nonhypothetical ethics story

Via Crooked Timber, here's an ethics story for ya:

I got a call from an excited park ranger in Hawaii that "a nice Canadian couple reported that they found your camera!" She gave me their name and number, and I eagerly called to reclaim my camera.

"Hello," I said, when I reached the woman who had reported the camera found, "I got your number from the park ranger, it seems you have my camera?"

We discussed the specifics of the camera, the brown pouch it was in, the spare battery and memory card, the yellow rubberband around the camera. It was clear it was my camera, and I was thrilled.

"Well," she said, "we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he's been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can't bear to take it from him."

I listened, not sure where she was going with this.

"And he was recently diagnosed with diabetes, and he's now convinced he has bad luck, and finding the camera was good luck, and so we can't tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card."

It started to dawn on me that she had no intention of returning the camera.

"We'd be happy to return your photographs..."

I was incredulous. "This is an expensive camera, you know."

"Oh, we know, we looked it up."

"I was hoping to offer a reward for it, but I was also hoping to get my camera back."

Silence. It is now clear I will never see the camera again. I'm shocked at what seems like an utter moral failure on her part, despite her claim to want to "do the right thing."

"Ok," I say. "Why don't you send me my memory cards, and, say, $50 and we'll call it even."

I give her my address.

I don't hear from her for nearly two weeks. Friends suggest filing a police report.

Finally, I get a package in the mail.

"Enclosed are some CDs with your images on them. We need the memory cards to operate the camera properly."

I call, furious. "I was shocked to get your package today. Our agreement was that you were to send me my memory cards, not that you would keep an additional $120 worth of my property on top of the valuable camera you already chose not to return."

"You're lucky we sent you anything at all. Most people wouldn't do that." We go back and forth a bit more. She eventually hangs up on me. I call the police department in her town (in Canada) but they tell me that it's a U.S. issue, since that's where the property was lost.

I am out $500 and some measure of faith in humanity.

Kieran has an interesting point about the initial contact making the following bad faith seem more reprehensible... would the woman who didn't intend to return the camera have been more ethically justified not to call in the first place?

The story ends well; the lady gets her camera back.

garden tending

Feminist Mormon Housewives is one of my favorite reads, although I don't think I've ever left a comment. I'm not Mormon, and I'm not a housewife, but I hope that reading their blog is more theological stretching than sociological voyeurism for me. This post by Artemis on Eve and Lilith has had me thinking about Genesis and gender construction again, so I decided to share:

While Wikipedia is quite explicit that the Lilith/Adam marriage story is at the end of the myth’s evolution, I want to turn things around a bit and suggest that in terms of our collective psyche, Lilith and Eve represent two halves of the feminine falsely separated into opposites–one powerful, confident and independent, the other submissive and compliant. Let’s say for the sake of argument, that the traditional patriarchal cultures that have dominated most of history have, either consciously or unconsciously, promoted this split to make sure they can keep control over women, i.e., teach the message that an uppity, independent, and egalitarian-minded woman is Bad and a submissive, “weaker”, and obediant woman is Good. If women believe this, women will do what men want because it is the ‘natural’ or ‘good’ order of life.

Instead, what if we unify the personalities/personaes of Eve and Lilith? The true companion of a complete Adam and his masculinity is a complete woman and her femininity (Evelith?), who is both powerful and good, nurturing and strong, independent and committed. The Mother of All.

Really, our LDS conception of Eve is evolving this direction anyway. She’s no longer the one who botched things for the rest of us, she’s a hero who made a brave, scary, and righteous choice (i.e., God wanted her & Adam & the rest of us to experience mortality, it was his will that they transgress one law to keep another, making her decisions a transgression, not a sin, sin being to knowingly act against the will of God). Now, it’s obvious that the ‘power’ issue is currently in flux among the Saints because we’re always back-and-forthing about how women and men are equal, but we (instituationally and culturally) still cling to a strong directive of men being the power wielders–they being the ones with the priesthood and presiding authority (though after Elder Oaks’ conference talk last fall, I’m not sure what that really means anymore).

I enjoyed the versions of this conversation that I had with LDSers during the summer I spent worshipping with them. This reimagining of Eve as a strong woman who made a courageous moral choice for the sake of all humanity appeals to my feminism. The women I know and respect are no more likely to neglect righteousness than the men I know and respect, so it seems unfair to lay the moral responsibility for 'the fall' at Eve's feet. I don't agree that the traditional Adam and Eve story is weighted against Eve, necessarially, but the LDS version of the story takes the guesswork out of the interpretation.

The LDS version of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is a comforting one for me, as a feminist, and therein I think it holds a danger for me. I'm more than a set of gendered expectations; I'm a whole person, and act as such across a field of moral choices. While it rankles me to hear founding stories told as though the responsibility for evil in the world lies with a stupid woman who didn't obey the law, I'm also uncomfortable with a version of the story that seems to remove the very real matter human participation in evil from both human characters.

Without getting into bizarre ideas of original sin, people really do have a tendency to break the commandments of God simply for the sake of doing so. I can witness to such times in my own life; I know the good, and I choose the evil for no better reason than rebellion. Choosing the evil feels freeing, in the short term, like I'm suddenly powerful, charting my own course across the sea of moral thinking.

That's a vapid metaphor, and I won't expand it with thought on what happens when the storms come, and the inevitable lighthouse that sneaks into such stories. Perhaps this is a better (and more relevant) image for the sense of power that comes with choosing evil: I am queen of my own garden. The plants and animals are mine to control, instead of mine to tend. When I rebel, as Adam and Eve do in the traditional story, I lose my sense of submission to God and a rightful place within an equality of creation.

I don't see how the LDS version of the story addresses this concern, but perhaps I haven't spent enough time with it. I'd love to have a more woman-affirming story, but a story that doesn't address head-on the human willingness to rebel for the sake of rebellion doesn't seem adequate. One of the things I've learned most clearly from feminist study is an awareness of power hierarchies as the root of violence in the world, and I can't seem to stand within the LDS story and see it as a founding narrative for a world that contains so much violence over power.

On the bright side, though, I'm all about the Lilith stories. And, Artemis is a much better writer than me, so go read her post.

encouraging words

...or not.

What do the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and the Vice President's Terrorism Task Force have in common?

Neither believes in holding meetings. Ever.

Awesome.

logic lesson

Why are we in Iraq, anyway?

Q. What if we can’t kill all the terrorists in Iraq?
A. Then we’ll invade somewhere else and trick ‘em into attacking us there – only this time it’ll be someplace really far away where they’ll get stuck, like the ocean or the moon!
Q. I would totally watch Operation: Lunar Justice live on CNN!
A. Wolf Blitzer in a space helmet… it writes itself!

Totally.

flook

I want this CD.

I also want an award for lazy posts.

happy valentine's day

Make a homemade card for your honey with explosive ink:

A very unusual ink-jet printer cartridge, containing explosive ink, has been patented by Qinetiq, the commercial spin-off of the British Ministry of Defence.

The ink is a mixture of very fine aluminium particles, each 1 micrometre in diameter, particles of copper oxide 5 micrometres wide, epoxy varnish and alcohol. The ink is stable in liquid form, making it safe to print onto conventional paper, but forms an explosive fuse once dry.

If that makes you nervous about the card you just got, then scroll down to read about the cannabis cough cure. (Cough, cough.)

extravaganza

Hmm...

This concludes today's posting extravaganza.