I keep hearing about problems of conflicts of interest on the news, but I rarely get a better description of what that means. I heard a story today where doctors are being accused of having a conflict of interest in the way they do business. But what kind of a conflict of interest would that be? Does a doctor have a conflict of interest because they like to perform surgery, but they can’t stand the sight of blood? Or, do they want to prescribe medicines to help people, but they also worry about prescription drug abuse? Or would a radiologist be torn between using the x-ray machine to look at broken bones vs. using the machine to see people with their clothes off? Or would a doctor be conflicted by having to try to keep rude people alive when they’re annoying and impolite to them? Are these the kinds of conflicts of interest they’re talking about?
Whenever I hear the expression “a conflict of interest”, I think of things that could be hobbies or interests that might tend to cancel each other out, like being an avid football fan, but also an anti-concussion activist, or maybe someone who likes to go fishing but also wants to protect the lives of fish. How about someone who is interested in scuba diving, but is also terrified of drowning? What about someone who wants to be a racecar driver but who is also passionate about setting safe speed limits and putting speed bumps everywhere to slow cars down? Perhaps there’s also someone who loves designing monster makeup but hates horror movies and is afraid of the dark. Or maybe there’s someone who hates and demonstrates against teen sex, but likes writing prurient romance novels aimed at teenagers. All of this sounds like a conflict of interest to me, but they never reference any of these kids of things when they talk about conflicts of interest on the news.
Whenever anyone talks about a conflict of interest, they always talk about stuff like a guy who gets paid illegally to do something they might do anyway as part of their job: like being paid to put a building somewhere they were considering putting it anyway. Now, this may be illegal bribery, but unless they get caught, it’s hardly a conflict of interest, since it’s combining two things that they’re clearly totally interested in: building a building, and getting paid even more money than they were originally going to get for doing it. That sounds like a combination of interests, rather than a conflict of them: see what I mean? And for stuff like political graft, that’s a politician getting paid bribe money to do something dishonest, right? Well, politicians are always lying, so clearly they are interested in being dishonest and misrepresenting things (or else they wouldn’t have gotten into politics to begin with!), and then they’re getting extra money to do it: clearly this is a case of extra reward for doing what they’re already doing anyway, which is hardly a conflict of interest, in the actual definition of these words. If they mean it’s dishonest and unseemly and perhaps even illegal, then fine; but to say it’s a conflict of things they’re interested in, well, that’s just flat-out incorrect. It is not a conflict, but rather, a combination of different interests that these people have that in this case align perfectly: an interest in getting money, and an interest in doing something related to their job that they already like doing. It’s just that the combination of these corresponding interests for one person may create an illegal or undesirable outcome for everyone else. Isn’t that a more accurate way of portraying what’s going on when they say something is “a conflict of interest”?
So in future, how about saying that it is a dishonest and criminal combination of mutual interests at work here creating an undesirable result for society, rather than a conflict of interest: it certainly would sound more accurate, and after all, isn’t it a conflict of interests for you to sound like you’re misrepresenting an issue, if you work for the news? (Even though the news deliberately misrepresents issues all the time. It's only a conflict of interests for them if people know they're doing it and stop trusting them. And it looks like that's been happening more and more lately to the news.)
