I recently came across an interesting situation at the Bank of America ATM the other day. I had already requested the amount of money for withdrawal, and my hand was at the ready, right under the cash dispensing slot, awaiting the friendly and welcoming feel of Mr. Andrew Jackson and his quintuplets. After receiving said bills and sighing in relief, I also noticed something else in my hand…My brows furred as my eyes fell upon a foreign object that should NOT have come out of the cash dispensing slot…a Chevy Chase ATM/checkcard, in the name of one Ernesto WhoseLastNameIHaveForgotten. I looked over my shoulder, around me, up and down…half expecting Ashton to jump out and say Spend, Spend, Spend (rather than Punk’d!)
It boiled down to this: What do I do with Ernesto’s checkcard? Read on.
The timeless question is often posited…what came first, the chicken or the egg? While the answer may invoke an age-old battle between Darwinism and Creationism, it has an indirect link to another question that has been debated since Aristotlean times (or further back): What is the essence of our actions, its driving force, and what are the implications of their repercussions? Does an infinitesimal amount of rights justify the action of a single, solitary…wrong?
It’s never been more evident than these current times in where rights and wrongs are portrayed within our media…perhaps more so on the latter, for that stirs up drama, debauchery, or the simple pleasure of saying: “AHA! GOTCHA! YOU’RE NO BETTER!” and glorifying in the toppling of a seemingly ne’er-do-wrong icon.
Case in point: Sports, and Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots. This season for the Patriots (pun intended) has begun flirting with history. No NFL team, since the ’70s has gotten through a season undefeated, and the Pats are making headway since their biggest challenger (the Indianapolis Colts and one P. Manning) fell at their feet. The Pats stand tall at 9-0, seven games away from matching the Dolphins’ 16-0…with the odds in their favor in the remaining weeks.
In the face of historic sports moments, another one is constantly surrounded by shadows: One Mr. Barry Bonds. This man has shattered a baseball milestone–the home run record held by Hank Aaron (755 career homers), hitting the 756th and continuing to extend the record until the Giants went home in September…questions loom about whether or not 755, or perhaps 762 (Mr. Bond’s grand total) of those baseballs were belted out of ballparks behind juiced up arms, begging for the insert of a monolithic *.
It seems that we are running out of professional sports in which our supposed role models are depending on the “X Factor” to either help them perform better or deal with the pressures of stardom. Bicycling’s Floyd Landis, tennis’ Martina Hingis, basketball’s The NBA Referee Scandal of 2006, the list goes on…
All of these incidents involve a deeper sense of right vs. wrong. Belichick’s moment when his hand was caught in the cookie jar as investigations unveiled stolen signs off “illegal” tapes probably was the crowning moment for this writer. How pervasive is the need to perform at your best? How far does one need to go to attain that sense of satisfaction, knowing that one has reached the apex of success and left their mark? Where is the challenge of it all if success is attained through illicit means? We all have our answers–this writer questions the motive behind those decisions of our media-plucked role models. Do they not realize that their actions reflect on their organization, families, and more importantly–themselves?
Perhaps they do, and they don’t care. Perhaps they feel safe in the confines of fame-as-buffer. Untouchable. Laws, rules, constraints, boundaries do not apply to them because they.are.f-a-m-o-u-s and self-proven.
Or, they feel they cannot perform without the aid of something. Take your pick.
Life sure looks good when you have an edge, doesn’t it?
After all, despite the brouhaha, Belichick is 9-0.
Think about it.
And, I passed the checkcard on to my wife for her happy use. No, really. Yes.
Ok, she’s a Chevy Chase bank member too and has returned the card to a Chevy Chase bank. So, Ernesto WhoseLastNameIHaveForgotten, if you’re reading this, I SWEAR that I have nothing to do with all those Las Vegas charges. Really.
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.
18 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
It occurred to me upon reading about you being at ATM and finding that checkcard with your cash…I don’t know why you didn’t just simply take a deposit envelope and put the checkcard in it, and slide it under the bank door (or put it through their night depository slot or something) YOURSELF, instead of umm…giving it to your wife and making her do all that work.
You were ON THE SPOT! Sheesh.
Other than that…I do think that the absolute line of right/wrong is getting weaker and weaker with each passing year. Do we blame parents, society, or…?
That line was a lie all along, IMO.
Is the going disappearance of absolute line between right and wrong necessarily a bad thing? Situational ethics is an example of the lack of absolute line. For example, in a poor town, a family does not have money to feed five children. The mother in the family decides to sell her body (becoming a prostitute, that is) for a night so that she can get some money to feed her children.
We sometimes lie to protect others. Kantian ethics would claim that lying is always wrong no matter what. But, situational ethics permits lying in some situations. For example, there are six kinds of lies: 1) Protective lie. 2) Heroic lie. 3) Playful lie. 4) Ego lie. 5) Gainful lie. 6) Malicious lie. An absolutist would condemn all of these lies while a situationist would permit some of these lies.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
josephpietrojeungriolo@gmail.com
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.
Joseph, people like you scare me.
I understand your point about using judgement to best fit the situation, BUT…constantly putting yourself in gray area automatically puts you on a very, very slippery slope.
It’s tough to stay in the same spot on that slippery slope.
I.e., to use your example, the mother who decides to sell her body to get money to feed her children…well, I could say that she is 1) betraying her husband and weakening the foundations of her marriage (I’m sure he wouldn’t appreciate her getting sex from someone else), and 2) there are other ways to get money without selling her body and giving away her self-respect.
And most importantly, 3) she shouldn’t put herself at a huge risk: if she doesn’t use condoms, she leaves herself open to AIDS and STDS, which she can ill afford to get, considering that she has children to take care of. Also, prostitution is a very dangerous profession and tends to attract sickos and killers, so she has put herself in serious danger of being killed and leaving her children motherless.
To answer your first question: is the ‘going disappearance of the absolute line between right and wrong necessarily a bad thing?’…my answer to that would be YES.
I personally wouldn’t want to teach my boys that it’s OK to lie for this or that, and then it’s not OK to lie for this or that. It would become one huge headache.
One must draw the line somewhere.
And of course, now that you say you would employ lies to meet various situations you described, it does make me look at you with less trust. It also makes you appear less credible in my eyes.
Is that the consequence you want to inspire in people? After all, this is what happens when you put yourself on that slippery slope: people will always wonder if you’re telling the truth or not, and if you’re credible.
Just because I mentioned situational ethics does not necessarily mean that I adopt it as my ethics. I mentioned it to show that it is possible to have ethics without absolutism. However, situational ethics is not without some problems as shown by your list of undesirable consequences if the mother in my example decides to become a prostitute even just for one night.
But, you seem to be oblivious to the problems with absolutism. For many centuries, it was absolute that any woman who aborts her baby is guilty and should be punished harshly. Now, that absolutism disappears almost completely in this nation and many other nations. I don’t think that anyone wants to see the absolutism in abortion returned to our society ever again.
This brings up the question whether absolutism in ethics ever exists. The philosophers and ethicists argued over different kinds of ethics for many centuries. Ethics is a mammoth subject. It is so big that one of traditional branches of Western philosophy is called ethics. Some of them thought that the absolutism in ethics is merely an illusion. You may think that you have absolute line now but many years later, you may begin to question it and all of a sudden, the absolute line changes or disappears.
I have no qualms about lying to protect other lives. Say, a man is chasing you down the road at night trying to kill you and you come to my house. (You may say that this is a dumb example and I am exaggerating to make my point. But, that is what ethicists do. They have to think of different possible situations to test their theories about ethics.) I let you in and you hide in one of my closets. Few minutes later, the man knocks on my door and asks me if I see any woman around here. In a heartbeat, I lie to him. I lie to him that I see a person running toward the forest across the road and that person could be what the man is looking for. After making sure that the man is running toward the forest, I call police to arrest the man for trying to kill you. I am not going to sacrifice your life on the Kantian altar of Honesty-At-All-Times!
Some years ago when my two oldest sons were young, probably around 10 to 12 years old or younger, they talked with me about lying because it was one of the topics being discussed at their school. The school taught that it is wrong to lie. Near the end of discussion, I told them that as they grow up, they would realize that they might need to lie sometimes, in contrary to what was being taught in school. I used as an example Anne Frank that was discussed at school previously. I explained that Anne Frank was able to hide in the apartment for a long time because people in the town were lying to the police.
Lying, however, can be easily misused for one’s own gains. For some ethicists, drawing an absolute line is not the answer to the problem of misuse but education is the best key for knowing when to lie and when not to lie. For other ethicists, absolutism is the absolute answer to the problem.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
josephpietrojeungriolo@gmail.com
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.
You said: “For many centuries, it was absolute that any woman who aborts her baby is guilty and should be punished harshly. Now, that absolutism disappears almost completely in this nation and many other nations. I don’t think that anyone wants to see the absolutism in abortion returned to our society ever again.”
If that was true, then people would leave Roe vs. Wade alone. As you very well know, many people (pro-lifers) still do judge women harshly for having abortions to the point where they will physically prevent women from going to clinics, or bombing abortion clinics, or harassing abortion doctors (in fact, it’s gotten so bad that many medical students now skip learning about abortion procedures in med schools), and so on.
There are still absolutes in this country and elsewhere.
About Anne Frank…her neighbors *didn’t know* that she and her family were in hiding, at first. They were eventually discovered by Germans on a tip given to them by one of the neighbors.
Michele–I have to agree RE: the absolute line of right/wrong…With all of us, including the younger generations being exposed to the world as it really is–thanks to the internet, media, reality shows and such–it might make the absolute lines fuzzy because such exposure takes away from old-school family cores/values–learning what is right and what is wrong, acceptable behaviors or not, and so forth, from the people instilled with the responsibility to do so in the home while you are being raised…the parents.
I notice it much more now than I ever did, because I’ve got a 2-year-old Deaf son, and I’m also 7 months pregnant (we’re expecting another boy).
Of course, having your own child puts you in the position of being able to really see what other parents are doing (or did) with their children.
Or, you could have stuck the ATM card back in the ATM machine and after a time, with no buttons being pressed, the machine would have swallowed up the card. You could even wait for it to swallow up the card. Presumably, the bank would have notified Ernesto that his card was found. Presumably.
Not sure that I like the idea of having to enter your PIN and information on your ATM card to deposit someone else’s card. And would the machine even accept a blank deposit?
Oh, and whatever you decide, smile and wave, you’re on camera.
And maybe do a happy dance? May as well entertain the people screening the videotapes. You may even end up on youtube.com.
I don’t get the analogy with sports. Cheating is different from fraudently using someone else’s ATM card - you’re talking criminal behavior. I don’t think they have an “I got it with my money” defense. I’d have pitched it in the deposit slot banks usually have for after hour deposits.
Right, newbie. That was my point exactly. When Oscar gave the card to his wife and she went to the other bank, she was doing the work for both banks for free.
Considering how banks happily charge fees for this or that, I would have put it in after hour deposit box or put it under the bank front door or something.
Newbie/Michele: I alluded to an age-old ethical dilemma, doing what is right versus wrong and/or cheating (insert perception here)…from an ethical standpoint, the ATM situation, the sports situations,they all boil down to choices–right vs. wrong.
Oscar, I’ll leave Newbie’s puzzlement about the sports analogy for you to answer.
For me, I’ve already said what I wanted to say about the ethics, right vs. wrong, slippery slope, absolutes, etc.
The bank thing…they’re a pain in the ass, and they’re forever charging fees for this or that and I guess I wouldn’t be so quick to do their job for them. That makes me selfish in one sense…but “wrong”? Hmmm.
Michele–one could say the whole right vs. wrong debate is fueled on personal experience, value systems, beliefs or perceptions. Different actions beget various “rankings” on the moral/ethical continuum.
Is it ethical to eat a turkey that has been injected with growth hormones for Turkey Day? The mind reels.
Well, depends on who you ask. If you ask someone who’s been accused of cheating via injections, he or she may say something along the lines of ‘Mmm, did you see how thick and tasty that turkey was? I wonder what it was injected with? Yum!’ :P
Cheating is… unfortunately… relative; it depends on if you’re the cheater or cheatee, and if you’ve been negatively affected by it or not.
As for the bank card case, hmm, that’s an interesting question. I’d probably have had returned it to the bank the next day, mostly because if I made a deposit, it’d have had initially been to my own account and caused much confusion.
I found this out when I once returned a check the bank sent me with a bill for ‘insufficient funds’ — but turns out that the person who bounced the check was the NEXT person after I had deposited my own check. The bank staff quickly looked at that day’s deposits and realized the goof. Still, required me to be present in person to sort it all out quickly.
I have no criticism for the original poster per se; I’m just saying how I might have had handled it. But in the end, he didn’t try to use the card for nefarious purposes and saw to that it got returned. So… not sure I could see a case for criticism.