Text 6. Toxic shocker

Spitzbergen has a dirty secret. The last stop before the North Pole, and Europe’s most northerly outpost, has become the continent’s long-range cesspool, courtesy of a quirk in the planet’s atmospheric circulation system. Some scientists fear that, eventually, the majority of some of the most lethal man-made chemicals - most of which are now banned in Europe - could end up in places like Spitzbergen, 1,000 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle. Fish in the lakes of Spitzbergen contain six times more mercury than fish in the Scottish highlands - and more than 20 times more than those in Spain. The further north one goes, the more contaminated the fish is.

There is nothing natural about this contamination. The metals come north from the mainland of Europe, and perhaps beyond. And it is not just metals. Poisonous

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pesticides and industrial chemicals, many banned in Europe for 20 years or more, are turning up in increasing concentrations in Spitzbergen. Every winter, pollution from European cities and metal smelters forms a smog that spreads north to the Arctic. Some pollutants are deposited on the snow and ice. Each spring, as the ice melts, these poisons flush into the sea, entering the food chain. They are eaten by fish and by birds, seals and polar bears that eat the fish.

There is a global process that is systematically transferring these chemicals from warmer to colder areas. That’s why, for instance, trout in remote lakes in the Yukon contained levels of the pesticide toxaphene that were 10 times higher than Canadian food safety health limits. High levels of DDT, a crop pesticide, dioxins, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, man-made chemicals once widely used in the electronics industry) and mercury are also found in the fish. Toxaphene has been banned in Canada for over a decade, but it is widely used in tropical Asia and Latin America. It should be noted that most chemicals evaporate readily - especially in hot climates - and can remain in the air, perhaps for several years, till that air gets cold enough for them to condense out. It is as if the entire planet’s atmosphere is operating a giant distillation experiment, evaporating chemicals from the tropics and transferring them north. The cold air of the Arctic acts as a cleansing system for the rest of the Earth at the cost of chronic pollution in the region once thought to be pristine. Once the poisons reach Arctic waters, they concentrate further as biological processes take over. They reach their highest concentrations in animals at the top of the food chain and humans.

(Adapted from The Guardian)

Text 7. Professional bribe-takers?

To take or not to take bribes is not the question. We have all given bribes at least once, like when you need a new passport in an hour, not in a month or 45 days which is a standard procedure. Or you want something else arranged for yourself quickly and effectively. And it is not necessarily an envelope slipped into one’s pocket or passed under the table. It can be arranged as a pay rise, royalty, sponsorship, donation, investment, a book published on a priority basis, or an act of perfectly selfless aid, say, to a court of law, like a shipment of stationery and office equipment. After all, there is a note warning of their shortage attached to every courtroom or office door.

They say the only way to get something done is by buttering palms, that it was always there. And, of course, that is true.

Bribery really is a vital component of the system of interaction and corruption that exists. However, the situation with corruption in general is considerably more complicated because its power to ruin is not bribery in itself but in the professional deformation of civil servants.

Professional deformity manifests itself primarily by negative changes in the individual and professionally required qualities, affecting the public servant’s professional orientation and professional thinking. Professional deformity emerges as the result of repeated negative typical situations over a lengthy period. The most

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dangerous personality change is found in the civil servant, in that it leads to legal negilism and premeditated violations of the law.

This deformity could be defined as a manifestation of the civil servant’s legal nihilism and acting unlawfully, distorted view of his/her performance as a public servant, simplification of professional stereotypes, along with weakening the reliability of the official’s morals and will. The main cause of such legal nihilism and unlawful conduct is the impunity and lack of public control over the bureaucrat’s performance.

An important sign of professional deformity is psychological instabiUty. This is manifested in one’s inability to resist negative influences in the line of duty. These negative influences include unlawful pressure from law enforcement authorities, ranking officials (one’s immediate superior, business people, etc.) to make illegal decisions, and complicated external working conditions.

The third sign is the trend to distort requirements in terms of unbiased reflection of circumstances existing within the state: ignoring realities, weakened self-criticism, as well as an inability to view one’s work and external circumstances critically. Here it is not so much one’s inaptitude as the reluctance or loss of the ability to assess circumstances in an unbiased manner. Thus professional deformity consists not in the initial absence of qualities or lack of professional training but in their transformation or atrophy.

All this makes it possible for the public servant to retain confidence in the correctness of his actions and regard errors as an inevitable possibility, caused by external factors. Among typical techniques of self-justification are constant references to inadequate legislation and the pure formality of its requirements; objective circumstances and hardships, such as overloaded schedule, constant shortage of time; unlawful decisions motivated by national interests, instructions from above, the complexity of one’s duties, etc. total self-justification under any circumstances is the main symptom of civil servants’ professional deformity.

All these changes are determined primarily by the imperfect organization and bad conditions of professional activity. Such changes emerge and manifest themselves at various levels - processes, status, and personal qualities, conscious and subconscious. Often, the most important changes come down to the hypertrophy of vital professional traits. Thus, vigilance turns into suspiciousness, confidence into self-confidence, contentment into indifference, diligence into pedantry, and so on. Secondly, it means the emergence and development of negative traits: cruelty, vindictiveness, rudeness, permissiveness, and cynicism. A certain mental state like disillusionment, boredom, or irritability emerges and becomes dominant. Thirdly, it is the suppression and subsequent atrophy of certain traits that become objectively assessed as being of minor importance, or even unnecessary. There is a loss of confidence in citizens’ law-abiding conduct and in the effectiveness of struggle against lawbreaking, especially corruption.

Proceeding from all this, the apparent conclusion is that bribe-taking is only one of the signs of professional deformity in civil servants. Thus fighting corruption requires a more skillful and systematic approach, whereby its causes and conditions facilitating abuse of office could be eliminated, primarily within the social category of civil servants.

(The Day, December7y 1999)

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Text 8. SPYING IN BUSINESS FIRMS: A COMPETITIVE NECESSITY?

Is it ethical to spy on competitors? An increasing number of American and foreign firms have corporate intelligence systems. Some people believe that unless a firm maintains a top-level corporate intelligence system, it can forget about'being technologically competitive.

AT&T launched an on-line computer service referred to as AAA (Access to AT&T Analysts). It’s designed to help employees learn from the thousands of other employees with specialized insight about Competitors. Employees are invited to fill out questionnaires identifying their areas of expertise. Users can log in key words and receive a list of company experts on various technologies, along with their job titles and telephone numbers.

Employees also used AAA to share information about competitors. What are competitors doing? How successful is a new experimental product that a competitor is working on? Who’s on the competitor’s experimental development team?

American, German, and Japanese companies and others make it a policy for employees to visit trade shows to collect competitors’ literature. In sophisticated companies the literature, gossip, and anything else collected at the trade show are analyzed by intelligence experts. These experts also have employees to attend seminars, take visitation tours, and collect professional papers.

Is all of this intelligence activity ethical? Even if you believe it’s not, what are you going to do about intelligence or information gathering? If you ignore information, your firm may be at such a competitive disadvantage that it eventually goes out of business. Lobbying for new laws to control abuses in the intelligence area may not bear fruit for years. It takes years for laws to become operational.

Intelligence gathering poses many questions. It’s an ethical dilemma for firms that rely on technological and innovative progress to survive. Firms that don’t gather intelligence can be quickly knocked out of business.

(Adapted from “The New Race for Intelligence” by Richard S. Teitelbaum.

Fortune, November 2. 1992. pp. 104 - 7)

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Task 6.35. Read the following texts and express your opinion "on ethical or non-ethical issues contained in the newspaper features:

Minister: I’m giving up my £ 70k-a-year car

By Jonathan Oliver (DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR)

THE Minister for Patriotism is off to a model.start - he's given, up his official limo to save the taxpayer £50,000 a year.

Instead of the chauffeur-driven car that normally comes with a ministerial job, Michael Wills, the man in charge of Gordon Brown's Britishness' agenda; uses public transport and taxis - setting an example that his colleagues will come under pressure to follow.

The annual bill for ministerial cars and their drivers is around £7 million, or £70,000 per Minister.

Ministers justify the perk in a variety of ways. Some cite security, while others say they need a car to transport their red boxes containing sensitive documents.

However, Mr Wills's sacrifice proves they can do without.

He uses the Tube, buses and taxis to get around London. And he takes the train to visit his Swindon North constituency.

Officials say the annual cost of his work-related journeys is around £20,000 - a net saving of £50,000. A friend of Mr Wills said: 'Michael was offered the car, but he saw it as a waste of money for the taxpayer and he reckons he can get around just as easily by other means.

Junior Ministers usually use Toyota Priuses, Ford Mondeos or Rover 75s. The perk comes on top of a generous £100,000 salary.

Mr Wills, 55, a former diplomat, was made deputy to Jack Straw in the Justice Department earlier this year.

He recently announced plans to consult the nation on a statement of ’British values'.

(From the mail on Sunday September 30, 2007p. 10)