Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 62

Should we help those unwilling to help themselves?

A few years ago, a reader from California joined a local church's singles group. The group's leader planned for the members to help cook, serve and clean up after one Saturday evening meal per month at a local homeless shelter.
On their first visit, members of the group were told that because a cookout had been planned for the shelter residents and some graduates would be manning the grills, the singles weren't needed for cooking. Instead, he handed the 10 singles trash bags and disposable gloves, and asked if they'd help pick up litter from the fenced-in yard outside the shelter.
When they went outside, there were about 200 men sitting on chairs, picnic tables and blankets on the ground. Cigarette butts, cans, bottles and candy wrappers were strewn around the yard.
"Something in my mind just immediately said, 'no' in a loud voice," the reader says.
She told her leader she had to work at midnight, which was true, and that she had a headache, which was not true, and she went home.
"All the way home, I questioned myself, and I still do," she writes. She wonders why she was willing to cook, serve and clean up for the program, but not to pick up litter.
"If (the homeless at the shelter) have it together enough to manage to get themselves to this dining room at the appointed times for meals," she writes, "they could be expected to contribute some effort."
The reader works in a hospital emergency room, so she interacts regularly with the homeless. "I contribute clothing, have found meals when they are with us, and have helped soak feet and cut toenails." She also does lots of community service, but picking up litter, "I could not do."
She never went back to the homeless shelter.
"Am I way off the beam thinking that people who are there expecting to be fed could be expected to pitch in and do what they can?" she asks. "I guess I have a dose of that old saying, 'He who will not work shall not eat.'"
That 'saying' the reader cites is an admonition from Paul to the Thessalonians in the New Testament portion of the Bible. The Thessalonians, expecting the imminent return of Jesus, exhausted their own resources and then began mooching off of others. Not cool, Paul pointed out.
It's fair for the reader to expect that the residents of the homeless shelter would be asked to help clean up the yard. What's not clear, however, is that they refused to do so. Since the job for which the singles group originally volunteered was covered, the organizer may simply have been trying to find an alternative.
The reader had every right to choose whether or not to participate. Lying about a headache to get out of the task was not the right thing to do, however. It would have been the right thing to tell the organizer the truth: that she was comfortable cooking and serving a meal, but not cleaning up a yard while those who presumably littered it sat around. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is there a by-the-book way to buy a book?

Are we obligated to buy something from the first place we discover it?
After requesting a catalog, a reader received it in the mail. He thought he might be interested in some of the products the catalog had to offer.
He perused the catalog and found a book listed that he really wanted to read. He writes that he'd never heard of the book before and wouldn't have known about it if he hadn't seen it in the catalog.
Once he knew he'd like to read the book, however, he searched around a bit to see if he could find it more cheaply than the catalog price.
"I found that I could buy it cheaper somewhere else," he writes. He also checked his local public library and found that the book was available there, as well, and on the shelves.
Since he wouldn't have known about the book if he hadn't discovered it in the catalog, he wonders about the propriety of going elsewhere to either buy the book at a cheaper price, or borrow it for no direct charge from the library.
Some readers of the column have taken me to task in the past for arguing that there's nothing wrong with browsing for a particular item one place, then buying it online or in another retail establishment if you can find a better price. Those readers and I continue to differ in our opinion.
In the case of the catalog browser, I'd make a similar argument.
It's up to me and other shoppers to decide if we want to buy an item from the place we first saw it, or if we're willing to shop around and buy it elsewhere at a better price. Or we can buy the item from a catalog or online seller and have it shipped to us at a better price. And it's up to bricks-and-mortar store owners, catalog purveyors or online sellers to decide how to make their products and service so good that we're not tempted to go elsewhere.
The right thing is for my reader to decide how he wants to spend his money and where he wants to spend it, or if he wants to spend it at all. He has no obligation to order the book from the catalog simply because that's where he first discovered it. If he decides there's some added value to doing business with the catalog supplier -- whether in the form of a special reader's guide, frequent buyer plan or other perk -- that's his choice. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Must we leave all of our children the same amount?

A married couple who read the column is nearing the age at which they say they want to get their financial affairs in order, including deciding how they will leave their assets to their three children after the couple dies.
When they drew up their will several years ago, they planned to split their assets equally among their three children.
"But each child's circumstances have changed considerably," the husband writes.
The couple is financially helping out one child and his family because of that child's poor health.
Another child, however, is in good financial shape with a great job and good pension.
"Our third child and family are doing quite well in good part because of our involvement in assisting them in some business dealings."
The parents are torn between leaving their will as is, or apportioning their children's inheritance according to their needs.
"We don't want to be unfair to any of them," writes the husband, "but the one with the least income and poor health can certainly use more money than the others."
The couple estimates that the total inheritance will be a little more than $1 million.
"My wife and I are both getting to an age where we must make a decision regarding this matter soon," writes the husband. "I'm sure we are not alone in trying to solve this sort of thing. But we don't really know who we can discuss it with."
There are financial professionals who advise on wills and estates. But the couple already knows who to go to for a will. The problem is trying to sort out the "fairness" of whatever choice they make.
They are certainly not alone. Many couples wrestle with how to allocate their assets after they die. While it's often possible to leave equal shares of whatever assets there are to any surviving children, there are sometimes mitigating circumstances that cause parents to wonder about the best thing to do.
Some parents who've loaned one child and not others large sums of cash and have never been repaid, for example, decide to deduct that amount from that child's share of an inheritance. If one child provided primary care for an ailing parent, there are occasions when parents decide to leave that child a bit more.
Leaving equal shares might be the simplest thing to do, but since the money belongs to the parents, they have every right to allocate it however they wish. They also have every right to spend as much of the money as they wish (or all of it) before they die.
If they do decide to leave more money to the child with significant health issues, the right thing to do is discuss their plans with all three children. There's no requirement that they do this, but if they truly care for their children and want to avoid creating ill will among them after the parents' deaths, discussing how the assets will be divided before the time comes is the best way to handle the situation. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

To trash, recycle or donate?

Is it better to recycle goods or donate them to organizations that may re-use them? That's essentially what a reader wants to know.
He gives the example of cottage cheese. After he buys a container and finishes eating the cottage cheese, he drops the container in a recycling bin that's picked up each week by the recycling truck. "So," he writes, "is the container used once and then made into something else?"
The reader notes that he volunteers at a local soup kitchen. After everyone has been served, leftover food is often given out in containers -- such as cottage cheese cups -- brought in by volunteers. He assumes that once these leftovers are eaten, the containers likely end up in the trash.
So rather than being used once, recycled and then made into something else, the containers donated to the soup kitchen are discarded.
"Which is better?" the reader asks, pointing out that his question also applies to plastic bags from the grocery store. "Recycle them, or take them to the soup kitchen where they'll be used to hold leftover food, then trashed?"
This question points to a larger issue most of us face when making ethical decisions. Most of the decisions we make don't have to do with choices between stark right and wrong alternatives. Instead, faced with multiple right choices, we're challenged to make the best right choice possible.
Trying to recycle used containers and plastic bags rather than throw them away is a right choice. But so too is donating those containers and bags so they can be used at a soup kitchen.
But there are other choices that can also be made. Many people stockpile plastic containers that they receive from deli counters and re-use them in their own homes to store leftovers. The same is true for plastic bags; some people use them to hold old newspapers that can then be recycled. Or they use the bags to pick up after their dogs when they walk them.
The reader's assumption that soup kitchen customers who take leftovers in used containers or bags will simply trash them may be accurate. But if the soup kitchen has never made an effort to encourage its customers to recycle those containers and bags, it could do so by placing receptacles by the soup kitchen door.
There's no one right choice among the many options the reader and the soup kitchen workers have when it comes to dealing with used containers and plastic bags.
The right thing is to try to find a way to put the used containers and bags to the best use possible. If the reader gives thought to how he might do this, then follows through by recycling or donating these items to the soup kitchen, he should rest easy at night about either choice. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Gambling on getting employer to settle losses

There's an old joke meant to disparage the reputation of a particular profession that goes something like this:
A client decides to pay for the services he receives in cash. After he settles his bill and leaves the cash with the professional who provided the services, the professional notices that the client mistakenly left twice as much cash as necessary. (Crisp new bills tend to stick together.)
Now, the professional faces an ethical quandary, goes the joke, followed by the punch line: "Do I tell my partner about the extra cash?"
An email from a reader reminded me of that joke, although I'm fairly certain the connection was unintended.
The reader recently went on a business trip for five nights to Las Vegas. He booked his hotel well in advance for $100 a night. His company was to reimburse him that $500 plus taxes and food expenses incurred while on the business trip.
After work hours, the reader writes that he spent a bit of his free time in the hotel's casino.
"I lost," he writes, "but I'm not sure that matters."
When he went to check out, his room and food charges had been comped by the hotel.
"My bill was $0."
Now, the reader wants to know if he should put the $500 for his room, as well as the food costs that he would have been charged had he not been comped, on his expense report.
"Or should the company not need to pay anything because I didn't?"
The reader seems in a genuine conundrum over whether or not his employer should pay for a room and food for which the hotel did not directly charge him.
"I certainly would not expect my employer to share my losses, and conversely, I do not expect to share my 'winnings' with them, either," he writes. "I'd love to know your thoughts on this situation."
Because the reader believes he was comped his room because he had sunk so much money into his gambling in the casino, he seems to be suggesting that he essentially paid the hotel something roughly equivalent (or more, he's sheepish about the exact amount of his losses) to what it would have charged him for his room and food. As a result, he believes he might be able to justify expensing what would have been the cost of his room and food had he actually been charged that amount.
If the reasoning in those prior sentences seems a bit convoluted, that's because it is.
The reader gambled on his own time, lost money, and should pay his debt. He should not expect his employer to directly or indirectly settle his losses by seeking reimbursement for expenses he didn't have on the business trip.
The right thing is to use his own money to pay for his losses in the casino, and to be honest about reporting to his company what he was actually charged by the hotel. If he didn't pay anything directly for his room and meals, then his employer shouldn't have to, either. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

What do I tell my boss when I'm interviewing for a new job?

According to a longitudinal survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person born between 1957 and 1964 had 11.3 jobs between the time they were 18 and 46 years old. Nearly half of these jobs (5.5) were held between the time these workers were 18 to 24.
The average person in the U.S. and Canada changes jobs often. Unless these average workers happen to be self-employed or unemployed while looking for their next job, they're typically required to find a way to interview for a new position while still holding their old one.
Going out on these interviews or searching for new employment while on the current job can be challenging. The process has one reader in the Midwest perplexed.
"When a person takes time off work to interview for a new job -- either locally or traveling out of state -- what is an acceptable reason to give to one's current employer about the need to take time off?" asks the reader.
He recognizes that "informing your current employer that you are job searching is probably not a good idea."
But the reader observes that saying you are ill or a family member is sick is "not ethical" since it's not true.
So what to do? he asks.
The reader is correct that disclosing that you're searching for a new job is likely not the wisest career move, unless perhaps it's part of a larger discussion about career goals and job satisfaction. Sure, signaling that you're looking around might prompt an employer to see what he or she can do to keep a valued employee. But it's just as likely to be interpreted that the worker is no longer engaged and already has one foot out the door. It's hardly worth the risk, particularly early on in a job search that might not yield positive results.
When a new job is offered, that's the time to be forthcoming with the current employer.
Calling in sick or claiming an illness in the family as the only alternatives to radical honesty with the boss seems a false premise. A few years ago, I wrote about a survey of workers that revealed 32 percent had called in sick over the course of a year when they really weren't sick, and 27 percent of them viewed sick days the same as vacation days. Faking sickness to get a day off, however, is wrong.
Rather than lie about illness, the right thing is to take either personal time or vacation days to go out on job interviews. If the boss asks why you want the day off, it's perfectly fine to respond generically by saying it's to take care of "personal business," although the right thing is for the boss to mind his own business.
Nothing is gained if a worker is caught in a lie. Granted, a job search is no vacation, but looking for a new job should not be done on a current employer's time. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Are cleaners cleaning up too much?

A reader in California decided to hire professionals to help keep her house clean. She made a verbal agreement with a husband-and-wife team to clean her house every other week. She writes that they told her the fee would be $30 an hour for a two-hour session.
The couple arrived and cleaned her house within an hour. The reader had already made a check out to them prior to their service for $60.
"I gave them the check with no discussion about the shortened time," she writes. "The next time they came, it was the same scenario. Again, they accepted the check without question or discussion."
Now, the reader is a bit flummoxed. She wants to know how to handle the situation when the cleaning crew returns.
"If they only clean for one hour, I feel their pay should be for an hour's worth of work," she writes. "If they want to get paid for two hours, I feel they should be working in my house for two hours."
She writes that she wants to discuss her concerns with the couple so they can come to an agreeable solution, but wants to know if she's wrong in her expectations.
It often can be a challenge to talk with independent service providers about their charges after they've completed a project. If a charge is more than, or a service less than anticipated, then the right thing is to ask the provider for an explanation of the charges.
Of course, initiating such discussions can be uncomfortable, particularly if you're pleased with the quality of the work being done. It's important to be clear that while you like the work performance -- if that's indeed the case -- you want some clarity on how you're being charged and what you're being charged for, particularly if it doesn't seem to jibe with your initial agreement. Any responsible homeowner has a right to know where his/her money is going. And responsible professionals should be more than willing to explain their charges.
The challenge for the reader in California is that she paid her cleaning crew $60 on at least two occasions, even though she believed she only received half the amount of cleaning time committed to her. When that concern first arose was when she should have broached the subject. At that point, the clean crew could have made clear whether the $30 was a per hour charge, or a per person per hour charge. Since this remains unclear, the issue should be raised.
Handing the cleaners a check for an amount the reader felt was too high simply because she'd already written the check was no reason not to have raised her concern at the first visit. The issue certainly should have come up on the second visit, when she once again paid double what she thought appropriate.
As difficult a conversation as it might seem, the right thing for the reader to do is to come clean with her cleaners and let them know that she believes their charge is not what she agreed to initially. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Why is this fine wine making me a bit queasy?

A recurring concern in the workplace is whether or not it's appropriate to accept gifts from vendors or suppliers. Every five or so years, typically around the holidays in December, I receive a note from a reader perplexed about the appropriateness of accepting such a gift.
The concern revolves around whether such gifts will be perceived to influence the recipient to give more business to the gift giver than he/she otherwise might have.
I've always believed that the clearest thing to do is for companies to establish a policy of not allowing employees to accept any gifts from workplace vendors and to make that policy clear to all vendors and employees.
Such policies, however, are not the norm. Many companies permit employees to accept gifts. In these cases, making clear to vendors and employees the restrictions about the types of gifts and their cost acceptable is important.
A reader writes that he recently received a bottle of wine as a gift from the senior partner of a law firm his company hires to do its legal work. The gift fell within the parameters of his company's gift policy. Since he doesn't drink wine, whenever he receives a bottle from a vendor, he usually gives it to others in his office or re-gifts it at some social event he might be attending.
He understands that once he receives a gift, he can do with it whatever he wants. The reader Googled the wine and found that it retails for as much as $60 a bottle, far more expensive than the gifts of wine he usually receives, but still within his company's gift policy.
One of the reader's associates saw this particular bottle of wine and asked about it. "He's a wine guy," the reader writes, so he asked if he wanted to buy it.
"Sure," the associate responded. "I'll give you $30 for it."
At first, the reader thought about selling it. But then he felt a "moral struggle" of taking a business relationship gift and converting it into "cold hard cash," something far different, he figured than giving it to someone who might enjoy it. "There is something about the conversion of the gift into cash so I can buy a new component for my bike, for example, that doesn't sit right with me."
He asks if there are "moral issues" with selling the gift and using the cash for next week's lunch or to pay his electric bill or buying "something fun for my mountain bike"?
As long as the employee did not violate his company's gift policy, the right thing is to do whatever he wants to do with the bottle of wine. After all, if he had re-gifted the wine to someone at a social event, he would have saved any money he would have spent on a different bottle of wine.
His uneasiness might be more reflective of the fact that permitting gifts from vendors can result in awkward situations regardless of their value and the best policy could be a no-gifts one.
But the wine belongs to him and selling it would be no different than selling that beautiful statue of dancing bronze bears he received from his Great Aunt Millie, although he's likely to find more buyers for the bottle of wine. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Lying to get a coupon discounts your values

Often, after making a purchase at a retailer, the cashier will indicate that if you fill out a survey online you will receive a coupon in return. (In some cases, you might be entered into a random drawing for a product or gift card.) The receipt typically contains a code to enter when you log onto the online survey site. Once you're at the website, survey questions typically involve the experience you had shopping at the store.
But what if someone other than the initial customer finds a retail receipt and subsequently completes the referenced survey and obtains a coupon or other related incentive for doing so? That's what P.B., a reader from Charlotte, N.C., wants to know.
"Is this ethical," he asks.
Judging from the popularity of such television shows as "Extreme Couponing" and the massive number of coupon strategy websites that exist, using coupons appears to be a popular art form for many. Some of these online coupon sites report that local stores selling the Sunday newspaper - in which many print coupons continue to be inserted - have started keeping the newspapers behind the counter so customers aren't tempted to take more of their share of coupon inserts. For the record, taking inserts from a newspaper you don't buy would be wrong.
Coupon swap clubs have also cropped up where coupon-ers trade what they don't need and collect what they do need with others committed to the craft.
There also seems to be some sort of coupon-ing etiquette practiced by some shoppers. If they hold a coupon that's about to expire in a day or so, they often leave the coupon by the product in the store so someone else might use it - a sort of paying it forward practice. Thank you to whoever left the $1 off coupon for Olivio in my supermarket a few weeks back.
And couponing is just a practical way of life for many families trying to keep their growing kids fed, clothed and shod.
But while P.B.'s situation ultimately may involve receiving a coupon that someone else might initially have used, it differs significantly from any of these scenarios. While it's perfectly fine to give someone tips on how to use coupons for maximum effectiveness, to share coupons with someone else, or even to fill out a survey and give a coupon received for doing so to someone else, it's not OK to pretend to be someone else to receive a coupon.
The retail store receipt asks for questions that are specific to that shopper's experience in the store. Since the finder of the receipt did not have that experience, filling out the survey would be a misrepresentation of an experience he did not have. So no, P.B., lying to potentially receive a coupon is not ethical.
If someone else's retail receipt with a request to fill out an online survey in exchange for a coupon is found, the right thing is either to return the receipt to the store's service counter or to throw the coupon in the trash. Finding a coupon to get a break on a product's price can be a good thing. But stick to the plenty of above-board ways there are to do so. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

After snow, should car be towed?

How tolerant should you be when someone invades your personal space?
After a snowstorm hits and you've dug out an on-street parking space for your car, there's a long tradition in some neighborhoods in Boston where I live of marking your parking spot with some object to indicate you dug it out and you're planning to return. While it's not exactly legal -- since individuals don't own the public street -- it's a tradition that seems to be honored, albeit reluctantly.
We're fortunate that we have an outdoor parking space that clearly sits on our property. We dig out the space after snowstorms and know that it will be there without having to mark it.
But after we had dug out after our most recent snowstorm and had driven to run some errands, we returned in the evening to find a car we couldn't identify parked in the space in our yard.
As our car idled outside our house, I beeped the horn a couple of times to see if any neighbors who might have parked there would come out. A few neighbors emerged, but only to say that they had no idea whose car it was either.
For the next hour or so, I knocked on doors to see if anyone might know whose car it was. My wife texted neighbors whose numbers she had to ask them the same question.
Just in case the owner showed up as I was soliciting neighbors, I had left a note on the car's windshield to let the owner know that he was parked illegally and that a tow service would be called to remove his car.
None of the neighbors we contacted owned the car.
Did I really want to call the tow service to have the car removed? In the thirty-something years we have owned the house, we had never called a tow company to remove a car from the space.
After a day of helping neighbors clear off their walks and decks and other neighbors doing the same for their neighbors, did I really want to have some guy's car towed? Was that really the right thing to do instead of driving several blocks away and seeing if I could find an uncleared space on the street to dig out? Ultimately, I did find a space up the road that it only took me 10 minutes to dig out.
Of course, the illegal parker could have done the same thing.
I called the tow service and while I waited another hour or so for the truck to show up, I checked with other neighbors who had since returned home. No luck.
After the car was towed I wrote another note telling the car's owner that his car had been towed and what number he could call to find out how to retrieve it. I taped the note to a trash can near the parking space and pulled our car in.
Regardless of the car being parked illegally, the right thing wasn't simply to have the car towed without making an effort to find its owner. Neither was it right not to attempt to let him know what had happened to his car.
The next morning the note was gone. We haven't seen the car again nor any sign of its owner. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at  Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net .  
(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.