NFL Fires a Player qua Domestic Violence; morally right??

And she gets to hobnob with millionaires and billionaires constantly, and use her political and management skills, and she likes manly things. Condi likes the finer things in life but she is not money grubbing like so many in her class are, I dont think that pay would be the main thing with her.

I think you and many others are approaching this from the base position that maintaining a thriving business that serves its customers, stakeholders and employees in general, is not a moral pursuit in and of itself. I maintain it is. A lot of people depend upon a very successful NFL, and the league has a legal and moral obligation to make certain that these people are not let down.

Almost by definition, if you are able to avail yourself of a condition of your contract, it is not immoral, or at least it's not against public policy which for many people is the same thing. The courts will not enforce terms and conditions of a contract that they deem are against public policy.

For example, if the indemnification clause of a lease requires the tenant to hold the landlord harmless for all claims and damages, even when it is the negligence of the landlord that has caused the damages, most courts will render that clause null and void. The reasoning, of course, is that if the landlord cannot suffer any consequences of his negligence, he has no incentive to address safety issues in his building; over which he has the most, or even only control. Obviously, that is not, to the benefit of any member of the general public that may enter his building.

A similar situation arises with punitive damage awards. Even if an insurance policy specifically states it covers the insured for such damages a court can decide that it is against public policy for essentially the same reason as the case of the landlord. Punitive damages are intended, in part, to act as a deterrent. If, in any given state, a drug company can pass off its liability for punitive or exemplary damages to an insurer, what's to stop them from repeating the same wanton and reckless conduct that precipitated the award in the first place? Often those acts have a profit motive and in such cases the pursuit of profit is, indeed, immoral.

A contract between two parties is intended, in part, to obviate future legal and moral dilemmas. Both parties agree to the terms and conditions which include the remedies available to either party if the other breaches any of them. In essence it makes it a very simple moral issue: In return for consideration, you promise to perform in a certain way. Keeping that promise is a moral issue and the contract makes it a legal one as well.

Contract law is not so ruthless that it doesn't consider extenuating circumstances. For instance, with a contract of adhesion (which is essentially a take it or leave it deal for one party - insurance policies, software licenses etc.) if there is an uncertainty about what the contract means, a dispute arising from that ambiguity is decided in favor of the party that had no control over how it was written. This is quite equitable since when you accept such a contract you cannot negotiate any of the terms and you really can't even ask what they mean and seek to have them clarified, therefore it is essential to you that they can be clearly understood when you read and accept them. Of course most people don't read these contracts, but the law still applies after the fact because the court will look at the contract to determine if you should have realized how the party interpreted the wording, if you read it. It's one of the reasons such contracts are written in "plain language," which is to say not "legalese." If only a lawyer can understand a software license, it's probably going to be considered ambiguous by a court.

Any contract Rice may have entered into was certainly not a contract of adhesion, and whether he personally read and understood the terms, he was represented by legal professionals who did, and had a duty to make sure he understood what it meant. During that process he had the opportunity to a) insist on changes or b) refuse to sign it. So, once the contract was signed, he had a made a promise or series of promises (as did the Ravens and/or NFL) that he had a legal, and I would argue, moral obligation to fulfill.

There may be situations where the law allows you to do something which morality prohibits, but they are far less than people think and almost always involve statutory rather than common law which is based on what is equitable, reasonable and "moral." I would also argue that there are too many statutes in place that attempt to "fix" or "modernize" common law, but really serve special interests, but that's a topic for another thread.

I don't know that Ray Rice himself is complaining about what's happened to him. Maybe he's left it to his wife because he thinks she will be listened to, but on several levels, cynical, legal, and moral, this is not about his wife. The Ravens and the NFL aren't taking their actions because of concern for the wife's welfare, either in terms of her proximity to a violent abuser, or her future financial condition. One might argue that it would be nice if they did listen to her complaint, but they clearly have no legal obligation to (she is not a party to the contracts) nor in my opinion do they have any moral obligation: For whatever reasons, she chose to marry Rice (even after he knocked her out in an elevator). She must have had some idea that the Ravens, the NFL, the public and advertisers would not be please by her husband (then fiancé) cold-cocking her, and if she didn't, she should have, just like any reasonable person would. She made her bed and now she has to lie in it.

I might be more sympathetic to her complaint if the NFL's decision left her and any children they have destitute, but it doesn't. Rice had made something like $22 million during his career. If he and his wife have blown through every penny he has made they will have left themselves in dire straits through their own irresponsible behavior. I don't think they have and I don't think that Rice is unemployable as a result of the NFL decision. He may be unemployable in professional sports, but Rice doesn't have a right to play in pro-sports and his wife doesn't have a right to be married to a millionaire.

An important consideration, for me, that I believe is absent in some of the arguments being made in this thread is personal responsibility. Clearly this is a major component in any legal consideration, and I believe it is any assessment of morality as well.

Meting out the least possible consequences for a person's actions is not necessarily the most moral approach.

PS: Double jeopardy doesn't apply here. The NFL is not barred from "punishing" Rice because the State has. Double jeopardy wouldn't apply if the Ravens or NFL sued Rice for breach of contract either. Civil and criminal actions are separate and distinct. If they were not, the Goldman family would not have been able to secure a judgment against OJ Simpson for the wrongful death of their daughter.

The double jeopardy that the union is complaining about is that the nfl punished Rice, and then with no new information punished him more for the same bad act, they say because of pressure.

Thanks for the well thought out response. Some questions for clarification: If a business is a moral pursuit in and of itself, should every business terminate the employment of someone arrested for domestic violence? Why is the NFL different than a factory somewhere? Is a legal conviction required? Does the employee at least merit a hearing with the company and should he have any recourse if fired since employers employ at their discretion?

If the accused is not a multi-millionaire like in this case, taking his job could do much more harm to a family that is already in trouble so I'd argue that if someone is doing their job satisfactorily, I would not fire them because of an event outside work. It would be to my benefit as an employer and as a moral person to make resources available to help them, but I don't see termination as a moral action.

As for double jeopardy, I think there is a clause in the players' contracts that forbids it.

for the record the NFL has over 1700 players on its main teams, plus a bunch more on its practice squads.

Urban myth: http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/congress.asp

Here in Maryland, people are lining up to trade their Ray Rice Jerseys for different Raven players. Raven fans are conflicted, some defend Ray Rice because they want him on the team, even a few women say that his wife was asking for it, others are flat horrified and putting as much distance as they can between themselves and Rice. Some pizza chains are offering a pizza in exchange for a Ray Rice jersey. I'm guessing the fine points of morality and immorality are no longer a matter of interest to Ravens supporters. Maybe another pro ball team is in the market for a tough man who isn't afraid to deck a women in the privacy of a closed elevator, with a tender side, so much so that after he punched her out of her shoes he picked them up.

He is not on the team, and is not likely to be on the team, so wearing the jersey is rather pointless. I dont think taking that ravens up on a free jersey for a current team member says anything about support or non support of Ray Rice.

7000 were returned, and while we dont know how many were sold we know that the NFL sells at least a couple million a year, and we know that ray rice jerseys have been very popular. He made number 28 in all the NFL on this list, the only Raven on the top 50 list.

https://www.nflplayers.com/Articles/Press-Releases/Russell-Wilson-tops-NFLPI-Top-50-Player-Sales-List/

You really don't understand sports fans. Matt Le Tissier left top flight football, (and Southampton,) in 2002, but the Saints store still sells "Le God" shirts.

Soccer is not football. I rarely go to games though did one game last year, but Olympia is almost a Seattle suburb so far as the NFL goes so every friday everybody from the bank tellers to the Costco employees are in their Seahawks jerseys. I very rarely see jerseys of non active players, and the ones I do see are basically Gods (Largent, Alexander)

The old bag is diving to a new low.

Glitterbag or Glitterhag I'm not even going to go there with you,. the fact that you wrote this in jest in a childish manner exposes the type of person you are, have a good day old lady.

A business should terminate an employee for any activity that is not job related if it makes it impossible or significantly more difficult to meet its obligations. That a factory worker is arrested for domestic violence is unlikely to have such an impact on the factory, except to the extent that he cannot report for work and perform his duties. The factory owner is not, in my opinion, obligated to, nor should he, join with society in punishing someone who has acted outside of what is acceptable to society.

Ray Rice's termination and banning is not justified as a punishment for his offense against his wife and society, but as the consequence of his failure to abide by the terms of his agreement, and by injuring the ability of the Ravens and the NFL to successfully conduct their business to the extent they would be able to if he had not knocked the woman out.

Legal conviction is not required (unless it is a condition agreed to in the contract), but a full investigation would be (likely through contractual condition, but, in any case, morally). The league has a legal and moral duty to act in good faith. Even if it is not spelled out in the contract that a reasonable investigation must be conducted to determine if the player has actually violated the standards of conduct, the league is obligated to do so. The immorality of firing an employee without any sort of due process is fairly obvious, but it would also be a legal issue. Both parties have a legal duty to act in good faith in terms of fulfilling their contractual obligations. In the Rice case, the video provides all the evidence needed.

If there is no employment contract and the laws of a Right to Work state apply, then legally the employer can probably fire the employee without any sort of due process, but most of us would find this inherently unfair. Whether or not it was actually immoral, in my opinion, would depend upon why the employer chose to terminate without due process.



Much more harm than what? Than the harm that will befall Rice and his family? That is irrelevant.

The whole basis for terminating an employee for non-job related activity is that it is harmful to the business and therefore harmful to the other employees of the business and possibly to its customers, suppliers, financers etc. If it is not harmful, the employee should not be fired. If it is, prior job performance may be a consideration, but not the deciding factor . The employer, in making his decision, should weigh the harm done to the company against the value provided by the employee. He may also consider the harm to the employee and his family caused by the termination, but by definition, losing one's job is going to result in some harm. Again we need to remain mindful of the morality of personal responsibility. The person is not going to be in this sort of fix for littering or jay-walking, and by hiring someone, an employer does not assume responsibility for the employee's family, irrespective of all other considerations.

It may be that after consideration of all of these factors, the employer decides to proceed with the termination, for the good of the company and its various stakeholders, but to provide some sort of financial assistance such as severance pay to the employee. In this way the harm to the company is remedied, and the impact to the employee's family is mitigated.

What you are suggesting is a situation where the termination of the employee would be frivolous or malicious and of course that would be immoral and possibly illegal even in a Right to Work State, but for the hypothetical to have any relevance it must contemplate that the employee's non-job related activity actually harmed the company and its stakeholders.

Of course it would not be of benefit to the employer to fire a worker who had been doing a good job, just because he had been arrested and the arrest made not one whit of a difference to the success of the company.

It’s never so simple a matter though. The employer needs to consider future possibilities as well. Is the employee likely to be involved in repeat incidents? Might they escalate to something worse which would bring even more harm to the company?

Certainly you can construct a hypothetical where I would agree it is immoral for the employer to terminate the employee, but the likelihood of such a situation actually occurring is minimal and it certainly isn't the Rice case.

I hope this has clarified my argument for you. I think though that you are not buying into the possibility that a non-job related activity of an employee can be harmful to the employing company and its stakeholders. There is no discussion if it can’t be, but the fact of the matter is that it can, and the Rice case is an example of how it can.

Most of us, including me, find it grating that an employer may have a right to care about how we live our personal lives. Over the years I worked for companies, I came to accept how this could reasonably be the case and once I owned my own business, I (of course) saw it even more clearly. I do not mean to suggest that this right doesn’t come with attendant obligations which are either legal or moral, but it can’t be an won’t be that anything you do in your private life has no impact on your employment, as long as you perform you duties in a competent fashion.

The degree to which your employer cares is directly proportionate to how important you are to the company, so the best way to keep your personal and business lives as distinct as possible is to remain at the entry level and never get promoted. It's a tough price to pay for as close to total independence as you can get, but by the same token the rewards increase as the dependence does.

Soccer is a derogatory term for football. It's name is football, the whole world, save America, calls it football.

Team sports are team sports, the psychology is the same regardless of whether it's football, rugby or gridiron.

you seem to be unaware that till very recently and for generations managements almost universally considered employees to be stakeholders in the firm. They used to to go so far as to keep people on the payroll when work was short because they owed it to the employees, the ones who had earlier carried the firm to success on their backs. This was back before management decided that they were responsible for everything good that happened, and should be paid accordingly.

Disposable workers, yes I believe we have seen this before as well. The last time unions were the corrective measure.



Gotta hope you were not around in 1962 when an important client informed the firm that continuing to do business was going to be impossible if niggers were hired.

I disagree with you on this part:

"Most of us, including me, find it grating that an employer may have a right to care about how we live our personal lives."

If I want to drink an entire bottle of vodka my employer does not have the right to determine I'm an alcoholic therefore I am immediately sent to rehab even though my work has no negative setbacks on the company. I should not be terminated because I like to drink a bottle of vodka everyday. Is it harmful to me? Yes. But once I'm off the clock my employer has no say so about my lifestyle.

I work at a Catholic institution can you imagine how many transsexuals and gays that work at my hospital? Should the hospital involve themselves in their homosexual/transsexual lifestyle? No. If I hit my wife my employer has no right to determine that I'm an unfit associate because of what happens outside of work because my employer does not know the details and the facts. My employer only has a right to my personal life when my vices become a disruption in the productivity of the work environment.

The NFL is a different company than your average work force because the NFL is all about maintaining an image. The NFL sees its players as investments, my job doesn't. My job like everyone else's job, sees its employees as expendable assets, nothing more.

You seem to be unaware that on more than one occasion I specifically included employee's in the company stakeholder group. I might take your comments more seriously if you bothered to actually read what I wrote before commenting. Missing a point that wasn't particularly emphasized is no big deal (I certainly don't expect anyone to study my posts!), but the fact that actions that impact the company also impact other employees is something I did emphasize and in more than one post.

You enter all of these discussions with an immutable point and manufacture opportunities to repeat the same tired lines.

"Big Bad Corporate America"
"Disposable Employees"
"Some allusion to racism in an attempt to establish bonafides as a "socialist" that no one buys"

You're certainly not required to agree with my argument, but it might be useful for you to read it before you fire off a counter.

you have posted over 17,000 times. I have not read them all. Very few employers anymore act like employees are stakeholders, employees are generally considered cost inputs and are treated accordingly. I disagree with Fran Tarkenton that we should want the NFL to police the workforce for off the field behavior but he is right that the NFL is all about the owners, and they dont give a **** about the players.

It sounds like you agree completely with me.

You don't find it grating that your employer might have a right to care about how you live in your personal life?

It's difficult to make blanket statements that actually apply like blankets.

I agree that under most circumstances it’s none of their business what and how much you drink, but it's not difficult to imagine when your consumption of a bottle of vodka a day becomes their business.

1) If your drinking affects your attendance, tardiness, or performance, the cause may not be relevant, but the results surely are. In such a case a lot of people would appreciate it if their employer asked them why their performance had suffered. I would argue that the employer has no obligation to determine the cause, but that to do so makes good business sense. Determining that an employee's performance problem is alcohol related, many companies offer specific programs that provide counseling and even rehab. Any employee is of course free to tell the company to mind its own business at which point it will do so, and will fire them for cause -- non-performance. Someone like engineer might consider this the employer acting morally, and I would agree for what is probably a different reason, but morality doesn't have to enter the picture. If you were a valuable employee before you took up drinking and can be one again after you receive help, the company benefits.

2) If your drinking harms the company's brand, mission statement, or business plan. Obviously if you are plowed when you take a customer to dinner, and you proceed to insult him or her, your drinking has intruded on your performance of your duties, but if your employer is an organization like MADD and your drinking leads to one or more DWIs, you will have created a potentially harmful situation for your employer. If you are a janitor or in the mail room, the only impact may be on your attendance (it's tough to perform well if you're in court or jail), but if you are in a senior position which deals with the public and large contributors, it's obviously a problem for MADD that you are guilty of the very activity the organization is trying to stop. If you think that DWIs in this case would not have a harmful impact on MADD, you are mistaken.

In the MADD example your DWIs might have no impact on the organization's donations or publicity, but I would argue that it still has a right to terminate you for moral reasons. After all, combating drunk driving is the mission of MADD and for its actions to be consistent with its mission statement, it can't have employees who consistently are found guilty of DWI. I suspect, without knowing, that MADD probably has an alcohol abuse program for employees, but it makes no business sense for them to either continue to pay for failed therapy or to pay you a salary while you spend months in rehab. When they hired you, they didn't assume responsibility for your life. It makes business sense to try and help you, and most people think of it as the "right thing to do" irrespective of business concerns, but if you won't or can't respond to the help and stop the DWIs they have no obligation to keep you on.

Of course this presumes that they advise you when they hire you that they won't tolerate DWI incidents regardless of whether or not it hurts your performance. I don't think they are required to do so, because a reasonable person should be able to come to the conclusion without being told, but if they have an HR department, I can practically guarantee that they advise all new employees of this policy, and that they have already had to terminate someone because of DWIs.

Similarly, irrespective of what any of us may feel on the topic, if a religion holds as one of its major tenets that homosexuality is a sin and it is part of their mission to eradicate it, it is not only logical it is moral (within the structure of their belief system) for them to refuse to hire homosexuals or to terminate employees if they learn of their homosexuality. I'm sure people who understand and appreciate the MADD example may still bristle at this contention, but that is only because in the MADD example they either agree with or accept MADD's "belief system" and mission as reasonable or, overall, beneficial to society, whereas in the religion example they do not. At this time in our history, enough people do not, so that statutes have been written to make it difficult or impossible for the religion in the example to act consistent with its moral framework. Obviously this is an ongoing conflict as respects religions vis a vis not only homosexuality, but birth control and abortion, and because of our constitution and history is significant enough that these conflicts find there was to our Supreme Court.

Quite a lot of people think it is an open and shut case and should not be subject to dispute because their moral framework is not aligned with the religions. They may, indeed, be on the "right" side of the issue, but fortunately, it is not easy for the majority in this country to impose its moral framework on everyone and particularly when it comes to religion. That people who do not agree with the religions moral framework, or even abhor it, have no use for religion to begin with should be irrelevant to the resolution of any dispute. Our constitution contains a specific clause protecting the freedom of religion in this country and we shouldn't scrap any portion of the constitution out of hand because a large number of people feel it is irrelevant. The erroneous assumption many people make in this regard, is that future scrappings of protected rights will likely be OK with them so the precedent is not dangerous. (Or they don't even think that far ahead). It shouldn't take too much thought to realize that this is a slippery slope.

To some extent I've strayed from the topic at hand, but to return to it I will say that I agree that the NFL is different from other companies, but only by the degree of its concern for a public image. All companies, to one extent or the other, are concerned about their brand and how they are perceived by their stakeholders. The circumstances for a Rice like incident to occur in a tire factory are far less likely to arise, but they can and if they do, the tire factory has as much right to terminate the factory worker as the NFL has to terminate Rice.

To some degree, the majority of companies do view their employees as "expendable assets," and this is perfectly reasonable, unless you believe that once you are employed by a company that it has assumed responsibility for your life. If employees are not, to some extent, expendable, a business is in for a rocky ride. If it cannot terminate its employees when it feels the need to, it will not remain viable for long, but you seem to be painting a picture of companies treating their employees like cheap equipment, and while I'm sure there are companies where this is the case, I'm also sure that they are the exception, and not the rule.

This notion that corporations are soulless monsters that chew employees up and spit them out is hyperbolic. Granted there is no shortage of anecdotes of some employee getting the complete shaft from his or her employer, but often a full review of the facts reveals that it is not so one sided as it is made to seem, and/or that what is really involved is a clash of personal interests where some individual within the corporate structure is abusing his or her power.

And there are companies that will skimp on safety measures and thereby place their employees in increased risk, but this is rarely, if ever, due to the fact that a corporate board has affirmatively decided that the human lives of the employees are entirely unimportant and that if they all died tomorrow they could be replaced over-night.

In any case this country has an extensive set of regulations designed to protect the safety of workers which is a good thing and which I support (not-with-standing that some of these regulations are excessive and unnecessary). Even if all the companies in this country wanted to treat their employees like cheap equipment the government and the courts would not allow them, and the simple truth of the matter is that they don't. The people who own and run companies are not uniformly stupid. The majority of them appreciates the value of their employees to their business, and understands that without employees they have no product or profit.

The smart ones understand that it is good for their business to appreciate the value of their employees as human beings as well, if for no other reason than employees want them to, and happy people make good employees. It doesn't take a lot of research to find numerous companies (many among the Fortune 500) who spend a lot of time and money on making their good employees want to work for them.

There is always, though, going to be excessive expectations among employees who, despite some seemingly cynical attitudes to the contrary, want to feel that when they join a company they are becoming part of something larger than the employer-employee relationship. Often their expectations are reasonable, but unfulfilled, but just as often or more so their expectations are unreasonable.

Despite some of the points of view expressed in this thread the "issue/problem" of employers intruding upon the personal lives of employees is not massive. The Rice incident has created a platform for an interesting discussion, but it's hardly representative of the experience of the average worker.

Again, an employer's interest in an employee's personal life is directly proportional to the employee’s importance to the employer. Being important to your employer means better compensation, more authority, and a greater sense of accomplishment. These are all things a great deal of workers desire. Life is full of bargains and giving up some of your personal life to obtain greater rewards from you job is one that can present itself to you. No one is required to make the bargain, but it's entirely unreasonable to expect the rewards will come without some price.

Obviously I don't require or expect you to read every post I have written, but, again, if you want to to take your challenges to my posts seriously that you should at least read them to make sure you challenges hold any water at all.

There are plenty of companies that view and act like their employees are stakeholders. In fact, if anything, it has been a trend in corporate strategy for years now. Granted, few of them completely make good on the puffery of their Vision or Values document posted on their websites ("XYZ Company Is It's People!" "XYZ's People Are the Best of the Best!"), but with increasing competition for high and consistently competent skilled performers, these companies realized that they had to raise the bar to meet employee expectations. They also realized that the cost of unnecessary employee turn-over is quite high, and that it's a net loss to bring someone in at a cheaper salary only to spend far more in training and "culturalization.")

Clearly, employees in America don't exist in a Utopia of employment, but it's nothing like the salt mines and sweat shops you and others would have us believe.