The BAE scandal is old news of course. "Old News" that tried and tested way of brushing unhelpful stories away - but the story popped its snout out of the trough again the other day under the heading "BAE paid too little heed to ethics, says report". This is the last reference to the Guardain for a while - it does seem to have become an irony free zone.
Imagine, an arms company that fails to pay heed to ethics. Which Ethics101 unit are they talking about Utilitarian ethics - 'only kill if the overall level of happiness is increased' perhaps? Or the Kantian 'Do not act in a way that is counter to the univaersal law'.
The core of the isuue, though, is the 'unethical' bribes paid to some Sheik to buy a bunch of those horrible Typhoon planes (see pic). If selling weapons of mass destruction to dictatorships and using public money to persaude them to purchase and then getting the government to supress the enquiry into the case weren't enough, BAE is in the shit in America for prety much the same reasons but ". . .political moves are being floated that could extricate BAE from corruption investigations in the US, in return for a financial settlement without admission of liability."
So to get off a bribery charge you can pay the authorities and get away with it. Strange ethics indeed.
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