OR/MS Today - June 1999

June 1999

Simple Ethics?

By Douglas A. Samuelson

"He made it all sound so easy," the OR/MS analyst sighed. He and a colleague were walking back to their hotel after hearing one of the profession's most famous members deliver a lecture on ethics.

"Yeah, but you don't believe it's quite that simple, do you, Mike?" his colleague replied. "I certainly don't." "No, Don, I don't," Mike affirmed. "For example, remember when that guy in the audience asked about deciding how to bill time and expenses, and our distinguished colleague didn't think that was hard to decide? I guess he's never worked on multiple government contracts, right?"

"Right," Don nodded. "I've wrestled with those decisions myself. Like when one pays for travel and the other doesn't, so you end up timing your trips for the one that doesn't pay to coincide with when you can make a case that you needed to take the trip for the one that does. And if you don't finagle that way, you or your shareholders or your employees end up bearing the cost. It isn't simple to me.

"And," Don went on, "That's not even getting into the question of 'who should pay' at the public policy level. I know plenty of hospitals that charge higher rates to some patients to cross-subsidize the poor patients they are ethically and legally obliged to care for. They don't ask the patients who can pay, or their insurers or the employers who pay for the insurance, whether it's OK — they just do it. Some insurers and employers negotiate reduced payments, others don't. And then there are the games health providers play with diagnosis and treatment codes to get insurers to pay more, and the games insurers play to try to pay less and get their sicker members off their rolls. Simple? I don't think so!"

"I think we're seeing this the same way," Mike chuckled. "I'll tell you, though, what really got to me — he claimed you usually know if you're honest with yourself, whether what you're thinking of doing is right or wrong. I'd agree that you often can tell, and you shouldn't stir up ambiguities and what-ifs just as an excuse for saying you didn't know. But I can still think of plenty of times when I really didn't know what was the right thing to do, and couldn't foresee the consequences of the actions I might take."

"The Vietnam War comes to mind," Don pointed out. "Most people I know who ended up opposing the war started out supporting it. The most ethical people I knew, in my opinion, were the ones who seemed to have the most trouble deciding what was right."

"Or this thing in Littleton, Colorado," Mike added. "There are plenty of people out there blaming the parents, the school, gun laws, whatever — but what should I do to protect my kids? It sure isn't obvious to me."

Don looked thoughtful. "We Jews," he said, "have a holiday called Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when we're supposed to make up for all our sins. I guess many people know that. What most non-Jews — and many Jews, for that matter — don't know is the part of the liturgy where we're reminded that the holiday is not mostly about things we know we did wrong. We're supposed to have recognized those and tried to make good before we ever get to Yom Kippur. What Yom Kippur is really about is the actions we don't realize were wrong, and the ones we can't really make good for. That's what our tradition says about how well you can know the consequences of your actions."

"I like that," Mike reflected. "Realizing that you may have done harm when you thought you were doing good is an important part of what ethical behavior means to me."

"And we also know from experience," Don noted, "that you can be too 'ethical.' You can get so wrapped up in obeying all the rules that you use the rules as a club on people!"

"I've seen that, too," Mike assented. "I worked for the Office of Special Counsel in the Department of Energy years ago, on the audits of the big oil companies. They had very strict ethics rules, because they didn't want the oil companies to have any influence in these big cases. I had to turn down one consulting job because there was a very tenuous connection, about three companies deep, where some oil company owned a large share of another company that owned a big interest in my client — and I didn't have any decision authority in the oil company's case, anyway. People had to agree not to go to work for an oil company for a couple of years after leaving Special Counsel. If they had friends in the industry, they had to report whenever they went out to lunch with them — and then they couldn't buy each other lunch. One time we went to a demonstration of a new product by one of the Department's computer suppliers, and they served coffee and doughnuts at the break, and the Department required us to pay for the coffee and doughnuts!

"It was clean, all right," he continued, "but it created one little problem: The Department had an awfully hard time hiring anyone who knew anything about the oil business! That made it a lot harder for us to do our jobs."

"We're back to 'who pays,' aren't we?" Don asked. "The taxpayers ended up paying for the Department's insistence on an unrealistic ethical standard. Not very simple after all, is it?"

Douglas A. Samuelson is the president of Infologix and Division E director of INFORMS.

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