I'm so lame that I spent half my night at a computer typing a response, and when I went to post it, the thread it was for had been shut down. 
I sent a PM to a certain administrator to see if he would post it for me, and he replied: "Go ahead and post this in a new thread. But if it gets out of hand again I'll have to shut it down." Sweet mercy, woo hoo! (Now I need to do a favor for him so I'm not a huge hypocrite after all this junk I typed! 
) Not that you all are were wanting to read this or talk about the subject anymore anyway, but it feels really dumb to do all of this and then have no one at all read it. Here ya go:
I have to do two responses in one here (because I’m so slow at typing); might still be too big of a chunk any way you look at it. My bad. You can probably figure out which part of the thread I’m referring to with each response…
I’m amused by the almost “spiritual” properties that people assign to ownership sometimes. Ownership is nothing more than a social contract between two or more parties that allows them to go about their business. It would be more accurate to describe the arrangement as being the caretaker or concierge of an object; a possession does not irrevocably fuse with your soul upon attainment. If someone hits you over the head and takes your purse while you are unconscious, they are now (at least temporarily) the caretaker of that purse. The purse does not have any intrinsic attachment to you. That is literally all the further ownership goes. You enter into a social agreement with someone whereby “you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone”, or “I’ll give you this for that”, or “your leave me alone if I do this and I’ll leave you alone when you do that”, etc. The choice of any person in the contract to break or honor the agreement at any time is contingent upon their understanding of the situation and the values they hold.
You can make a [weak] case for ownership vis-à-vis self-concept, but none of the variants I’ve heard hold any water with me. Let’s say for a second that you (I’m just blindly pulling an example out of the air) have a car that you really like. I mean this car is a big deal. You are “the guy with that one car”. It’s as much a part of you as where you were born or the way you talk. The trait you ascribe to yourself would be something like: adjective, adjective, noun who owns and verb adjective, adjective car. Operating in this role is now part of your identity, but since the car is part of the equation, is it now also part of you in a sense? Hmmm… the problem with this is that while the possession of the car is important to the formation of your identity, ACTUAL possession is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the self-ascribed trait to show up in your head. Example: I come and steal your car while you are on vacation. I am now the caretaker of that object, not you, and for all practical purposes, am now the “owner” of that car. Meanwhile, while you’re off ignorantly sipping margaritas and still playing the role you were when you left. Another example: You received the car as gift from someone. Even though you are now clearly and completely the legal owner of the automobile, you don’t feel like you’re worthy of it, and find it difficult to think of the car as really “yours”. Another example with something non-physical: you believe that you are a “famous” person who is liked by many people. This trait you attribute to yourself can exist and grow with unimaginable vigor without any basis in reality at all. In fact, you may not be a famous person (according to the definition you are using), and liked by few people (“liked”, “few” and “people” also according to your own definitions).
Admittedly, none of the above considers that it would be indeed possible (and perhaps even more probable) for your being the actual caretaker of an object to be a sufficient or necessary condition for the existence of a portion of your self-concept. (You arrive home and realize: oh ________, my car is gone forever; I’m really not “the guy with that one car” anymore.) Suffice it to say that my intention was to point out a kink in the chain. The argument keeps going, but delves [much] deeper into identity formation, perception, memory, blah blah blah - a whole jumble of concepts and questions that at some point are either 1) insanely complex 2) out of my league [for now] 3) unanswerable, or 4) boring. I’m not trying to stir the waters up and run, I’m just trying to get myself out of this hole while I still can. Hope you understand.
The way the concept of “law” has arranged itself in my head is still focused around the operation of a series of social contracts. When a group of people band together and want to form a society, they pick out an agreeable minimum standard for behavior. As long as the members of that society hold themselves to that standard of behavior, they are afforded the cooperation of their fellow members and benefits arising from organizing in that fashion. If one of the members breaks one of the conditions, then they are usually cut off from the cooperation of the other party in some way. If the society was formed with a little leniency built in, this might not mean that the person is automatically excommunicated (perhaps receives some other form of punishment). However, if the person continues to violate the social contract, then they are often removed from the society in some manner or leave the society on their own when the contract is “voided”. In the good old days, there were plenty of places where people could go to form their own clubs with their own rules when they decided that a contract was unfair. Nowadays, all the good spots have been claimed by other societies and so there is no reliable protocol for ensuring that the person is excommunicated and goes to/stays in a place where they (and their value system) will be wanted. As a part of a global community, countries enter into social contracts whereby they do their best not to boot serial killers across the border in order to get rid of them. Instead, these people are “excommunicated” into a very “special” kind of society where they won’t bother anyone but “their own kind”, or are killed outright. Curiously, this Lesotho-like sub-society is contained in a position where they are able to be controlled by the super-society and are very limited in the number and kind of collective social contracts they can create and only organize in a very limited way with other members. Before you end up there, of course, you always have the option of overthrowing another society, your own society, or evading the detection of your violation of the social contract. The best choice would depend on the situation.
A “responsible” person may or may not feel comfortable overthrowing a part or the whole of another or their own society, or avoiding the detection of their violation of a social contract. The implication of a person needing to violate a social contract and then hide it is that the contract was perceived as unfair or disagreeable in some way, but still wanted the benefits that a relationship with the other party in that context had to offer. Within a social contract, a person or society which places contractual demands on the other member which the member is unable to meet, but must meet (upon pain of threatening a reasonable existence for themselves) is coercion. If a person has had enough, but is literally unable to leave the society because of geographical, financial, social or some other constraint which would threaten a reasonable existence were the constraint disregarded, or is unable to renegotiate the contract, and the society does not make provisions for them, it is coercion. A society which manufactures consent from the member it wishes to form a social contract with is coercion. Keep in mind that the person or society (or more properly, the “ruler(s)” who draw the terms of the social contract for its members) is under no “ethical’ or “moral” obligation whatsoever to act or not act in a coercive manner. The only reliable binding force which “keeps” them in line is the social contract which is drawn between its members whereby the one agrees to not coerce the other insofar as they are not coerced themselves. Other values may play a role (it is my belief for whatever reason that only “bad” people coerce others, and since I do not want to see myself as a bad person [maintenance of self-esteem], I will not coerce other people), but may be less desirable for the party which holds them as their primary motivation. This type of motivation is incredibly convenient for the more aggressive member of the contract, because it obviously allows them some leeway in the amount of coercion that they are able to exact on the other member without fear of retaliation. This is not necessarily “bad” or “good” either, unless the more aggressive party begins to lose benefits from the relationship with the dominated party. Only then does the aggressor have any motivation to change, unless there are secondary motivations at work. Perhaps the aggressor decides all of a sudden that he wants more than anything, for whatever reason, to give everything he has away to make other people happy. The ex-aggressor’s new “reward” is the successful construction of a new self-concept, and/or possibly some sort of social reward (wider social acceptance, more friends, easier to manipulate others, all of which he would find pleasurable).
“Rights” in a society would be more properly termed “mores”.
Keep in mind after all of this that a social contract can just as well be (and very often is) considerably unbalanced: “I’m going to kill you if you don’t kill your family”, or “the price for a quart of Havoline is $2.63”. “Compromising” is no more an abandonment of holding value than is being unable to place two physical objects into the same physical space an abandonment of physics. It may be true that you hold one value higher than another, and so give it preferential treatment in the concession (the tree you like best goes in front of the house while the other one has to go in the backyard), but sometimes you just cannot realistically pursue two values at the same time.
The people who wantonly violate beneficial social contracts in the society they live in are usually (excuse the expression) too “stupid” to see that many of the social contracts can work to their benefit (I’ll stop at red lights as long as other people stop for me). The goal of a social contract in this usage is, after all, to develop a mutually beneficial or synergistic arrangement. Ideally, this would be the predominant type of interaction that we would engage in. The desire to dominate others to pursue our own interests is not “wrong” (IMO), and very likely results from a driving force in our evolution that we are not consciously aware of when we act. If we’re all going to keep getting packed tighter and tighter into a finite world though, we had better learn to get along more effectively than we do currently. Well, there you go.
“Well there you go”? Complete lack of conclusion and structure in rant duly noted and 
I sent a PM to a certain administrator to see if he would post it for me, and he replied: "Go ahead and post this in a new thread. But if it gets out of hand again I'll have to shut it down." Sweet mercy, woo hoo! (Now I need to do a favor for him so I'm not a huge hypocrite after all this junk I typed! ) Not that you all are were wanting to read this or talk about the subject anymore anyway, but it feels really dumb to do all of this and then have no one at all read it. Here ya go:
I have to do two responses in one here (because I’m so slow at typing); might still be too big of a chunk any way you look at it. My bad. You can probably figure out which part of the thread I’m referring to with each response…
I’m amused by the almost “spiritual” properties that people assign to ownership sometimes. Ownership is nothing more than a social contract between two or more parties that allows them to go about their business. It would be more accurate to describe the arrangement as being the caretaker or concierge of an object; a possession does not irrevocably fuse with your soul upon attainment. If someone hits you over the head and takes your purse while you are unconscious, they are now (at least temporarily) the caretaker of that purse. The purse does not have any intrinsic attachment to you. That is literally all the further ownership goes. You enter into a social agreement with someone whereby “you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone”, or “I’ll give you this for that”, or “your leave me alone if I do this and I’ll leave you alone when you do that”, etc. The choice of any person in the contract to break or honor the agreement at any time is contingent upon their understanding of the situation and the values they hold.
You can make a [weak] case for ownership vis-à-vis self-concept, but none of the variants I’ve heard hold any water with me. Let’s say for a second that you (I’m just blindly pulling an example out of the air) have a car that you really like. I mean this car is a big deal. You are “the guy with that one car”. It’s as much a part of you as where you were born or the way you talk. The trait you ascribe to yourself would be something like: adjective, adjective, noun who owns and verb adjective, adjective car. Operating in this role is now part of your identity, but since the car is part of the equation, is it now also part of you in a sense? Hmmm… the problem with this is that while the possession of the car is important to the formation of your identity, ACTUAL possession is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the self-ascribed trait to show up in your head. Example: I come and steal your car while you are on vacation. I am now the caretaker of that object, not you, and for all practical purposes, am now the “owner” of that car. Meanwhile, while you’re off ignorantly sipping margaritas and still playing the role you were when you left. Another example: You received the car as gift from someone. Even though you are now clearly and completely the legal owner of the automobile, you don’t feel like you’re worthy of it, and find it difficult to think of the car as really “yours”. Another example with something non-physical: you believe that you are a “famous” person who is liked by many people. This trait you attribute to yourself can exist and grow with unimaginable vigor without any basis in reality at all. In fact, you may not be a famous person (according to the definition you are using), and liked by few people (“liked”, “few” and “people” also according to your own definitions).
Admittedly, none of the above considers that it would be indeed possible (and perhaps even more probable) for your being the actual caretaker of an object to be a sufficient or necessary condition for the existence of a portion of your self-concept. (You arrive home and realize: oh ________, my car is gone forever; I’m really not “the guy with that one car” anymore.) Suffice it to say that my intention was to point out a kink in the chain. The argument keeps going, but delves [much] deeper into identity formation, perception, memory, blah blah blah - a whole jumble of concepts and questions that at some point are either 1) insanely complex 2) out of my league [for now] 3) unanswerable, or 4) boring. I’m not trying to stir the waters up and run, I’m just trying to get myself out of this hole while I still can. Hope you understand.
The way the concept of “law” has arranged itself in my head is still focused around the operation of a series of social contracts. When a group of people band together and want to form a society, they pick out an agreeable minimum standard for behavior. As long as the members of that society hold themselves to that standard of behavior, they are afforded the cooperation of their fellow members and benefits arising from organizing in that fashion. If one of the members breaks one of the conditions, then they are usually cut off from the cooperation of the other party in some way. If the society was formed with a little leniency built in, this might not mean that the person is automatically excommunicated (perhaps receives some other form of punishment). However, if the person continues to violate the social contract, then they are often removed from the society in some manner or leave the society on their own when the contract is “voided”. In the good old days, there were plenty of places where people could go to form their own clubs with their own rules when they decided that a contract was unfair. Nowadays, all the good spots have been claimed by other societies and so there is no reliable protocol for ensuring that the person is excommunicated and goes to/stays in a place where they (and their value system) will be wanted. As a part of a global community, countries enter into social contracts whereby they do their best not to boot serial killers across the border in order to get rid of them. Instead, these people are “excommunicated” into a very “special” kind of society where they won’t bother anyone but “their own kind”, or are killed outright. Curiously, this Lesotho-like sub-society is contained in a position where they are able to be controlled by the super-society and are very limited in the number and kind of collective social contracts they can create and only organize in a very limited way with other members. Before you end up there, of course, you always have the option of overthrowing another society, your own society, or evading the detection of your violation of the social contract. The best choice would depend on the situation.
A “responsible” person may or may not feel comfortable overthrowing a part or the whole of another or their own society, or avoiding the detection of their violation of a social contract. The implication of a person needing to violate a social contract and then hide it is that the contract was perceived as unfair or disagreeable in some way, but still wanted the benefits that a relationship with the other party in that context had to offer. Within a social contract, a person or society which places contractual demands on the other member which the member is unable to meet, but must meet (upon pain of threatening a reasonable existence for themselves) is coercion. If a person has had enough, but is literally unable to leave the society because of geographical, financial, social or some other constraint which would threaten a reasonable existence were the constraint disregarded, or is unable to renegotiate the contract, and the society does not make provisions for them, it is coercion. A society which manufactures consent from the member it wishes to form a social contract with is coercion. Keep in mind that the person or society (or more properly, the “ruler(s)” who draw the terms of the social contract for its members) is under no “ethical’ or “moral” obligation whatsoever to act or not act in a coercive manner. The only reliable binding force which “keeps” them in line is the social contract which is drawn between its members whereby the one agrees to not coerce the other insofar as they are not coerced themselves. Other values may play a role (it is my belief for whatever reason that only “bad” people coerce others, and since I do not want to see myself as a bad person [maintenance of self-esteem], I will not coerce other people), but may be less desirable for the party which holds them as their primary motivation. This type of motivation is incredibly convenient for the more aggressive member of the contract, because it obviously allows them some leeway in the amount of coercion that they are able to exact on the other member without fear of retaliation. This is not necessarily “bad” or “good” either, unless the more aggressive party begins to lose benefits from the relationship with the dominated party. Only then does the aggressor have any motivation to change, unless there are secondary motivations at work. Perhaps the aggressor decides all of a sudden that he wants more than anything, for whatever reason, to give everything he has away to make other people happy. The ex-aggressor’s new “reward” is the successful construction of a new self-concept, and/or possibly some sort of social reward (wider social acceptance, more friends, easier to manipulate others, all of which he would find pleasurable).
“Rights” in a society would be more properly termed “mores”.
Keep in mind after all of this that a social contract can just as well be (and very often is) considerably unbalanced: “I’m going to kill you if you don’t kill your family”, or “the price for a quart of Havoline is $2.63”. “Compromising” is no more an abandonment of holding value than is being unable to place two physical objects into the same physical space an abandonment of physics. It may be true that you hold one value higher than another, and so give it preferential treatment in the concession (the tree you like best goes in front of the house while the other one has to go in the backyard), but sometimes you just cannot realistically pursue two values at the same time.
The people who wantonly violate beneficial social contracts in the society they live in are usually (excuse the expression) too “stupid” to see that many of the social contracts can work to their benefit (I’ll stop at red lights as long as other people stop for me). The goal of a social contract in this usage is, after all, to develop a mutually beneficial or synergistic arrangement. Ideally, this would be the predominant type of interaction that we would engage in. The desire to dominate others to pursue our own interests is not “wrong” (IMO), and very likely results from a driving force in our evolution that we are not consciously aware of when we act. If we’re all going to keep getting packed tighter and tighter into a finite world though, we had better learn to get along more effectively than we do currently. Well, there you go.
“Well there you go”? Complete lack of conclusion and structure in rant duly noted and 
! Turns out the head captain was manipulating the hours and working all the right hours while the rest of us were getting the leftovers. This was the same guy who made an "executive decision" 
to raise his share from 1.5 to 1.75...and not tell anyone (basically stealing) a couple years back and had to repay us 
. He had 18 years with the company (now 19) and has been demoted 
!
Hasn't the company surrendered their expectation of ethical behavior due to their own disingenous and deceptive negotiations with the employee ..at least in this instance??
At that point, if you can establish that unethical action by the company, which is married to the said document, do you still feel that some "static" ethical behavior is mandated?? Why? The contract, that you seem to feel has much weight upon the employee in this situation ..appears to have little merit in reciprocity ..or so I reason from your take on it.
Just because I lied and stole from you ..is no reason to exempt you from what you agreed to give me.
That's not saying that YOU necessarily would.
I think that you could 
