The American Red Cross (Ethics) - Essay Example

These include blood services, food, blankets, cots, emergency and disaster relief services, health and safety services, and dozens of other goods and services provided to people in need. Their ethics document is highly developed, including standards for the sharing of biomedical knowledge, protocols for behavior in war, compliance with the law, avoidance of conflicts of interest, confidentiality and rules governing gifts (Red Cross). This makes ethical breaches especially troubling: The ARC is not only a leader in relief efforts and humanitarian work, but has clear issues and protocols for dealing with and managing ethical issues.

It is important to note that recent problems with the ARC have not prevented it from doing good work on the ground for hundreds of thousands of people. Ongoing relief efforts continue. Yet the breaches could jeopardize that work. Executive turnover at the top, from Elizabeth Dole to Bernadine Healy to Mark Everson, not only occurred under inauspicious circumstances (Healy's failure to adequately respond to 9/11, Everson's sexual dalliances and abuse of authority), but threatened the contiguity of leadership important to managing an organization as big and diverse as the ARC (Ferrell and Ferrell, 2011, p. 503). Embezzlement in many state chapters occurred, one of the most shocking being a Pennsylvania manager who stole money for crack cocaine!

Congressional mandates have only stemmed, not stopped, the reports of embezzlement and impropriety. Hurricane Katrina also reflected badly on the ARC, though here most of the blame and attention was placed upon FEMA and the Bush administration's inadequate response (Ferrell and Ferrell, 2011, p. 505). Yet the ARC did make many miscalculations, such as using felons, diverting relief supplies, and poor tracking and distribution (Ferrell and Ferrell, 2011, p. 506). The issue is that, as a charitable organization beholden not only to contributors but also to policy-maker, agencies and taxpayers, the ARC's ethical issues threaten its ability to market, gain contributions, and remain trustworthy as a leadership force in humanitarian aid.

As noted, the ARC has an extensive moral code. This is not simply a statement of principles, though those principles are well-established and complex. ARC care providers are supposed to be, in a sense, nurses and doctors for the world. They are, for many, a one-stop shop for needs: People in poverty-stricken, disaster-stricken or crisis areas, refugees and other recipients of aid get everything from medical care to clothes and blankets. The ARC attempts to avoid partisanship and nationalism: They seek to serve all of mankind (Red Cross).

Again, most of the problems that have plagued the ARC have been leadership, not rank-and-file, issues: Embezzlement by managers and poor executive decisions are damning, true, but there is no evidence that the people actually providing aid have declined one iota in their ethical standards, belief in the ARC's core principles, or have ceased to provide a useful service. None of the four major organizational ethical philosophies can justify the ARC's current lapses, but what philosophy do they generally operate under?

Between denotative, relativistic, deontological and consequentalist frameworks, the ARC's traditional