Love the glove you're with

Back in the winter, a reader in New York spotted a glove on the ground while on a walk with his elderly mother. "It looked expensive," he writes, "and was distinctive because it was a convertible glove." It had an attached cover that, when zipped into place, converted the glove into a mitten.

My reader thought nothing of his find. "People lose a lot of gloves in the wintertime," he figured. But a bit further along, he came upon what was obviously the companion glove.

He presumed that the second glove had either been dropped by a child who had also dropped the first, or perhaps thrown away in irritation by an adult who noticed the absence of its mate. On their walk home, the reader and his mother retraced the route they had taken earlier and picked up both gloves. "Having no use for them myself, I donated them to a thrift shop," he writes.

Since then, he's been bothered by the thought that he should have paired the gloves and left them somewhere along the way so the original owner might have seen and retrieved them. But his thinking at the time was that they were nice gloves and would probably be picked up by some third party instead. He also figured that since they were walking in an affluent area, "the owner could probably afford a replacement, whereas someone buying them at a thrift shop would probably need them more."

He writes that he'd have had no problem keeping the gloves for himself. It was only when he decided not to keep them, but took it upon himself to make judgments about who should or shouldn't have them, that things got a little murky for him. "Perhaps I ought to have left them there, if I wasn't going to use them."

He explains his question isn't about right. "Clearly, having found them, the gloves were mine to do with as I saw fit." But he struggles with what the proper thing was for him to do with them.

He thinks he knows the answer to the question, that "basically it's finders keepers." But for whatever reason it feels more complicated to him, even months after the fact.

I don't believe it makes a difference whether he kept the gloves for himself or decided to give them away. One is no better and no worse a decision to have made.

While the fact that his decision involved gloves may make his struggle seem a bit trivial in comparison to other more life-altering decisions he might have to make, his quandary points to a central challenge when it comes to making good ethical decisions. More often than not, the work of making an ethical decision isn't a choice between right and wrong, but rather a choice among many right options with the goal being to make the best right choice possible.

Given his concern that the gloves had no identification on them and he determined they were unlikely to find their way to their rightful owner, my reader did the right thing by assessing the situation and deciding that the most useful thing to do with the gloves was to donate them to a charity that might get them onto the hands of someone who needed them. It wasn't the only choice he could have made, but it was a good one. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.