A Hypothetical Question in Ethics

For this week’s ethics post, I would like to invite everyone out there to join me in a hypothetical question:

Imagine that you are the owner of a highly visible business. A report is published in the newspapers, and immediately picked up by every media channel in the world, in which a witness with extremely marginal credibility implicates one of your most productive employees as the long-term user of an illegal substance. Further, let us imagine that the witness offers no proof, no hard evidence of any kind, and there is no way for anyone to corroborate his accusation of your employee, who in turn categorically denies all of the charges. There is no way this evidence would ever be presented in a court of law; no prosecutor in the world would touch such a case for fear of being laughed out of court. But because both your business and the employee being impugned have relatively high profiles, the media scrutiny of both you and your employee is intense, and uninformed people all over the world are convinced of his guilt and your complicity.

Including at least some of your customers.

What are you going to do? Before you answer that question, you may want to review your reaction to the Mitchell Report, released one month ago today. Because, as near as I can tell, almost every one of the Major League Baseball franchise owners is dealing with that exact question right now – or will be soon…

Now, as a long-term baseball fan, I must tell you that I have no love for the owners. Even the most balanced accounts of the sport during the mid 20th Century make it painfully clear that the owners brought the Player’s Union and all of the attendant problems of the players as represented workers down on themselves, through dirty dealings that would make a Teamster blush. And I have no great sympathy for most of the players; it is difficult to feel sorry for a bunch of grown men who are being paid tens of millions of dollars to do something that half of the people in America would gladly do for just a living wage – if we were capable of doing so in the first place. Both groups should have realized decades ago that if they didn’t work out some means of policing the industry themselves that the public would demand action be taken, and that the government would eventually attempt to do so.

For the players themselves, the best course of action seems clear: they don’t have to prove their innocence, the government has to prove their guilt, so the best thing for them to do is get clean, stay clean, and say as little as possible. Documenting every medical treatment they’ve ever had would be sensible, and I’m sure they’re already working on doing just that. None of the “evidence” presented so far is any real threat to anyone, and if a real case does pop up somewhere, they all have the money to hire top legal representation and defend themselves. But what if you were one of the owners; how would you approach this storm? For the purposes of this question, we will assume that you do not have certain evidence of your employee’s guilt or innocence (in which case your legal obligations would be clear). Do you have an obligation to support your employee and maintain his innocence? Even though he probably can’t do as much for you without risking public and/or legal exposure? Or do you just remain aloof, refuse to discuss the matter, and let the pieces fall where they will?

It’s worth thinking about…