generosity

Obligation or Charity: Retired Baseball Player Pensions and Fairness

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is an old ethical problem: what is “fair”?  If you help someone, are you obligated to help everyone? Does charity have to be consistent to be fair? Does a potential beneficiary of generosity have a right to demand it? It is obviously good for those who are fortunate and successful to share the benefits of their success with the unfortunate and less successful, but is it unethical if they choose not to?

These are some of the ethics issues being raised in a controversy launched by the major league baseball veterans, now retired, who played  between 1947-1979. In those days, when free agency was just beginning and top players made six-figure salaries rather than seven or eight as they do now, a player needed four full years of  time on a big league roster to qualify for  medical benefits and an annuity. In 1980, however, new rules put in place by the Major League Baseball Players Association  granted health insurance benefits to those with just one day of service, and a pension after merely six weeks. The new benefits were not retroactive. Continue reading →

Nice Guy, Unethical Lawyer

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

A Massachusetts lawyer, Daniel Szostkiewicz, tried to help out a former client by hiring her as his receptionist in August 2007. She asked him to pay her “under the table,” so she could keep state health benefits for her husband, who was ill. Szostkiewicz agreed. Six months later, he fired her, and his ex-receptionist applied for unemployment. This led to the state discovering the undisclosed payment arrangement.

Szostkiewicz has received a three-month suspension, with all but one month stayed as long as he allows his law firm to be audited.

I think he got off too easy. Continue reading →

On Unethical Tipping

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I had an enlightening, even shocking, discussion last night with a young woman who waitresses as a second job. I asked her about her observations regarding customer tips during the recession and generally. From what she says, there are a lot of unethical diners out there. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: The Billionaires of “The Giving Pledge”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Encouraged by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, more than 30 U.S. billionaires have pledged to give at least half of their fortunes to charity. Buffett and Gates launched The Giving Pledge project in June. The Giving Pledge does not accept money, or try to steer its participants to any particular cause.  Nor is it a contract. The project asks billionaires to make a moral commitment to give away their wealth to charity.

This is clearly the ideal time for such an effort, when state and local governments are fighting deficits and less wealthy donors are having difficulty meeting prior levels of charity. It is also an eloquent statement by a group of productive, talented, hard-working and patriotic Americans that has been unfairly used too often as a cheap political target by the Obama Administration, Congress and the media.

Nothing bad whatsoever can come from The Giving Pledge. Continue reading →

Gift or Bribe? Barry Bonds’ Generosity to the NABJ

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Barry Bonds, the retired baseball slugger who used banned or illegal performance enhancing drugs to fuel a late-carer transformation that allowed him to grow from merely great into Superman, breaking every home run record in sight as a result, has adamantly maintained his innocence despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence, positive drug tests, and the verdict of common sense. He has also played the race card when it seemed convenient to his cause. Bonds’ cheating ways have made him rich beyond belief, and his only real problems now are 1) the likelihood of a Federal perjury trial next year in connection with his Grand Jury testimony that he never knowingly took steroids, and 2) the fact that few of the sportswriters who vote for the Hall of Fame seem inclined to enshrine steroid cheats, based on their rejection, so far, of Mark McGwire, whose steroid-assisted single season home run record Bonds broke while he was especially pumped-up.

Both of these problems could conceivably be helped by some positive press opinion, something that Bonds has never cultivated, being inclined to treat all journalists as if they were something he had to wipe off the bottom of his shoe. Thus it raised eyebrows when  it was announced that the charitable foundation created and controlled by Barry Bonds has donated $20,000 to The National Association of Black Journalists. NABJ president Kathy Times told the Associated Press that the money will be used to fund an annual award promoting entrepreneurial spirit. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Garage Sale Treasure

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

CNN is reporting the story of a man who bought two small boxes at a garage sale ten years ago and just discovered that they contained 65 previously undiscovered glass negatives by famed nature photographer Ansel Adams. He purchased the boxes for $45 (haggled down from $75), and their contents are now assessed to be worth at least $200 million.

Such stories raise interesting ethical questions. For example, if you were the lucky stiff who bought the boxes, would you give any part of it to the original owner? Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I know what you are going to say.  There has to be an angle, right?

“Come on: fool me once, shame on you, fool me 67,896,432 times, shame on me. A mayor donates her kidney to a citizen of her city just because it’s a nice thing to do?  Who is gullible enough to believe that?“

East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon, like many politicians, uses her Facebook page less for social networking than for political public relations, and to built those fundraising mailing lists, of course.  Almon was perusing the status updates of her more than 1,600 “friends” last year when she happened to read the status update of Carlos Sanchez, whom knew slightly. It said his friends and relatives had all been tested and couldn’t donate a kidney, which he needed desperately.

So  Almon, 35, got tested, was a match, and gave him her kidney. Continue reading →

Blizzard Ethics and Parking Space Etiquette

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Great Blizzard of 2010 inspired The Washington Post to publish a piece about snow ethics, focusing especially on this touchy question: Is it ethical to park in a space shoveled out by someone else?

The problem with the article is that it doesn’t ask the ethically crucial second question: Is it ethical for someone to hold one of the rare cleared parking spaces on the street open, when other motorists desperately need a place to park? Continue reading →

James Cameron, Poul Anderson, and Posterity’s Loss

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

James Cameron, whose ground-breaking film “Avatar” will soon be the top-grossing movie of all time, is currently being bashed in some of the more obscure corners of the blogosphere for plagiarism. This time the criticism is not based on his blatant borrowing from Russian science fiction, but for his lifting of ideas from an American master of the genre, Poul Anderson. Anderson wrote a novella in 1957 entitled “Call Me Joe” that chronicled the adventures of a paraplegic who becomes telepathically merged with a manufactured alien life form created to explore a planet. He is exhilarated by the sensations and power of his artificially-created body, and eventually is seduced into abandoning his humanity completely to become a significant figure in the development of a new civilization. Along the way, he battles vicious alien creatures. Sound familiar? Yes, these are major components of “Avatar” as well. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes, Holiday Division: The Philly Mystery Diners

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ethics Newsline reported a story that we almost missed: a  mysterious anonymous couple ate breakfast at the Aramingo Diner in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Philadelphia, and paid for both their meal and that of the diners at a table next to them. Their spontaneous act of generosity set off a “pay it forward” chain reaction worthy of Haley Joel Osment that had one waitress crying tears of joy. For the next five hours, everybody paid someone else’s check, “paying it forward,” with no concern about the price of the meals involved.

Was it  just a group of people who decided to act out a scene from a Christmas movie Frank Capra forgot to make? Did it only happen because the diner had reasonably priced meals? Was the whole thing staged by some street theater group?

Let’s hope it was not a stunt, and that the experience of being nice to strangers for no reason other than that it’s a good habit to have will last longer than the family Christmas tree.

As for the Mystery Couple—Ethics Heroes for sure—good work, and Merry Christmas!