The fact that her values were so well defined. Had she been less concerned about the confidentiality of information which, in its highest form, grows out of a desire to respect and honor everyone in her community she might not have hesitated to turn over the name to the detective. She might have bowed so entirely to the authority of the officer or sought so willingly to help him bring the criminal to justice that she would never have noticed how quickly, in her mind, the caller became the criminal before he had even been questioned. On the other hand, had she been single-mindedly committed to her profession as a gatekeeper of society s information, she might never even have considered her obligations to the larger community. She might simply have stood on the principle of confidentiality, and seen no conflict with the urgency of a social need.
Tough choices don t always involve professional codes or criminal laws.
Nor do they always involve big, headline-size issues. They often operate in areas that laws and regulations don t reach. That was the case for a corporate executive with a nationwide manufacturing firm, who faced such a choice shortly after becoming manager of one of his company s plants in California. Every year, he learned, the producer of one of Hollywood s best-known television adventure series shot a segment for one of its shows in the plant s parking lot. Every year, the upper management at his firm s corporate headquarters allowed the crew to do the filming free of charge typically on a Saturday, when the lot was empty.