Banana Packaging: The Saga Continues

This is just an update. Not sure if there's anything ethically interesting here at all.

Three weeks ago I blogged about bananas being packaged (in South Korea) in plastic wrappers. Extra packaging for a banana seemed odd. A week later I posted an update with an explanation from Starbucks: the plastic wrappers, they had told me, reflected Korean 'cultural norms' dictating that premium produce be individually wrapped.

OK, interesting answer.

But now, in a recent issue of MacLean's magazine, there's a story (by Kate Lunau) that gives a much more plausible explanation — and it's about bananas being sold right here in Canada. According to Lunau's story, retailers package banana's for individual sale to help extend the very small window of time during which bananas are the pristine yellow colour that consumers demand, rather than either too green or too brown. Here's the story: An inconvenient fruit.

Now I'm not sure what to think about the two different explanations. Maybe there really are 2 separate reasons, I guess. Or maybe there's a failure of communications within Starbucks.

Some might say (re the Maclean's story) that if it's that much trouble to get pristine bananas to consumers, we shouldn't bother. Some might say the same about the "cultural norms" explanation. But then, potato chips come in a plastic bag too. Either way, garbage is generated. Presumably the healthfulness of the banana makes the garbage generated worthwhile, socially. Yeah?

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Thanks to Michael B for pointing me to the Maclean's story.

The Superbowl, Abortion, and Corporate Responsibility

This story brings together Americans' two 'favourite' battles. One, an annual epic battle between opposing sports teams, carried out on the gridiron, namely The Superbowl. The other, a never-ending battle between opposing moral points of view, carried out in seemingly every nook and cranny of American life, namely the abortion debate. Add to that a debate over corporate responsibility and a debate over free speech, and it's not hard to see why sparks are flying.

(That much is cultural anthropology for me. I'm a Canadian. Our "Superbowl" is called the "Stanley Cup," and it's a hockey game not a football game. And abortion has not been the subject of significant debate in Canada since 1988.)

So, here are the basics of the current story: CBS, the tv network airing the Superbowl today, has agreed to air an ad by conservative Christian group, Focus on the Family. It's a pro-life/anti-abortion ad featuring Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and his mom. Though the full ad has not been seen publicly yet, the gist of it apparently is a claim that Tebow's mom, Pam, had, while pregnant with Tim, refused medical advice that she have an abortion. The result of her refusal is the man we know today as Tebow, a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback. That would be just another little human-interest story, if it weren't for the way Americans are deeply, bitterly, divided over abortion.

(You can get more details here, from The 5th Down, the NY Times' NFL Blog.)

The question being debated: should CBS be airing such a controversial ad during the Superbowl? Within broad limits, networks can pretty much air whatever they want: if CBS wants to air controversial ads, it's within its rights to do so. Heck, if it wants to adopt a pro-life/anti-abortion editorial view, it can do that two.

But two issues complicate the matter:

1) In recent years (?) CBS has had a policy of not airing controversial ads during the Superbowl. Why the exception? Now, CBS is of course free to change its policy. There's been a suggestion that the economic downturn has prompted the network to be a little more daring. But that argument will only work if other, equally controversial ads are allowed in the future, from a range of moral-and-political points of view. Failing that, CBS would become the network that allows controversial ads only representing certain points of view. It's hard to judge which way CBS is going, based on a single ad. In other words, based just on the Superbowl, CBS's new strategy might be "allow controversial ads" or it might be "allow conservative Christian ads." Time will tell.

2) Questions have arisen about the accuracy of the claims being made in the ad. Tebow was born in the Philippines. Abortion was entirely illegal in the Philippines then, as it is now. So, the claim that Tebow's mom was advised to have an abortion is a claim that her physicians counselled her to break the law (and offered to break it themselves, too). The illegality angle means that a) the story is less likely to be true (though not obviously false) and that b) the story effectively accuses physicians of criminal behaviour. The question then becomes: should CBS care? It's probably not plausible to say that a broadcaster is morally responsible for the veracity of every claim made in any commercial it airs. But then again, this isn't just "any commercial."

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(Note: if you want to post comments, please stay on-topic. The topic is corporate responsibility. If you want to debate abortion itself, there are lots of other places to do that. Exceedingly inflammatory comments will not be approved. Thanks.)

Corporate Personhood and Citizens United

This is the third of 3 blog entries on the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Yesterday I argued that the Court's decision was fundamentally the right one, because the decision struck down a law that sought to use clumsy and intrusive means to achieve dubious ends. (And I pointed out that it's possible to think the decision is the right one even if you worry about the possible consequences of that decision.)

Today I want to talk about the role of corporate personhood in the Court's decision and in the underlying issues. Much of the furor over the Citizens United decision seems to be rooted in a reaction against the notion of corporations being (or merely receiving protections normally reserved for) persons. I think much of that reaction is misguided: not because I'm in favour of an expansive understanding of corporate rights, but because I think many people are misunderstanding what "personhood" means in this context, and the history of that notion.

A few points about the notion of corporate personhood, and the Court's view on it:

1. The U.S. Supreme Court did not, in the Citizens United decision, suddenly declare corporations to be persons, contrary to what you might have heard. All they did was declare that one of the limitations on corporate speech could not be justified in light of the U.S. Constitution (in particular, the First Amendment). The Court left in place the legal restrictions on corporate donations to political candidates, and it left in place requirements about the obligations of corporations to disclose their political expenditures. Corporations were, prior to this decision, and they remain, after this decision, a kind of person before the law, with a limited range of rights and responsibilities.

2. It's worth noting that the Court's decision (in PDF, here) does not focus on, or argue in favour of, corporate personhood. Indeed, it mentions the concept just once in 57 pages of argument. The view of the Dissenting judges was that the decision by the Majority of the Court must have assumed that corporations are in some strong sense "real persons." How else could corporations be thought worthy of constitutional protections? As a matter of Constitutional law, though, the majority's argument was simply that the First Amendment applies to speech per se, not to the speech of men or humans or persons or anything else. Just speech. Ethically, I think the key is really that you can't limit the speech of corporations without thereby limiting the speech of the persons (executives, employees, and shareholders) who make it up. Corporations are instruments: legal "persons", yes, but also instruments or mechanisms by means of which real, flesh-and-blood humans achieve their ends. The Court's decision is worthy of support not because it helps make sure that corporations per se are able to express themselves, but rather because it helps make sure that human beings are not denied a mechanism through which they sometimes choose to express themselves.

3. Legal personhood for corporations is not new. It goes back at least hundreds of years. At heart, all it means is that the corporation exists as an entity separable (ethically and legally) from the human beings that work within it. GM exists today despite the fact that none of its founders or original employees is alive today. You can sign a contract with Apple, and Apple (as a legal person) is required to honour its warrantees, without you having to interact with every shareholder in the company. Governments and courts have, for centuries, seen the wisdom of allowing (and sometimes insisting) that corporations be treated as collective entities (in legal parlance, as "persons.") As I've argued before, there are good reasons Why Corporations Must be Legal Persons. Assigning some form of personhood to corporations (and churches and universities and unions and so on) is how we assign both rights and responsibilities to them. If corporations were not in some sense persons, they could not sign contracts and own property or do any of the other things that makes them useful to us. If corporations were not in some sense persons, you could not sue them when they do wrong. The piece of legislation that the U.S. Supreme Court declared, in part, unconstitutional — the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — itself treats corporations as persons, since it imposes criminal sanctions on certain kinds of corporate behaviour.

4. Personhood is not a monolithic concept. The fact that the Court rejected some restrictions on corporations does not imply that corporations are now full-fledged persons in the same sense that competent adult human beings are. We have always recognized many different "kinds" of persons, with different sets of rights and responsibilities. Note that the rights and responsibilities of a child, for example, differ from those of an adult (even though both are persons). And the rights and responsibilities of a foreign tourist, for example, differ from those of a citizen (even though both are persons). The fact that corporations are regarded as a type of person does not mean that they're going to be accorded the right to vote next. And the fact that they don't have certain rights (e.g., the right to vote, or to adopt children, or to marry) does not mean they aren't (in some sense) persons.

In summary, I think the corporate-personhood issue is a huge red herring, here. It's a distraction. If you think (as I do) that there are specific rights that corporations shouldn't have, argue against those. Treating corporations as in some sense persons should be the beginning of a conversation about which rights and responsibilities we think they should have.

Free Speech: Means, Ends, and Citizens United

(This is the second of 3 blog entries on the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Yesterday's was about what corporate citizenship requires in light of the decision. Tomorrow's entry will look at the decision from the point of view of the vexed notion of corporate personhood).

The U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision was fundamentally right, it seems to me. I'm not a lawyer, nor a scholar of the U.S. Constitution, but from what I can see the decision was a sound one constitutionally. More importantly, for my purposes, the decision was the right one ethically. And as Glenn Greenwald at Salon rightly pointed out, you don't have to like all of the possible consequences of this decision in order to believe that it was the right decision. (See Greenwald's blog entry, What the Supreme Court got right.)

The law the Court struck down (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act or BCRA, and really the Court only struck down part of it) was problematic both in terms of ends and in terms of means. Ends vary in their moral worth, as do means; so, the ends don't always justify the means. Some ends of course are particularly worthy, and may justify just about any means. And some means are so clearly harmless that their use is ok regardless of what your goals are. Though most of us think that consequences matter, few of us think that absolutely any means is justified in pursuit of good consequences.

So, first, what were the law's ends, its objectives? The BCRA sought to limit corporate political speech, in order to limit the influence of powerful corporate interests in the political sphere. That first, immediate goal of limiting speech is of course worrisome in its own right, in any society that values freedom. The ultimate goal (limiting corporate influence) is problematic too. First, it's problematic because it's not really clear that corporate money actually exercises a catastrophic amount of influence. Indeed, some scholars have wondered Why Is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics? [pdf] (ht to Marginal Revolution). But more fundamentally, the goal of reducing corporate influence is only a good one for those who think corporate influence is (mostly? always?) a pernicious thing. That is, it requires that the corporate point of view is generally a bad one. And you're perfectly free to think that's the case. Certainly that's a conclusion reached by lots of people. But it's not a view shared by all. And ultimately the question is whether governments ought to be playing favourites, whether they should be deciding that certain points of view ought not be heard. I for one think there are individuals out there whose views are pernicious, and I would rather they not be heard. But that doesn't mean I want the government passing laws to prevent them from speaking.

What about means? What means did the law employ? In seeking to limit the influence of powerful corporate interests in the political sphere, the law basically made it a criminal offence for corporations and unions to spend money on independent political communications in the weeks leading up to an election. In this regard, the law was both overinclusive and underinclusive. It was overinclusive in that it applied equally to very small (even single-shareholder!) corporations and nonprofits. And it was underinclusive in that it limited the political speech of wealthy corporations but not of wealthy individuals: there are no limits on how much, say, Bill Gates or Warren Buffet is allowed to spend on promoting a political candidate. The relevant section of the BCRA was a bad means to achieve its supposed ends.

So, the law sought to use clumsy and intrusive means to achieve dubious ends. So the ends pretty clearly don't justify the means, here. When you're messing with fundamental rights — even when you're doing so in the pursuit of noble ends — the means you employ need to be pretty carefully targeted. From what understand, that is an acknowledged principle of constitutional law; it's also a pretty good ethical rule of thumb. That's why the Court's decision was right.

The US Supreme Court, Free Speech, and Corporate Citizenship

Many of you are already aware of last week's controversial decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United case. Basically, the decision struck down a part of the U.S. government's law that limited the freedom of corporations (and unions) to engage in political speech.

But saying that you are free to do something is not the same as saying that you should do it or that there are no limits on the way you should do it. Ethics is, in part, about figuring out what limits we ought to accept on our own behaviour, beyond the limits imposed by law.

Here's a very useful piece that looks at the Citizens United case from that point of view, by Wayne Norman (of Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics), writing in The News & Observer: With 'citizenship' comes great responsibility:

For the foreseeable future, "corporate citizens" have a right to speak their minds and to spend as much as it takes to get you to hear their message.

But should they? Is it ethical to actually exercise these rights - for example, to spend money to try to defeat a candidate who would tighten regulations on the firm or its industry?

It is time to shine more light on a realm of corporate responsibility that tends to get overlooked when we are focusing on more obvious irresponsible behaviors like pollution, sweatshops or excessive risk taking....

Wayne goes on to suggest a couple of likely obligations, including an obligation on the part of corporate citizens to use their free speech rights in ways conducive to the public good, and an obligation to be transparent about their lobbying.

But I think the key contribution, here, is the idea that the Court's decision is not just a conclusion — it's the starting point for a (renewed) conversation about what a corporation's responsibilities are in how it exercises free speech in the realm of politics.

Should Consumers Take Sides in Labour Disputes?

Should individuals or groups stay away from hotels (or other businesses) in the midst of labour disputes?

The Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association is currently struggling with that issue — not as an abstract ethical question, but as a practical one. Basically, the hotel at which they were planning to hold their annual meeting this year (the Westin St. Francis, in San Francisco) is currently subject to a boycott being promoted by Local 2 of the union Unite Here. The union is not on strike, though they're in the middle of negotiations that apparently are not going well. (See details, including the Association's compromise decision, here: Statement on the Labor Dispute at the 2010 Conference Hotel.)

The situation faced by the APA raises the more general question: should associations like the APA, or consumers more generally, comply with this kind of union-organized boycott, either of a hotel or of another kind of business? Here are a few points to consider:

1. The first thing to note is that, in going along with the boycott, the APA would effectively be choosing sides in this labour dispute. And to take a side means determining (or assuming) that one side is in the right, and the other is in the wrong. But in a labour dispute, the most natural assumption for an outsider is to assume that the two sides simply want different things, and are engaged in what is (roughly) a zero-sum game: the union wants more (more money, better benefits, and/or more job security) while management wants either the status quo or to provide less of one or more of those things.

2. It's worth being clear about what the role of unions is. Unions are a mechanism of collective action. They are a way for labour to band together for more efficient and effective bargaining in the sale of their labour; this is in parallel to the way that equity investors (i.e., shareholders) band together to hire managers to (among other things) buy labour on their behalf. So a union is a way to further the interests of its members. (I've benefited substantially, for instance, from my membership in my university's Faculty Association.)

3. The APA faces this issue because at least some of its members take it as obvious that the Association should respect the boycott. The impulse to side with the union, here, might be grounded in a presumption that the union is in the right — perhaps that unions always or typically are in the right. Part of that might be rooted in particular philosophical points of view about economic justice. But certainly it's a point of view that accords nicely with a significant theme in popular culture. The general impression given in popular culture is that workers are powerless and corporations are powerful. They make movies about workers bravely uniting against a common, heartless enemy. They don't make movies about shareholders banding together to fight Big Labour.

4. It matters that the decision maker in this case, the APA, is an association, rather than an individual. Being an association complicates things in two ways. First, associations often have rules and policies, including sometimes foundational documents (a constitution or a set of by-laws), that to a certain extent guide (and sometimes determine) their behaviour. (The APA, for example, has a policy of only meeting at unionized hotels, though whether that policy applies to the current situation is a matter of interpretation.) Secondly, an association has members, who in many cases need to be consulted and asked for input. Ethical decision making for associations, then, takes on some of the trappings of political decision making (broadly understood).

5. For some people, the decision to support a union in its boycott will be easy, because their own preferences make it so. If you are an ardent supporter of labour movements, generally — if you take the successes of a union as your own successes, the way you might the successes of a friend or family member — then supporting such a boycott might seem a no-brainer. It doesn't necessarily require any restraint on your part. If, on the other hand, you are neutral or even antagonistic to unions generally, then the boycott presents you with an ethical dilemma. Assuming (as is the case for the APA) that you already have plans in place that involve using the hotel in question, then changing those plans means accepting some inconvenience, and maybe even significant expense. Normally, in the marketplace, we look to buy those things (and only those things) that meet our needs, and satisfy our preferences. Complying with a boycott may imply accepting a limitation on the pursuit of what's in your best interest. That, in a sense, is the hallmark of ethically-significant issues: they put constraints on the pursuit of what is most obviously in our best interest (narrowly construed).

6. Assuming that you neither a) assume that unions are always right, nor b) have a natural passion for unions and their causes (either of which might make the decision trivial for you) you need to make a decision about whether the union's case is morally compelling. The problem, of course, is that the relevant information is going to be hard to acquire. Accurate information is particularly hard to come by in the context of labour conflicts, which are characterized by dissimulation, exaggeration, and bluffing. Individual consumers, limited as they inevitably are in their information-gathering capacities, are going to find it incredibly difficult to sort through the labour equivalent of a "he said, she said" dispute. It may well be that this is among the more difficult domains in which consumers can attempt to engage in ethical consumerism.

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Thanks to Matt for alerting me to this story.

Haitian Tourism: The Role of the Profit Motive in Development

I was on CBC Radio's "The Current," this morning, talking (still!) about the issue of cruise ships visiting Haiti. Here's the link to today's show (scroll down to the third segment, called "Haiti Cruises") or you can find the podcast here: Haiti Cruises.

The show included some useful comments from two other professors, (Rebecca Tiessen from Royal Military College who specializes in global development, and Brian White who is Director of the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at Royal Roads University), both of whom had interesting perspectives on tourism and its contribution (or lack thereof) to developing nations in general.

Host Brent Bambury was full of great questions for me. My favourite was about the motives of companies doing business with Haiti. It's at the very end of the interview. Here's how the conversation went:

BB: Are you comfortable when you hear the CEO of Royal Caribbean, Mr. Goldstein, talking about his economic rationalizations for continuing to do business there — or do you hear, there, self-interest or a self-serving economic argument, at a time when really there's this whole other moral question?"

CM: I hope I hear his self-interested argument coming through. Because, you know, there are organizations in the world that do things because they have, you know, good intentions towards others. But an awful lot of productive work in the world goes on because people find a way to make a living for themselves, right? So I think what Haiti desperately needs, you know, is a bunch of companies that find ways to make money in Haiti, in ways that are going to also be beneficial to Haitians. That kind of profit-making opportunities are what's going to bring in companies that are going to provide jobs, provide export opportunities, things like that and I think that's what Haiti's going to need.

BB: It's the second part of the argument, though, 'In a way that will make benefits for Haitians,' that's the tricky part of the argument, because historically that hasn't been there.

CM: Yeah, historically that hasn't been there. There's been — I'm not an expert on the history — but from what, you know, most people know, it's a place that has had trouble in the past with achieving something like stable government and responsible government and those kinds of decisions haven't always been good. So what we need to be looking for then, is transactions that Haitians see as being in their own best interests, to the best we can tell that, right? So I'm at least somewhat comforted with regard to the cruise ships when I hear reported by reputable...you know, by objective third parties, journalists and so on, that by and large Haitians are saying, 'Yes, please, keep bringing the cruise ships — we see that as beneficial to us.'