Gathers Death Still a Question in Ethics : Aftermath: Expert sees a set of complex issues and problems in the decision-making that allowed player to compete.

The questions surrounding the death of Hank Gathers have moved far from the arena in which the former Loyola Marymount basketball star thrived.

According to Michael Josephson, a Los Angeles ethics expert, a complex and ambiguous set of problems must be unraveled. The main one deals with who should have decided whether Gathers should have been playing Sunday night when he collapsed during a West Coast Conference tournament game and died 1 hour 40 minutes later.

Paramount to any philosophical discussion is this: Did Gathers, 23, have the right to decide whether he could play?

“The standard thinking in ethics is that an individual has a right to take those risks for themselves,” said Josephson, president of the Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute for the Advancement of Ethics. “On other hand, you’re dealing with a very young person, a person who is subject to the influence of the team and the school. And I think the university has special ethical obligations with regards to those people it treats as students.

“The hard fact to deal with is, was the school influenced by its own self-interest in its desire to have him play?”

Another consideration, Josephson said, is that if Loyola officials had disallowed Gathers from participating, they could have been subject to a suit.

“If they told Hank, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t play,’ he says his whole career is now ruined,” said Josephson, who taught law at Loyola Law School. “He says, ‘You did this unfairly and irrationally,’ and he sues.

“The ugliness of this kind of second-guessing is that you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

So what to do?

“Had they said, ‘We thought this through and this is why we let him play and even though he died we think it was the right decision because we concluded the weight of moral choice was in favor of his decision to play,’ (that would be ethical),” Josephson said. “But if on the other hand they never made that decision, they instead passed the buck or like Pontius Pilate washed their hands of the matter, then it seems to me, there is a bit more of a moral taint.”

The school, however, is one of four components in this equation. Josephson said doctors, athletic department officials and family also have responsibility that cannot be ignored.

“Look, everybody can view the morality with 20/20 hindsight,” he said. “I think the self-righteous finger-pointing that tends to occur after a terrible incident such as this is brutally unfair to the people involved.

“We can’t say every decision was wrong because it turned out wrong.”