Simple moral arithmetic.(on the right)

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 17

SOME years ago, at the outset of the age of e-mail, I was lunching with three or four media moguls, and the discussion turned to security. Specifically, how to guard A from B's gaining access to A's correspondence. The late A. M. Rosenthal, at that time the executive editor of the New York Times, told how he had addressed the problem. "I called in the senior staff and said, Look, we don't read each other's mail, do we? Well, for the same reason we don't do that, we will not look at other people's e-mail."

This seemed to us, for a brief moment, kindergarten moralizing. But there was silence at the table as we recognized that Rosenthal had said everything that needed to be said on the question. If it is wrong to read other people's mail, it is wrong to read that mail in whatever form it comes in, and transmissions by Internet are no exception.

That moral question is easily answered if you simply stare it in the face, as are many others. But our failure to do so results in acts of moral default which somehow go on. The most spectacular recent episode of this is the matter of Dr. William McGuire, of the United Health Group.

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The device he used is very tempting. The executive asks for, and receives in his package of compensation, stock options on the company he goes to work for, such options giving him the right to purchase shares at the value they sold for on a given date.

Let us say that the hypothetical company shows a rise in the value of its securities, which is most generally the case in successful companies. The trick is to exercise an option granted on a date when the stock sold at a lower price than it is selling for today. The point at issue is whether the dating was by happenstance, or whether an option was deliberately written to coincide with downward fluctuations in the share price.