Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 70

Should daughter help her father vote?

If you had a chance to guarantee that at least one person wouldn't vote against your preferred candidate, would you take it? What if that prospective voter were your elderly father whose care is partially entrusted to you?

In the past year, a reader has relocated her 87-year-old father from the state in which he was living to a senior-living facility near her home. She writes that he has been diagnosed with short-term memory loss and moderate to severe dementia.

"For example," she writes, "he doesn't usually know his own age, the month of the year, the season, or the name of the current president." But he does read the newspaper on most days and maintains "pleasant social interactions."

The reader has managed her father's finances for several years. Since he moved closer to her, she has managed his medical and health care issues, as well.

The facility where her father resides recently distributed absentee ballot applications to all residents. The reader notes that her father is unable to fill out the application on his own. "I really doubt if he could complete the ballot without assistance," she writes. "I know he couldn't handle voting in person. But he has always voted, and I might add, along strict party lines."

So here's the reader's quandary as she sees it: Should she help her father fill out the absentee ballot? Should she help him vote even though, as she observes, he doesn't know who the current president is?

"If I ask him, 'Do you want to vote for the Republican or the Democrat?' I know what he will say. But it seems to me he is no longer capable of making a rational decision."

She adds that her and her father's political affiliations are opposite one another. "I'm wondering," she writes, "if the thought of his vote canceling out my vote is influencing my uneasiness."

While it would be lovely to believe that all voters make rational decisions, are educated about the candidates or are in full control of their faculties when they cast their votes in an election, it's a safe bet that that's not the case. The reader is not obligated to help her father fill out the application for his absentee ballot nor is she obligated to assist him in remembering to cast that ballot in time to be counted in the upcoming election. But she shouldn't do anything to dissuade him from voting, particularly if she's motivated by the knowledge that his vote is likely to cancel her own out.

It's clear that she cares for her father and knows that voting is important to him. That she is wrestling with the question suggests she knows the right thing to do in this situation and that's to ask her father first if he wants to vote in this election and then to offer him assistance by telling him what he has to do to attain his absentee ballot and to fill it out in time to be counted. If he decides not to vote, that's his choice. But so, too, is whether he asks his daughter for help. If he asks, it seems right to offer assistance even if the outcome that goes against how his daughter might have cast her ballot. In the end, offering help in this case stops short of making any decision for him. 

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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Honoring the will of her mother

Now that her mother is 96 and in an assisted living center in the Midwest, a reader has taken over paying the bills and handling her bank account.

The mother receives a pension as well as Social Security payments totaling less than $2,300 a month. Her rent for her apartment in the assisted living center is $5,000 a month.

The ownership of her mother's house was transferred to my reader about eight years ago. Last year, the house was sold and the proceeds remain in the daughter's name. The mother's earnings total a couple of hundred dollars too much to qualify for Medicaid, so my reader needs to come up with another $1, 700 a month just to pay her mother's rent. On top of that, she pays for any additional medical supplies, health insurance and other miscellaneous costs her mother incurs.

My reader draws $3,000 a month from the account that holds the proceeds from the sale of her mother's house. She also supplements that by paying for many things with her own limited income, which is less than $2,000 a month from Social Security.

In her mother's will, she names several people to inherit certain percentages of her money. She has no idea that her daughter is using that $3,000 per month to pay for assisted living and, as a result, there will be less money left to her church and her grandchildren.

My reader says her dilemma is whether she should let her mother's savings build so she can leave a larger amount of money to the heirs, but as a result deplete her own funds -- or whether she should use her mother's funds, which would mean that any inheritance for the grandchildren would amount to practically nothing.

Her grandchildren have told her that they do not want any inheritance. "They would rather that I protect my inheritance for as long as I can and continue to use her income to help with paying her bills," she writes.

"I know that everyone involved would say to go ahead and use her monthly income, but am I not honoring her will by doing so?" my reader asks. "It's been very hard for her to give up all control, and I'm afraid this whole state of affairs would be devastating to her."

The right thing is for my reader to honor her mother's wishes as much as possible, but not to deplete her own funds that she needs to pay her living expenses in the process. Her mother's intention in her will was to divide whatever assets existed upon her death to her grandchildren, the church and other beneficiaries. It's not her daughter's responsibility to draw on her own funds to make sure that her mother's funds stay as healthy as possible.

While the best thing might be to let her mother know the specifics of her financial condition, if their agreement was that the daughter would take care of paying her bills and managing her expenses drawing on her mother's accounts as needed, then that's what she should do.

She is already honoring her mother by taking care of her and her affairs. She should not go broke in the process if the resources exist in her mother's accounts to pay her mother's expenses. If she wants her children to inherit more, she can decide to leave whatever she wants to them in her own will. 

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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Making sure the owners get paid

In the course of writing an ethics column over the past 14 years, some questions seem to arise from readers more than others. Although the occasional truly complex, gut-wrenching conundrum does come my way, the most frequently common questions have to do with everyday issues such as whether it's OK for someone to take recyclable bottles from someone else'strash.

One question that arrives more frequently than others is whether it's acceptable to go to a bookshop that sells coffee, buy a cup of coffee, choose a publication to read while you drink your coffee, and then place the publication back on the shelf without paying for it.

Several months ago, in a response to reader whose friend told her she was a thief for her "borrowing" of magazines while she drank coffee at a local bookshop, I wrote that since the shop did not prohibit the casual reading of magazines that she was in the clear.

Soon after, I received an email from a reader taking me task. "Wrong," writes L.K. from Ohio. "Double wrong."

Surely, I knew that even if the bookshop didn't care about the reader reading the magazine and placing it back on the shelf, the magazine's publisher certainly would if the bookshop eventually returned the manhandled copy to the publisher for credit.

My critic used the analogy of a clothing consignment shop to make his point. He envisions a high-end women's clothing consignment shop that also has a wine bar. The wine bar contributes significantly to the shop's profits.

On one occasion, a customer asks the shop's owner if she can "borrow" an evening gown. He concedes, not wanting to upset a good wine customer. She returns the gown to the store the next day. Over time, her friends do the same.

"No one was harmed, so what's the big deal," my critic asks. "Those dresses didn't belong to the store!" he responds. "In time, the store may mark down the dresses because they didn't initially sell. They may even tell the owner who consigned the clothing that she can have her clothing back."

But he points out that the dresses were never the consignment shop's owners to use as a promotion for another sales line.

Aside from giving me an idea for a unique consignment store startup that sells wine and loans gowns, L.K. makes a very good point. Of course, in his fantasy consignment shop if a dress is not in the store and a potential customer happens to walk in, the sale is lost. At the bookstore, there are typically multiple copies of magazine for sale.

Nevertheless, if a bookshop wants to signal to customers that it has no problem with them reading magazines while they drink their coffee, the right thing is for the bookshop management to make sure those magazines are purchased by the store for such use. That way the publisher gets paid, the customers get a good read over a cup of coffee and the bookshop retains loyal customers.

I still believe the onus is on the store to make clear to customers what the rules are about reading unpaid merchandise while sipping their coffee, but I agree with L.K. that attention must be paid to the rightful owners of the goods. 

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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Our bodies, our cars

If you're reading this column over breakfast or are inclined to a queasy disposition when faced with a story that involves medical procedures gone awry and hospital bills piling up for these procedures, be forewarned. A reader from California's question to me may give you pause. Or it may remind you of just how frustrating lingering medical conditions can be when a remedy proves hard to find.

Several years ago, the reader had surgery for prostate cancer. Because the surgery left him with mild incontinence, he has had many tests and undergone multiple procedures from several urologists. His problem has not been fixed.

He's found himself in the emergency room on three different occasions as a result of his condition. "I've just received the billing statements from the latest unpleasant attempt at getting dry," he writes.

For the most recent office procedure (collagen injections), he writes that he was charged $1,500, the same as he was charged for the prior two office visits. He says that this most recent round resulted in great pain and a lot of bleeding.

"Coupled with what may have been an allergic reaction to the drugs given, another office visit was required -- at an additional $100 charge -- on the following morning I was told to go to the emergency room at the local hospital," he writes.

His total bill for the emergency room visit totaled $5,000, plus another $400 charge for the emergency-room physician.

"The previous two abortive occasions resulted in similar billing amounts from the office procedures and the resulting emergency room follow-ups to put me back together," he writes.

"It seems to me that if a doctor attempts a procedure which does not fix a condition, but instead results in a significant cost to counteract its outcome, it's unethical to bill the victim for his failure," he writes. "Shouldn't I expect the same billing consideration from my doctor as I do from my auto mechanic?"

My reader raises a good point. When we go to an auto mechanic and he works on the car to fix, say, the brakes, if we find that two weeks later the brakes don't work, we expect the auto mechanic to make good on his work without an extra charge for that same work that should have fixed the problem in the first place. If it turns out that the brakes are fine, but something else goes wrong within a couple of weeks, we might not like that the auto mechanic didn't catch the problem, but we wouldn't expect him to eat the cost of fixing the new problem.

In the reader's case, the same problem seems to be recurring and the doctors haven't been able to fix it, but it's hard to make an argument that the human body is exactly like a car. I'm not a doctor, but it seems like a reasonable expectation that while more often than not our doctors help heal us, there are times when finding a solution proves challenging -- even if it means trying a similar procedure more than once.

Given the frequency with which he's had the same experience with this doctor, were it me, I might seek out a second opinion. But the right thing for the reader is for him (or his insurance company) to pay the bill for the procedures done and to continue doing whatever he can to work with doctors to find a solution to his problems. Whether the cost of medical care is woefully out of whack is a whole other question. 

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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Love the glove you're with

Back in the winter, a reader in New York spotted a glove on the ground while on a walk with his elderly mother. "It looked expensive," he writes, "and was distinctive because it was a convertible glove." It had an attached cover that, when zipped into place, converted the glove into a mitten.

My reader thought nothing of his find. "People lose a lot of gloves in the wintertime," he figured. But a bit further along, he came upon what was obviously the companion glove.

He presumed that the second glove had either been dropped by a child who had also dropped the first, or perhaps thrown away in irritation by an adult who noticed the absence of its mate. On their walk home, the reader and his mother retraced the route they had taken earlier and picked up both gloves. "Having no use for them myself, I donated them to a thrift shop," he writes.
Since then, he's been bothered by the thought that he should have paired the gloves and left them somewhere along the way so the original owner might have seen and retrieved them. But his thinking at the time was that they were nice gloves and would probably be picked up by some third party instead. He also figured that since they were walking in an affluent area, "the owner could probably afford a replacement, whereas someone buying them at a thrift shop would probably need them more."
He writes that he'd have had no problem keeping the gloves for himself. It was only when he decided not to keep them, but took it upon himself to make judgments about who should or shouldn't have them, that things got a little murky for him. "Perhaps I ought to have left them there, if I wasn't going to use them."
He explains his question isn't about right. "Clearly, having found them, the gloves were mine to do with as I saw fit." But he struggles with what the proper thing was for him to do with them.
He thinks he knows the answer to the question, that "basically it's finders keepers." But for whatever reason it feels more complicated to him, even months after the fact.
I don't believe it makes a difference whether he kept the gloves for himself or decided to give them away. One is no better and no worse a decision to have made.
While the fact that his decision involved gloves may make his struggle seem a bit trivial in comparison to other more life-altering decisions he might have to make, his quandary points to a central challenge when it comes to making good ethical decisions. More often than not, the work of making an ethical decision isn't a choice between right and wrong, but rather a choice among many right options with the goal being to make the best right choice possible.
Given his concern that the gloves had no identification on them and he determined they were unlikely to find their way to their rightful owner, my reader did the right thing by assessing the situation and deciding that the most useful thing to do with the gloves was to donate them to a charity that might get them onto the hands of someone who needed them. It wasn't the only choice he could have made, but it was a good one. 
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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

If you say it, they will come

Typically, I don't write about politics. There's no doubt that questions of right and wrong behavior abound when it comes to the behavior of some elected officials. One reason for my hesitation is that the minute a question is raised about the behavior of a member of a particular party, the vitriol that secretes from members of the other party arrives in abundance. The blinders go up and it's difficult for many to admit shortcomings among their own.

It's a challenge to write about ethical behavior among politicians without being accused of being partial to one party over the other. Thankfully, two high-profile examples of curious ethical behavior come from each major political party, and they closely mirror one another.

The first is the seemingly continuous loop that Democrats seem to play of Republican candidate Mitt Romney saying, "I like being able to fire people." He said the words, of course, but only after a lead up that made it clear that he was talking about insurance companies that might not do a good job. That he said he likes to fire service providers who don't provide good service is a sentiment that many of us can embrace. The full context of his comments, however, was conveniently lost so his opponents could make him appear to be a villainous ogre who took joy in the pain of de-jobbing hard-working citizens.

The second resulted in the "We Built It" theme night on the first night of the Republican National Convention. It alluded to the snippet of a comment Barack Obama was making about how people who built businesses didn't succeed entirely on their own but instead relied on infrastructure provided by other taxpayers. Just as "I like being able to fire people" came at the end of a longer comment, Obama's "You didn't build that" came at the end of his talk about the support businesses might get along the way toward success.

Each party was shocked, simply shocked, that the other had taken its candidate's words out of context and used them to make him appear to be saying something he wasn't. Given the equanimity of the infractions, the claims of shocked-ness seem disingenuous at best.

The right thing is not to deliberately mislead people to get them to behave in a way you want them to behave. But anyone who has purchased something based on the skills of a slick salesperson knows it's naive to believe such behavior is not commonplace. We may like to believe that the people we choose to govern us would rise to a higher level of behavior. But we don't always get what we want. It turns out that politics really ain't beanbag.

If ethics truly is "how we behave when we decide we belong together" as Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner Rogers wrote in A Simpler Way (Berrett-Koehler, 1999), perhaps politicians have agreed that deliberate misleading is how they've decided to behave with one another.

But for those not in politics who haven't agreed on such behavior, the right thing is not to take any political ad at face value. Candidates post policy papers online on most every issue you can imagine. And each party posts its platform online for all to read. The responsible thing is to dig deeply enough to determine which candidate best meets what you want of a leader. 

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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Does sleeping well reflect good behavior?

Mark Twain is widely credited as originating the comment: "I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead." While the observation may not have been original to Twain (the philosopher Blaise Pascal appears to have written something very similar almost 200 years earlier, albeit in French), the sentiment holds a lot of merit.

Writing short can be a challenge. And there are times when things simply get lost that should have been said but weren't.

Recently, I included in my column the example of a businessman who, in a prior business, had gone bust. After liquidating his assets, he worked out a deal to pay his debtors pennies on the dollar. Even though he wasn't legally obligated to pay back the full debt, he said he did so because "it's just a moral or ethics issue." He told me: "I have to sleep at night."

Several people who read the column observed that I appeared to be a fan of the "sleep test," a simple ethics test that basically holds that you can gauge if you've made an ethical choice by whether or not you can sleep at night.

As one colleague reminded me, Harry Truman is quoted as saying he never lost any sleep over his decision to use the atomic bombs during World War II. "That's not to say he made the wrong decision," my colleague wrote, "only that it was sufficiently complex that his sleep should have been disturbed."

In his book, Defining Moments: When Managers MustChoose Between Right and Right (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. points out that "people sometimes lie awake at night precisely because they have done the right thing. They understand their decisions have consequences, that success is not guaranteed, and that they will be held accountable for their decisions. . . . In short, if people like Hitler sometimes sleep well and people like Mother Teresa sometimes sleep badly, we can place little faith in simple sleep-test ethics."

My readers, colleagues and Badaracco are correct. Being able to sleep soundly is no more a guarantee that an action you've taken is ethical than is the ability to read about yourself on the front page of your local newspaper without blanching at the report of your actions. Many people would find it abhorrent to have their exploits made public. Some, however, might not care one whit.

Making a true ethical decision takes more than just the ability to sleep well at night. It involves a thorough examination of the consequences of your possible actions. Sometimes we are presented with clear choices of right and wrong, but most often the challenges we face involve choosing the best right answer possible among many possible choices.

For the businessman who paid back his debtors, even when he didn't have to, his decision-making process involved far more than just determining whether he'd be able to sleep well. It was not the only right choice he could have made, but after doing the work of thinking through his various options, he decided it was indeed the best right thing to do.

Knowing that whether or not someone can sleep at night is not a clear indication of having behaved ethically is important enough that it warrants writing a bit longer.  

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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.
 

Ridding the yard of nasty varmints

A post on the North Carolina Cooperative Extension website ends with a note of hope from the retired extension agent who wrote it: "Moles can be frustrating, but with patience and persistence the damage can be minimized."
That observation provides little comfort to a reader in North Carolina who writes to tell me he has "a problem with moles" in his lawn.
They have been doing a lot more tunneling in the last couple of years," he writes. "I almost fell when mowing last week on account of a soft area where moles created a hole I couldn't see."
The reader says he has shelled out for "pricey" lawn treatments, but he believes these just motivate the moles to make more tunnels to get away.
"It's only a temporary fix, anyway, like a month or so, before they come back, and one's next-door neighbors have to treat their lawns, too."
North Carolina bans the use of poisons to kills moles. ("There are no chemicals that legally can be used to kill moles in North Carolina," the Cooperative Extension site tells us. "It is even illegal to mail such materials into the state.") But, my reader writes, neighboring South Carolina has no such laws, "so anybody could go there and buy the poison."
He imagines that he could drive the 50 or so miles to meet a friend in South Carolina for lunch one day and then pick up the poison there to apply to his yard.
"On the other hand," he notes, "I am a law-abiding citizen who thinks that people shouldn't flaunt laws they don't like when they inconvenience them. So, legally, I should either do nothing, risking bodily injury to myself and visiting grandchildren running around the yard (not to mention having an uglier lawn that costs me $1,200 a year for assorted applications to make it look good), or spend hundreds of dollars every year for short-term fixes, still risking bodily injury as I grow older and am more susceptible to falls."
He supposes the greater question is: "Is it ever ethical to break the law?" and suspects the answer is probably, "It depends."
In the case of the moles, it would be hard to imagine a case where it would be ethical to break the law and poison the moles. Even in the highly unlikely circumstance that my reader might find himself under direct physical attack by a mole, it's much more likely he would want to use a method of defense that works far more quickly than poison. (Directly confronting a mole is not recommended, since they can carry rabies.)
My reader should continue to follow the law and refrain from using poison to kill the moles. He could try to convince his neighbors to treat their lawns to help the effort, but he can't force them to care as much about the issue as he does.
As frustrating as it might be to control the varmints, my reader is doing the right thing by exploring all the options available to him to rid himself of the pests. Even the retired extension agent suggests that "minimizing" the problem is the best that can be hoped for. With that in mind, he can make the drive to South Carolina to have a pleasant lunch with his friend with no poison having to change hands.
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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

I'll gladly repay you Tuesday...

The good news is that noncommercial bankruptcy filings in the U.S. were down by 13 percent in the first six months of 2012 compared to the same time period last year. The bad news is that 601,184 noncommercial bankruptcies remains a bundle.
Still, Samuel Gerdano, the executive director of the American Bankruptcy Institute, the outfit that tracked U.S. bankruptcy data provided by Epiq Systems, issued a statement that we're "on pace for perhaps the lowest total new bankruptcies since before the financial crisis in 2008."
A reader from New York recognizes that during the harsh economic conditions of the past few years, many people have resorted to bankruptcy. "It's hard for a former bankrupt to get credit, but it does get them out from under potentially crippling financial liabilities," he writes.
But, he asks, what of the creditors? They typically receive pennies on the dollar.
Granted, "this is a long-established custom and entirely legal, but it is basically a way of avoiding repaying debts that you've legitimately incurred."
He wants to know whether  it is ethical not to pay back such debts.
Several years ago -- about a decade before the current economic downturn began -- I looked at a similar question for an article I wrote for a business publication. When a business goes belly up, are the company owners responsible to go beyond what the law requires in paying back vendors and others money owed for providing goods and services?
Some of the business owners I interviewed believed that meeting the requirements of the law was what was required so they met that obligation.
They did the right thing by doing so. And the same would hold true now for anyone unable to pay his or her debts who decides to file for bankruptcy protection. As long as they are honest in their financial reporting and meet the requirements that the bankruptcy courts set for them, these folks have behaved in a way that their communities have agreed is acceptable behavior.
But meeting the minimum requirement isn't enough for some. One businessman I spoke with for that article had failed at a furniture-making company he had started. After his company was liquidated in 1989, he said others were about $10,000 short of what they would have been paid if the company hadn't gone under. Legally, he was free to walk away. But over the next four months, he slowly paid everyone back.
"I guess it's just a moral or ethical issue for me," he told me at the time. "When we make a decision to do something, we should be able to explain that decision in the same way to anybody who asks, be it our spouse, our business partner, an employee, a creditor, or a customer. I have to sleep at night."
Sometimes, it might be impossible for debtors to make good on their entire debt as this fellow did. But when the opportunity arose to do what he believed to be the right thing to do, he did it. Doing so allowed him to sleep at night and undoubtedly built some good will that served him well as he later went on to build a successful manufacturing company in Indiana.
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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Two weeks' notice

A property manager for a homeowners association in Southern California had been looking for a job for a year.

"I wanted to find something less aggravating and with less overtime required," she writes.

Luckily, she found a possible job as a commercial property manager. While the new employer was doing its due diligence on her, and before she had given notice to her current employer, she found out that she had to have abdominal surgery that would place her out of work for four weeks.

"Yikes," she writes. "I didn't expect that."

She had a total of 22 comp and vacation days coming to her from her current employer, just about the time she would need to recover from surgery. Two weeks before her surgery was scheduled, she told her current employer she would be off for 22 days.

The next day, the new employer offered her the property manager position, which she accepted. She explained that she wouldn't be able to start until after her surgery. The new employer was fine with her start date.

Two weeks before her recovery period was over, she still hadn't told her current employer that she was not coming back.

"I feel that I owe them two weeks' notice," she writes, "but I am afraid they will somehow decide not to pay me for my remaining comp days and shortchange me one paycheck. I can't afford that."

But she also doesn't want to "burn any bridges" because she says she did a good job for them. "I don't want to just not come back and not tell them."

"Do I owe them the two weeks' notice?" she asks. "I want to do the right thing."

I'm not an employment lawyer -- or any kind of lawyer, for that matter -- but whether or not the reader from Southern California gives notice, if her employer had committed to paying for unused comp time and vacation days upon an employee's departure, that commitment should be honored.

Of course, when she goes to tell her supervisor that she plans to leave in two weeks, there's no guarantee that he or she won't respond by suggesting that she clean out her desk and leave right away. It's not always a guarantee that when an employee tries to do the right thing by giving an employer notice that an employer will respond in an equally fair way.

Since those two weeks were days that she planned to be out using the unused comp and vacation time her current employer owed her, the right thing would be for the company to honor its commitment and pay for those days she had earned before she leaves for her new job.

Just as she doesn't want to burn any bridges in how she handles her departure, her current employer would be wise to behave in a way that sends a message to remaining employees that they will be treated fairly if they do a good job for the company.

There's no guarantee that such fair treatment will ensue -- in a bad or good economy -- but it's hopeful that managers and employers recognize that the effects of their behavior towards departing employees goes far beyond those departing and can send a message of whether theirs is the type of company for which others would want to work. 

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) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.