We often see ethical issues around us, and we understand ethics are important. But we are often reluctant to raise ethical issues, or sometimes we use strategies to avoid facing ethical issues. These strategies help salve our consciences. This section covers the strategies: rationalizations and avoidance techniques we use to avoid facing ethical issues.

Call It by a Different Name: “Way Harsh” Labels versus Warm Language If we can attach a lovely label to what we are doing, we won't have to face the ethical issue.

For example, some people, including U.S. Justice Department lawyers, refer to the downloading of music from the Internet as copyright infringement. However, many who download music assure us that it is really just the lovely practice of peer-to-peer file sharing. How can something that sounds so generous be an ethical issue? Yet there is an ethical issue because copying copyrighted music without permission is taking something that does not belong to you or taking unfair advantage.

When baseball star Roger Clemens was confronted with lying about steroid use, he denied it, and the language his spokesperson used to explain the statements was that Mr. Clemens

“misremembered”” When Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was confronted with the fact that he had overstated his military service as being in Vietnam when he served in the Marine Reserves only in the United States, he said, “I misspoke.” When National Director of Intelligence, James Clapper, was confronted by journalist Andrea Mitchell on what appeared to be a false statement in a hearing before congress he explained, “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying no.”

The financial practice of juggling numbers in financial statements, sometimes referred to as smoothing earnings, financing engineering, or sometimes just aggressive accounting is less eloquently known as cooking the books. The latter description helps us see that we have an ethical issue in the category of telling the truth or not leaving a false impression. But if we call what we are doing earnings management, then we never have to face the ethical issue because we are doing something that is finance strategy, not an ethics issue. One investor, when asked what he thought about earnings management, said, “I don't call it earnings management. I call it lying.” Referring back to the categories helps us to be sure we are facing the issue and not skirting it with a different name.

Rationalizing Dilemmas Away: “That's the Way It Has Always Been Done”
When we hear, “That’s the way it’s always been done,” our innovation feelers as well as our ethical radar should be up. We should be asking, “Is there a better way to do this?”
Just as “Everybody does it” is not an ethical analysis, neither is relying on the past and its standards a process of ethical reasoning. Business practices are not always sound. For example, the field of corporate governance within business ethics has taught for years that a good board for a company has independent directors, that is, directors who are not employed by the company, under consulting contracts with the company, or related to officers of the company. Independent boards were good ethical practice, but many companies resisted because their boards had always been structured a certain way that they wanted to continue; they’ say, “This is the way our board has always looked.” With the collapses of Enron, Adelphia, WorldCom, and HealthSouth and the scandal of substantial officer loans at Tyco, both Congress, through the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), through follow-up regulations, now mandate an independent corporate board (see Reading 4.14 for a summary of the SOX and Dodd-Frank changes). When board members performed consulting services for their companies, there was a conflict of interest. But everybody was doing it, and it was the way corporations had always been governed. This typical and prevailing practice resulted in lax corporate boards and company collapses. Unquestioning adherence to a pattern or practice of behavior often indicates an underlying ethical dilemma.
Rationalizing Dilemmas Away: “We'll Wait until the Lawyers Tell Us It’s Wrong”
Many people rely only on the law as their ethical standard, but that reliance means that they have resolved only the legal issue, not the ethical one. Lawyers are trained to provide only the parameters of the law. In many situations, they offer an opinion that is correct in that a company’s conduct does not violate the law. Whether the conduct they have passed judgment on as legal is ethical is a different question. For example, a team of White House lawyers concluded in a memo in March 2003 that international law did not ban torture of prisoners in Iraq because they were technically not prisoners of war. However, when pictures of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq emerged, the reaction of the public and the world was very different. The ethical analysis, which went beyond interpretation of the law, was that the torture and abuse were wrong, regardless of their compliance with treaty standards. Following the abuse scandal, the U.S. government adopted new standards for interrogation of prisoners. Although the lawyers were perfectly correct in their legal analysis, that legal analysis did not cover the ethical breaches of interpersonal and organizational abuse..................

Discussion Questions 1. A recent USA Today survey found that 64% of patients in hospitals took towels, linens, and other 2. Aman has developed a license plate that cannot be photographed by the red light and speeding camitems home with them.” Give a list of rationalizations these patients and their families might use that give them comfort in taking the items.
3.Commercial truckers keep track of their hours on the road through paper logs. The logs were mandated in order to keep track of the federal maximums for commercial truck drivers. The law places a limit of 70 hours of driving in any eight-day period, followed by a mandated 34-hour rest period. The American Trucking Association indicates that the paper logs allow truckers to drive illegally, that is, beyond the limits, something that creates a safety hazard.
What rationalizations would the drivers be using for their violations of the safety standards?
eras. When asked how he felt about facilitating drivers in breaking the law, he replied, “I am not the one with my foot to the gas pedal. They are. | make a product they can use.” What rationalization(s) is he using?
4. A parent has instructed his young son to not mention his Uncle Ted's odd shoes and clothing:
"If Uncle Ted asks you how you like his clothes or shoes, just tell him they are very nice.” His son said, “But that’s not the truth, Dad.” The father’s response was, “It's a white lie, and it doesn't really hurt anyone.” Evaluate the father’s ethical posture.