I usually keep a watchful eye on advice columns, especially “The Ethicist,” Carolyn Hax and a few others, but have been a bit lax of late. Thus I missed this astounding letter sent to “Ask Amy,” which was bought to my attention by loyal reader and frequent commenter Jeff.
Hold on to your heads or erect signs nearby warning others that they are in a potential head-explosion zone…
Bullets, shmullets, what’s the difference?
“Ask Amy,” authored by Amy Dickinson, is one of the mid-level practitioners of the syndicated advice columnist’s craft—not consistently brilliant like Carolyn Hax, not as persistently wrong-headed as the now mercifully retired Emily Yoffe at Slate.
A recent letter to Amy read,
Dear Amy: This week, I discovered that my intelligent, hard-working, responsible 24-year-old daughter (who lives with me) is a gun owner! And it’s not a normal gun, either — it is a 40-caliber semi-automatic, and she has hollow-point bullets to go with it. Amy, this is the kind of weapon a criminal would possess! She says it is for emergencies. There have only been two home invasions in our neighborhood in the last 11 years. I’ve given her three choices: She can either give her weapon to me, sell it or move out in three weeks. I love my daughter and would be so sad for her to move into a place that she would hardly be able to afford, but now I have to lock my bedroom door at night because I don’t know what she’s going to do. Now she says that I don’t trust her, and is barely speaking to me. How can I convince her to stop endangering us?—Dumbfounded Father
Let’s make a couple of observations right away.
The writer is apparently frightened by the scary “semi-automatic” part, which just means he is unfamiliar with firearms that wouldn’t be used by Hopalong Cassidy.
It’s also a gun a law-abiding citizen would possess, except that such a gun would be possessed legally. Continue reading
Newspaper advice column maven Amy Dickinson encountered one of those juicy letters that boosts readership but that should also set off ethics alarms. Her responsible, ethical course was to leave the situation alone. Unfortunately, she took the bait. How unfortunate, we will never know.
“Conflicted” (I have some better names for her ) wrote to “Ask Amy” because, she said, her conscience was bothering her, and no wonder. She had divorced her husband of five years two years ago. “We loved each other, but our marriage was deeply troubled,” she wrote, which is an understatement. He lied to her. He had “inappropriate relationships with other women.” He was profligate with money, and spent the couple into financial trouble. Worst of all, this: “…during a two-year period of our marriage and on five occasions, he was physically abusive. Not a slap or a shove, but full-out rage. I thought he would kill me.”
Naturally, she is still sleeping with him! “We see each other frequently and have a lively sexual relationship,” she says cheerily. The Ex assumed her old hubby had a social life outside of hooking up with his former wife/punching bag, and was fine with that, since the swinging Ex is also sleeping around: Hey, it’s the 21st Century! But now she has learned that he is in a serious relationship with another woman who does not know he never stopped making whoopee with “Conflicted.” They are talking about marriage and babies.
So now, she tells Amy, she is certain he will ruin this “lovely girl’s” life. She thinks she has an obligation to the innocent young thing to tell her about his spending problems and some other more recent details ( “he owes thousands of dollars on credits cards and has not filed his taxes in two years”) and, she says confidently, he “clearly” hasn’t told her about his spouse-bashing episodes, though “Conflicted” hasn’t asked him, and hasn’t talked to her. “What obligation do I have to share any of this information with her? I don’t know what to do,” she asks, plaintively.
Amy: This is the Amityville House talking to you now.
“GET OUT!!!” Continue reading
“DANGER, Other Woman…DANGER!!!”
Today, syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson (“Ask Amy”) answered a query with admirable directness, properly defining the proper use of ethics alarms for a woman who was puzzled about what to do when the answer should have been obvious. Unfortunately, Amy adopted the letter-writer’s incorrect terminology for an ethics alarm, based on the help-seeking “other woman” in an adulterous relationship writing that her relationship was beginning to feel “icky.”
As we have discussed here many times, “ick” and unethical conduct are not necessarily the same thing. Humans naturally assume that what is strange or instinctively repugnant is wrong, but that assumption always needs to be tested by sound and objective ethical analysis. The best current example: to heterosexuals, gay sex is “icky,” but that doesn’t make it unethical or wrong. When Amy uses the term “ick-o-meter,’ what she means is “ethics alarm.” Continue reading
Advice columnist Amy (of the syndicated column “Ask Amy”), was just asked one of those questions that every advice maven has to have in their files, with the perfect answer ready to go. If Amy had her answer prepared, it was the wrong one.
The question was the deathless classic, “I just found out my husband has been having an affair with a married co-worker. Should I tell the other spouse?”
Amy gets it half right: she tells the reader that the other spouse has a right to know; that this is not a case of meddling because the reader is directly involved in the betrayal; and that not to make sure the other spouse learns the truth would now be abetting the deception. All true. BUT…
…Amy forgets the Golden Rule as it applies to the reader’s husband’s adulterous lover (yes, the rule still applies to busted wrongdoers) and the whistleblowers obligation to minimize needless harm. She tells the victimized wife to spill the beans to the victimized husband.
Wrong.
The adulterous wife deserves the opportunity to tell her husband herself. That would allow her to reveal the affair to her spouse with the least damage to the marriage, and providing that opportunity to her is kind and fair. Amy should have told her reader to contact her husband’s paramour and say this: “I will be calling your husband and telling him about your relationship with my husband in three days. You should tell him the truth yourself, and then all he needs to say to me when I call is, ‘Yes, she told me.’ But if you haven’t told him, he’ll hear it all from me.”
File it away, Amy, and get it right the next time.
Ethics Alarms 