There is a post out there this morning talking about who to blame

[Angry Dragon]

for the oil gusher and Ecocide of the Gulf. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=8639502&mesg_id=8639502


The question was raised whether the US or bp would get blamed by other countries if the oil hits their shores or are affected by it.
Most of the people said that the US should or would be blamed. This just boggles my mind that this would be the case.
I raised within the discussion the question of morals and ethics. One person took the time to respond to that post.

I remember a time where MBA schools had to start requiring ethic courses within their curriculum because it seemed to be lacking within business. Have we become a society where ethics and morals do not exist unless they are regulated or laws passed to define them??
I have noticed that most on DU think of republicans of having no morals and the only thing that drives them is greed. This morning I noticed that we may be losing our moral and ethical bearings. This saddens me.

Ethics and morals should not have to be regulated, they should come from within. If morals and ethics do not exist unless regulated then we are very lost and deserve what comes our way.

edit to add link

[branders seine]

1. this kind of thinking is so pre-reagan

capitalism is purely amoral.

If genocide, for example, costs less than non-genocide, a good CEO will choose genocide every time.

If reckless exploration, drilling and production of oil might result in a trillion dollars of damages and/or fines, but will yield tens of trillions of dollars of profits, a good CEO will champion recklessness every time.

Morals, schmorals. Show me the money! And lots of it!

(It's called externalizing costs.)

IF it ain't illegal, it is open season. If it is illegal, but the profits outweight the penalties, it is open season.

Get with the "New" America amigo!

[Angry Dragon]

3. Thank you for answering both of my posts

Perhaps ethics and morals only exist in fairy tales and books

[branders seine]

4. sadly, they are as endangered as a Gulf Coast pelican.

[LWolf]

2. I said that the U.S. should, and would, be blamed.

I gave a clear reason. Did you read it? Why does it "boggle your mind?"

When and where HAVE morals and ethics existed anywhere in the context of big business, ever?

[Angry Dragon]

5. I am sorry I can not agree with you

If a person is granted a drivers license and drives recklessly a few years later and kills someone, should the person that granted that license be also charged??

And if ethics and morals do not exist in big business then big business should not be allowed to exist. There are ethical businesses out there so it does exist in business.

[branders seine]

6. 'if ethics and morals do not exist in big business'?

"big business should not be allowed to exist"

There really *ought* to be a Santa Claus too.

[Angry Dragon]

7. There is a Santa Claus

I just had that discussion with someone last night

[branders seine]

13. if we believe a pure instinct survives in the souls of people,

we need to act soon and forcefully to make it real in the world.

the nature of "human" is changing rapidly, and I fear that altruistic instinct will become a casualty of corporatevolution

[Poboy]

9. If the granter (MMS) rubber stamped the written test

and waived the road test. Yes, absolutely. Collusion, complicity, corruption.
BP can be blamed, but w/o US approval, it would not have happened. Now we continue to let the criminals (BP) be in charge, while 'we' (US Gov't) stands back and watches.

Hardly mind boggling.

[branders seine]

14. yup

legally, morally, and ethically, the USA is complicit in the gusher.

[Angry Dragon]

16. I would assume you know what it takes to do your job well

So if I understand you correctly you are saying if you want to short cut the process and if your boss has not laid out all the rules covering everything it is his/her fault that you short cut the rules and made costly mistakes??

Another side to that would be that corporations are begging the government to have numerous and a large number of regulations placed upon them because that is the only way big corporations can function within society??

[Poboy]

18. One metaphor at a time.

I guess that one didn't work out too well for you, so that one is dropped/unanswered.
You also seem to ignore the US gov't complicity.

[Angry Dragon]

19. I am not sure what question of yours' I did not answer

I am not happy at all in what is happening in the Gulf.
It seems no one is in charge, everyone is running around
reacting to the newest threat.
My feeling is that MMS personal that okayed the lacks
regulations should be fired and charged with crimes.
Oil execs should be charged with crimes and heavy personal fines.
Congress people that okyed the new regs should be charged with crimes
and subject to heavy personal fines.
People up and down the chain should be held accountable.
I am just saddened that ethics and morals are so non-existent that
it seems they do not exist at all except as a theoretical thought.

[G_j]

11. who granted the license?

the Minerals Management Service

[LWolf]

17. You don't need to agree with me.

I don't believe that the U.S. should ever have allowed off-shore drilling to begin with; THAT would have been the ethical choice.

Trusting the ecosystem to big business is unethical, in my opinion. Business has conflicting priorities. And, frankly, Big business doesn't care if their profit is moral or not.

What ethical businesses are out there? BIG business, not small family business. When we know that not every person has morals or is ethical, why should we expect all businesses to be so?

We have laws that regulate some of the most extreme examples of personal immorality and unethical behaviors. We don't need to do the same for businesses?

Isn't whether or not to allow Big Oil to risk the planet's oceans an ethical decision in itself?

[Cleita]

8. We are partly responsible for giving the permits to BP to drill and

not making sure they met the strictest of standards. Although, since I didn't vote for Bush, I feel less guilty about being involved in this because those lapses came from his administration and more specifically Dick Cheney.

Something that people don't understand. Corporations main purpose is to turn a profit any way they can. Ethically, this is what they are bound to. Our job is to impose regulations on them so that they don't take the lowest road to profits or they always will. The husband of a friend of mine owned a business in which he regularly hired illegal immigrants. He would pay them far below minimum wage, sometimes only a hundred dollars a month and work them ten to twelve hours a day.

I pointed out to him one day how unethical it was for him to be exploiting the poorest of the poor people. He said he had done nothing illegal. At that time there was no laws against employers for hiring illegals. Since they didn't have a work permit or green card, he could pay them whatever the market would bear. It was just good business. As far as he was concerned, they were responsible for themselves and if they didn't have enough sense to demand higher wages, it wasn't his problem.

So you cannot ask a cat not to hunt and kill a mouse. It's their nature. So if you don't want kitty to kill things, you keep him indoors or confined somewhere where he can't. In the same way you can't expect a business to have self-imposed high ethical standard because it is their nature to seek profits in every way they can, including cutting corners on safety standards and worker's rights. We have to prevent them from doing that by regulating the hell out of them.

[Iggo]

10. It boggles your mind that other countries would blame the US for this?

[Greyhound]

12. It's just the inevitable result of a ruling class, for whom laws do not apply, becoming

too visible. People quickly see that the rules they play by always lead to failure when the other side cheats with impunity. Selective enforcement of bad laws leads to disdain for all laws.

"It's only against the law if you get caught" is a common phrase.

Ethics and morals can only survive in an egalitarian atmosphere wherein a social contract exists for all parties. That contract was broken long ago.

[JDPriestly]

15. I recently checked the course requirements for an MBA

at a major university recently. In fact, I posted it here on DU. There was no ethics course, per se.

In contrast, in California at least, attorneys must pass a special Ethics exam and undergo a sort of personal check called a character examination. In addition, law schools often require a separate, specific course just on ethics. This is in addition to passing the bar exam (and about 50% - 40% of examinees fail each exam in California). Then once the attorney has passed all those hurdles, the prospective attorney is finger-printed.

You don't have to face any of these hurdles to be the CEO of a billion dollar company. You make many times what an average attorney makes in a year. You get far more time off. Yet, lawyers have the reputation for being greedy and untrustworthy.

CEOs have the money to hire PR folks. Lawyers don't.

MBAs should be treated just like lawyers are -- right down to the fingerprints.

And while we are at it, maybe we should require the PR folks to pass ethics exams too. Is there even such a thing as ethics standards for PR folks? Wouldn't that be something? PR is sort of the anti-ethics field, isn't it?

[obxhead]

20. A corporation is not an organism and can not be expected to be

ethical in any way. To expect that is just insane.

I blame the greed of our leaders that has lead to the deregulation and failed inspection process that allowed this mistake to happen. I blame BP for taking shortcuts that lead to the death of 11 rig workers and will lead eventually to illness and death of 100's if not 1000's of cleanup workers in the future.