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Ethics, cameras and Boeing's Stonecipher affair

I'm a big fan of "Futurama". It's a cartoon comedy series set a thousand years in the future, where a no-hoper from our time has ended up after being accidentally frozen for a millennium - and one of Christopher Fry's first misdemeanours is to download an illegal Internet copy of Lucy Liu, the actress.

It's easily done: "Just put a blank robot into the drive, and press download" and Nappster.com turns it into your very own Lucy - prepared to love you and hug you and kiss you (and constantly nag you to register her) - and after that, of course, humanity is doomed.

Because, as Fry's boss points out, "all business, sports, science and philosophy was merely an effort to impress the opposite sex or sometimes, the same sex." Without the need to captivate a partner, humanity retired to its bunks and Earth was destroyed by aliens.

Sex in the office is an obsession with American corporations, not just in the 31st century, but today. It is regarded as verboten. And the logic is easy to follow: it causes deep distress to employees when they see one of their number promoted, not because of talent or energy or loyalty, but because they please the boss in bed.

The trouble is that problems of this sort can't be fixed by "There ought to be a law against it" legislators. Humans are obsessed by sex - well, many of us are! - and as the old saying has it, love will find a way.

So the Mikados of American blue-chip companies have formulated complex - and strict - laws against flirting. And, because cameras are seen as a way of taking pictures of sexy colleagues (with or without their permission) they are banned from offices. And thus, Harry C. Stonecipher lost his job as head of Boeing.

To be honest, I have no idea whether Harry C took a cameraphone in to work. Logically, you'd say that a chap of 68 would be the last to fiddle with the buttons on one of those little toys - but he has admitted to fiddling with the buttons on one of his colleagues - which, at that age, might seem equally unlikely. And, since he was brought into the company from retirement to sort out a lapse in ethical standards, this ethical lapse - camera buttons or blouse buttons, doesn't matter, it's sex - he had to go. And he has gone.

For Europeans visiting America, the taboo on flirting is weird. I've noticed a widespread pretence that it doesn't happen. And even when some executives wear clothes that would be seen as purely provocative in Paris or Bonn or Rome, their male colleagues look them straight in the face and never allow their eyes to fall to the chest area.

And then, somehow, they end up in the same bar that evening.

Statistics for marriage in America show the same proportion as in Europe. "Where did you meet your husband/wife?" produces "At work" more often than not.

The problem is that the symptom we're trying to suppress isn't actually the problem.

We don't want people to be promoted unfairly. We see that people are tempted to promote their lovers unfairly but instead of preventing unfair promotion, we try to prevent love.

And the same, perhaps, for camera-phones? We see that it is possible to harass colleagues with a camera. Instead of preventing harassment, we try to ban the camera.

It isn't working, it isn't going to work, it can't work. The rule must be to create an ethical mind-set in the office, not to suppress activities which could be used by unethical people.