ethics

a sort of generic category, based on the idea that humanities and philosophy/ liberal arts can/must inform our design decisions

see office of Gov't Ethics

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AN 5 26

President Donald Trump has been engaged in a historic and ruthless level of corruption since his return to the White House last year, and according to numerous ethics experts who spoke with The New Yorker, it will require a level of reform amounting to "radical surgery" in order to prevent future presidents from doing the same thing.

In a piece published Monday, New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy laid out the ever-expanding scope of Trump's corruption in office, including his trading of stocks for companies with business before the U.S. government and, most damningly, his new $1.8 billion DOJ slush fund that would essentially loot the U.S. Treasury of taxpayer funds to line the pockets of the president and his allies.

For the report, Cassidy spoke with Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who also served as the chief ethics lawyer in the White House under George W. Bush, where he notably halted the hiring of a Goldman Sachs executive as Treasury Secretary, due to the conflict-of-interest laws their appointment would violate. When pressed about the current situation with Trump, Painter said that historical parallels were inadequate.

"[Former President Richard] Nixon had his issues, but I don’t think there is anything like this,” Painter said. “The President is specifically precluded from getting any financial favors from the Treasury while in office.”

Cassidy spoke with a variety of other experts in addition to Painter about what sorts of things would need to be done in order to protect the country from having to weather the corruption of a future president similar to Trump, and the answers suggested that vast, sweeping ethics reforms are in order.

"Painter told me that the first task is to make the President and Vice-President subject to the federal conflict-of-interest law, and require them to divest their conflictive assets," Cassidy detailed. "Another obvious and necessary reform is a ban on trading individual stocks, one that applies to Presidents and members of Congress alike."

Passing such a reform would require action from Congress that appears unlikely with Republicans in the majority. The alternative would be to impeach presidents who violate the rules against self-enrichment by the Executive Branch, but as Painter noted, "We already tried that twice and failed."

"Ultimately, then, it comes back to politics, where there are structural problems that run even deeper than Trump," Cassidy added. "In the post-Citizens United world, Presidents—Republican and Democrat alike—sit atop political parties and allied fund-raising entities that can gin up practically unlimited sums, which can be used to crush dissidents. (This month, in Kentucky, Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican willing to criticize Trump, was defeated in what became the most costly House primary on record.) The weight of money shifts the balance of power away from individual members of Congress, insuring that for many of them the default position is submission."

He continued: "What we’ve learned during the past decade is that when the Supreme Court puts democracy up for sale, Congress is utterly beholden to a President, and if that President is a malign actor, the U.S. Constitution is no longer fit for purpose. Trump is ruthlessly exploiting this weakness, but he didn’t create it. Assuming that the Republic does eventually get past him and his grifting, it will need radical surgery, not merely a reset."

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AN 2 25

Former ethics czar and impeachment lawyer Norm Eisen is working with a group of attorneys fighting back against President Donald Trump over they're calling his unlawful actions.

Speaking to MSNBC on Monday, Eisen said that they have been successful in court so far — and they believe they will continue to be.

"The very first case, locking Mr. [Elon] Musk out of the Treasury Department. He has no right to look at that data," he said, referring to a challenge which saw a judge at the weekend temporarily cut Musk's access to the nation's financial records.

"Tying the hands of the president, the attorney general and others who want to dox reveal the identity of 6,000 FBI agents. They don't have any legal right to do that under the Privacy Act and otherwise," he went on, referencing plans to name agents who worked on January 6 cases.

He also pointed out that on Monday morning, they're in court fighting Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship, which Eisen said is "rewriting the Constitution." The legal team also filed a brief on behalf of "almost two dozen conservatives" fighting back against the purge of federal staffers who work for congressionally established and funded agencies.

"This offer to force federal employees out without the permission of Congress is illegal. And that case will be heard today. We've been involved in many of these cases, and they're going to lose," Eisen said.

The host asked whether he believed the courts would agree.

"I do. I think that the courts will start with civil contempt. They'll move to criminal contempt. They have broader sanctions. They're going to rule against the administration," promised Eisen. "In that case, I think the Supreme Court will back them up."

The host also wondered if there was any way to enforce the court rulings if Trump decided to ignore them, asking whether the U.S. Marshals would get involved.

"I think American democracy is strong enough to meet this test," he added. "We are at a crossroads. That's why we've been involved in dozens of cases, with dozens more coming in the weeks and months ahead. But I believe in the strength of American democracy. If Donald Trump and Elon Musk and J.D. Vance test the will of the American people or the American courts, I think they're going to get a very strong pushback."

See his comments below or at the link here.

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an 12 24

badash

In 2005, President George W. Bush’s nominee, John Roberts, became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Five years later, just over one quarter of the country (27%) disapproved of him. By last year, that disapproval number had risen to nearly half the nation: 46%.

Since 2021, Gallup reports, the Supreme Court’s disapproval rating has consistently remained in the mid to upper 50s—a roughly ten-point increase compared to the previous decade. The majority of Americans have an apparent growing dissatisfaction with a court that wields ultimate authority while becoming increasingly secretive and activist on some of the nation’s most consequential issues.

While the Supreme Court’s job is not to make decisions based on popularity contests, it relies on the other two branches of the federal government to enforce its rulings. And when the Supreme Court’s credibility falls into question, some warn, our institutions may be at risk.

In October, Bloomberg Opinion’s Noah Feldman warned the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy crisis is getting worse.”

“Democrats’ faith in the court began to fail after the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision, then went into freefall over the last couple of years,” Feldman wrote. “They worry the justices aren’t sufficiently ethical. They deplore the eagerness of the court’s conservative majority to overturn 50 years of precedent on issues like abortion and affirmative action. They are appalled at the court’s defiance of originalism — the idea that Constitutional law should rest on the document’s original meaning — to grant criminal immunity to former President Donald Trump for official acts while president.”

Nearly two years ago the Alliance for Justice (AFJ), a progressive coalition of nearly 140 organizations “advocating for a fair and independent justice system,” published a piece warning that the Supreme Court was “destroying its own legitimacy.”

“The Court’s wounds are entirely self-inflicted,” William W. Taylor, III, wrote at the AFJ. “It has a far-right agenda and the scholarship informing its decisions is often questionable. Worse, new details have come to light of relationships some justices have had with wealthy ideological soulmates, including those with interest in cases before the Court. The Court’s credibility and the public’s acceptance of its decisions depends upon trust that it is not subject to outside influence. While lobbying may be common and acceptable in the legislative and executive branches, it is not — nor ought not to be — conceivable in our courts.”

The New York Times on Tuesday took a deep dive into the behind-the-scenes conversations at the end of the summer of 2023 among the Supreme Court justices as they weighed whether or not to establish a code of ethics, amid a nation angered by numerous reports of what many see as blatant corruption.

“Last year, pressure on the court and the chief justice intensified. Journalists revealed that Justice Thomas had accepted far more largess from Harlan Crow, a conservative donor, than he had disclosed, including decades of travel on private jets and a superyacht, and boarding school tuition for his grandnephew. The public uproar also reflected another concern: Virginia Thomas, his wife, had been involved in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” The Times reports.

“Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process,” The Times adds, revealing that “behind the scenes, the court had divided over whether the justices’ new rules could — or should — ever be enforced.”

In the end, the justices all signed onto a new code of ethics for the nation’s highest court, but one that “had no means of enforcement.”

It was quickly criticized.

Liberals on the court have since gone public with their apparent frustration that although there is finally a code of ethics, there is no way to enforce it.

“All three liberals — Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson — supported enforcement, The Times reports.

“Rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them, and this one — this set of rules — does not,” Justice Elena Kagan said in July.

“I haven’t seen a good reason why the ethics code that the Supreme Court adopted shouldn’t be enforceable,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. “Other justices have posited certain ways in which it could be made enforceable but we have not yet determined or decided to do that.”

By contrast, at least some of the majority right-wing justices appear opposed to any code, certainly one that would have methods of enforcement.

“In the private exchanges, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable,” The Times revealed. “Justice Gorsuch was especially vocal in opposing any enforcement mechanism beyond voluntary compliance, arguing that additional measures could undermine the court. The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it.”

The Times also reveals that the justices “seemed to codify their own preferences” when they drafted, or signed off on the code of ethics.

Those preferences appear largely financial.

The justices “gave themselves no firm restrictions on gifts, travel or real estate deals. Nothing in the new rules appears aimed directly at the trips and gifts Justice Thomas accepted. The code says only that justices should uphold the dignity of the office and comply with existing gift guidelines, in separate federal rules, which make allowances for ‘personal hospitality.’ Justice Thomas has maintained that his nondisclosure of gifts and free travel did not violate those rules,” according to The Times. Other legal experts disagree, with some saying he broke the law.

Since signing the new code of ethics, “questions about the justices’ behavior have continued. The Times revealed that two provocative flags associated with the Jan. 6 riot had flown at the homes of Justice Alito and his wife. The second was displayed at his New Jersey beach house just as the justices were considering the new ethics rules. That summer, he also accepted concert tickets from a far-right German princess. He later disclosed those, but in keeping with the new rules, said nothing about his free stay at her 500-room Bavarian palace.”

Last month, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), among the Senate’s top proponents of Supreme Court reform, wrote: “As long as the Court maintains a secretive billionaire gifts program for justices and unique immunity from ethics scrutiny for itself, and as long as its decisions predictably align with those billionaire interests, its reputation will continue to crash.”

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Or: How Not to Regret the Things You Build

Visit ethicalOS.org to learn more

REDWOOD CITY, CA —Omidyar Network, the Silicon Valley impact investment firm, has collaborated with the Institute for the Future (IFTF) on the development of a new toolkit — the Ethical Operating System (Ethical OS) — to help makers of tech, product managers, engineers, and others get out in front of problems before they happen. The three-part guide is already being piloted by nearly 20 tech companies, schools, and startups, including Mozilla, Techstars, and others. This is one of many partnerships Omidyar Network’s newly founded Tech and Society Solutions Lab is pursuing to address the growing concerns about responsibility in tech with long-term solutions, a topic of growing importance.

The Ethical OS (#EthicalOS) toolkit is available for Beta testing and community feedback here: www.ethicalOS.org.

What’s in the toolkit:

1. Tomorrow's Risk, Today: Fourteen scenarios to spark conversation and stretch your imagination about the long-term impacts of tech you're building today.

2. Check Your Tech: A checklist of eight risk zones to help you identify the emerging areas of risk and social harm most critical for your team to start considering now.

3. Future-Proofing Strategies: Seven future-proofing strategies to help you take ethical action today.

Omidyar Network's Tech and Society Solutions Lab draws on Omidyar Network’s long-standing belief in the promise of technology to create opportunity and social good, as well as the concern about unintended consequences that can result from technological innovation. The team aims to help technologists prevent, mitigate, and correct societal downsides of technology—and maximize positive impact.

“We envision a world where technology companies take proactive measures to ensure products are responsibly designed and brought to market. That time is now,” said Paula Goldman, global lead of the Tech and Society Solutions Lab. “Inspired by industry standards to mitigate security risk, the Ethical OS helps developers think not just about innovation but long-term societal impact.”

“As makers of tech become more mindful of the unintended effects that their products and services have upon society, we saw a need for a practical toolkit and easy to apply framework for learning, discussion, and eventually better products with fewer potential downsides,” added Raina Kumra, the founder of Mavin and Juggernaut and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Tech and Society Solutions Lab. “Something as simple as a checklist can be a real game changer.”

"Building a startup takes a lot more than just funding,” said Cody Simms, partner at Techstars. “At Techstars, we are building a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. Helping founders anticipate future ethical challenges that their technologies could encounter or incite is critical to their ultimate success. We’re thrilled to be working with Omidyar Network and the Institute for the Future on this initiative and to help our global network of more than 1,500 startups get ahead of problems before they happen.”

“The future is like a game. We have to play it to see how it turns out. But if we wait until the future actually happens, it’s too late to shape it or change our strategies for a better outcome,” said Jane McGonigal from IFTF, a renowned expert in collaborative foresight and human interaction. “But we can play it in advance. Our goal is to engage tens of thousands of tech workers in anticipating the long-term impacts of what they're building today, so they can use that foresight to make better, more ethical choices now.”

“Most people create technology with the hope that it will make the world a better place, but our best intentions must incorporate actionable safeguards to ensure others don’t corrupt our ideas along the way,” added Samuel Woolley, director of IFTF’s Digital Intelligence Lab. “This toolkit helps anyone creating new technology contemplate worst-case scenarios and familiarize themselves with major areas of potential risk. Considering unexpected risks is a must for the entire tech community. Our collective future will be the better for it.”

Feedback on the toolkit and inquiries regarding trainings and workshops related to the toolkit are encouraged by contacting ideas@ethicalos.org. Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #EthicalOS.

Other Tech and Society Solutions Lab partnerships and investments include: the Center for Humane Technology, which was co-founded by Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, to align technology with humanity’s best interests; Data for Democracy, a global community of data practitioners and technologists dedicated to increasing tech worker participation in civil society; the TechEquity Collaborative, which is engaging the tech community to build a more equitable and inclusive twenty-first century economy; as well as the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, which brings the traditions of ethical thinking to bear on real-world problems; among others. The hope is that these efforts help technologists build responsibility into core business and product decisions and contribute to a thriving tech industry.

Institute for the Future (IFTF) is celebrating its 50th anniversary as the world’s leading non-profit strategic futures organization. The core of IFTF’s work is identifying emerging discontinuities that will transform global society and the global marketplace. They provide organizations with insights into business strategy, design process, innovation, and social dilemmas. The organizations research spans a broad territory of deeply transformative trends, from health and health care to technology, the workplace, and human identity.

[https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/scientists-have-strong-reservations-about-elon-musks-brain-implant-technology-a-slew-of-ethical-concerns/](https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/scientists-have-strong-reservations-about-elon-musks-brain-implant-technology-a-slew-of-ethical-concerns/)