A restauranteur has opened and closed numerous businesses in multiple states without paying employees, vendors, landlords and investors, and keeps getting away with it. Is this ethical? Is it fraud?
Question posed by a Baltimore Sun reporter
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Ethical Decisions 
There is probably fraud involved in the legal sense, but I am not a lawyer and will focus on the ethical side.
This looks like a case of false promises. A promise can be false in two ways, either of which is unethical, but for a different reason.
One type of false promise is made with no intention of even trying to keep it. This would occur if the restauranteur is a fly-by-night operator who is deliberately perpetrating scams. It is unethical because it is not generalizable. If it were general practice to make promises with no intention of keeping them, then no one would believe the promises. In particular, the restauranteur would be unable to attract investors, employees, etc.
Another type of false promise is made while having no realistic control over whether it can be kept. If I promise that you will win the lottery, then this a false promise because I know I don’t decide who wins the lottery. It is not a promise at all, since by definition, I can promise only actions over which I have control. The restauranteur may be unable to say with any confidence that his business venture will succeed, perhaps due to his record of failures. If so, he is leading people to believe falsely that he is making a promise in the first place. This is not generalizable, because if it were general practice, no one would consider his proposals.
If the restauranteur is a perpetual optimist and truly believes that he will succeed this time, then he is not making a false promise. Nonetheless, his conduct could be misleading, because it may cause others to assume that he doesn’t have a record of failure. Neglecting to alert them to his history could be ungeneralizable, because if it were universal practice, employees and investors might be more likely to investigate his background and get cold feet.
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