Dear Max,

Ethics are such an important part of every day life and culture. Not everyone has the same ethics, although you may wish them too. 

When I was in my masters program at Madonna University I took a few very interesting ethics courses from Dr. Leon Levitt. He knew ethics inside and out. 

To give you a sense of who he was, Dr. Levitt graduated college in the 1940s and grew up in New York. He fondly told stories of remembering going to the dock as a young boy with his father to watch the bootleggers bring in booze to sell illegally. He was well-seasoned and had an unmistakeable charm to him. 

He had such a knowledge around ethics in business that he wrote a book he constantly referred to as his monograph. It cost a whopping $4 at the book store, unheard of when all the other books were in the $180 range. He thought the costs of new books were unethical when new versions are constantly written to sell more books, so he wrote his own. He wrote it so well that his students couldn’t cheat. They had to simply know the material. Many students were so upset by how the book was written that he was reported to the Dean multiple times per semester. Those students would drop the class and those that stayed learned lessons of a lifetime. 

Dr. Levitt was passionate about being ethical in every way. He wrote the book on it. In the end, you just need to do whats right, just as he did for his students. Be ethical with even the smallest things and make no exceptions.

Love,

Dad