This one isn’t an ethics quiz; I know the answer. Maybe you’ll disagree.
In the final, 5th season of Showtime’s Chaos Theory and ethics series “The Affair,” the ethics carnage radiating from the now over-and-done-marriage-destroying tryst between Alison and Noah is still powerful. Alison is dead (murdered); Noah is out for prison, and teaching at a charter school in LA. His first wife and kids are also in LA, having followed her new, reliable, loving partner Vik, a surgeon, to a new post at a prestigious hospital.
But Vik is diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He knows it’s incurable, and stubbornly refuses treatment. Asked by Helen, Noah’s wife before “The Affair,” what she can do, he answers, “Have my baby.” (That’s a selfish request, but it’s a different issue). Overwhelmed by self-pity, the prospect of impending death, and a “why me?” mood, plus being drunk and depressed after learning that Helen can’t have any more children at 50, Vik falls into bed with Sierra (above), a New Age, moon-ring, crystal-loving, 20-year-old woman-child hippie idiot next door. SHE gets pregnant as a result, and decides to keep the baby.
Helen learns about this as her crypto-husband (they never formally wed) is on his death bed. Later, after promising Vik, Helen tells Sierra that she will do what she can to help her with her now deceased sort-of husband’s offspring, because he so wanted to have a piece of himself live on, or something.
Now it’s nine months later. Sierra, an aspiring actress with IQ of a sponge, has invited about 20 New Age friends into her home to witness the birth of her child, “naturally,” in her living room. They romp around chanting, toking and dancing with funny things on their heads. Meanwhile, Sierra has been in labor for 24 hours, and a woman who may or may not be a trained midwife is telling her that her “negative energy” is keeping the baby from feeling welcome and other nonsense.
Sierra is exhausted and in pain. Helen shows up and Sierra shouts out that she can’t stand the pain and wants to go to the hospital. The acting midwife says that this is typical of first-time mothers under the influence of “negative energy,” and that Sierra doesn’t mean it. Helen is worried about the baby and Sierra.
What should she do?
Does the fact that she has a special interest in the baby, it being the offspring of her now dead partner, matter in her decision-making?
I think the answer is clear. I’d call 911, get an ambulance there and police to deal with any resistance from the mob of stoned hippies to taking the pregnant woman to the hospital.
And you?
Ethics Alarms 
Clearly the pregnant mother will have a much more pleasant, safe delivery among the positive vibes offered by trained nurses and obstetricians at the hospital. She can bring some healing crystals, too.
Yep. Call EMS immediately.
Same as you, Jack. Get the medics and law enforcement on the way.
I just learned that I saved myself from 5 seasons of junk that couldn’t possibly have benefited my life …simply by not watching television.
Live ethically and you’ll enjoy a more peaceful life, even with all the adversity that surrounds us daily.
I’m with you, Ian. I don’t subscribe to Jack’s theory on staying up to date with all sorts of popular culture. I avoided “Breaking Bad” like the plague. In my mind, there’s lots of “popular culture” that can just come and go without its having taken up any of my time. Like, oh say, rap music.
You’re in a Cognitive Dissonance Scale trap; Ian too. All genres, even silly one, can reveal useful ethics problems. Westerns and science fiction are prime examples. Reality shows, which are uniformly crap, often illustrate marvelous ethics dilemmas: “Survivor,” “American Idol” and Trump’s “The Apprentice” were terrific for that. You have to separate the messenger from the message.
“When you’re an ethicist, everything looks like an ethics problem.”
Remember The Lawyer’s Handbook, the successor to The Preppie’s Handbook from the very early ’80s? There was an entry that noted lawyers who took their kids to the zoo on weekends spent most of their time, and took most of their pleasure from, looking for typos in the plaques identifying the animals on display.
You can learn a lot about people by hanging around in dive bars, but that doesn’t mean I have to.
There’s also a time management and time utilization problem I have that Jack evidently does not: I need to sleep eight or nine hours out of a twenty-four hour day. Jack evidently does not. I have limited energy, Jack appears to be the Energizer Bunny and works around the clock.
Call 911, that’s not even a question. Although I am a heavy watcher of “Wolf world” shows, i.e. Law and Order, One Chicago, etc., I’m glad I don’t watch any of this junk. Life is problematic enough without adding stupid problems to it.
I don’t know what’s worse, stupid behavior like this or the out and out embrace of evil and shocking behavior typified by things like Game of Thrones.
I am certain that the scenario I related has occurred in real life. Almost all of the chain of ethics dilemmas and conflicts in “The Affair” have, though probably not the baroque 3-way vehicular homicide mess I asked about earlier. These are life competence tests.
In the show, Helen did NOT call 911, and I’m certain most people in her position wouldn’t.
“Wolf World” jumped the shark for me quite a while back.
What was it that caused it to jump the proverbial shark for you?
I would walk away! The gene pool of this group needs cleansing, nature has an organic way to deal with the problem.
There’s a utilitarian analysis!
There’s also a time management and time utilization problem I have that Jack evidently does not: I need to sleep eight or nine hours out of a twenty-four hour day. Jack evidently does not. I have limited energy, Jack appears to be the Energizer Bunny and works around the clock.