I own a small manufacturing company, and recently I made a special order for a friend. He and I agreed on a certain price. My bookkeeper misunderstood my billing instructions and sent an invoice for less than the agreed-upon price. I discovered the mistake two weeks later. I contacted my friend to notify him of the mistake and to tell him we were sending out a corrected invoice. He said, "Your mistake is not my problem," and that he would only pay the incorrect amount on the original invoice. Who is right? STEVE COHEN, BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y.
This is a question I receive roughly three times a week: A product costs X dollars, but a consumer is mistakenly charged Y dollars. Does the consumer now need to pay the difference, or is she only obligated to pay what she was accidentally undercharged?
The answer always strikes me as obvious — people should accept that mistakes sometimes happen and pay the agreed-upon price. In this particular situation, you told your friend what the price would be, and an employee made an error. That error should be fixed; there was a verbal contract, considered fair by both parties, and that agreement should stand. If the employee had accidentally overcharged your friend, you would need to reimburse him for the overpayment once you realized it had transpired.
This reasoning, however, rarely satisfies people. There is a popular sentiment (at least among some readers of this column) that every salesman is responsible for charging exactly what he or she is owed — and if they fail, the window for rectifying that error closes almost immediately. (Not surprisingly, these same readers rarely express the same inflexibility when they are overcharged. The directive only seems to apply when the error works in their favor.) People in this camp operate from the premise that a retailer is like a game-show contestant; if the contestant misspeaks while answering a question, the contestant automatically loses (even if she knew the correct answer and was just momentarily confused).
So let's remove money from the equation. Imagine this business exchange was actually an exchange of ideas. If one party misspeaks and inadvertently says the opposite of what he means, and both parties recognize that this mistake has occurred, only a fool would demand that this error must now be accepted as some kind of new, durable reality. Only a child would say: "Well, I just won this argument. You uttered words that oppose your original point." If we concede that words have meaning, we must also recognize that the intent of those words matters even more. Ideas don't become irretrievable just because someone says them aloud. In the same way, the intent of an invoice matters more than the invoice itself.
Is Voter Suppression O.K.?
A recent opinion piece in The Times about voter-suppression tactics contained admissions by a few Republicans that these techniques — reducing early voting, voter-ID requirements, impediments to voter registration, purging voter rolls, felon disenfranchisement, inequality in voting-day resources — are simply ways to reduce voting by Democratic-leaning groups, mainly minorities. While many argue that these tactics are a form of impermissible racial discrimination, the new pretext is that it is allowable as mere partisan discrimination. Can this practice be justified as an extension of partisan politics? T. W. RYAN, TUCSON, ARIZ.
No. It's unethical. It's not illogical, but it is wrong. And unlike the situation in the previous question, it's a problem in which intent is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is the act itself.
The person arguing for voter suppression is essentially saying: "We are not trying to suppress voters because of who they are. We are trying to suppress voters because of how they vote." In practice, this isolates racial minorities. But to the suppression advocate, that detail is extraneous. He or she would insist the same techniques be applied to middle-class red-haired factory employees, if (for whatever reason) middle-class red-haired factory employees always voted Democratic. Moreover, the person promoting this line of reasoning would undoubtedly suggest that — if the world were reversed, and minorities overwhelmingly voted for Republicans — the same forces that currently support voter suppression would actively encourage these marginalized groups to exercise their right to vote. In short, suppression proponents would insist that this is simply how the game of politics is played, that nothing about this is remotely personal, and that the motive for preventing left-leaning citizens from voting is the same as the motive for persuading right-leaning voters to get to the polls.
All of which might be true. But it changes nothing.
Voter suppression is wrong even if it's not racist. Any legislation that exists for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for an otherwise-eligible person to vote is unethical. It's straightforward cheating. It doesn't matter what the espoused intent for doing so is (or isn't), and it doesn't matter where on the political spectrum the suppression originates. The act is intrinsically wrong, regardless of how the intent is rationalized.
E-mail queries to ethicist@nytimes.com, or send them to the Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, and include a daytime phone number.
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