The Ethics of Blamestorming

Let’s consider a hypothetical situation for a moment. Suppose your company had leased a property for business purposes, and you paid the people who owned it to build the structures and set up the equipment you would need to do business there – a very common arrangement, similar to the build-to-suit real estate contracts. Now let’ suppose that shortly after you were scheduled to take possession of the site, the main building caught fire and exploded, killing eleven people and causing a great deal of collateral damage to surrounding businesses, homes, and the local environment. An initial investigation indicates that a piece of equipment in the building was faulty, and the property owners blame the contractor who sold them the equipment and installed it for the whole situation. The contractor, in turn, claims that they were working from blueprints and specification provided by the property owner, and the disaster is not their fault; they were just fulfilling their contractual obligation. Meanwhile, the local residents, businesspeople, state and local governments, the media and the U.S. Congress are all blaming you for the whole situation…

What are you going to do? If your employees caused the actual disaster, either through negligence or through incompetence (or bad equipment design) you’d have a legal and ethical responsibility to clean things up and make everyone whole again, including compensation for the families of the victims, but what it you’re just leasing the property and none of your own people were involved in the breakdown? Do you still have an ethical responsibility to pay for all of the damage, just because it was your business that was operating the property at the time things blew up, or should the company that was actually responsible for the design, construction, and operation of the site take the blame for it? Does it make any difference that your company has a miserable safety record (meaning that you should have been anticipating future disasters) or that the company you were leasing from has an exceptionally good one (meaning that you shouldn’t have been expecting any problems)?

In the present case going on in the Gulf of Mexico, none of the players are particularly sympathetic; BP has a miserable safety record, Transocean is blaming their contractor, and Haliburton (the contractor) is saying they were given faulty plans and specs and blaming Transocean, who are saying its all BP’s fault for wanting to drill there in the first place. It’s a neat little tail-chasing circle, and it probably doesn’t help that BP and Haliburton are two of the most hated companies in America, and Transocean soon will be. But my question isn’t really about what the CEO of BP should be doing; it’s what you would be doing if you found yourself in an analogous position…

Would you assume full responsibility for such a disaster, knowing that your company wasn’t actually at fault and that the decision would destroy your organization, bankrupt hundreds of your shareholders and throw tens of thousands of people out of work, just because it might be the right thing to do? Or would you argue that you had obeyed all laws, regulations and industry standards, and that the failed equipment doesn’t even belong to your company (you’re just renting it)? Clearly you have a responsibility to your stockholders, your employees, and all of the other people who will be hurt by the destruction of the company; you also have the responsibility to do the job you’ve been accepting that large salary for and protect your company’s best interests. The real question here is whether those responsibilities outweigh any responsibility you might have to the people who will be impacted by the disaster. After all, no one forced you to rent that property, and you could have insisted on a different contractor and a different kind of machinery, or taken your business somewhere else. So if your company was the one caught in the middle of this sort of fiasco, what would you do?

It’s worth thinking about…