BP's Criminal Guilt in the Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Disaster

More than two years after the worst oil disaster in U.S. history, BP agreed in 2012 “to accept criminal responsibility for the . . . disaster that killed 11 workers.” What does it mean for an association to “accept criminal responsibility”? The notion seems unwholesomely anthropomorphic, if not chimeric in nature. Taken even just practically, holding a corporation itself criminally responsible may not be make sense, even as a deterrent. I contend that the notion of criminality applies only to human beings, whereas civil charges are suitable for associations including corporations.

From a corporate perspective, criminality would of course be viewed in financial terms, ideally from the standpoint of the financial welfare of the stockholders. Accordingly, the “criminal responsibility” translates into $4.5 billion in “fines and restitution.” The figure includes nearly $1.3 billion in criminal fines. The settlement includes payments of $2.394 billion to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, $350 million to the National Academy of Sciences over five years, and $525 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission for having misled investors by lying to Congress. The fines relate to BP pleading guilty on 11 felony counts of misconduct or neglect of ships officers, one felony count of obstruction of Congress and one misdemeanor count each under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Clean Water Act. The 11 counts related to the workers' deaths are under a provision of the Seaman's Manslaughter Act.

It is the outflow of cash, rather than “pleading guilty” to 11 felony counts of “seaman’s manslaughter” relating to the deaths of the 11 workers onboard the rig and one felony count of obstruction of Congress in providing false information on the rate that oil was gushing from the deep-water well, that “translates” directly into corporate terms. During the three months in which the well was gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf, the U.S. Government relied on BP for accurate information on the rate of output, and the company executives in turn were aware of this reliance and yet chose to lie—misleading investors as well as the U.S. Government. It could be argued that the fines are essentially the same as pleading guilty, but then such fines are generally perceived as qualitatively different than those in the civil cases against BP. It is this qualitative distinction that does not translate into a business calculus other than in terms of the negative financial impact in terms of reduced reputational capital from headlines such as, “Oil Giant to . . . Plead Guilty to Criminal Charges.” What really registers in the bewindowed albeit closed offices at BP is the “to Pay $4.5 Billion” part of the headline.

Fundamentally, a company’s management is geared in its very perspective to the interest of the company, and ideally its stockholders, rather than to the business environment, even when the company has created harm to the latter. How does a corporation even accept responsibility for something like manslaughter or lying? It is not as though an organization has a mind, much less a conscience. A business mindset is more like that of a shark—a feeding machine. It does not make sense to hold a shark responsible; it can only be kept out of Sydney’s swimming areas, for example, by nets.

Organizations are basically the people who run and operate them. “Company” is actually a plural noun, as in “a company of men.” Accordingly, the individuals who formulate, sign off on, and implement a policy, procedure or decision that results in harm to others (or the environment) can and should be held criminally responsible. Put another way, human beings rather than associations can feel punishment and thus can be subject to it.

Fortunately, besides the criminal settlement, “three former BP employees were charged by a federal grand jury with felonies in the incident, two of them for allegedly failing to carry out a critical safety test properly” and “to alert onshore engineers to problems with the drilling.” The two oil well supervisors were charged with 11 counts of “seaman’s manslaughter,” 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter and one violation of the Clean Water Act. The third, “David Rainey, BP’s former head of Gulf of Mexico exploration, who took a lead role in the disaster response, was charged with obstruction of Congress and making false statements to a law enforcement officer for allegedly lying about how much crude was spewing from the well.” Unless decided on his own to lie, others at BP should have been charged criminally too.

The fact that criminal charges were made against particular persons at BP is extremely important, both in itself (i.e., justice) and as a deterrent. Two years after the disaster, BP was still the largest oil producer in the Gulf of Mexico. Additionally, the oil giant was exploring for oil and gas in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Ohio. The company would likely have to send executives to the Hill to testify in the future, and those executives should know that they could go to prison for deciding to lie or even “just following orders” to mislead Congress.

As for the criminal fines, they may actually be insufficient financially, given the wealth of the oil giant. The $4.5 billion is merely 17% of the company's profit in 2011 alone. To cover most of the cost of the criminal fines, the company simply sold its Texas City, Texas refinery—where fifteen people had been killed in an accident in 2005—for $2.5 billion. Meanwhile, the multinational company was able to maintain “strategically important” refineries in Washington, Ohio and Indiana in the U.S. alone. Although “leaner,” the well-publicized company might even benefit in terms of public relations in the future from being rid of the sordid refinery in Texas.

To be sure, the civil claims pending at the time could include up to $20 billion under the Clean Water Act if the company is held grossly negligent (i.e., “conscious and voluntary disregard”). Additionally, the company has spent about $14 billion on spill response and clean-up and more than $9 billion in claims to business and individuals. A related claim was up to $7.8 billion when BP announced the criminal settlement in late 2012. Also, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida were suing BP for civil fines. Clearly, these fines dwarf the monetary element of criminality. I contend that the other elements of criminality do not register at the company level.

In spite of having agreed to have BP plead guilty, the company’s executives did not seem particularly interested in admitting guilt. "We believe this resolution is in the best interest of BP and its shareholders," said Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP's Chairman. "It removes two significant legal risks and allows us to vigorously defend the company against the remaining civil claims and to contest allegations of gross negligence in those cases." This is hardly an acknowledgement of criminal guilt. Rather, it is a statement of how the settlement benefits the company! This is like boy sent to his room as a punishment bragging about being able to play video-games from his bed. Surely his mother hearing this would wonder whether she had in fact just punished her son or rewarded him for bad behavior.

From BP’s standpoint, the decision to plead guilty on criminal charges was done in the best interest of the shareholders by reducing legal risk. This is not to accept and acknowledge being blameworthy in a criminal sense. Accordingly, on the day in which the criminal settlement was announced, shares of BP actually rose 14 cents, ending the day at $40.30. Relatedly, the Journal reports that analysts “reacted positively to BP’s settlement of its criminal liability.” There is no sense in this reaction of how you or I might react to a person who “pleads guilty to criminal charges.” We would not exactly buy stock in that person. A company is different—it is a financial machine wherein a settlement that provides a ceiling on the cash to be spent translates as “limiting legal risk.”

In my view, the various civil fines are what must have registered at the company level at BP because of the sheer amount of cash involved. It can be asked from this case whether it even makes sense to hold a company criminally guilty. “Fighting crime” could be more focused against the persons involved—expanding what counts as who is “in the know” on a given policy or a decision that harms others—while the monetary aspect to a company is in civil crimes.

Alternatively, if a corporation truly is to be held criminally guilty in a given country, then it would seem to me that “going to prison” would mean that the company could not do business inside or even with that country or its businesses during the length of its sentence. Lest it be answered that an oil giant would hardly agree to a settlement under those terms, I answer that criminals don’t necessarily agree to plead guilty and there is, after all, the alternative of a criminal trial and verdict. A company being found guilty rather than agreeing to plead guilty deprives it of its share of control while still implying the ethical obligation to admit rather than deny the guilt implied in the verdict. In short, either being criminally guilty should mean something besides reducing legal risk (i.e., something bad ) or concept should not apply at all—to companies, that is.

Sources:

Michael Kunzelman, “BP Oil Spill Settlement Announced,” The Huffington Post, November 15, 2012.

Tom Fowler, “BP Slapped With Record Fine,” The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2012.

Angel Gonzalez and Daniel Gilbert, “Accident Fails to Dent British Firm’s Ambitions in U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2012.

Decoupling Responsibility from Power: The Case of Transocean in the BP Disaster

With much power comes implicit responsibility. Hence, on February 21, 2011, the world recoiled when Gaddafi violently turned on his own people--using his power sans responsibility in a selfish attempt to stay in power. So too, the world had been shocked in April, 2010 when BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and that the Gulf itself was at risk. That a company could ruin something as big as the Gulf of Mexico came as a surprise to many. That a company, or three in this case, could have minimized such a risk by, for example, sending the U.S. Government contingency plans on Gulf clean up that included rescuing sea animals that actually live in the Arctic, shocked the public just as much. How could people holding such power treat its use with such carelessness concerning any downside?  The defense of having followed company policy or having excuted business procedures pales in comparison with the societal demand that power, whether public or private, be handled responsibly.  In other words, people take it for granted that power is given to adults rather than to children.  I think we would be surprised how often this has not been the case.  The case of Transocean demonstrates this thesis.

Transocean, which owned the Deep Water Horizon oil rig that exploded in April of 2010,  was the subject of a criminal investigation into possible tax fraud in Norway. The company indicated in S.E.C. filings that Norwegian officials could assess it about $840 million in taxes and penalties. The filings also contended that a final ruling against Transocean could have a “material impact” on the company. The company was also the target of tax inquiries in the United States and Brazil. Furthermore, drilling equipment from Transocean was shipped by a forwarder through Iran and until 2009 the company had held a stake in a company that did business in Syria. The State Department claimed at the time that Syria and Iran sponsor terrorism.

In reaction to these charges,  a Transocean statement simply claimed that the managers at the company had always acted appropriately and that they would prevail in any investigations. This is interesting, for “always” is quite an accomplishment.  Once I took a self-inventory and one question was “I always tell the truth.”  Of course, no one always tells the truth, so the question was geared to assessing how truthful one is in taking the test.  Had I answered yes, I would have been lying. The transocean statement, taken by itself, indicates a proclivity to lie, for no human being always acts appropriately. Transocean's statement evinces a certain arrogance, as if to say, "We are above reproach."  Such an attitude is dangerous where there is sufficient power at one's disposal that one's actions can do real damage to the planet.

Transocean, which drilled in some 30 countries and employed more than 18,000 people, owned nearly half of the 50 or so deepwater platforms in the world in 2010. “These people are capable and considered the gold standard of deepwater drilling,” said Peter Vig, managing director at RoundRock Capital Management, an energy hedge fund in Dallas.  I contend that expertise in drilling does not sufficiently counter the kind of charges that were brought against the company. To focus only on expertise in operating machinery or in managing a company as though they were all that matters in business is to hold an extremely narrow perspective on what counts. Furthermore, to let blantantly false asseverations stand (such as of always acting appropriately) is to enable a pattern that can literally destroy a major marine ecosystem.

Source:

Barry Meier, "Owner of Exploded Rig Is Known for Testing Rules," The New York Times, July 7, 2010.

Related material is in Cases of Unethical Business, which is available at Amazon.

BP: Dividends to Stockholders Despite a Sordid Safety Record

As BP was wrestling with stopping the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and cleaning up the oil, a controversy broke out between the company’s stockholders and the  US Government on whether any dividends should be declared and paid before the company has taken care of the Gulf.  BP earned more than $16 billion in 2009. Based on higher oil prices, in the first quarter of 2010 the company’s profit more than doubled to $6.08 billion from $2.56 billion  in the first quarter of 2010.  BP’s dividend payment accounted for about £1 of every £8 handed out by British companies in 2009. Given the higher profit in the first quarter of 2010, stockholders were expecting more in dividends.

The question was how much the company’s costs in regard to the Gulf would or should cut into the dividends; the political question was whether any surplus wealth should be paid to investors before the company’s legal and moral obligations were taken care of in the Gulf region.  Although not suggesting that their company was not obligated to stop the rupsure and fund the clean up, BP officials claimed that their company had already paid in other ways.

Already by mid June, 2010, BP shares had fallen more than 40 percent since the fatal explosion at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in April, wiping more than £50 billion, or $73 billion, from the company’s market value. The drop came after lawmakers in Washington called on BP to suspend its dividend and advertising campaign to pay for the cleanup, and a senior official said the Justice Department was “planning to take action.” Most shareholders rejected concerns that the costs of a cleanup and possible damages could force BP into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and said the drop in the share price is not justified by the value of BP’s assets.  BP officials indicated the company’s executives would decide in July whether to keep the quarterly dividend at 14 cents a share for the second quarter. In 2009, the company paid about $10.5 billion in dividends.

By June 10 2010, the company’s cost in regard to the oil spill had reached about $1.43 billion. A BP official said it was “too earlier to quantify other potential costs and liabilities associated with the incident.”  Earlier in June, BP officials told investors that the company had $5 billion cash on hand and that it was generating “significant additional cash flow” as the price of oil remained above $60 a barrel. BP had 18 billion barrels of proved reserves and 63 billion barrels of resources at the end of 2009 that it could draw on.

Iain Armstrong, an analyst at investment manager Brewin Dolphin in London agreed with BP that the company had enough money to pay for the cleanup efforts and also rejected any potential concern that the company might not be able to pay for its debt. “It’s gotten completely out of hand,” Mr. Armstrong said. “It’s a totally overpoliticized situation. There is a disconnect between reality and BP being totally lambasted… . Ironically, by being extremely strong financially, BP has become a target here,” he said. I contend, however, that BP became a target because of its atrocious safety record and its culpability at Deepwater Horizon.

BP falsified regulatory documents by indicating that there was zero percent risk of an off-shore rig accident creating a rupsure and that the company had the technology to stop and clean up such a problem.  Tony Hayward admitted after the explosion that BP lacked the “tools you would want in your tool kit” to close a blown deep-water well.  In other words, the earlier claim to have had the technology was a lie (which MMS never bothered to disconver, as the agency had been captured).  Lest it be said that no group of people is perfect, BP’s history attests to justifiable blame.

In 2005, a blowdown drum overfilled with liquid hydrocarbons at BP’s Texas City refinery killed 15 and wounded 170.  BP was cited for old equipment, overworked and unsupervised employees and contractors, and managerial inattention to safety. The US Chemical Safety Board put the cause as “organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels.”  Meanwhile, a shoddy ballast system was found at BP’s offshore platform Thunder Horse.  In 2006, a corroded pipeline in BP’s Purdhoe Bay field in Alaska leaked thousands of barrels. In the following year, Tony Hayward became the CEO. He promised to make safety his priority. Yet in 2009, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined BP a record $87.4 million for more than 700 safety violations at the Texas City refinery. Nonetheless, David Nicholas, a BP spokesman, wrote, “Safe, reliable operations have been and continue to be our number one priority.”  Not only has this not been the case, BP managers (and lawyers) have been more interested in minimizing liability than being responsible for the consequences of the lapses.

At Deepwater Horizon, when an employee discovered that one pod of the blow-out preventer was leaking, a manager simply shut it down and used the other pod (rather than fixing the leak). Another worker found such low hydrolic pressure in the device that he knew it was time to leave.  In Congressional testimony, Tony Hayward said BP regarded the equipment as the fail-safe mechanism, even as blow-out preventers in general have a 44% failure rate and the device at Deepwater Horizon was known to have a broken pod. Furthermore, after the well fire, the company low-balled the estimated volume of oil going into the Gulf in order to minimize its future liability.  During the first week after the explosion, the company’s estimate was 1000 barrels per day.  During the second week, the company estimated 5000.  Meanwhile, company documents show an estimate of 100,000 per day as a worse-case scenerio. That the wider society would not be sufficiently informed of the magnitude of the clean-up required did not seem to bother the managers at BP, whose concern was mainly to minimize the company’s liability (and thus maximize their stockholders dividends).  Selfishness among the culpable is telling. At the very least, responsibility can be defined as paying for the harm consequent to one’s mistake.  Satisfying such responsibility has priority over dividends, which are residual, after all. In making the protection of dividends (and the stock price) a priority, BP’s managers evinced a reversal of priorities that was ahistoric for the modern corporation.

It is for these reasons, not because BP is a giant corporation or is British, that BP was the target of such scathing rebuke by the American public and the American governments. Mr. Armstrong said that President Obama should not forget that 40 percent of BP shares are owned by United States shareholders. “So he’s not doing them any favors either,” he said. Again, I beg to differ. Acting in the public interest, Barak Obama is doing us all a favor.  Of course, the politics of this matter were no doubt different in Europe.

London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, said Thursday that the drop in BP’s shares was slowly becoming a political issue in Britain. “When you consider the huge exposure of British pension funds to BP and the BP share price and the vital importance of BP then I do think it starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on international airwaves,” he told BBC Radio on June 10th. However, Reuters quoted Prime Minister David Cameron as saying, “This is an environmental catastrophe. BP needs to do everything it can to deal with the situation, and the U.K. government stands ready to help. I completely understand the U.S. government’s frustration.”

In a general sense, the governments are relatively oriented to the public interest, whereas BP, as a private corporation, has a fiduciary obligation to its stockholders.  Robert Reich referred to this obligation as a company’s “corporate social responsibility” on the Countdown with Keith Obermann show on MSNBC on June 14, 2010.  “Social” can admittedly be in reference to stockholders’ social concerns (though “social concerns” is rather vague); however, the term can also refer to society, which is larger than any group of stockholders. To BP’s management, it makes perfect sense in terms of corporate governance to declare and pay dividends as long as the company has enough resources to cover its actual and contingent liabilities related to the gulf.  Considering the billions that the company has in oil reserves, it could satisfy both. In an economic sense, the dichotomy may not make sense.  However, politically, there is resistance to the declaration and payment of dividends, and this “irrational” element is ignored by BP to its economic peril.  Essentially, the political reaction is challenging the right of the company to continue to exist. At the very least, the objection is that the company should not be run as normal.  In other words, the political claim is ultimately that BP has broken the social contract that legitimates its right to conduct business within the US.

Lest we have become too ahistoric, it might be worth our while to study the history of the modern corporation.  Originally, the modern joint-holding company was delegated a function to do for the public by a government.  If the company had enough left over after performing the function, it could give the surplus to the stockholders.  Through the twentieth century, the interests of the stockholders became increasingly central, eclipsing even the “delegated public function” aspect of the charters.  Essentially, a society gives a group of people permission to do a function. This implies that doing the function, and taking care of any adverse consequences caused by the company, are primary.  The political demand of the American governments is that dividends not be declared or paid until BP has rectified the Gulf region as required by law, societal norms, and ethical standards. From the standpoint of BP having been granted permission to operate in the US (leaving aside the billions in contracts from the US Government), the demand is not so much the product of irrational exuberance.

In effect, BP’s managers ignored systemic risk.  In being the closest we have to anyone able to solve the problem, BP is too big to fail. Managers at the company lied about being able to handle a major rupture. The MMS regulatory agency went along, having been coopted by the industry it was to regulate.  This is a failure of business as well as government.  All the emphasis on BP taking orders from the US Government in the wake of the rupture can be interpreted as “reaction formation” given the powerlessness felt in government having been so dominated by private interests ahistorically oriented to their stock price.  If the Gulf of Mexico seemed broken, this condition could be read as a symptom of a political-economic rupture.  I suspect that big business has gotten too big—taking too big risks, capturing governments, and acting with impunity.  As if the financial crisis of 2008 was not enough of a warning call, the oil spill of 2010 depicts too big to fail in very concrete terms.  Whether governments have sufficient power to reassume the driver’s seat in delegating public functions to private commercial associations depends on whether legislators have enough backbone to limit the size and wealth of big business.

Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/business/11bp.html?hp
Countdown with Keith Obermann, MSNBC TV, June 21, 2010; Byran Walsh, “The Spreading Stain,” Time (June 21, 2010), pp. 51-59.


Related material is in Cases of Unethical Business, which is available at Amazon.

A Structural Conflict of Interest in Feinberg's BP-Claims Disbursement Office

A year after the BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, only $4 billion of the $20 billion fund alloted by BP had been paid to claimants. Out of 800,000 claims submitted, two-thirds had been processed.  That is to say, two-thirds of the claims translates into 20% of the available funds. It appears that Ken Feinberg, the lawyer tasked with administering the funds, was being too stingy.

The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

Transocean Executive Compensation Bonuses Ignored the Rig Explosion of 2010

Transocean, the world’s largest off-shore oil rig company, owned the Deep Water Horizon rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April of 2010. Astonishingly, the company awarded its managers healthy bonuses. Even more astonishing, safety was a major component in the calculation of the bonuses. Even without intending to, the compensation sets up managers in a conflict of interest—their compensation motivating them to keep up the good work rather than to correct for what went wrong in the management of the Horizon rig. In other words, the bonuses give all the wrong incentives, and there has been no principled leadership to point in the other direction.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, which is available at Amazon.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward: A Golden Parachute Despite Having Failed on Safety

In terms of corporate governance setting executive compensation to align the employee's incentives to the financial interests of the company even beyond his or her term of employment, it is apparently quite easy to go overboard. This can include severance packages for top managers--packages that may not reflect the performance of the executive. At the very least, it would appear that corporate lawyers are not writing very good contracts. Worst yet, insider board-management friendships may mean that the gap between achievement and severance pay may be intentionally wide. Sadly, the innocent non-management investors whose interests are not adequately represented in the board room pay the price, even if they don't perceive it on an individual level.  Even so, the lack of fairness alone calls for an end to the insider luxuriating.  The case of BP, whose rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, provides a good case study.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, which is available at Amazon.

A Structural Conflict of Interest inside BP

Mark Bly, BP’s head of safety and operations, released an internal report on September 7, 2010 blaming not only the company, but also its partners for the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill. A spokesman at Transocean quickly lashed out, calling it a “self-serving report” that minimized what was critical: BP’s “fatally flawed” well design.[1] Behind the self-serving aspect was a larger conflict of interest—one premised on the structure of two functions: an “objective” investigation and efforts to minimize legal damages.

The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon.

1. NBC News, "Transocean: BP Probe 'Self-Serving' and Misleading," September 8, 2010.

BP Clips Societal Norms

In Senate testimony on May 11, 2010,  the three companies did their best to point the finger at each other, with the result that neither BP, Transocean or Halliburton would admit, undoubtedly for liability purposes, any contributory role. In the midst of such liability evasion, those of us in the wider society want to get to the bottom of the accident so future such accidents can be prevented. In pointing the finger at the other guy while ignoring one’s own role, the managers of the three companies are added insult to injury.  

The BP executive did not mention that several days before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, BP officials chose, partly for financial reasons, to use a type of casing for the well that the company knew was the riskier of two options, according to a BP document. Specifically, BP managers opted for a “long string” pipe for the well rather than a liner tieback that would have cost $7 million to $10 million but would have added barriers to prevent gas from reaching the surface.  BP managers were not unaware of this risk. The concern with the method BP chose, the document said, was that if the cement around the casing pipe did not seal properly, gases could leak all the way to the wellhead, where only a single seal would serve as a barrier. 

As another instance of cutting corners to save time and money, BP engineers used just six “centralizers,” rather than twenty-one as recommended by Halliburton, to stabilize the well before cementing it. According to an April 16, 2010 email from BP’s well team leader, the problem was that the extra centralizers would have taken ten hours to install. Another official wrote of the decision: “Who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine.”[1]   BP managers also decided not to take twelve hours to completely circulate the heavy drilling fluid in the well that would have enabled detection and removal of any leaking gas. BP also skipped a test to determine if the cement had properly bonded to the well and rock formations. A petroleum engineer independent of BP told a congressional committee that the decision was “horribly negligent.”[2]

Workers from the rig and company officials said that hours before the explosion, gases were leaking through the cement, which had been set in place by the oil services contractor, Halliburton, which Dick Cheney once ran. But it was not merely the casing and cement that were problematic. On 60 Minutes on May 16, 2010, a worker who was on the rig when the accident happened spoke of a BP manager overruling a Transocean manager to cut corners, such as beginning to drain the pressure fluid from the well before the third “cork” was installed.  The methane was able to reach the rig’s engines because there was insufficient pressure to keep the gas down in the well.  Also, a BP manager had earlier ignored the worker’s warning that there were shreds of rubber coming up in the drilling–the rubber being from the device that was supposed to take pressure readings (e.g., whether there is gas in the well).  Nevertheless, the BP manager who testified before the Senate blamed Transocean and Halliburton managers, and on the morning after the 60 Minutes interview BP’s COO said he was just focused on the clean-up and knew nothing of such “details” even though his specialty was in development and exploration. Both in cutting corners and in ignoring his job description, BP’s COO demonstrates a willful disregard for societal norms wherein society itself is protected and accountability is accepted.  Sadly, this attitude is not uncommon in the business world.

Perhaps as business operations expand in businesses too big to fail, the societal dangers in the attitude are magnified because more damage can result. In other words, it becomes increasingly dangerous to a society to allow such an attitude to exist.  Where societal norms are ignored by business managers, perhaps the societal norm that allows for their authority should be rescinded as well. This is a social contract reading of society, wherein if one side of the norms are broken, the other side is deemed invalid as well.  The problem is that social contracts unravel rather slowly or incrementally, such that a dangerous attitude can be allowed to remain in a position of authority.  It is worth investigating whether violating societal norms is actually detrimental to a company’s bottom line. 

To the extent that a social contract has a certain inertia, it may be that the bottom line can survive long enough to allow the attitude to survive and perhaps even prosper.   These matters are distinct from questions of justification, which lie in the field of business ethics, and from those of whether more government regulation is needed, which lie in the field of business and government. We can define corporate social responsibility as meeting the general expectation in a society that people admit to their wrong-doing or mistakes and make amends.  This is different from the ethical question of whether people should admit to their wrong-doing or mistakes and if so why.  It is also distinct from the question of the proper relationship between business and government.  Business and society involves the relationship of business interest and societal norms.  To treat the latter (or the former, for that matter) as ethical requires ethical justification, which is more than simply aligning business and societal norms.  In other words, a societal norm is not in itself ethically justifying (consider Nazi Germany as a case in point).  With these distinctions in mind, I turn now to the field of business and society.

I contend that the people at BP (and Halliburton) admitting to their role and paying for economic damages incurred by third parties would be more important than BP’s charitable giving, even if some people in the wider society may have let BP off the hook for the accident if the company’s managers had decided to announce a new philanthropical project unrelated to the accident. Working on another society problem does not make up for having not admitted to BP managers' negligence.  Culpability, on other words. cannot be obviated or transferred so easily.

Too often, business managers use the term “responsibility” even as they are evading it for financial reasons. BP initially estimated the daily output of the leaks at between one and fourteen thousand barrels a day; BP picked the low end-point because the amount of fines the company would pay was tied to the volume. That the company managers were misleading the wider society didn’t seem to factor into their financial decision. As a result, the anticipated damage to the Gulf (and the world) was not sufficiently appreciated in the wider society. The convenient use of  the term “responsibility” can be gleemed from the Senate testamony of Lamar McKay of BP.  “As a responsible party under the Oil Pollution Act,” he said, ”we will carry out our responsibilities.” But he quickly added that Transocean “had responsibility for the safety of the drilling operations.”[3]  That is to say, he acknowledged the obligation to be responsible for his mistakes while conveniently ignoring the mistakes made at his company. By pointing the finger at people at another company, McKay was contradicting his own asseveration on being responsible.  It is like he was lying even as he insisted that people shouldn’t lie.

Pointing the finger is childish, even if it is done for financial reasons. Steven L. Newman, president and chief executive of Transocean, did no better that the BP executive when he said that the accident had to have arisen from elements of the work done by other companies. “Were all appropriate tests run on the cement and the casing?” he asked, apparently implicating Halliburton. Tim Probert of Halliburton said in turn that all work on the casing by his company was carried out “as directed by the well owner,” meaning BP.[4]  Suggesting that the men act like adults and take responsibility for what their coworkers had done (or failed to d0), the ranking Republican minority member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, told them to stop the finger-pointing. “I would suggest to all three of you that we are all in this together,” she said.[5] Notice that she is pointing to a societal norm, rather than using an ethical rationale. She is essentially asking the executives to step up to societal standards. Unfortunately, there was no sign that the three boys would take responsibility for their actions, as they continued on, still oriented to the other guy.  The cost to society includes a more difficult route to uncovering the cause of the accident and possible accidents to come from BP. The company’s clean-up efforts do not address the cause of the accident; the spending does not go far enough. In other words, BP can’t spend its way out of it, or can it?  Are there societal norms that allow it to suffice?  My question is this: why hasn’t the social contract unravelled that has allowed the managers at BP to continue to hold their jobs (and BP to remain in business)?  Is economic liberty at play here–society saying that there is room in such liberty for a shirking attitude?

1. Ian Urbina, "BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Well Before Blast," The New York Times, May 26, 2010.

2. Neil King, Jr. and Russell Gold, “Congress Says BP Crew Focused on Costs,” The Wall Street Journal,  June 15, 2010, p. A5.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.