The Moral of the Story? That There’s Even Any Question

Today’s morality tale arrives compliments of Mr. Thomas Conley of Fullerton, who neatly divides his story into two parts. He refers to them as the positive part and the negative part. The tale is set in a glamorous San Francisco hotel and involves Middle Eastern royalty and a room service employee who delivered champagne one night to their suite.

Ultimately, though, the story is about you and me.

As related in a letter by Mr. Conley, and corroborated by a hotel employee who didn’t want to name names, some weeks ago a royal family checked into the hotel and ordered an $80 bottle of champagne. A family member, unfamiliar with U.S. currency, gave the room service employee $800 in cash. The hotel source says the employee could have pocketed the money and no one would have been the wiser.

The employee refused on the spot to accept it. The royal family member, embarrassed and confused by the seeming hassle, ordered the employee from the room. Instead of throwing up his hands and keeping the extra $720, the employee went to his supervisor and, with the concierge in tow, returned to the room and corrected the overpayment.

Mr. Conley writes: “I was fascinated by the story. That’s the positive part.”

Ah, but he continues: “Now comes the negative part. When I proudly told my friends about this, I was the one who was stunned. Many of them told me they thought the server should have boogied with the money and flipped off the ‘towel heads.’ What am I missing here? Have we become somehow a nation of greedy little people who feel justified in disregarding the basic rights of our fellow man simply because he can afford it? I’ve argued this point many times over during the past few weeks and generally have to mimic a short course in ethics before people will grudgingly admit that the sheik deserved better.”

Have we become a nation of greedy little people?

Who am I to say? Luckily, while grappling with that puzzling question, I got a letter the same week as Conley’s from Richard Doetkott, a communications professor at Chapman University. For the upcoming semester, he’s teaching a class titled, “Integrity: What It Is, Who Has It, How It’s Kept, How It’s Lost.”

In outlining the course, Doetkott (pronounced “docket”) wrote: “The world is getting grayer and grayer for people who wish to keep their integrity. We must try to define ourselves and what we believe and the way we must live. Not just with others, but with ourselves.”

Doetkott sees a slow invasion against ethics, particularly in the workplace, that results “in the fraying away at the edges of a person’s integrity. I don’t think you suddenly lose your integrity. I think it’s a slow erosion. Pretty soon you find yourself on the other side of the line and you didn’t realize when you crossed over.”

To many people, Doetkott says, the hotel scenario seems uncomplicated. “This is an ethical issue, but it’s part of the whole idea of integrity. A person has integrity, an airplane has integrity. It means it’s structurally solid, so it can weather the storm. The storms we face are those ethical questions.”

The room service employee could have immersed himself in rationalizations, Doetkott says. “He could have said, ‘They don’t pay enough on this job, the guy [who overpaid] is a fool, he has too much money anyway, he wouldn’t miss it.’ But to a person of integrity, none of that would make any difference.”

Few professions are exempt from the erosion of integrity, Doetkott says. “I think the most dangerous is the professional--whether it’s a doctor, lawyer, journalist or college professor--who has compromised little by little by little until, when a major question arises, they don’t have a moral compass anymore. It points in every direction. I think there was once more professional integrity. You trusted your doctor, your lawyer. The lack of trust people feel today, which is in virtually every profession, is largely because people feel that lack of integrity among the majority, the majority, of practitioners.”

Doetkott is 60 and insists he isn’t wearing rose-colored glasses about the past. “I don’t think everything was wonderful when I was growing up in the ‘50s,” he says. “But I think there was a certain standard that people tried to meet, a certain standard that was accepted.”

Today, he blames “group-think” among professions for allowing standards of integrity to wane. Rather than adhering to obvious standards of right and wrong and shunning violators, what’s acceptable becomes situational and evolving. “In my profession, people forge research,” Doetkott says. “The people who uncover that don’t get published.”

I ventured the novel thought that money is the root of all evil. Doetkott demurred, saying “We’ve always had money.” Besides, he says, money doesn’t explain many of the ethical lapses we hear about in various professions.

Thomas Conley wrote his letter because he was shocked that there was no consensus to return the sheik’s money. That lack of consensus doesn’t please me; nor does it surprise me.

Nor do I know why people stray from the ethical fold. We just do. So, failing that test, I’m content on this day to raise a toast to the anonymous man who delivered the champagne and to thank him for holding up his little corner of a world that seems to grow ever more wobbly.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.