structures reaching into every single home in the country.”
Now add a new technology, like EPC, to the mix, and ponder the implications. While EPC has many potential benefits – including the ability to protect us from the next Timothy McVeigh, by alerting vendors and, ultimately, authorities to suspicious buying habits, like the vast quantities of fertilizer purchased by McVeigh to construct the bomb that he detonated in Oklahoma – “will that alarm status also go off in my private life, if I suddenly shift from one habit of purchasing to another?” asks Kidder. “Whether or not there’s anything wrong with that, the fact is we are going to be seeing a huge public outcry over this, I think,” driven largely by fear of technology and possibly leading to over-regulation. A case in point: the reaction of governments in many European countries to consumer protests over genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Taking the EPC scenario a step further, what if supermarket XYZ was contacted by Canadian security authorities and asked: ‘What can you tell us about the buying habits of Jane Doe?’ “Who’s going to answer the phone, and what are they going to say when that call comes?” asks Kidder. “Where is the thinking that is going to happen about these things? Because if it doesn’t happen, we’re going to back into it and do it by trial-and-error, and it’s going to be a horrendous mess,” he warns. “The challenge is that there aren’t a lot of people, in the grocery industry or in any other, who are comfortable thinking about ethical questions in this way, especially as they relate to technology. And we need to bring these two ideas of technology and ethics together, and think this through, because the regulation will take a long time to catch up.”
“Customers are demanding more responsibility through the food chain,” notes David Nitkin, president of EthicScan, a Toronto-based corporate social responsibility research house and ethics consultancy. “And they’re expecting Canadian retailers to use technology in a way that makes them accountable and acceptable.”
A good starting point for grocers is the establishment of “an ethical sourcing and trading policy, one that covers the entire food chain, from original production to the sale in the food store,” Nitkin suggests. He urges them to “force more transparency on the part of their suppliers in the area of the universal product code,” referring to a technology that was first employed some six years ago in organic food stores in California. The customer uses a hand-held machine in the store to gather social-responsibility data, including information about where the food product was sourced, the nutrition content, the social responsibility of the company, and the background of a particular product. A newer version, demonstrated recently in Massachusetts, connects to the Internet to present information in real time about the particular company, including whether it has had any recent health and safety violations.
Nitkin also advises an “ethics audit,” in which employees are able to report, anonymously and to a third party, on any difficulties they are experiencing at work, or unethical behavior that they may have observed. According to professor Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional & Applied Ethics, University of Manitoba, “an organization that wants to win the loyalty and support of its employees has to think about whether it has mechanisms in place to protect those employees – whistle-blowing mechanisms if your manager is harassing you, or is behaving in an arbitrary or unjust way.”
Organizations must also be cognizant of how their behavior impacts shareholders and the wider community. Nitkin describes an emerging trend, called “Social, Ethical, and Environmental (SEE) Risk Analysis,” whereby companies are being asked to demonstrate their social, environmental, and ethical risk to minority investors. “Shareholder groups, consumer groups, and ethical investors are asking companies to be more transparent about practices that might be serious liabilities in the marketplace.”
Kidder calls for more vigilance in the hiring process. “We have to be discerning ways in which to find out whether there is an ethical chip missing from the mental motherboard of the person who walks in the door.” He advocates presenting prospective employees with a theoretical ethical dilemma to determine their moral reasoning. After all, he points out, it wasn’t the CEO who was directly responsible for blowing up Chernobyl; it was employees with access to the technology. “We have never had the kind of technological capacity to take the single unethical decisions of individuals, quite often way down the supply chain, and leverage those things into such disaster,” he notes. “This matters more now than ever, because there are really two alternatives: either you police everything, or you trust in and build and promote the internal ethical compass in individuals, so that they are self-regulating, rather than being regulated from outside. We simply can’t afford to put a policeman behind every post, so there has to be a standard that is operating internally in the individual. A clearly efficient way to do this is to build in the sense of self-respect, the sense that ‘what I’m doing really does matter, because I’m part of the grocery industry.’ If you can get to this point, where there is a dignity about that kind of work and an importance to it, and have people understand the value of being an ethical contributor to an ethical culture, that’s hugely important.”
Leading by example is key, says Schafer. “An organization in which the leadership shows integrity and truly rewards integrity is likely to be an organization in which employees throughout the hierarchy behave better than one in which the people at the top preach integrity but behave in ways that are seen to be unscrupulous,” he says. “Those who adopt ethical standards because they expect a big payoff will abandon those standards just as quickly if the payoff, at least in the short run, turns out not to be what they anticipated.”
For his part, Nitkin is less concerned about the motivation than about the behavior. “Many people are concerned about companies doing the right thing and doing it for the right motives,” he notes. “In that context, I’m enough of a pragmatist to say: I don’t care if a grocery chain does it to be the ethical leader. It would be nice if they did it for altruistic reasons, but even if they’re doing it for crass, commercial, bottom-line reasons, it still is the right kind of behavior.” He says few stores try to compete in the broad area of social responsibility that consumers are demanding. “The advantage would go to the retailer who is willing to say: ‘this is an area on which we’re going to compete, that we think the market segment that’s called socially responsible consumers is ready for.’ And it represents, depending on the survey you look at, between 18 and 33% of all consumers.”
Whatever the motivation, never has it been more important to make the case that ethics matters. The 21st-century CIO must become the “Chief Integrity Officer,” says Kidder. “If we put unethical decision-making into the systems we have today, we’re courting disaster. Technology leverages ethics; ethics is reputation; reputation is survival.”
[sidebar] Right versus right
Compliance and ethics are two different concepts, says Dr. Rushworth Kidder, president of the Institute for Global Ethics. Whereas compliance means choosing right versus wrong, ethics is about right versus right. And whereas law is obedience to the enforceable, ethics is obedience to the unenforceable.
Ethics is dictated by the five core values: honesty, fairness, responsibility, respect, and compassion.
Managers and employees alike are often faced with an ethical decision driven by one or more of these four paradigms:
- Individual versus community
- Short term versus long-term
- Justice versus mercy
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