Seemingly nice and good people still fall prey to habitually unethical thinking. This was illustrated to me vividly just now when I heard a call fielded by Rush Limbaugh while I was driving to the cleaners. Today, like every Friday, was a free-for-all in Rush’s domain: callers get to pick the topic.

A middle-aged woman called Rush to announce that something was “stuck in her craw,” namely, that former NFL players with serious cognitive disabilities were suing the NFL, because they had not known the extent of damage the repeated head trauma their football careers entailed would cause them later in life. She was indignant because, we learned, she had suffered a concussion when she was a nurse (due to a violent patient), and now, years later and well into retirement, she suffered vertigo and the loss of the use of one arm as a consequence of that injury.

She said. in essence, “These football players were paid millions to bang heads, and they are complaining. I wasn’t paid millions, and I didn’t agree to get hit on the head. All I did was help people as a nurse, and nobody’s going to pay me for my disability.”

“So you don’t support the NFL players being compensated?”Rush asked.

“No! They got their millions. Why should they get more when people like me get nothing?”

And there you have it. This is what passes for fairness among a large number of our neighbors, colleagues, relatives and friends, even though it makes no sense, has no relationship to fairness, and is as mean and self-centered as a the revenge of a four-year-old.  The attitude is also at the root of a great deal of political advocacy. The underlying thought: if I have to suffer, it is unfair that everybody doesn’t have to suffer too.

This is ethics fatally tainted by non-ethical and unethical motivations like jealousy, envy, bitterness, anger, bias, hate and frustration. It is the exact reverse of the truly ethical impulse, which is “I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I have.” From that misbegotten vantage point, it metastasizes into thorough bile and illogic:

• Those players, a lot of them anyway, are far worse off than the bitter nurse.  They are suffering from premature dementia, serious personality changes, and incurable brain damage that is driving some of them to suicide. She is arguing that they should suffer far more than she has or will, in part because they are abstractions to her, not real people.

• The nurse can’t legitimately compare her plight to that of hundreds of NFL players. There are a lot of them, to begin with, which is why they are now able to sue en masse. If many nurses were being hurt by having schizophrenics  throw them down, like Rush’s caller, and hospitals weren’t warning them of the danger, then the analogy would still be lousy, but better.

• The players were willing to accept certain risks of injury, just like the nurse was. Her injury, resulting from a single violent patient, was within those assumed risks, just as a single, crippling accident was reasonable figured into the equation by all of the NFL players. They had no reason to assume that the routine pounding through their headgear would leave them senile in their 50’s, homicidal, or in constant pain. If the NFL knew or should have known that this was the real risk they were assuming and neither told them nor took reasonable steps to prevent it, the NFL really is responsible for their medical problems and should pay for them. That’s not necessarily the case with the nurse, unless her employers secretly knew there was a huge, violent patient stalking her and never let her know about it so that she would stay on the job.

• Her lack of compassion for anyone who has earned, made or inherited a lot of money is pure class bias and envy, mixed with the warped political logic of the Occupy movement: the ex-football players “have more than their share,” on the flawed assumption that it is fair for every human being to share in good fortune and wealth equally,  so she hates them and can muster no compassion or sympathy for their terrible plight.

• The nurse expressed satisfaction with her career and despite her current malady feels she got what she wanted out of nursing: she just resents that she wasn’t paid as much as an NFL tackle. In contrast, I am quite certain many if not most of the damaged football players would have chosen another line of work even at the loss of millions if they knew they were selling their minds, health, sanity, longevity and relationships with their loved ones for the privilege of being high-paid athletes.

I wondered what Limbaugh really thought of his caller and her rant. He treated her respectfully but non-committally, expressing sympathy and admiration for her dedication without arguing with her. Limbaugh has ridiculed the NFL’s efforts to reduce the violence in the sport, calling it “chickification,” but he also objects to the trend of vilifying the wealthy, and Rush is not a fan of stupidity. He chose to be kind and allow the woman to rid herself of what was “stuck in her craw,” allowing her to feel a little better, perhaps, as she continues through life with a useless arm and chronic vertigo. The downside of Rush’s choice is that millions of listeners heard a display of unethical reasoning, and some of the mean-spirited, nasty and ungenerous rationalizations may have taken root. The fewer people out there who reason like the ex-nurse, the better off we all are.