Going to great lengths to correct a mistake, but at what cost?

'Roundtable Ethics' features University faculty members answering ethical and moral questions solicited from the community. The questions may range from personal to academic in nature. The 'Prince' hopes that the column will spark campus dialogue. This week's columnist, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Breidenthal, is the Dean of Religious Life.

Recently, after making a purchase at a local store, I realized that I had been undercharged. Before leaving, I brought the mistake to the cashier's attention and offered to pay the difference. Rectifying the situation was much more complicated than I expected, however, and a manager had to be called to first void the purchase, refund my credit card and then re-scan my items. By the time I left the store I was running late, frustrated, and aware of all the angry glares I was getting — both from the people who had been waiting in line and the inconvenienced cashier and manager.

I consider myself to be an honest person, but I think that if I find myself in a similar situation in the future I will simply just leave the store. Does the time of the people involved factor into this decision? Is the amount of money in question — or whether you have been overcharged or undercharged — ethically relevant?

Let me begin by breaking the question down into its constituent parts, since you raise several different issues here. You honorably (and rightly) want to pay what you owe. But in trying to pay what you owe, you run up against another issue: your discomfort with how much trouble it is to other customers.

Let's take the least important thing first: your discomfort with other people being mad at you. There are a number of ways to pay what you owe without taking up other people's time. For example, you could have simply gone home and sent the store a check and a letter explaining what the check was for. Alternatively, you could have braved Customer Service, where everybody is standing in line wanting to do something roughly equivalent to your task, and you might have gotten positive, instead of negative, reinforcement for wanting to rectify accounts. All that aside, if the other customers were inconvenienced by being delayed, they benefited from your honesty in the long-run, because the store didn't have to raise its prices to cover the loss. By the same token, the clerk benefited from your noticing the overcharge, because they didn't find a short-fall at the end of the day.

Now I turn to the deeper issue of paying what you owe. Few will deny that honesty in exchange is a value worth upholding, despite inconveniences along the way. We cannot get along without a certain level of trust in one another. Most ethical schools of thought would yield the same answer to your question: it's better to give back what's not coming to you. And that's because they all regard getting along with one another as the goal ethics serves.

Nevertheless, various ethical approaches do make a difference in the end, because they rest on differing assumptions about the ultimate point of "getting along."

These assumptions boil down to two: First, we are all essentially separate and disconnected from one another, but it is in our self-interest to enter into fellowship with others (and hence to submit to the moral disciplines that make it possible for us to get along); second, we are bound together from the beginning, whether we like it or not, and are made for community even if we resist it (hence the need for absolute principles that override our temptation to opt out of community when community is inconvenient).

The first assumption yields moral arguments that favor the self-interest of all parties concerned, since, on this view, community is essentially chosen or opted into (and thus is basically an artifice). The concern here will always be to preserve the viability of community as an attractive option, and every moral decision will be weighed in this light. The result is modes of moral reasoning grounded in cost-benefit analysis.

The second assumption subordinates self-interest and cost-benefit analysis to our obligation to obey certain absolute principles, even when this causes inconvenience or even suffering. To be clear: the point is not to obey a body of rules, but to subordinate private self-interest to the common good. On this view, our essential connection to one another is so important, and our tendency to deny that connection so persistent, that we must bend over backwards to abide by principles that show forth and make concrete our commitment to fellowship.

I will confess that I favor the second assumption. In regard to the present case: if honesty in exchange is a principle that curbs our tendency to line our pockets at the expense of others, then we need to be all the more careful not to abandon that principle when it is inconvenient to us or to anybody else.

This is not to say that cost-benefit analysis has no place in this mode of moral reflection. Thomas Aquinas argued that moral argument needs to proceed in a certain order. First, moral questions must be weighed in the light of principles that express our fundamental connection to one another. If a given action or policy passes this test, it is perfectly reasonable to proceed to weigh its costs and benefits to a specific community in the light of specific circumstances (Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae, Q 18. Art. 1). That is to say, acts which are good in theory may be harmful in certain situations, and therefore should not be pursued.

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With regard to the present case: since it is not permissible to be dishonest in exchange, further considerations relating to cost and benefit are irrelevant.

Got an ethical question? E-mail The Page 3 Department.