THE RIGHT THING: WALKING A FINE LINE

"What are one's ethical obligations," wonders a reader from Columbus, Ohio, "when someone else is doing something wrong?"

My reader was driving along a fairly busy two-lane road, dutifully observing the posted 35-miles-per-hour speed limit. Up ahead of him he saw three people - two men and a toddler - start to cross.

"They were crossing the road roughly 75 yards away from the nearest crosswalk," my reader writes, noting that there was a traffic light at the crosswalk but not where they were.

"I saw them, but did not slow down or stop to let them cross the road," he writes. "They continued to walk, until they realized that I was not going to stop for them. So they stopped."

As he drove past them, the older of the men yelled something at my reader, who slammed on his brakes and got out of his car. Harsh words ensued on both sides.

The older man yelled at my reader for not letting them cross the road. When my reader pointed out that the three were not crossing at the crosswalk and therefore did not have the right of way, the gentleman accused him of putting the child in danger - when, in my reader's view, that is exactly what the two men themselves had done.

When my reader asked if he was attempting to teach the child to cross the street outside of the crosswalks, the older man called him an anatomically related expletive. My reader got back in his car and drove away.

Having cooled off, he still believes that, if pedestrians are going to cross outside of a crosswalk, it is their obligation to pick a time to cross that doesn't interfere with traffic.

"Did I have any obligation to stop and let them cross," he asks, "given that they were jaywalking?"

I agree with my reader that the two adults should have walked the extra 75 yards to the crosswalk before crossing the street. It would have been the best way to teach a young child how to cross a street, not to mention the most legal way to cross and the safest: Teaching a little boy to assume that cars will stop for him no matter when and where he may decide to cross a street could lay the groundwork for a tragedy.

But that's not the question my reader asked. He wants to know if he had any obligation to stop to let the jaywalkers pass, and here I don't agree with him: I believe that he should have stopped.

That he had the right of way is relevant from a legal point of view, but ethically it's beside the point. The fact is that for a very minor gain - the chance to teach the jaywalkers a lesson in traffic law - he took a very substantial risk. If he had misjudged the distance or his speed, or if the little boy or one of the other pedestrians had happened to slip or stumble, the results could have been catastrophic.

Since my reader had enough spare time to stop and challenge the man who yelled at him, it's clear that he wasn't rushing to some urgent appointment, and the fact that nobody rear-ended him when he slammed on his brakes to do so suggests that traffic wasn't heavy enough to make it dangerous to slow for the jaywalkers. He didn't let them pass simply because he was annoyed that they were abusing the right of way - and that's no excuse for a potential tragedy.

The right thing for my reader to do was to slow down, gritting his teeth at the injustice of it all, and let them cross. To endanger a child in order to prove his point that the other men were endangering a child doesn't pass the basic ethical requirement of proportionality. If he wanted to challenge the jaywalkers, the time to do so was after he had stopped for them, not after he had blown by them. By then their minor ethical lapse had been eclipsed by his major one.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)