If this post has any merit, it is perhaps in pointing out what tiny issues from the past a blogger can find to write about. Or how early memories are often more "real" to us than more recent ones.
I attended Swarthmore College. A few of my friends were Quakers, and towards the end I was flirting with the idea of becoming one myself. Doing the right thing was important. I had a debate with a friend about the ethics of sneaking food out of the cafeteria: The meal plan allowed for 3 meals a day, seven days a week, but no food could be taken out of the dining hall. If you wanted to eat some place else, you had to pay for it yourself. One friend felt that it was ethical to sneak food out of the cafeteria to consume at a meal that one was entitled to eat in the dining hall but was in fact going to eat elsewhere (say, as a picnic on campus). I argued this was not ethical since the dining hall set its prices and made its plans with the expectation that some students would miss some meals in such a fashion, so it was not fair to them, or other students who followed the rules exactly. I'm not sure what we thought about the case where the food was to be consumed as a midnight snack instead -- I don't remember. Isn't that one of life's gripping moral dilemmas?
But I partook in a worse transgression. The campus employed a woman known to us as Catherine, an institution at the college for many years. Her job was to make sure that only people who were enrolled in the dining plan ate there. In theory we should all show I.D.s, but after the first few days no one ever did. Catherine apparently had a good memory and could tell who was allowed and who was not. I, however, did not enroll in the second semester of my senior year -- I had credits from the University of New Hampshire, which was what our high school in Durham did in place of AP courses. While AP courses did not qualify for college credit, these courses qualified I guess under the same theory as credits from other colleges would count for transfer students, even though I was not a transfer student. Such are the arcane details college administrators must confront. In any case, that gave me enough credits to graduate without enrolling for the second half of my senior year, and I had run out of courses I really wanted to take, and my frugal Yankee nature was aware that this would save my parents a fair amount of money (maybe $2,600!) They were fully funding my college education. However, during that semester I lived near campus, worked as a research assistant, and participated fully in the social life of the campus.
Just for fun, I went into the dining hall at the start of the spring semester as I always had to see if Catherine could tell that I was not enrolled. She could not! Somehow I had slipped through her net. It was certainly convenient, because the rule was that those who were not on the meal plan could eat but they had to pay cash right there at the entrance table. This was a nuisance and slowed the line down. It was awfully convenient to just walk down the stairs with all my other friends. And of course once I revealed that I was not enrolled, Catherine would surely remember and I would be unable to do this any more. Fessing up was an irreversible decision. So, I just kept walking freely down the stairs with all my friends for the whole semester.
This did, however, bother me. Partly this had to do with my Quaker leanings. But another factor might have been the spring weather. The Philadelphia area has mild spring days, one after another, for weeks at a time. This pattern is rarely seen up here near Boston. Union soldiers camped around Washington, D.C. remarked upon this in letters home, in the 1860s. Swarthmore's campus is also an arboretum, and the combination makes the campus quite stunning at that time of year. Feeling generous and morally upright were in harmony with the weather.
Eventually I got one of my Quaker friends to approach the director of the dining services with some amount of cash -- sixty dollars, maybe? -- explaining the situation and that one of his friends wanted to reimburse them for meals he had eaten that he was not entitled to. The director was apparently moved that a college student in 1976 would make such a choice. It wasn't, however, all of what I owed. It was perhaps a bit more than half. Or was it a bit less?
What was I thinking? One possibility would be that since I was not making the line stop at each meal to collect my cash, which I was entitled to do, I was saving everyone money by cheating and giving a lump sum later, and deserved a discount. Maybe I was figuring that I should be entitled to the pro-rated lower "bulk discount" price that students on the meal plan got. If they could not enforce their rules, was it my job to pay? Perhaps I thought that giving any significant sum at all was a good thing, and after all most students in my position would have just taken advantage of their good fortune. There is a lot of rationalization there. Maybe I just didn't want to part with the money. I dimly recall being aware that I had still cheated to some extent and being mildly troubled by that fact. I think my concern rapidly faded.
Certain people with highly developed scruples might argue that even if I reimbursed them in full it was still morally wrong to break the rules. I don't recall worrying about that at the time.
If you've gotten this far, perhaps you've joined me in nostalgia for a time when that level of moral question was on my mind. I like to think I've been pretty upstanding and moral since then but I can think of a few lapses. When I was a grad student at MIT there were piano practice rooms that I was not eligible to use, but I was able to "pick" the 5-button lock and use pianos when others were not around. There weren't other students waiting, and I didn't harm the piano, but there is of course wear and tear...
My parents had bought 10 ounces or so of gold, and when I got to handling their affairs, it was time to sell it. I was dimly aware that we might be liable for capital gains tax if (as was likely) it had gone up in price since they bought it. But they had no record of the purchase price, and the sale was handled anonymously in a coin shop, so... I just made no report of this gold to the IRS. I suppose I cheated the feds.
It is ludicrous to think that that is the worst of my moral transgressions. I have undoubtedly filtered out of my awareness others, or justified them because everyone else was doing them too, or others were doing worse. I've had 45 years to accumulate sins. I suspect I have made use of as many cognitive distortions to justify them as the next person, but (likely another distortion) figure I'm more ethical than average even if I'm not.
So there.
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