Conflicts of Interest

2004
Norm Augustine

Among the most common dilemmas to be found in the ethics arena are those involving potential conflicts of interest.  Such issues seem to have implicit in them the same four challenges which, in my experience, characterize all ethical issues.  These are:

1. An individual facing a decision may not realize that the matter encompasses ethical connotations .  This is perhaps the most common avenue whereby basically decent, well-meaning individuals find themselves in serious trouble.
2. Even when one recognizes that an ethical choice is being confronted, it often is not immediately obvious what is, in fact, the "right" course to pursue.
3. Furthermore, when one knows what is the "right" thing to do, doing so often requires a considerable amount of moral fortitude.
4. Finally, when one does do the morally correct thing, the outcome, at least in the short term, often will not be what one would have preferred.

Perhaps the most difficult class of ethical dilemmas occurs when two or more dearly embraced principles seem to collide.  This was in fact the circumstance confronted by one highly respected CEO of a major U.S. corporation who discovered that a personal friend who worked for the corporation had condoned the actions of several employees found to have been collecting information about a competitor by "dumpster diving," that is, dipping into the trash outside the competitor’s plant.  In this instance, the CEO confronted in a very straightforward manner the resulting conundrum involving his belief in loyalty to a friend and his abhorrence of unfair business practices.  Among several other actions, he fired his friend.

I recently had the privilege of co-chairing a review of the conflict of interest policies of the National Institutes of Health. (Steve Potts, Chairman of the ERC Fellows Program, also served as a member of that group).  In carrying out our responsibilities we encountered not one but several issues where sound principles seemed to conflict  . . . frequently involving substantive ethical connotations.  For example, there was the right of government employees to a degree of privacy in what they elect to do in their personal lives; but at the same time, there was the right of the public to know what activities are being pursued by those who serve it, at least insofar as those activities might somehow impact their responsibilities as public employees.  One might say that it was a case of the Privacy Act meeting the Sunshine Act! 

A second issue we engaged related to the fact that the government does not "own the brains" of the scientists who choose to work for it -- particularly given that many such scientists have spent decades gaining the knowledge that they possess through prolonged educational pursuits.  Further, many of those same individuals have worked elsewhere for a number of years before even joining the government.  On the other hand, it is broadly viewed as inappropriate for government employees to benefit personally from the particular knowledge they gain while serving as public servants. 

A third issue concerned the sensible desire of policy makers to maintain uniform conflict of interest rules across the government, if for no reason other than fairness to those individuals who are impacted by those rules.  Yet, no two circumstances are alike, and it appeared necessary that special prohibitions be imposed upon certain employees who bear unique responsibilities. 

Our committee sought to balance these along with many other considerations.  The result was a set of recommendations that has received both strong endorsements and strong criticism.  The committee was well aware at the outset of its deliberations  that in such circumstances the simplest approach would be to disregard one or the other facets of these dilemmas (for example, the right of a government employee not to open their outside activities to general public scrutiny, say, by having them posted on the web.)  Instead, the committee sought to exercise judgment in balancing the conflicting objectives.  Simply stated, the "easy" solution did not, in many instances, seem to be the correct one. 

It was our belief, for example, that scientists at NIH, like their counterparts in academia, should be free to use their talents for the good of society even when this involved working part-time for other organizations, as long as (1)  no conflict of interest with the scientists’ own government work was created, (2)  the outside activities were fully disclosed, (3)  no use was made of unpublished government research and (4)  their outside activities did not consume so much time that they adversely impacted the employees’ ability to focus on their primary responsibilities, that is, their work for the government. 

The subject of the ethical connotations of conflict of interest policies is one where reasonable people can-- and in this case did -- disagree.  But this is exactly the characteristic that makes ethics a fascinating yet very difficult field of endeavor.

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Norm Augustine, is the former Chairman of Lockheed Martin Corporation and Founding Chairman of the ERC Fellows Program. He recently served as co-chair of the NIH Blue Ribbon Panel reviewing NIH conflicts of interest policies.