Good intentions, it is said, pave the road to Hell. It’s an especially direct road when the good intentions are those of a prosecutor who doesn’t have the skills or common sense to reach the correct decision to resolve a rather easy ethical conflict. An ethical conflict occurs when there are valid ethical arguments for diametrically opposed actions, and one must weigh the priorities, implications and likely results in order to make the most ethical choice. Mark Hurlbert, the district attorney for Eagle, Colorado, faced such a conflict, as prosecutors often do. He botched it royally, and that road he’s paving is going to reach far beyond Colorado. Continue reading
restitution
Obligation or Charity: Retired Baseball Player Pensions and Fairness
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
Ethics Alarms 