Hard stops

Most ethical failure starts as a series of small trades, each one reasonable, where a harm gets priced, offset, and carried forward. A hard stop refuses to price. The list is written and dated before the opportunity arrives. A list written afterwards is an argument.

What the practice requires

• The stop list exists in writing, dated and published.
• It is authored before diligence on any specific venture. Amended on a cadence, never in deal week.
• A trigger stops the work. It does not open a negotiation about mitigation.
• The stop is recorded with its reason, so the next team sees the precedent.
• We report the count of ventures stopped. A screen that has never stopped a venture has not been tested.

Why we refuse offsets

• An offset assumes the harm and the benefit are in the same unit and land on the same people. They usually are not.
• Permit one offset and the list becomes a price sheet. Then it becomes a budget line.

Where it goes wrong

• Writing the list vague enough to survive any deal.
• Putting stop authority inside the team whose pay depends on the deal closing.
• Treating an internal finding of harm as a communications problem.

Measures

• Stop list published, dated, version-controlled. Yes or no.
• Ventures stopped by the list, per year, with reasons recorded.
• Hours from trigger identified to work stopped. Target: same working day.
• Offset transactions permitted. Target: zero, permanently.
• Share of stop decisions made by someone with no economic interest in the venture.

Three cases

These cases come from the public record: settlements, filings, testimony and the companies' own reporting. Citations are being attached case by case. Good, bad and ugly describe one decision against this one question, not the company as a whole.

How this one is marked

Green means we have the evidence and it carries a date. Yellow means someone owns the gap and there is a date to close it. Red stops the work until it clears. Early work sits at yellow for a long while, and we mark it that way.