W hatever I know about ethics, I didn’t learn in kindergarten, but it was around that time. That’s when I was part of the great green pea incident, the central moral event around which my three sisters, my brother, and I built our ethical worldview.

The story put on perfect display the ethical strategy of our father, which was always to force us to understand the underlying issues. His occasional punishments drove us back to our bedrooms and into private Socratic agonies such that we could only figure them out once we sorted through the confusing details and got to the heart of the matter. Let me explain.

Dinner, when I was a kid, involved all seven of us at the table, and most nights there were good things on the plate, like, say, chicken and potatoes. But occasionally there were green peas. And, no, not young and tender early peas that came in a can. If only. Instead, it was those big chartreuse marbles, the kind that entered the house in frozen plastic saddlebags and which, even cooked, could contain in each small pea a world of gross textures ranging from cold baby-food-like mush in the interior, but sometimes with something crunchy in there, to a bloated chewy skin, the combination of which paralyzed a kid’s palate and filled that part of the imagination devoted to food with horrible images and eventually led to a discussion of Cool Hand Luke and the egg scene.

The trick of tucking the loathed peas under some leftover mashed potatoes had gotten old, so one night my oldest sister came up with a new and diabolical idea. When the parents had stepped into the kitchen to get something, we scraped our peas into our napkins, kept them balled up in our laps, and at the end of the evening happily took our plates into the kitchen. Then, the napkins all went into the garbage can. It was later that night, precisely as we all sat upstairs exulting over our genius, that we were summoned back downstairs. Confronted by a father sitting at a table before the nauseating evidence – several napkins unfurled to reveal cold, green horror – we quickly confessed.

Ethics

“Who,” dad asked, “came up with this idea?” Family loyalty is way overrated. Without hesitation, we pointed to our oldest sister. Her punishment? She had to sit down and eat all the green peas. Everyone gasped at the inhumane spectacle, but we all got it: Doing evil was one thing; planning it was even worse. This was especially true because, in time, we came to understand that if we had conferred with dad beforehand and offered some plausible fix (we all hate peas, can we substitute broccoli instead?), then there would never have even been a dilemma, a conspiracy, or a post-traumatic-stress-inducing vision of watching our eldest sister eat five helpings of coagulated peas.

When you’re young, ethics is what happens after you get caught. But when you get older, ethics is what passes for forethought to make sure you don’t have to get caught. Or, at least, that how it’s worked out me. I don’t remember when in my life I made the move from thinking about ethics before I did something instead of afterward. But, as with my ability to be comfortable lying to my aunts about their hairstyles, I awoke one day and realized that I could do it.

I grew up in a profoundly ethical house. My father was a lapsed Baptist from Bamberg, S.C., USA, who had fallen to the wicked state of becoming an Episcopalian after marrying our mom in Charleston. My grandmother never quite recovered from my father’s decadence – Charleston taught him to laugh loudly and dance in public. But that said, the old man brought a simple Puritanism to all the family’s ethical dilemmas, an inheritance I am happy to share.

I have been asked to bring my family’s moral compass (which, you now know, is centered somewhere between public dancing and not) to bear on an occasional Rotarian dilemma. So feel free to write in and submit any quandary that you think might need some public consideration. When I can’t channel my dad’s sense of goodwill, I’ll consult my sisters or my brother or, with some luck and perhaps a need for comedy, some of my favorite but more remote South Carolina relatives. That said, let’s start.

One Rotarian writes that he is troubled by participating in raffles because they are technically against the law, even though most people look the other way, given that they often support good causes. He suggests that the ethical solution is to avoid raffles while engaging in a lobbying campaign to change the law.

When you are young, ethics is what happens after you get caught.

On a strict legal level, there is no ethical dilemma here because the letter of the law is clear. Awarding money or prizes for a game involving chance – even if it’s a rubber duckie race down the local river to benefit a charity – is a crime. Of course, such draconian thinking also makes every grandmother at the local bingo hall into Bernie Madoff. Most people might tell you not to worry: Like bingo, it’s just one of those violations of the letter but not the spirit, and it’s best handled by ignoring it.

Not this time.

The problem is that there is a political dilemma. I called some folks with the Department of Justice involved in this issue, and here is what they report. A lot of officials who might otherwise vote to support a law permitting charitable gambling activities like raffles have been scared away from a reasonable bill by an equally reasonable fear: Some on the left (who oppose gambling because it disproportionately reduces the poor to the destitute) and on the right (who oppose gambling because they believe it is immoral) are suspicious that bills promoting raffles are actually Trojan horses put forward by the gaming industry to create a loophole that can be exploited later. This has happened before, so it’s not paranoia.

Any bill written would have to be quite strict and make clear the distinctions of magnitude. A three-legged race that benefits a local hospital, while sharing a definitional similarity to a game of blackjack with $100 action permitting soft-hand doubling and double-down rescue, is not the same in terms of magnitude. This is a difference that can be handled legislatively, such as by insisting that no third-party vendor manage the game, among other requirements.

And here is where Rotarians can be helpful. Legislators who are pressured to vote against decent raffle bills are told that the bills derive from out-of-state interests that are shopping for new turf. If Rotarians were to call their individual state legislators and ask them about the legality of a friendly raffle, the politician would become educated on the inherent complexity of a seemingly simple situation. If enough politicians are convinced that a real, working bill can be written, then they will write it.

Do-overs

Another correspondent writes that he plays golf regularly with a friend who will announce after a terrible shot that he’s taking a “do-over.” What to do? Well, we all know this kind of guy, right? He thinks he’s the president of the United States. I called my brother, Bobby, on this one. He’s the golfer in the family, and immediately you can tell that he’s our father’s son.

“I would not play golf with someone who makes up rules that way,” he said. He suggested that one might ask at the beginning of the game, “Okay, are we playing for a true score this time? No mulligans?” Part of any game is to ensure that everyone knows the rules before you start. So, all of you are complicit if you let a friend tweak the rules or get around them because you chose not to clarify them up front. At the very least, you should say, “How many do-overs are we going to allow on this round? And each will count as a stroke, right?” Why does golf even allow this kind of slack attitude? What would you say to a guy in a friendly poker game who announced that he’d like an extra card because his hand just wasn’t that good, or decided in the middle of a hand that one-eyed jacks were wild? Same essential principle.

But more than that, my brother said: “Ben Hogan used to say that golf is a game of recovery. It’s about what you’re going to do when you get into trouble. It’s about shooting out of the woods or a sand trap.” If one cheats over the very essence of the game, what does that say about your friend? “I wouldn’t do business with him,” added my brother, who said the golf course is where he often goes to take the measure of a man. “Everything you need to know about somebody you’re going to work with can be learned in a round of golf.”

So, whether its peas or tees, set the rules at the beginning.