September 2009 Archives

Penn State freshman Joseph Dado died early last Sunday morning in circumstances that may be all too easy for many of us to imagine ourselves in. The friends he went out with Saturday night had already taken off by the time he decided to leave the party they had attended together. He was somewhat buzzed perhaps, but was apparently confident that he could make it home safely. Instead he suffered a fatal head trauma from falling off a ledge between two buildings on campus.



Now, imagine you were in a similar situation at the end of a long night of partying: What would you do?

You may be struggling with the implications of your answer to this question. According to what I have been able to learn about the events so far, I don't see any glaring signs that would have been telling me to stay put, or to take a cab instead of walking. It's hard for anyone to be sure that, given the same situation, they would have made a different, somehow better, choice than the one Joe made.

Are there any lessons that we should learn from Joe's death? Are there any clear targets for blame here? Are there changes that can or should be made to ensure that nothing like this happens again?

Beyond grieving, and sending our condolences to his family and friends, what should we do to honor the memory of Joseph Dado? What will you do?

[See The Daily Collegian for ongoing coverage of the story and of the various ways in which the PSU community is honoring Joe's memory.]        

     

Imagine that you are a chicken farmer with a family to feed. You are struggling to keep up with the mortgage on your farm and to make payments on your equipment. You barely have any money to buy clothes and food. A representative from Big Chicken, Inc. offers to buy as many chickens from you as you can produce. 

There is one condition, though. You have to produce them in exactly the way Big Chicken, Inc. tells you to. This requires that you borrow even more money for new chicken houses, raise the chickens in conditions that you find objectionable, and not allow your operation to be seen or filmed by outsiders. What would you do? 

Would you take their offer and try to ignore your worries about more debt, the health of your animals, and the quality of your product? Would you decline their offer and hope to make ends meet in some other way?

It's the semi-finals of the U.S. Open and you are a lines-person. One of the most prominent athletes in the world, who is also an African-American woman, has already been given a conduct warning after she destroyed a racket in anger. Now her back is really against the wall. She needs to hold serve to avoid being eliminated from the tournament. On a crucial second serve, you believe you see her commit a foot-fault. What would do you do?

Remember, there is always a possibility that you were mistaken... and nobody likes to see a match go one way or the other because of the officials.

When you make your call, you can't know whether or not she will come at you, threatening to "... shove this [deleted] ball down your [deleted] throat!" Thus, you can't know that she will incur a one-point penalty that will cost her the match, or that the whole situation will be seen as an indication of racial and gender bias in the sport and in society more generally. Should it make any difference to your call if you somehow could?



Would it be better to play it safe, to let it go, and to avoid all the potential controversy?  Or, should a lines-person always "call 'em like she sees 'em", regardless of how important the point may be, how angry the call might make the player, and what larger points about our society the resulting scene may be taken to underscore?

If you were the lines-person, what would you do?

Imagine that your sister is starving to death. You have plenty of food for yourself. You could spare enough food to keep her alive until you find a long-term solution. What would you do?

You probably answered something along the lines of 'Help her, of course!' You might even be shocked or appalled by anyone who would give the matter a second thought before acting. It's not only what you would do, but it's what anyone should do. If that's right, then I wonder how you might respond to a question, that I have long wondered about, and that a recent New York Times article on the drought in Kenya reminded me of:

How important is it, really, that she's your sister?              

Imagine the same scenario as above, except that the woman in need is someone living on the other side of the globe who you have never met. Would helping her then become something that would be nice of you to do, as an act of charity, but not something that you should do? If so, why is this?      

Imagine learning that the burger you picked up from Joe's last week may have been contaminated with E coli. Five other people who ate at Joe's last week got sick. Now there is a report that hundreds more cases have been linked to beef from the same supplier that Joe uses. There is talk of a massive recall. No one is sure what the toll will be, in dollars or in human lives. What would you do?

Would you stop eating at Joe's? Would you stop eating hamburgers altogether?  Would you find yourself wondering about the workings of an industry whose products you have always taken for granted? What do you think you would find, if you took a look behind the curtain of food production in the United States? Do you think you have a right, or maybe even a responsibility, to find out where your food comes from? 

The makers of the recent movie Food, Inc. think you have both a right and a responsibility to know... although they don't think you will be pleased with what you find. The movie points to a whole range of ethical challenges that confront us when we consider the complex, and often messy, business of feeding millions of people every day. The following trailer should whet your appetite to participate in an informed discussion of the ethics of food production and consumption: