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warshawlawI hate to discuss "moral" or "ethical", for a couple of reasons:
1. Different people and different cultures have different standards for what sort of commercial activity is ethical/moral. In some cultures I deal with every day (Eastern European, Asian and Middle Eastern), it is a given that your first number is never your real number and that negotiations continue even after that. If you don't know this and simply take the first offer, the seller/buyer doesn't think it is wrong and wouldn't give it a second thought. People raised in the Anglo-American legal/ethical/commercial system have a particular world view that the other 50% of the world population does not share.
2. Ethical and Moral lends itself to hyperbole and name-calling. Clustering the Enrons of the world with the referenced situation is just not accurate. The folks at Enron (allegedly) broke the law. They (allegedly) knew the rules and circumvented them. Here we are talking about voluntary dissemination of information and expertise, not breaking the law.
3. As far as I am concerned, professionally, there is lawful and unlawful, and the lawfulness of conduct has built into it society's collective moral/ethical judgment about what behaviors are tolerated. I think most attorneys view things about that way. Don't blame Hal for approaching the question from that standpoint. It is every bit as valid a line of reasoning as any other you can come up with as "moral" or "ethical".
Moving on to the issue, we all know that all business dealings more sophisticated than straight retail sales of mass produced goods have a component of information gamesmanship to them. Strictly speaking, every great deal we collectors have ever gotten on a card has come at the expense of the seller of that card. Hell, I picked up a $500 card at a recent show for $10 because the seller did not realize what he had, and I wasn't about to tell him. I simply do not believe that there is a duty incumbent on someone with a particular expertise to share that expertise with someone on the opposite side of the table in a negotiation. So, would I voluntarily show the old lady what the cards are worth? Probably not. I would try to get them for as little as I could, without lying to her (that is fraudulent conduct).
Now, applying that to the real world, as I have often had to do as a dealer/collector, if someone came to me and said in essence "here are these cards, what will you give me for them?" I would ask myself "Who is this person? Is what I could make from this deal worth it to me to lose this person as a friend/contact if they find out I paid them a pittance for this collection?"