BRG253

OK so I recently got busted for driving with a suspended license and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service. Since governemnt doesn't have the right to issue driver's licences in the first place, I felt that I had done nothing wrong and that the most moral course of action was to get it over with as painlessly as possible.

I did the community service with a one-man environmentalist organization picking up trash and removing invasive plants at city parks. The "president" of the organization is a guy who lost his job as an airplane mechanic (before the recession) and cannot now find another line of work, so spends his days as a professional "volunteer" running his one-man nonprofit agency. He is very ideological about volunteerism and the first day I met him, he went on a fucking rant about how evil employers are and how he couldn't get a job now because he was "overqualified." Really f'd up shit.

Anyway, most of the work was unsupervised, so there were plenty of opportunities to cheat and embellished my hours, i.e. report work when I really wasn't working. I spent about 50% of my reported time not working. He eventually caught me taking a break offsite while I was "on the clock" and read me the riot act. I later sent him an email apologizing for lying to him and explained my side: I didn't mean to rip him off, but I was operating under coersion and had no incentive to work any harder than absolutely necessary. Here is his response:

"Attitude is everything. You wasted my time and cheated the community of a valuable service. Volunteering can be fun, rewording and educational. I suggest you find something you like to do and try it some time."

This seems ridiculous to me beacause the hours I lied about required no time investment on his part. He only benefitted from the time I spent working, and lost nothing during the time that I wasn’t. Regardless of how many hours I reported, he was always the beneficiary of my misfortune. Of course, we all understand the silliness of "cheating the community."

My question is: did I owe this guy my honesty since it wasn't his fault that I was in trouble with the law? The contract is that I give him a certain number of hours and he pays me in the form of a letter to the judge verifying my completion of those hours. However, since I'm operating under coersion, and he is in collusion with the courts, I think this renders the contract morally invalid. But I would like to hear your thoughts. Did I "cheat" this man out of something that was rightfully his?