Ethics Exam

Question 1

You go to a local café for lunch, feeling dissatisfied with life, in particular the dwindling number of options ahead of you in one or more of the following areas:

• career

• relationships

• finances

• improvement of social status

You sit by yourself and read a book while eating your lunch, which consists of a sandwich on wholegrain bread, a pickle, and a small pile of potato chips.  Also some sort of coffee-based beverage.  The waitress who serves you is the young attractive Polish waitress who has served you at this café on several past occasions.  When you pay the bill she mistakenly gives you too much change, a fact that you do not discover until well after you have left the establishment.

What do you do?

Bonus:

Describe how your answer to Q1 changes if

a) the café is owned by a large multinational corporation

or

b) the mistake is deducted from the waitress’s tips.

Question 2

You return to the café later that evening, having decided to return the money.  The waitress is closing up and she is charmed at your honesty but tells you it’s going to be too much trouble for her to re-open the register and re-calculate the daily numbers and unlock the safe and add the ten dollars to the daily money bag and so on and so forth.

“The company won’t miss ten measly pounds anyway,” she tells you.

However, having decided that the money is not rightfully yours, you feel like you must do something not entirely selfish with it.

What do you do?

Bonus:

Does it make any difference to your answers thus far if the sum involved is £10 million instead of £10?  Why or why not?

Question 3

The waitress has accepted your invitation to a quiet local bar where you put the £10 towards the purchase of one round of drinks including one cocktail and one imported beer.

As you consume your drinks you propose and commence to discuss various subjects with the waitress, all the while studiously avoiding any mention of your fragile long-term relationship.  You discover a mutual love of film, and the waitress invites you over to her apartment to consume additional drinks and to watch a recently released DVD of a movie made by a director whom you both rate highly.

It is very clear where this is leading.

What do you do?

Bonus:

Describe if and how your answer to Q3 changes:

a) if you are simply cohabiting rather than married

or

b) if there is in fact no fragile long-term relationship

or

c) if you have two children.

Question 4

The following day your partner in your long-term relationship returns from an academic conference where she has been presenting a summary of her award-winning Ph.D. research.

Your partner studies plants, and as is typical of people who are intensely involved in their work, this passion spills over into her home life.  Your small rented house is filled with flora – specimens both mundane and exotic – despite the fact that you suffer from mild hay fever.  In fact you seem to have constantly inflated sinuses while in the house, a condition which did not bother you when you first moved in together, but now seems both symbolic of some larger dysfunction, and symptomatically much much worse.

You have not watered the plants since your partner left three days ago.  The two of you will argue about this later.

But now, you have a headache.  As a result of what happened the previous evening at the waitress’s apartment you are both hungover and regretful.

Your partner fingers the desiccated leaf of a rare echium wildpretii and asks how you spent the last three days.

What do you say?

Bonus:

Briefly discuss the meaning of truth using examples from at least three of the following historical thinkers:

-Plato

-Aristotle

-Descartes

-Kant

-Nietzsche

-Sartre

Question 5

Over the next two weeks, unbeknownst to your partner, you see the waitress three times, and have sex with her twice.  Your fragile long-term relationship is becoming even more fragile.

“I don’t know where this is headed,” your partner tells you.  She knows something is up.

There is a final scene during which you are given an ultimatum with various conditions attached.  You are given the option to either leave, or to stay, but if you stay, you are required by your partner to give a full and fair accounting of your extracurricular activities, begin attending some form of joint relationship counseling, put serious demonstrable effort into attempting to change your mundane, low-paid, misery-inducing “creative” job, and help out around the house some more.

Your partner, on the other hand, pledges to replace the pollinating members of her current collection of plants with hypoallergenic alternatives.

What do you do?

Bonus:

Using marginal theory, provide a purely economic defense of monogamy, without reference to non-quantifiable incentives.

Question 6

The truce with your partner is short lived, due to your failure to live up to one or more of the stated requirements for the continuation of your long-term relationship.

The breakup is pathetic, and the process of sorting through and dividing personal belongings forces you to examine a lot of your own personality traits, long-standing memories and deeply rooted psychological issues.

Afterwards, you move in with the Polish woman.  She has quit her job at the café so is no longer, technically, a waitress.  In two months she will finish her studies at the nearby university and she is making plans to move to a different city to pursue her chosen career in nursing.  During periodic discussions of this plan there is no mention or implication of you moving along with her.

Emotionally drained, you continue to work at your mundane, low-paid, misery-inducing, “creative” job.

At times, you wonder whether leaving your partner was a mistake.  You frequently stay up late, sitting on the Polish woman’s couch, flipping through television channels but not really watching in the true sense of watching, instead mulling over your decisions and considering your options, and after some contemplation you come to the conclusion that you have one simple choice:

a) Remain with the Polish woman for the next two months, then start a new life.

b) Return to your former partner and beg her to take you back.

What do you do?

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Mike Wendling is a writer, journalist and radio producer. He’s a past winner of the London Writers’ Award and has been shortlisted for the London Short Fiction Award and the Bridport Prize. Originally from the the U.S.A., he lives in London, and he edits the online audio fiction magazine 4’33” (fourthirtythree.com).