>>Why is giving the ball away for free the “right thing to do?”<<
We all attune our moral compasses according to our understanding of what is right.
I think giving the guy who hit the ball back to him since it is of significance is the right thing to do and certainly the class thing to do.
Your compass may turn a different way.
Let’s look at a scenario which might illustrate my point better. Suppose that there were two winning tickets sold to the weekly lottery. The first ticket was a gift from his parents to a recent college graduate with student loan debt of $150,000. The other ticket was purchased by the owner of a small private school for underprivileged kids. The total jackpot was for $1,000,000. The day after the tickets were sold, a story appeared in the local paper that said that the school would have to close, because they had over $900,000 in debts that they couldn’t pay, and the administrator announced that even after applying the $500,000 that they won in the lottery, repayment of the remaining debt was being demanded immediately by the creditors. The administrator announces that the school had hoped to win the lottery payout, but since they had to split it with someone, they only got half of what they needed, and therefore they’d have to close their doors for good.
As a result of this story, people in the community became outraged. They demanded that the college grad with the other winning ticket had a moral obligation to give his ticket to the school - that doing so would be the only ethical thing to do, because that ticket was so significant to the school.
Are they right?