Devil's Advocate: Ethics before profit

If companies truly put principles ahead of profits, you might be surprised at the number of issues that would be affected, says Martin Brampton.

It is not often that I feel sympathy for the likes of Microsoft and Cisco. But reading of attacks on them by politicians over complicity in Chinese censorship, I almost shed a tear. These companies have been putting profit ahead of principle. How extraordinary!

Some US politicians feel so strongly about this kind of thing that they are thinking about new laws to prohibit compliance with such rules. They want to insist on email servers being located outside "oppressive" countries. A "global internet freedom office" is envisaged to co-ordinate an international strategy.

Now this all sounds very fine until we start to consider that it was only recently that our own Home Secretary was urging new laws to censor the "glorification of terrorism". Such ideas only foundered when confronted with the risk of making history books about Boadicea a criminal offence. It certainly seems our politicians believe there are boundaries to what should be freely advocated. It is just that they always apply to other people.

Ethics has the interesting property of frequently coming up with insoluble conundrums. Only last week we discovered that freedom of expression can easily turn into deep offence. Historically, laws restricting certain kinds of public expression have been far more prominent than those protecting free speech. And it is not clear that has really changed.

Attempts to balance rival ethical principles - such as blasphemy versus freedom of speech - work at too abstract a level to ever reach any final conclusion. When specific issues arise the balance may tip one way or the other, although the questions are often hotly disputed. But the next example may well tip the other way.

Moreover, the idea that keeping internet facilities out of "oppressive" countries will solve any problems may turn out to be excessively optimistic. We are increasingly aware that, for example, Google records our every search and if it so decided could hand over its records to the government. Likewise, in the name of the "war against terrorism" our emails and mobile phone calls are liable to be stored for scrutiny.

Since both the US and UK governments have now taken to themselves the right to lock up without trial people who are not citizens of the respective country, we have good reason to be concerned about our safety when travelling abroad. After all, even the most innocent of communications can, taken out of context, be made to sound incriminating. And being innocent is no use in the absence of a right to fair trial. So we are forced to wonder exactly which "oppressive" countries companies are being urged to avoid.

Indeed, it appears that politicians care more for the citizens of China than for those at home. US politicians are notorious for refusing to take effective action against spamming, leaving us vulnerable to a broad range of abuses. It seems that on this kind of issue, profit takes precedence over the protection of citizens against exploitation. Censorship of uninvited email communications might be very welcome to many.

It would be quite something if large companies could be instructed to put ethical considerations above profit. But I would not want to confine that behaviour to the single issue of complicity with censorship. There are numerous other ethical principles, compliance with which would be of considerable benefit to all citizens, not just the Chinese.