Dombrowski pp. 152-226

Tobacco and death-when is a cause not a cause? if the avoidable sudden and violent death of seven astronauts can be called a tragedy, what word can describe the avoidable, slow, and misery-filled death of millions?

• the tragedy lies in the entirely preventable nature of these deaths and in the strained resistance of the tobacco industry to acknowledging its ethical responsibilities.

in reality, there was no debate. the industry knew full well, these authorities contend, that they were causing serious illness and death on a tremendous scale. there is no public drama here, just the very real personal tragedy that is unbearable for others to watch.

• it's clear that steady smokers will in general lose from ten to twenty years from their nonsmoking life expectancy, regardless of the specific disorder from which they die.

we will see how technical and scientific information about smoking and disease was deliberately controlled, manipulated, and misrepresented to various audiences by the tobacco industry. these audiences include the public, the government, the scientific community, and even the tobacco industry itself. We will see, too, how even the strict meaning of a single technical word can become the focal point of a complex web of misleading arguments spanning several decades.

cause:

the first reason concerns probabilities and populations rather than certainties and individual persons.

• with statistical causes, the connection between cause and effect is often not immediately seen and not intuitively obvious as is the case with smoking and cancer.
• in the case of Challenger, on the other hand, the connection between cause and effect was close in time.

the second reason also has to do with causation but from another angle and an unethical one. the tobacco industry has engaged in an aggressive program of misinformation, obfuscation, denial, and opposition that has clouded the connection between smoking and disease in the minds of the public.

the method of "concomitant variation" by which an increase in an independent variable leads to an increase in a dependent variable, and a decrease yields a decrease.

• for overy 50 years the statistical connection between smoking and cancer and other diseases has been known and generally accepted among scientists. each year this connection is reinforced as more and more studies show the same statistical connection. heavier smoking and over a longer period correlate with greater incidences of disease and shorter life expectancy.

how the term cause has been used in these communications clearly reflects the value system of the communicators and the goals they value and work toward.

the techniques of the sophists as traditionally represented do seem to closely resemble those of the tobacco industry, and our ethical judgment of them is similarly negative.

• it aggressively sought out ways in which the statistical connection could be characterized as anything but causal; it solicited scientists and doctors who were willing to oppose the representation of the connection as causal; and it developed clever distractions from the focus on cancer.
• "smoking causes lung cancer if by 'causation' we mean any chain of events which leads finally to lung cancer and which involves smoking as an indispensable link" p.159
• even in 1958, the tobacco industry in the US had already begun an aggressive campaign to discredit the scientific reports and to deceive the public.
• they vigorously sought out any scientist or doctor who would endorse their position-and found a few. (money?) a very few people were represented as credible and respected voices in opposition to all the others, which was a gross distortion of their standing in the field and of the feelings of the field as a whole.

single, recent landmark legal debate: the civil case of the State of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota versus the major American tobacco producers (and one British producers) and the tobacco research group they created.

in the case of the tobacco industry, the knowledge of harmful effects was known with practical certainty, regardless of the industry's denial of such knowledge.

• they knowingly and willfully brought certain disease and death to a portion of their consumers and did so over the course of several decades in direct defiance of the urgings of governmental and medical authorities. they were also conscious of their continuous deception as they schemed for language and arguments to avoid any public acknowledgement of what they well know.

documents: the tobacco industry in 1997 negotiated some of the terms of an out-of-court settlement of gigantic magnitude, on the order of 350 billion dollars over a period of years.

the tobacco industry had never, until very recently, lost a case in the courts over the damaging health effects of its products, their addictiveness, or their advertising methods. on the face of it, this fact might appear to suggest that they were in the right.

• the fuller, truer reality is that the context is complicated in many inapparent ways: the industry's ability to identify even a few legitimate scientists who would quibble on the issue of causation; tremendous profitability of the industry, which gives them enormous financial and legal resources to use on their behalf as well as an indefinite expanse of time; this profitability also yields enormous tax resources to the states involved, leading to support for the industry at high levels in their state legislatures; every time a case has approached a culmination that might yield a decision unfavorable to the industry, the industry has negotiated an out-of-court settlement.
• above all the industry had avoided not only a single judgment against them but had also avoided the crucial first judgment against them, which would act as a watershed yielding a cascade of further cases based on that precedent.

the charges are very serious, including fraud, conspiracy, negligence, false advertising, and product liability, and are of an unprecendented magnitude.

the legal system has repeatedly tried to build a case against the industry in the past few years. many of the documents they have to work with are worded in obtuse, contorted ways to disguise their direct substance.

• the documents also reflect an intense effort by the legal staffs of the tobacco industry to ensure that these documents couldn't serve the interests of potential claimants. lawyer-client privilege. it took active steps to keep itself ignorant of and insulated form what it did not want to know.
• from the mid 1970s, the industry has taken active steps to distance itself from the information it already had. files were purged and documents were shredded. the industry tried to conceal or destroy any potential "smoking guns".

on the face of them, the documents appear to be reasonable, cautious, and careful as long as one does not examine their claims critically and without consideration of their overall context.

1950s: several medical research reports were published linking smoking with lung cancer, and other cancers, and other diseases.

• in response to these reports and the concern they evoked among the public, chief executives of all but one of the major tobacco companies met to mount a defensive strategy. they concluded that they needed to launch a public relations campaign that would be "entirely 'pro-cigarette' in nature"
• the problem, we should note, is not one of concern for health but for public relations. their plan was to form a research group supposedly independent of the tobacco industry in order to get at the "real" facts of the matter.
• key memorandum states the need to reassure the public that "there is no proof that cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer" and that "there is no proof to the claims which link smoking and lung cancer"

"A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers" was the result: the terms "cause" and "proof" cannot accurately be used regarding smoking and disease; that the scientific and medical community is divided on the matter; and that the industry believes there is no health danger from smoking.

• the first section addresses recent reports about the dangers to health of cigarette smoking and attempts to discount them.
• the second section states that the tobacco industry feels a great responsibility for the health of the smoking public and presents a plan of action to discharge this responsibility by forming an industry group to research the health effects of smoking.
• it undermines the conventional wisdom about medical research reports, namely that they tell the truth. it refers to recent reports linking smoking to cancer as "experiments" associated with a "theory". their connotations for the lay public would cast these reports as speculative and not factual. the scientific reports seem watered down and indefinite.
• the document also portrays the industry as a victim of malicious publicity from other agents. notice also the tone supporting victimage even of the title, which suggests that it speaks the truth as it opposes the supposedly less frank and supposedly less true statements made by its opponents.

four points:

• the first point states that lung cancer has many possible causes.
• the second point states that there is "no agreement among the authorities" as to what the cause of lung cancer is.
• the third point states that there exists "no proof that cigarettes smoking is one of the causes."
• the fourth point contends that conclusions drawn from statistics can be misleading or confusing, and that, furthermore, the "validity" of the statistics "is questioned" by many scientists.

central to this misrepresentation was developing the appearance of the industry conscientiously insisting on technical accuracy, an appearance exactly the opposite to the reality.

from the start, the voices on the council were unrepresentative and became even more so as time went on, to the point of absurdity.

the industry can simultaneously recognize the growing concern about technical information in the form of medical research reports, while deflating this concern through mocking humor.

1960s: the US Surgeon General appointed an advisory committee to investigate the health effects of smoking. the industry had to respond to governmental concerns from such a high level.

• the industry had to call on the same few people over and over to claim that a causal connection was "not proven"
• every nuanced word was reviewed scrupulously, assuring the most cautious possible language consistent with the evidence. disagreement as to whether the evidence warranted using the "cause"
• also contained is a truly frank (and secret) statement about the real purpose of the Tobacco Institute Research Committee (TIRC). states that the true purpose was not disinterested science but public relations propaganda intended to oppose genuine scientific research.
• the principal interest of the writer and the industry is to protect the industry, not to protect the health of the public. in this way, values strongly guided what technical information was reported and how it was represented.
• no industry was going to accept that its product was toxic or even believe it to be so.

1970s: the industry had become highly interested in filtered cigarettes as a way to respond to increasing health concerns among the public and in government.

• the tactic they settled on was to try to justify the filtering of cigarettes on the basis of only a perception among the public that smoking is linked to health problems, without actually acknowledging the reality that smoking causes health problems.
• the use of euphemisms: "biological activity"=cancerous tumors. also acknowledging a health hazard while denying it in the next sentence.
• by the mid 70s, the industry's own research had become so clear and compelling about the health damages caused by smoking that they closed down several of their research operations in order to prevent discovering information they did not want to learn.
• it was decided that lawyers were to have decisive control over which research proposals would be approved, what research would be terminated, how reports were written, and which reports would be published.
• it was hoped that the findings could be kept from disclosure to the government and to the public under attorny-client privilege.

1980s: the control of information by lawyers in order to prevent disclosures that would be detriemental to the industry was tightened. lawyers struggled to find a way to make the industry's activities appear defensible.

• rather than receiving lengthy, fully explained documents, reports on research would now be limited to snippets in order to limit the revelation of potentially damaging information.
• the language and the argument of a report could also be reworked by lawyers and managers to water them down, make them seem more tentative, or otherwise obscure the full meaning and significance of the information.
• Dr. Gary Huber, a long-time smoking researcher, decided to become a whistleblower after learning of how the tobacco industry was controlling, distorting, and misrepresenting scientific findings.

1990s: public and private outcries, governmental inquiries, legislative actions, and judicial suits are finally beginning to take their toll. in 1997, facing the possibility of astronomical judgments against the industry from innumerable claimants, the major tobacco companies had negotiated the terms of a single enormous settlement that would quell some of the public clamor.

A single word: what are the ethical implications of a single word?

• upon learning of these documents from within the tobacco industry itself, especially those clearly showing that nictoine is addictive, the federal Department of Justice launched an investigation into possible perjury charges against those CEOs.
• the Department of Justice has decided not to pursue the charge of perjury because of that single word, believe.

graphical images: the meaning we might ascribe to an image can be strongly influenced by the context in which it appears.

Joe Camel: projects a socially desirable image, what RJR calls a "smooth" character, who is self-confident, attractive, independent, a trendsetter. it also the charming goofiness of a cartoon character, which perhaps reinforces our initial feeling that it is not meant to be taken seriously.

• we are less likely to read carefully the required fine-print notice warning us that all cigarettes, including Camels, cause terrible diseases and death.
• also suggests that if we were to have any attitude other than Joe's blithe happiness, then we are only being prudish party poopers, too like a "grown-up"
• counters those serious technical concerns by being the opposite: antiserious and antitechnical.
• RJR in the 1970s in its French operations had revived the Joe Camel image-was updated and made younger and cartoonlike to "youthen" the image of Camel cigarettes in order to appeal to a younger audience.
• conducted research on advertising to potential smokers in the 15-17 age range. Joe Camel image would appeal to an audience as young as 9 years old and entice them to start smoking.
• resonates with many of the attitudes that young people have.

Janet C. Mangini vs. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in California.

• the Joe Camel image was an integral part of a conscious and willful plan by RJR to entice children and adolescents to become addicted to smoking tobacco in violation of federal laws against tobacco advertising aimed at minors.
• C.A. Tucker, explained that the "young adult market represents tomorrow's cigarette business. As this 14-24 age group matures, they will account for a key share of the total cigarette volume for at least the next 25 years." p. 179
• "realistically, if our company is to survive and prosper, over the long term we must get our share of the youth market."
• the industry deliberately aimed its advertising to the age group least likely to resist their messages and least likely to be concerned with their health whether immediately or in later years.
• 90 percent of the 10 million dollar settlement is earmarked for anticigarette advertising directed to the same audience of youths.

advertising can be seen as a technical activity, a collection of techniques that can be honed to be as effective as possible a means to achieve particular goals while avoiding any ethical concern about the goodness of those goals.

ethical appraisal:

• aristotle: lack honesty, fail to reason according to legitimate prevailing standards of inference, avoid making difficult decisions and facing the painful truth, and irresponsibly sacrifice the health and lives of millions for the sake of personal and corporate profit. the "tobacco wars" appear to demonstrate the Aristotelian notion of adversarial rhetorical debate between opposing parties.
• kant: tobacco documents are clearly unethical. these careful researchers are treating the public as the researchers would want themselves to be treated. the tobacco industry has done the exact opposite. their motives and the ends they sought were only the continued existence and profitability of their industry.
• utilitarianism: as far as the public is concerned, the costs, whether monetary, social or emotional, vastly outweigh any benefits. the industry simply wants to maximize its benefits while limiting its costs (and liabilities).
• feminist perspective and ethics of care: they would argue that the stonewalling and deliberate deceits of the industry show capitalism and free enterprise at its worst. the tobacco industry's reliance on arguments supposedly founded in scientific scrupulousness reveals perhaps one of the worst sides of science as an enterprise. would emphasize the wilful irresponsibility of bringing years of debility and slow, misery-filled death to millions.

Star Wars-Hope vs. Reality:

Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI, it is commonly known as Star Wars. though the program itself has now been terminated, the research and development of various parts of the system still continue under many different, less ambitious programs.

much of the technical communications about the software planned for SDI have to do with the prospective future rather than the real, immediate present. In the case of Star Wars, the speculation seems to have gone too far. It might have been more ethically responsible and in keeping with standard governmental practice to have consulted more thoroughly with recognized technical and scientific experts on the feasibility of claims made for Star Wars.

claims made about the ability of the proposed software to operate the Star Wars system were exaggerated, selectively represented, or misrepresented. the mission assigned to SDI changed substantially over time.

in this Star Wars case, the documents and their drafters were not necessarily unethical because debates on important public policy issues commonly are two-sided, both sides having legitimate concerns driving their statements.

context: the statement that created SDI sketched a plan of enormous scope, but as a sketch of technical program it suffered an important difficulty: It was almost entirely a statement about goals. It was not clear exactly who or what would be covered by the plan, or when, or even how.

• seemingly definite, objective topics such as computer software programs and the performance we can expect of them often carry with them a heavy burden of judgment, both technical and ethical.
• question is only whether appeals to national security should be allowed to exaggerate, distort or misrepresent realistic technical matters.

overview of SDI: "technological optimism"-the assumption that any problem can be solved by technological means and that this technology can be devised if only sufficient will, money and talent are applied to the problem.

• the goal was clear: "to intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies" and to render these nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete"
• complete, "perfect" protection stopping 100% of all enemy missiles was later reduced to "near-perfect" protection, then "less than perfect" protection involving maybe 400 megatons "leaking" through SDI protection.
• program was linked to the values motivating it and defining its goal. the influence of values in shaping public discourse and technical claims about a highly technical topic is powerful.

a complex system: five areas-surveillance, acquisition, tracking, and kill assessment; directed energy weapons; kinetic energy weapons; survivability, lethality, and key technologies; and systems concepts and battle management.

• all these detection, tracking, guidance, and interception devices would have to be precisely coordinated by various computer systems, interconnected by reliable communication links also under computer control, and operated under a computerized battle management system for command, control, and communication (BMC3).
• complicating its tasks would be various tactics the enemy might use to confuse sensors, disrupt communications, and "fry" computer chips. this computer system would have to operate in an extremely difficult environment that has no realistic parallel.

congressional office of technology assessment:

four "misapprehensions" regarding the stated goals of the president's plan (all are related to software issue):

• individual, separate devices such as lasers are not the same as the total system in which they would be used together, which would be extremely complex.
• SDI is unlike any prior technical program such as the Manhattan project.
• hopes for entirely new technologies cannot be realistic. "such breakthroughs are not impossible, but their mere possibility does not help in judging the prospects for the perfect defense"
• accurate predictions cannot be made about the performance of this complex system. there is, and can be, no realistic test of the system beforehand; all possible outcomes cannot be anticipated.

ten million lines of code of its program would have to function reliably and perfectly the first time it was used. the SDI system would also be used for the very first time under the worst possible battlefield conditions with sabotage, power outages, decoys, shock, confusion, and electromagnetic disturbance. these conditions have never been experienced before.

from the earliest days of the program, serious concerns were voiced about the feasibility of SDI and its software-there is a significant probability that a catastrophic failure caused by a software error would occur in the system's first battle.

congressional hearing: the debate over SDI was particularly heated and was particularly concerned about the possibly unethical misrepresentation of technical feasibility.

• its purpose now was defense per se but leverage in negotiations for arms control and reduction agreements.
• hopes hinge not on computing power, but on the correspondence between software programs and the complex realities of a determined enemy trying to defeat the system at some unknown time in the future.
• seemingly definite technical information can be derived from speculation and wishes and from backward reasoning that might not hold up under scrutiny.

pro: proponents began their arguments with statements concerning moral, political, or ideological statements in order to justify the need for the radical change embodied in SDI.

• wouldn't directly emphasize technological feasibility. the celebration of past technological achievements generates a sort of patriotic fervor that distracts one from considering the realities of SDI.
• the truer reality is that there are many sides to the problem of preventing nuclear war, and many parties and countries involved.

a lengthy official statement articulating the plan only sketched two years earlier and addressing concerns raised by critics.

• even the top technical advisor to the president had reconceived the aim away from rendering missiles "impotent and obsolete" by building a protective shield across the US.
• the aim of SDI was changed in two ways-it would now provide an additional sort of deterrence against an enemy's use of nuclear missiles and it was to provide additional leverage in arms control negotiations, which it could do even if it worked imperfectly or only with limited capability. the technical needs that SDI would have to fulfill were now much reduced, even through its feasibility was still to be determined.

it does not say that SDI is feasible or even that it is expected to be found feasible, only that after a good deal of research we will have the means to make a determination as to feasibility.

con: though the hardware was thought to be at least remotely feasible, the vitally important software was seen as fundamentally infeasible.

parnas: not only does it deal with a very sophisticated technical topic in easy to understand language, but it also takes a clear, explicit ethical stand in support of a technical position. it melds technical information with ethical concerns in a way that each supports the other.

• his statement accomodates its audience very effectively. It communicates highly technical concepts in language that is accessible to any educated, nontechnical reader. focuses on the task of clear communication and effective persuasion of its audience. takes a definite ethical stance that is clearly articulated, firmly defined, and appropriate for the context. takes care to explain that his conclusions are expert professional judgments from someone with military software experience.
• chief point is that no software system could possibly be developed along the lines required by SDI that would be "trustworthy". many of the potential difficulties could not be completely anticipated and debugged simply because we can never be sure of what we do not know or understand.
• his selfless gesture of resigning reinforces his credibility, for he had nothing to gain by it and a good deal to lose.
• his clear, calm, cogent arguments brought an air of common sense to the SDI debate that cut through a cloud of wishful thinking and political brow beating that had led to the funding of research without clear goals or realistic expectations.
• sees no inconsistency between his professional responsibilities and his public, civic ones. neither does he see any inconsistency between his professional responsibilities and his personal ones.
• was criticized for not trying to protect the image of his profession-was making the defense research establishment appear selfish and ineffective.

Star Wars boycott pledge: no other technical and scientific issue in modern times-except for the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons themselves-has so stirred this community. the sense of ethical responsibility was coupled with a civic responsibility and burst forth dramatically in the form of the public boycott. signing the pledge was a selfless gesture that could do real damage to their reputations and livelihoods.

Patriot-Small Scale SDI: Star Wars is still with us in many ways. The Patriot system has been touted as a rudimentary form of Star Wars.

• "American soldiers' lives could be unnecessarily endangered if they are deployed in future conflicts based on inaccurate assessments of the Patriot's capabilities." pp. 219
• what the data precisely are, how they are arrived at, how they might be verified, and what they mean are all subject to the influence of various factors that shape the final representation in important ways.

technical claims about air operations: GAO examined in detail the validity of claims made by various sources about the air operations during Desert Storm, particularly about the effectiveness and suitability of new weapons systems .

• difference between claims made about the effectiveness and suitability of various weapons systems during the war versus the findings of the GAO about their actual performance during the war.
• example: "an 'all weather' attack aircraft" vs. "the ability of the F-15E using LANTIRN to detect and identify targets through clouds, haze, humidity, smoke, and dustwas very limited, the laser designator's ability to track targets was similarly limited. only less accurate unguided munitions could be employed in adverse weather using radar."

ethical appraisal:

• aristotle: it's unclear whether the statements of supporters could be characterized as representing a virtuous persona. at the surface level, they adopt an ethical stance toward strategic security and favor ethical rightness over sheer practical effectiveness. on the other hand, they mask or deny any suggestion that there is little realistic feasibility to claims they are making for the overall system they are proposing.
• kant: statements are problematic and questionable ethically.
• utilitarianism: the calculated weighing of national interests against individual interests would have been entirely acceptable ethically.
• feminist perspective and ethics of care: most feminists ethicists are firmly opposed to violence and militarianism in general. an ethic of care that of course would insist on a caring concern for the American people, and implicitly for all the world's people, would seem to be supported by these statements, too, taken at face value. seen in its larger social-political context, these statements seem to be aimed at cutting off dialog with knowledgeable technical experts, which would not be ethical. in the social context of continuing poverty; weak education, poor health care, and racial and gender inequities for so many people, one could readily suggest more socially constructive uses for that same vast amount of money.

Parnas statement set a benchmark for ethical responsibility in the field of software engineering:

• aristotle: wrote and acted in a way that sought the true, good, and right in this matter.
• kant: treating his audience as he would wish to be treated himself. he is acting out of a sense of duty rather than self interest.
• utilitarianism: statements accomplished the benefit of avoiding fruitless expenditures on a program that would fail. no suggestion that he ulterior motives.
• feminist: the frank openness toward the public would be applauded, as would his rhetorical stance to educate rather than just to win audience approval.
• ethic of care: showed a keen sense of caring concern for the public in ensuring they did not feel a false sense of security and that they get what they pay for.

our ethical responsibility as communicators is to make sure that our hopes and wants do not cloud our claims about our technical abilities.