French Executives Found Responsible for 35 Employees' Deaths by Suicide

Katie Way

vice.com

Originally posted 20 Dec 19

Today, in a landmark case for worker’s rights and workplace accountability, three former executives of telecommunication company Orange (formerly known as France Télécom) were charged with “collective moral harassment” after creating a work environment which was found to have directly contributed to the death by suicide of 35 employees. This included, according to NPR , 19 employees who died by suicide between 2008 and 2009, many of whom “left notes blaming the company or who killed themselves at work.”

Why would a company lead a terror campaign against its own workers? Money, of course: The plan was enacted as part of a push to get rid of 22,000 employees in order to counterbalance $50 million in debt incurred after the company privatized—it was formerly a piece of the French government’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, meaning its employees were granted special protection as civil servants that prevented their higher-ups from firing them. According to the New York Times, the executives attempted to solve this dilemma by creating an “atmosphere of fear” and purposefully stoked “severe anxiety” in order to drive workers to quit. Former CEO Didier Lombard, sentenced to four months in jail and a $16,000 fine, reportedly called the strategies part of a plan to get rid of unwanted employees “either through the window or through the door.” Way to say the quiet part loud, Monsieur!

The info is here.

How should we balance morality and the law?

Peter Koch
BCM Blogs
Originally posted 20 Dec 19

I was recently discussing a clinical case with medical students and physicians that involved balancing murky ethical issues and relevant laws. One participant leaned back and said: “Well, if we know the laws, then that’s the end of the story!”

The laws were clear about what ought to (legally) be done, but following the laws in this case would likely produce a bad outcome. We ended up divided about how to proceed with the case, but this discussion raised a bigger question: Exactly how much should we weigh the law in moral deliberations?

The basic distinction between the legal and moral is easy enough to identify. Most people agree that what is legal is not necessarily moral and what is immoral should not necessarily be illegal.

Slavery in the U.S. is commonly used as an example. “Of course,” a good modern citizen will say, “slavery was wrong even when it was legal.” The passing of the 13 amendment did not make slavery morally wrong; it was wrong already, and the legal structures finally caught up to the moral structures.

There are plenty of acts that are immoral but that should not be illegal. For example, perhaps it is immoral to gossip about your friend’s personal life, but most would agree that this sort of gossip should not be outlawed. The basic distinction between the legal and the moral appears to be simple enough.

Things get trickier, though, when we press more deeply into the matter.

The blog post is here.

Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure

Jackson, C. J., Watts, J. and others.
Science  20 Dec 2019:
Vol. 366, Issue 6472, pp. 1517-1522
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw8160

Abstract

Many human languages have words for emotions such as “anger” and “fear,” yet it is not clear whether these emotions have similar meanings across languages, or why their meanings might vary. We estimate emotion semantics across a sample of 2474 spoken languages using “colexification”—a phenomenon in which languages name semantically related concepts with the same word. Analyses show significant variation in networks of emotion concept colexification, which is predicted by the geographic proximity of language families. We also find evidence of universal structure in emotion colexification networks, with all families differentiating emotions primarily on the basis of hedonic valence and physiological activation. Our findings contribute to debates about universality and diversity in how humans understand and experience emotion.

Exceptionality Effect in Agency: Exceptional Choices Attributed Higher Free Will Than Routine

Fillon, A, Lantian, A., Feldman, G., & N'gbala, A.
PsyArXiv
Originally posted on 9 Nov 19

Abstract

Exceptionality effect is the widely cited phenomenon that people experience stronger regret regarding negative outcomes that are a result of more exceptional circumstances, compared to routine. We hypothesize that the exceptionality-routine attribution asymmetry would extend to attributions of freedom and responsibility. In Experiment 1 (N = 338), we found that people attributed more free will to exceptional behavior compared to routine, when the exception was due to self-choice rather than due to external circumstances. In Experiment 2 (N = 561), we replicated and generalized the effect of exceptionality on attributions of free will to other scenarios, with support for the classic exceptionality effect regarding regret and an extension to moral responsibility. In Experiment 3 (N = 128), we replicated these effects in a within-subject design. When using a classic experimental philosophy paradigm contrasting a deterministic and an indeterministic universe, we found that the results were robust across both contexts. We conclude that there is a consistent support for a link between exceptionality and free will attributions.

From the Conclusion:

Although based on different theoretical frameworks, our results on attributions of free will could be related to the findings of Bear and Knobe (2016). They found that a behavior that was performed “actively” rather than “passively” modifies people’s judgment about the compatibility of this behavior with causal determinism thesis. More concretely, people consider that a behavior performed actively (such as composing a highly technical legal document) is less possible (i.e., less compatible) in a causally deterministic universe than a behavior performed passively (such as impulsively shoplifting from a convenience store; Bear & Knobe, 2016). According to Bear and Knobe (2016), people relied on two cues to determine the active or passive feature of a behavior: mental effort and spontaneity (Bear & Knobe, 2016). By adopting this framework, we may assimilate an exceptional behavior to an active behavior (because its “breaking off from the flow of things,” and require mental effort and spontaneity) and a routine behavior to a passive effort (because it is “going with the flow,” and does not require a mental effort or spontaneity). In the same vein, an agent acting spontaneously is considered freer than an agent acting deliberately (Vierkantet al., 2019). Despite the fact that Vierkant et al. (2019) manipulated the agent’s choice (spontaneous vs. deliberate) in a within-design their study, it may suggest that when deliberation (or mental effort) and spontaneity are experimentally contrasted, it is spontaneity that seems to be the driving force behind the increase of perceived free will of the agent.

The research is here.

Big tech is thinking about digital ethics, and small businesses need to keep up

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet
zdnet.com
Originally posted 16 Dec 19

Here is an excerpt:

And insurance company Aviva recently published a one-page customer data charter along with an explainer video to detail how it uses personal information, "instead of long privacy policies that no one reads," said the company's chief data scientist, Orlando Machado.

For McDougall, however, this is just the tip of the iceberg. "We hear from Microsoft and Intel about what they are doing, and how they are implementing ethics," he said, "but there are many smaller organizations out there that are far from thinking about these things."

As an example of a positive development, he points to GDPR regulation introduced last year in the EU, and which provides more practical guidelines to ensure ethical business and protection of privacy.

Even GDPR rules, however, are struggling to find a grip with SMBs. A survey conducted this year among 716 small businesses in Europe showed that there was widespread ignorance about data security tools and loose adherence to the law's key privacy provisions.

About half of the respondents believed their organizations were compliant with the new rules – although only 9% were able to identify which end-to-end encrypted email service they used.

A full 44% said they were not confident that they always obtained consent or determined a lawful basis before using personal data.

The info is here.

ESG controversies wipe $500bn off value of US companies

Chris Flood

ft.com
Originally posted 14 Dec 19

Quarrels involving environmental, social and governance issues (ESG) have wiped more than $500bn off the value of large US companies over the past five years, according to an analysis by Bank of America.

ESG-related risks are becoming increasingly important considerations for institutional investors and asset managers because of mounting fears about climate change, high-profile scams and damaging corporate governance failures.

Bank of America examined the impact on stock prices of companies in the S&P 500 index, the main US equity market benchmark, of 24 controversies related to accounting scandals, data breaches, sexual harassment cases and other ESG issues.

It found these 24 ESG controversies together resulted in peak to trough market value losses of $534bn as the share prices of the companies involved sank relative to the S&P 500 over the following 12 months.

“The hit to market value of an ESG controversy is significant and the impact is long-lasting. It can take a year for a stock to reach a trough following an ESG controversy,” said Savita Subramanian, head of US equity and quantitative strategy at Bank of America. “Negative headlines stick in investors’ minds.”

Bank of America declined to name any of the companies involved in the controversies.

The info is here.

Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization

Engin Bozdag
Ethics Inf Technol (2013) 15: 209.

Abstract

Online information intermediaries such as Facebook and Google are slowly replacing traditional media channels thereby partly becoming the gatekeepers of our society. To deal with the growing amount of information on the social web and the burden it brings on the average user, these gatekeepers recently started to introduce personalization features, algorithms that filter information per individual. In this paper we show that these online services that filter information are not merely algorithms. Humans not only affect the design of the algorithms, but they also can manually influence the filtering process even when the algorithm is operational. We further analyze filtering processes in detail, show how personalization connects to other filtering techniques, and show that both human and technical biases are present in today’s emergent gatekeepers. We use the existing literature on gatekeeping and search engine bias and provide a model of algorithmic gatekeeping.

From the Discussion:

Today information seeking services can use interpersonal contacts of users in order to tailor information and to increase relevancy. This not only introduces bias as our model shows, but it also has serious implications for other human values, including user autonomy, transparency, objectivity, serendipity, privacy and trust. These values introduce ethical questions. Do private companies that are
offering information services have a social responsibility, and should they be regulated? Should they aim to promote values that the traditional media was adhering to, such as transparency, accountability and answerability? How can a value such as transparency be promoted in an algorithm?  How should we balance between autonomy and serendipity and between explicit and implicit personalization? How should we define serendipity? Should relevancy be defined as what is popular in a given location or by what our primary groups find interesting? Can algorithms truly replace human filterers?

The info can be downloaded here.

A Semblance of Aliveness

J. Grunsven & A. Wynsberghe
Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
Published on December 3, 2019

While the design of sex robots is still in the early stages, the social implications of the potential proliferation of sex robots into our lives has been heavily debated by activists and scholars from various disciplines. What is missing in the current debate on sex robots and their potential impact on human social relations is a targeted look at the boundedness and bodily expressivity typically characteristic of humans, the role that these dimensions of human embodiment play in enabling reciprocal human interactions, and the manner in which this contrasts with sex robot-human interactions. Through a fine-grained discussion of these themes, rooted in fruitful but largely untapped resources from the field of enactive embodied cognition, we explore the unique embodiment of sex robots. We argue that the embodiment of the sex robot is constituted by what we term restricted expressivity and a lack of bodily boundedness and that this is the locus of negative but also potentially positive implications. We discuss the possible benefits that these two dimensions of embodiment may have for people within a specific demographic, namely some persons on the autism spectrum. Our preliminary conclusion—that the benefits and the downsides of sex robots reside in the same capability of the robot, its restricted expressivity and lack of bodily boundedness as we call it—demands we take stock of future developments in the design of sex robot embodiment. Given the importance of evidence-based research pertaining to sex robots in particular, as reinforced by Nature (2017) for drawing correlations and making claims, the analysis is intended to set the stage for future research.

The info is here.

Ethically Adrift: How Others Pull Our Moral Compass from True North, and How we Can Fix It

Moore, C., and F. Gino.
Research in Organizational Behavior 
33 (2013): 53–77.

Abstract

This chapter is about the social nature of morality. Using the metaphor of the moral compass to describe individuals' inner sense of right and wrong, we offer a framework to help us understand social reasons why our moral compass can come under others' control, leading even good people to cross ethical boundaries. Departing from prior work focusing on the role of individuals' cognitive limitations in explaining unethical behavior, we focus on the socio-psychological processes that function as triggers of moral neglect, moral justification and immoral action, and their impact on moral behavior. In addition, our framework discusses organizational factors that exacerbate the detrimental effects of each trigger. We conclude by discussing implications and recommendations for organizational scholars to take a more integrative approach to developing and evaluating theory about unethical behavior.

From the Summary

Even when individuals are aware of the ethical dimensions of the choices they are making, they may still engage in unethical behavior as long as they recruit justifications for it. In this section, we discussed the role of two social–psychological processes – social comparison and self-verification – that facilitate moral justification, which will lead to immoral behavior. We also discussed three characteristics of organizational life that amplify these social–psychological processes. Specifically, we discussed how organizational identification, group loyalty, and framing or euphemistic language can all affect the likelihood and extent to which individuals justify their actions, by judging them as ethical when in fact they are morally contentious. Finally, we discussed moral disengagement, moral hypocrisy, and moral licensing as intrapersonal consequences of these social facilitators of moral justification.

The paper can be downloaded here.