Ethics Scoreboard doesn't enjoy beating on poor Paul Hamm, America's sort-of-gold medal Olympian gymnast, any more than it relishes saying "I told you so." But the time has definitively run out for Hamm to do the right thing (voluntarily exchange his erroneously awarded gold for a silver), and now he and the Olympics have nothing but disagreeable and degrading options. An earlier column here pointed out that Hamm had a temporary opportunity to be honored and remembered as a sports icon of fairness, empathy, selflessness and the Olympic spirit by graciously turning over his medal to South Korean gymnast Yang Tae Young, who was stuck with a bronze in the men's all-around gymnastics competition by a scoring mistake. The alternative to that symbolic gesture of sportsmanship was to hold on to a medal that would be forever tarnished by the controversy, standing not for his undoubted athletic excellence but for officiating incompetence. You would think it would be an easy choice.

Instead, Hamm has listened to the predictably ethically tone-deaf voices of sportswriters and the US Olympic Committee, who are more concerned with medal counts than they are with virtuous behavior. They have succeeded in making a nice young man behave like the voracious sea gulls in Finding Nemo, incapable of saying anything but "Mine! Mine!" So now they're all going…you guessed it!... to court. Hamm has flown to Lausanne, Switzerland (Ethics Scoreboard hereby declares all "Hamm and Swiss" jokes unethical) for a hearing before the impressive sounding Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). And he is supported by a brigade of six attorneys and his agent, Sheryl Shade, all determined to help Paul keep his clutches around the gold.

The lawyers (two representing Hamm, two from the U.S. Olympic Committee and two from an outside firm assisting the USOC) have worked day and night, charging hourly fees all the while, since Aug. 28, when the South Korean gymnast made an official appeal to the Court to declare him, not Hamm, the all-around winner.

The price tag for fending off this challenge to Hamm's gold? Perhaps as much as $500,000 of the USOC's money, according to USA Today. But, the paper says, the USOC believes it's "money well spent."

Money well spent?? Money well spent?? Do people really give contributions to the US Olympic teams intending that it should be used to pay lawyers? "Money well spent" is helping poor young gymnasts afford training. "Money well spent" is educating athletes about the dangers of steroids. "Money well spent" is contributing the $500,000 to support inner city schools, feeding the hungry, build homeless shelters, find a cure for AIDS, heck, promote adoptions for unwanted pit bulls…but to pay lawyers to help Paul Hamm keep his pathetic, pointless, thoroughly discredited medal? Are sea gulls running the USOC?

How did Hamm get sucked into such a travesty? He fell under the spell of a powerful ethical rationalization (See "Ethics Fallacies" in the Ethics Scoreboard "Rulebook") rationalizations being false logic we use to justify unethical conduct. There are many rationalizations, and this was one we left off the website, but no more. Starting today, it is enshrined with the rest, and named in honor of Paul Hamm. It will be known as "Hamm's Excuse": "It wasn't my fault."

This has been Paul Hamm's mantra all along, and that of his defenders as well. "I played by the rules," he has told David Letterman, Jay Leno, and dozens of others. "I didn't do anything wrong. It was the officials' mistake. It's not up to me to fix it." This is a popular rationalization, especially in sports…think of the recent spectacle of tennis pro Jennifer Capriati resolutely ignoring the fact that Wimbledon officials were cheating her opponent, Serena Williams, at every turn.

Popular or not, it is wrong, unethical, and dangerous. Very, very frequently, the only person who can right a wrong is someone who shares no responsibility or blame for the wrong having occurred. Human beings are all ethically obligated to clean up the messes they create, but when they don't, won't or can't, everyone else cannot simply say, "Not my problem." This, remember, was Ebenezer Scrooge's argument, and you know where that got him. As Marley's Ghost tried to persuade him, we are all responsible for helping each other to the extent that we can. It is irrelevant whether a particular injustice is someone's "fault;" if that individual is the one person who can make things right when everyone else has refused, then the obligation is his.

The opportunity to right the wrong done to Yang Tae Young turned ended up with Hamm, and at that point not being the one originally responsible for the medal mess became unimportant. He was the one who could have made a statement for fairness, helped a fellow athlete, saved $500,000, and burnished his own reputation in the process. He chose not to do so, and now has the primary responsibility for a problem that once was not his fault, but no longer. "It wasn't my fault" is the credo of the bystander, the apathetic, the hermit and the coward. It is an excuse designed to avoid to doing the right thing.

The USA Today story says that Hamm is being paid $15,000 an appearance as a motivational speaker, and that is disturbing. His values have been thoroughly scrambled by this unfortunate situation, and it is he that is need of guidance; he is unqualified to provide it to others. In these troubled times that often require the strong, principled and courageous to step into breaches left by others, "It wasn't my fault" just doesn't cut it.

Leave it to the sea gulls.

Read Related Commentary:

• Paul Hamm and the Right Thing

Related Links: Rulebook: Ethics Fallacies