Many actions that appear to be unethical at first glance are really just thoughtless, careless decisions by people who should know better. It is only when knowing better is an obligation of their jobs or positions that a foolish mistake becomes unethical, or when it involves willful disregard for basic ethical principles.
Here are three scenarios from the news. Your choices: Dumb, Unethical, or Dumb and Unethical.
Scenario 1. You are the wife of a national leader presiding over a nation in economic crisis. Citizens are jobless in disturbing numbers, and deficits are reaching alarming size, states are cutting back on essential expenditures, and your husband is making speeches about “tightening belts.” You pick this time to take your daughter and a large number of family friends on a lavish vacation in Spain.
Is this Dumb, Unethical, or Dumb and Unethical?
ANSWER: Close call, but the verdict here is Dumb and Unethical.
Being a captive public figure in the White House is not the picnic people seem to think it is, and criticizing either Obama for taking vacations, especially the President, who is always on the job anyway, is a cheap shot. But here the operative word is Spain. The economy here is in trouble; if Michelle is going to spend money at a luxury hotel, it should be an American hotel—this is a matter of loyalty and citizenship. The Secret Service has to follow her and her entourage anywhere, but the costs of doing so overseas is infinitely more expensive, and there is that deficit thing: the values at stake here are integrity, responsibility, and fairness. Finally, leaders really have an obligation not to live it up ostentatiously when the rest of the nation is suffering in heat, anxiety, joblessness and housing problems. The Obamas have been remarkably tone-deaf on this factor all along, but Michelle’s jaunt charges over the limits of responsibility, respect for the feelings of others, and good taste.
Scenario 2. You are the mayor of a city that has just suffered through the trauma of having its mayor impeached and thrown into prison. The city also has one of the worst murder rates in America. You nominate a convicted murderer and convict the city’s police board
Is this Dumb, Unethical, or Dumb and Unethical?
ANSWER: It is Dumb.
Mayor Dave Bing of Detroit believes in redemption. Raphael Johnson, who served 12 years in prison for a Second Degree Murder committed while he was 17 appears to have turned his life around, and Bing’s argument that former criminals who have paid their debts to society should be able to offer their services and accumulated wisdom to the public has some legitimacy. He’s just wrong in this case, in this city, at this time. His appointment isn’t unethical, but it sends a message that if he realized he was sending it, would be unethical: it suggests, falsely, that Detroit doesn’t have sufficient numbers of qualified non-felons to staff its public boards, and that message is disheartening. It also risks defining down the misconduct of lawbreaking. Since he succeeded a mayor who proved to be a felon, Bing has an obligation to distance himself and his administration from criminals, reformed or otherwise, not be an advocate for them.
Scenario 3. You are a city health inspector. You see a roadside lemonade stand, and inform the proprietor that since she has not purchased a $120 temporary restaurant license, she needs to shut down the stand of pay a $500 fine. The proprietor is a 7-year-old girl.
Is this Dumb, Unethical, or Dumb and Unethical?
ANSWER: Dumb and Unethical.
In Portland Oregon, where crazed sex-poodles run free, Jon Kawaguchi, environmental health supervisor for the Multnomah County Health Department, explained the lemonade stand bust by saying, “We need to put the public’s health first.” This could be the symbol of all outrageous bureaucratic “no-tolerance” enforcement decisions, if the public schools weren’t so active and creative on that front. Enforcing any laws, rules or regulations requires common sense, proportion, and the judgment to know when strict enforcement is unreasonable, unfair and cruel. This conduct exhibited a shocking lack of any of these qualities, plus a callousness and ignorance of the culture of American childhood that is inexcusable. Intimidating and discouraging a little girl for failing to follow regulations that were never intended to apply to kids’ lemonade stands, and ruining an iconic childhood experience for an innocent is an abuse of power by any standard, and a public employee who can’t figure that out before the media comes down on him is unqualified for public employment. Meanwhile, he’s given Glenn Beck great material for an anti-government rant that even Keith Olbermann will have to agree with. The county health department has apologized, but it is too little, too late.
Ethics Alarms 
County health department… I had always heard of this type of thing happening, but was pretty sure it was mostly legend. In this instance, the legend has become the man.
I think this situation shows a lack of citizen oversight in a bureaucracy. Town councils across the nation need to create exemptions for lemonade stands operated by children under the age of 12 (provided they don’t have a permanent structure and employees).
Do we really have to formalize common sense? Once we start writing “lemonade stand” exceptions into the law, then the next idiot will argue “if they wanted to exempt a 5-year-old’s mud pie stand, it would have been in the law.”
We’re both in the same situation arguing the same points. Common sense dictates that murder is wrong, but we wrote a law. Obviously common sense has taken a nose dive in recent years and unless this health official is made an example of for other health officials, it sounds like the poison is in the water and we need an antidote for the future.
No, we don’t need to write exceptions into the law, but the alternative is a public flogging for this individual.
Public face-pieing?
The notion of “This simply isn’t done” and resultant societal snubbing of the malefactor has long passed into the notion of “There ought to be a law.” The result of this bureacratic mission creep has resulted in the “swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” [See the Declaration of Independence.] John Kidner, in his delightful book “A Guide to Creative Bureacracy: The Kidner Report,” suggested that all bureacrats belonged to an organization called the Society of Bureaucrats (more frequently known by its initials) and whose motto was something like “There’s no point in working in a bureacracy if you can’t be a bureaucrat.”