Ethics are very subjective. What may seem acceptable to me will probably shock someone else, and vice versa.
For a business, the easier step towards ethic responsibility is clearly to treat its employees well and equally, whilst respecting the environment. Yet, most companies don't do this first step, and that's one very good reason for me to be proud of mine (note: I don't own it).
However when you work in the service industry, there are obvious choices of clients that will, whether you want it or not, have an ethical meaning for people who work for you. Clients do fuck up, or do sometimes promote things that are ethically blurry.
Which agency would refuse Nestlé because of their actions in Indonesia? Who would turn down Total or Goldman Sachs? They're big money, and while they do some things wrong, they can't be blamed for all evil in the world. They're not selling drugs or weapons, are they?
It's easy to think that we should forgive our clients for what they do wrong. At the end of the day, who are we to preach? Anyone here who has never sinned... But the reality is that we all, at some point, feel very righteous in front or our TV, occasionally with a little tear down our eye. Then why stop at the working place? Are we ready to sell out our beliefs for a steady income?
It isn't necessarily wrong to work for a corporation that does bad things. At the end of the day, they can still improve, and pointing the finger isn't going to solve any problem. Besides, their wrong doings can sometimes be over evaluated by a group of extremists for whom nothing is good until it's perfect. However, it shouldn't stop us from thinking more about our involvement in the grand scheme of things. Especially when our job is to promote this company, and increase people's affinity for their brands.
Being marketers makes us, whether we want it or not, accomplices of who and what we promote, and history has shown us that it doesn't take much more than a willingly blind collaboration for a whole nation to fall into dark corners.
We recently had an issue with a product that was supposedly tested on animals, which obviously raised concerns (and defiance) amongst some of my colleagues (including myself). Others argued that saying this kind of things would open an ethical pandora's box (where do we stop? Are we right enough ourselves to show despise to people who work for this client? and what about the other clients, who are doing this and that wrong? Why don't we care about these ones?).
In the end, and not necessarily for this reason, we ended up not going for the project. I believe that, should the issue be real, it would have been the right thing to do.
Going for projects that defy our beliefs is, in my eyes, ethical prostitution. It means that while you have ideals, you're ready to put them aside for money. We're lucky enough to have many bad things hidden from us, we shouldn't behave like ostriches when we actually know that there is a problem. I'm sure I'd be totally depressed if I knew all about the clients I work for, and yes, it's always blurry to decide where to stop. Yes, there is something extremely self righteous in the decision to turn down a client for ethical reasons. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't have a line. Because not having a line is exactly how these things can and will still happen.
Where's your line?
PS: Having just watched The Cove (brilliant, watch it if you haven't!), I just realised how much cruelty there is in keeping cetaceans in captivity. Ric O'Barry, the guy who created it all (Flipper, that's him), came to realise one day how cruel it was for these animals to be kept outside the ocean, and has since been fighting his whole life to try to undo what he had started (to some extent, his story deeply reminded me of Einstein and his fight against nuclear weapons).
No one likes to think of wild animals in cages, but most of us came to the conclusion one day or another that it wasn't that bad, some of them even needed it after all (ya' know, preservation and raising animals that couldn't survive in the wild, thins are not black and white and no solution is ideal bla bla bla).
Let's be realistic here. For a man, who knows dolphins probably better than anyone else on this planet, to fight against what he had created with so much passion and dedication, it takes some serious belief that it is just wrong beyond any personal judgement to keep a dolphin (or an orca) inside a water tank for tourists' enjoyment.
It is one thing to take care of these animals, it's another to make millions displaying them doing all sorts of tricks. And while I know that there are better places than others, the inconvenient truth is simple: it is a lie to say these parks have an educational value (Attenborough has one, not them), and at the end of the day, they promote and normalise the very act of using captive cetaceans for people's entertainment.
They may take the best care they can of their animals, and I'm sure people working there are genuinely nice people who have helped more of these animals than I (and you) ever will. But this is just not an environment for this kind of animals, period. And promoting it opens the gates to all sorts of businesses to thrive, including the kind that get their dolphins from places like Taiji in Japan. It is simply irresponsible.
You probably wonder how it's relevant to my post above... My colleagues won't.