Michael S Pritchard and Elaine E. Englehardt

Distinguished Professors of Philosophy

RESPONSIBLE CONDUCTFOR PROFESSIONALS

“THE INTEGRITY OF THE GAME IS EVERYTHING.”

PETER UEBERROTH, BASEBALL COMMISSIONER,

Integrity in all Professions• Headlines in sports with steroid

probes: Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodrigues, Jhonny Peralta and Roger Clemens.

• Headlines in Science: Problems in America, South Korea, Japan, and many other countries

INTEGRITY IS FIRM ADHERENCE TO MORAL PRINCIPLES AND IDEALS:

INCORRUPTIBILITY• Researchers allege Merck waged a campaign of deception to promote Vioxx. They hid possible Hazards. They claimed in-house studiesas work of independent academic Researchers.

• Blood pressure medication resultsDemonstrate falsification of data withJapanese pharmaceutical corp.

• Herbal products have “weeds andother materials” in them rather than herbs. Do the herbs actually help individuals with health concerns?

CODES OF CONDUCT FOR IH

• Codes of Conduct are important guidelines for Professionals in IH:

• The code provides a framework individuals for

guiding the entire professional group.

• If a group of professionals are not in line with the code,

what happens to the society?

• Should the code be changed or the society?

• Codes ask for a collaborative commitment to the profession. The individual’s desires in the profession are secondary. The profession must survive and to survive the code is in place as a guide of professional responsibilities. It also details how to serve clients, patients and the public.

A SIMILAR PROFESSIONAL CODE: THE PREAMBLE TO THE NSPE CODE OF ETHICS FOR ENGINEERS:

• To loosen up the grip that ‘misconduct’ has on us, consider how engineering societies approach responsibility. The Preamble to the NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers:

• “Engineering (…Industrial Hygiene) is an important and learned profession…. Industrial Hygiene (Engineering) has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all people. Accordingly, the services provided by these professionals require honesty, impartiality, fairness, and equity, and must be dedicated to the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare. They must perform under a standard of professional behavior that requires adherence to the highest principles of ethical conduct.”

PROFESSIONALS IN DAILY LIFE

VIRTUES IN ALL FORMS- RESEARCH

Suppose we substitute ‘Industrial Hygiene’ for ‘engineering’. Nothing ethically significant changes. What seems to be called foris that IH exhibit certain virtues, certain dispositions regarding what it is to be a responsible professional. Honesty in the profession would be one of those virtues.

KNOWLEDGE EXPLOSION

William May says, “The knowledge explosion is also an ignorance explosion.”

• This is partly because expertise is highly

specialized.

**But it is also because experts have to rely

on one another to do their work

responsibly because they have

neither the time nor desire to

monitor one another’s work all,

or even much, of the time.

“PROFESSIONALS MUST BE VIRTUOUS”

“Professionals had better be virtuous.

Few may be in a position to discredit

them. The knowledge explosion is also an

ignorance explosion; if knowledge is

power, then ignorance is powerlessness.”

Given this picture of the world(s) of

professionals, May suggests: “One test of character and virtue is what a person does when no one is watching. A society that rests on expertise needs more people who can pass that test.”

WHAT RESPONSIBLE PROFESSIONALISM REQUIRES

•Responsible professionalism in industrial hygiene requires more than simply following rules.• Rules will not resolve the personal conflicts and moraldilemmas that arise in in the profession.

WHO MUST WE PROTECT? WHO IS USING YOUR

PRODUCTS?•Every day there are new choices to be made in your jobs. These are choices in professional integrity. •The adequacy or inadequacy of the protection of those who will utilize your products cannot rely solely upon procedural safeguards.

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GO BEYOND THE RULES: THEY ARE A MINIMUM STANDARD

•Bounded Ethicality (F) •Conflict of Interest (F)•Conformity Bias (F)

HE MADE ME DO IT: TRUST AND INTEGRITY

• The Jack Abramoff Story:

“In it to Win.” When you hear his name what comes to mind?

FADING FROM ETHICS

Ethical Fading (F)

Fundamental Moral Unit (F)

Framing and Mental Models(F)

Incentive Gaming (F)

HASTINGS CENTER GOALS

Hastings Center goals in teaching ethics:*Stimulate moral imagination *Recognize moral/ethical issues *Analyze key concepts and Principles*Stimulate a sense of responsibility.*Help us deal with ambiguity and disagreement

ETHICAL GAPS

• We tend to overestimate how ethical we are—

• The person I want to be is not the same as

• The person I actually am

• Deliberate Wrongdoers

• Aware Of Others’ Wrongdoing—but Do Nothing

• Not (Consciously) Aware Of Their Wrongdoing

“Culpable Ignorance”

Incrementalism

WHEN GOOD PEOPLE PERFORM QUESTIONABLE ACTS

• Moral Agents/Moral Worth: “The processes that lead even good people to engage in ethically questionable behavior that contradicts their own preferred ethics.”

• Limits resulting from our self-interest,

concerns for “our near and dear”,

organizational and social factors

• Tendency “to exclude important and relevant information from our decisions by placing arbitrary and dysfunctional bounds around our definition of a problem.”

EVERYBODY IS DOING IT,SO IT MUST BE OK

• Conflicts of interest, loyalty to friend or firm.

• Linguistic Masking:

“Collateral damage” vs. “Dead civilians”

“Creative accounting” vs. “ Cooking

the books”

Chemical pollution as “runoff”

Waste as “by-product”

“Laid off,” “downsized,” “made redundant”

vs. “Fired”

Moral Equilibrium (F)

MENTAL MODELS OF BEHAVIOR

• Overconfidence Bias: We need recognition of our unethical behavior. (F)

• Awareness of the acts can trigger

mental models operative in our thinking.

• We can then begin exploring means

by which to correct them. It is that

cognition that helps us accept the

responsibility.

ARE ETHICS VIOLATIONS RARE IN OUR PROFESSION--IH?

•Only a few bad apples? Why does it happen?

Is it acceptable to lie, deceiveOr conceal?

RECALIBRATE MORALITY

• Role Morality (film)

• We cultivate new behavioral strategies

• Create new habits, and

• Galvanize more intentional and

evolved mental models.

• While we organize and order

our world through mental models,

we do not often do so with the

luxury of analytical hindsight.

SELF-SERVING BIAS

• Failing to attend to our ethics blind spots

creates self serving bias. (film)

• “Vision is one of the best things we do.

We have a huge part of our brain

dedicated to vision. Bigger than dedicated

to anything else . . . We are evolutionarily

designed to do vision.

• And if we have these predictable repeatable mistakes in vision, which we're so good at, what's the chance that we don't make even more mistakes in something we're not as good at.

STANLEY MILGRAM AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY

• The central question that challenges each viewer or reader of Milgram’s obedience experiments is not simply why

the subject/participant acted

in the manner observed, but

how that reader would act if

in the same situation.

MORAL IMAGINATION

• If we do not attend to this blindness;if we do not revisit our mental modelsand develop a strong moral imaginationin order to challenge the intuitions thatotherwise persist without question ordeliberation, we are destined to accept common bias.

CAN YOU JUST SAY NO?

• So, when faced with a corporate,

professional or organizational opportunity

to say “no” to an inappropriate request or

expectation, what “mental model” would

be operative with us? Would we recognize

the request or expectation as problematic, develop a strong commitment to our individual choices and values, and then take a firm stance as needed?

DISASTERS AT BP & HALABURTON

11 crew died immediately or in the water, 16 seriously injured

200 million gallons of light sweet crude spilled in the Gulf over the

next 100 days

Last moment of the Deep-water Horizon

The platform sank 36 hours after ignition

SHARED VALUES FOR RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT

• HONESTY — conveying information truthfully and honoring commitments,

• ACCURACY — reporting findings precisely and taking care to avoid errors

• EFFICIENCY — using resources wisely and avoiding waste

• OBJECTIVITY — letting facts speak for themselves avoiding improper bias.

DON’T BEND AND STRETCH RULES

Rules are not always reasonable or rationally applied.

Life and colleagues are not always fair.

Good guys do sometimes seem to come in last.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

• Would you report misconducteven if doing so could put yourcareer at risk?

• Would you turn in someone for cheating, or “mind your own business”?

Nuremburg trials

DON’T IGNORE PROBLEMS YOU SEE

•Be proactive•Report concerns to responsible leaders•Support those who come forward to discuss an issueor report a concernDon’t ignore a concern------------------

LOCAL RESOLUTION IS A START

•Local resolution is usually the best place to start•Use normal supervisory channels•Units may have assigned specific people to handle certain concerns