New York Times Magazine columnist Randy Cohen told delegates at yesterday's conference that the business practice of transparency was an insufficient approach to ethical behaviour.

Mr. Cohen writes the weekly column 'The Ethicist' and is a regular contributor to 'Weekend All Things Considered' on Public Radio. He also won three Emmy awards as a writer for 'Late Night with David Letterman' and a fourth Emmy for his work on 'TV Nation'.

Yesterday, he addressed the subject of transparency at MAR's 9th Annual Conference on Offshore Funds.

He said: "The idea here is you should only act in ways that you would be willing to act if the entire community could see what your are doing."

Mr Cohen said that this conservative approach to ethics could be viewed as confessional wrongdoing."

"It only asks that we live up to the values of our society," he said. "Transparency is good but it is not enough. The butcher sign that says tainted meat on sale or a cigarette pack that runs the surgeon general's warning ? in both cases they are practising transparency. That is a good thing but not enough, not when you spend billions of dollars every year advertising cigarettes or if you know poor folks are going to be pressured to buy beef. The caveat emptor [the principle that the buyer alone is responsible if dissatisfied is not the loftiest moral principle."

Mr. Cohen said that disclosure can even be perverted as a way to avoid a company's responsibility.

"What the cigarette warning really says in a practical manner is you can't sue me. When a boss says working in this nuclear plant is risky what he is really saying is you're on your own. Yet to my way of thinking it is still unethical to sell toxic products or to fail to provide safe working conditions."

Mr. Cohen says that the myth of rational choice is also built into the limitation of transparency.

He said: "If we know all the facts we will make reasonable decisions but the fact is I'm not a mature adult behaving reasonably. I'm a big baby when it comes to the stock market or computer repairs or my personal life. I'm affected by advertising, I'm swayed by emotion and I'm completely bound by my own ignorance. Inevitably, I rely on the integrity of those I deal with which I suppose makes me a bit of a sucker but it also says transparency is necessary but its not sufficient."

Mr. Cohen said that when the editors of the magazine first approached him about writing a column titled 'The Ethicist' he misunderstood and thought he was being asked to write a column titled 'The Anaesthetist' where his job would be to lull the readers of 'The Time' back to sleep on a Sunday morning.

He has neither a PhD on the subject matter ? he actually studied music in graduate school ? nor any other formal credentials, but he said that perhaps his editors felt that, in a democracy, the questions of ethics should not be left to the specialists but instead addressed by ordinary citizens.

"Perhaps I am their definition of ordinary or perhaps they thought that given my peculiar background I might make the discussion lively and help readers see questions in a fresh way and that is what I strive to do. I take a great deal of reassurance in knowing 'Cat Fanciers Magazine' isn't written by a cat," he said.

Mr. Cohen said that writing for 'Late Night with David Letterman' was excellent training for writing about ethics.

He said: "'Late Night' was a profoundly moral enterprise. For one thing it had a coherent moral thesis that our childhoods were bought and sold for profit and as a consequence we grew up in a world of witless pop culture c**p. If the show was about anything and I think often it was, it was meant to offer a critique of that c**p especially as it manifested itself in rock movies and crummy television shows. The show had a real clear sense of right and wrong and its job was to differentiate between the two."

"Do you tell" questions are those most likely to come across his desk at the magazine.

He said: "Do you tell about a co-worker who is taking kickbacks, a classmate who is plagiarising, your best friend's spouse who is having an affair? They are called duty to report questions. You yourself have done no wrong but you are aware of the wrongdoing of others. When do you have an obligation to come forward?"

In almost every jurisdiction the law imposes no duty to report upon ordinary citizens even though they are witnesses to the most hideous of crimes. While there are some legal exceptions to this rule, Mr. Cohen says that nonetheless there are moral obligations to report wrongdoing.

He said: "You do have an ethical obligation to come forward and report wrongdoing if by doing so you can prevent serious imminent harm to a particular person. By a particular person, you have no such obligation to report someone if they represent a menace to society, a general threat, but if you see an angry guy heading to my house, call 9/11."

Mr. Cohen said that the Catholic Church was one example of what can happen if that duty to report is ignored.

"Far more disturbing to me than the crimes of the individual priests was the failure of the bishops, the church management to come forward and report them even when they had every reason to believe that a particular priest might do harm in the future."

The Ethicist acknowledged that while being good may be a good strategy for business ? you can't conduct business unless you know contracts will be honoured, shipments delivered and bills paid - there is a paradox to this theory.

"Honesty may be good for the entire community but dishonesty is a wonderful strategy for the individual. There is no question that deceit, treachery, ruthlessness can be excellent business strategies," he said.

"A few dreadful people will go to jail but if you look around at the world it is clear that, yes, the wicked do prosper. Now one argument against behaving dreadfully in business is its only a short term strategy, that in the long term people will get to know you, stop doing business with you, but the great economist John Maynard Keynes pointed out that in the long term we'll all be dead so if dishonesty pays ? and I believe it clearly does ? how do we get people to be honest."

Mr. Cohen says that one way is to encourage individual rectitude sometimes punitively. The other is to attempt to build honest communities to create conditions in which it is possible for people to be good.

He cited cab lines and dog laws in New York City. No one enforces the tradition of waiting in line at a "cab line" or picking up after a dog, but most people responded to the introduction of these concepts positively.

He said: "I would say 90 percent of the people 90 percent of the time pick up after their dog. By changing the social conditions, the assumptions about how people should act we have really transformed the way they will act."

Mr. Cohen said that you have to hold an individual accountable for their action, but that is not where it end. Societies must also create conditions in which good behaviour is at least possible.

"There is a kind of en ecology of ethics that no matter how much you scream at them, most Spartans are going to act like Spartans, most Athenians are going to act like Athenians," Mr. Cohen said.

"Every community is dynamic, whether it is Sparta or Enron or the 'Letterman Show' or the White House. We not only live in these communities, but through our actions we create them. Each community supports our values as we shape its structures and so if ethics will flourish only in a just society it then becomes a kind of ethical obligation to create a just society."