How Will Your World Change by 2025?

Make plans to join us on March 24 for a dramatic view of global society in the year 2025. Our speaker will be Erik Peterson, director of the "Seven Revolutions" project at the Global Strategy Institute of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.. The project identifies and analyzes some of the key challenges that policy makers, business executives, and other leaders will face in the future. It is used by governmental agencies and leading corporations to promote strategic thinking on long-term trends that few leaders take the time to consider.

"Seven Revolutions: How Will Your World Change by 2025?" will be presented March 24 at 10 a.m. in Brock Recital Hall at Samford University. (Convo credit is available to Samford students.) It is a program in the Mann Center's A. Gerow Hodges Lecture Series, conducted in partnership with the Brock School of Business.

This lively, multimedia presentation will look at global trends in population, resource management, technology, information, conflict, governance and economic integration. "When taken together, the change that we can envisage in these seven areas suggests the need for far-sighted leadership animated by vision and innovative approaches," Peterson says. "This, I believe, is where higher education is especially important. Our overarching challenge is to provide the knowledge for leaders to develop vision, to inculcate them with the understanding to execute on their vision, and to help them develop a conceptual and ethical foundation on which difficult -- sometimes excruciating -- tradeoffs will have to be made."

Youth Survey: Academic Dishonesty Worsening

Academic dishonesty continues to grow as a problem in secondary schools. So says the Josephson Institute's 2008 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth, based on a survey of nearly 30,000 students in U.S. high schools. Nearly two-thirds reported cheating on a test within the last year, and 38 percent had done so more than once. More than one-third had plagiarized an assignment using the Internet. There were no significant differences between male and female students.

Perhaps surprisingly, students at non-religious independent schools reported the lowest cheating rate (47 percent), compared to 63 percent at religious schools. On a regional basis, students in the Southeast reported the highest rate of cheating (70 percent). The rate was 64 percent in the west, 63 percent in the northeast, and 59 percent in the midwest.

How do the students view this behavior? Ninety-three percent actually said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, while 77 percent said that when it comes to doing what is right, "I am better than most people I know." Ironically, 26 percent admitted they lied on one or two questions in the ethics survey, which also covered issues outside of school, including stealing and lying.

Additional resources: Journal of College and Character; Center for Academic Integrity; Plagiary (scholarly, online journal on plagiarism, fabrication and falsification).

Teaching and Research at Samford

Wilton H. Bunch, M.D., Ph.D., "Ethics of Direct Advertising to Consumers," SpineLine (Nov.-Dec. 2008): 38-41.

Writing in the journal of the North American Spine Society, Dr. Wilton Bunch examines the problem of direct-to-consumer advertising by manufacturers of prescription drugs and medical devices. "Advertisers may claim that patients seek more information, but it seems that patients are swimming, and sometimes drowning, in a sea of health information. . . .," he contends. "Most of these advertising vehicles are unregulated and totally interest driven." He gives particular attention to issues in orthopedic medicine (e.g., advertising of joint implants), which is his own field of practice. "Surgeons need to make a virtue out of what is now perceived as a vice," he concludes, by using consumer awareness of products as an opportunity for patient education.

Dr. Bunch is a professor of philosophy and an associated scholar of the Mann Center.

News and Views

People are as willing as ever to inflict pain on innocent strangers in blind obedience to authority, according to recent experiments replicating the infamous 1963 study by psychologist Stanley Milgram. In the original experiment, familiar to many who have taken undergraduate psychology courses, ordinary citizens were told they were participating in a study of the effects of punishment on learning. The subjects were instructed to administer electric shocks to a "learner" (who was strapped to a chair and fitted with electrodes) whenever test questions were answered incorrectly. Eighty percent were willing to deliver what they believed were 150-volt shocks; 65 percent continued as the level increased to 450 volts and appeared to cause great harm to the learners. The new study, published in the current issue of American Psychologist, yields similar results, though the researcher at Santa Clara University modified the methodology somewhat to comply with ethics rules regarding human subjects. Additional resource: Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

On his first full day in office, President Obama issued an executive order designed to limit the influence of special interests by closing the revolving door of lobbyists in and out of the executive branch of government. Though the order is entitled, "Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel," its scope is limited to specific matters involving lobbyists: a ban on gifts by lobbyists to employees; recusal of political appointees from participating in matters relevant to the interests of past employers or clients; and restrictions on lobbying access to the executive branch by political appointees after they leave their government jobs. Not surprisingly, the policy is already proving difficult to maintain in a city with a tradition of cozy relationships between lobbyists and public officials. Additional resources: Office of Government Ethics internal memorandum on the policy; the ethics pledge signed by political appointees; and a publication from the Council on Excellence in Government describing a broader range of ethical principles and issues relevant to public-sector institutions.

Companies in China, India and Russia are among the most likely to bribe public officials when doing business abroad, according to a new report by Transparency International, a non-governmental organization working to combat corruption. By contrast, businesses based in Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands and Switzerland are among the least likely to engage in bribery. The industries most prone to bribe officials are construction, real estate, oil/gas, mining and heavy manufacturing. Financial services and technology rank among the least corrupt. TI Chairman Huguette Labelle said, “The inequity and injustice that corruption causes makes it vital for governments to redouble their efforts to enforce existing laws and regulations on foreign bribery and for companies to adopt effective anti-bribery programmes."

Is intense competition for online "eyeballs and page views" is eroding the ethical and quality standards of journalism? Bob Steele of The Poynter Institute thinks so. Writing last month in a publication of Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, he argues that the "time-honored journalistic values of accuracy and fairness are eroded" when information is posted online, in real time, without verification. As editors increasingly encourage reporters to blog and Twitter, and as traditional media rely on non-journalistic blogs and web posts as sources, the resulting errors undermine credibility. Steele concludes, "The intense financial forces, the thinner staffs, and the risk-taking culture create a mixture where heightened quality control measures are all the more essential."

Ethical Echoes: Roosevelt's 1933 Inaugural Address

The last time a president was inaugurated amidst a widespread financial crisis was March 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's first words as president underscored the indispensable role of ethics in the market system. He pointed to the moral culpability of business leaders in precipitating the Great Depression, calling them "unscrupulous money changers" and exhorting the nation to "apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit."

The following words were brought to our attention by Steven Young, a friend of the Mann Center and director of the Caux Round Table.

Excerpt from Franklin D. Roosevelt's Inaugural Address of March 1933:

"In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

"More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

"Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

"True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

"Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live. Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now."