Community ClicksBaby-sitter contract
Last fall my wife and I hired a young woman to care for our two children two days a week.
We’d been left in the lurch before, so we insisted that she commit for the school year. We felt similarly committed to her.
I now find that I’ll lose my job in April, so we won’t need day care.
I want to lay her off, likening my situation to her having a medical emergency that renders her unable to work.
My wife says we must pay her through June.
You?
— Name Withheld,
Tacoma, Wash.
I agree with your wife.
You insisted on a commitment that locked in the young woman’s job for the school year, even if she won the lottery or was invited to go on the road with Beyonce or became queen of Neptune.
That it was instead your situation that changed doesn’t efface your mutual obligation.
By committing to you for the school year, she gave up other potential opportunities for yearlong employment.
You can’t simply stiff her.
Here’s what would be akin to her facing a medical emergency: your facing a medical emergency.
But it’s your job, not your health, that has collapsed.
As an ethical and (as I, a nonlawyer, understand it) a legal matter, the oral agreement you and she made constitutes a contract, albeit unwritten.
Your current uncertainty is a good argument for having a written contract.
Negotiating its terms compels you to make your mutual obligations explicit.
When you hired her, you could have proposed an out for emergencies, whether medical, economic or that familiar pairing of the theological and the meteorological: come hell or high water.
As things stand, you might help her find another job.
If she can line something up for those two days a week, she might waive your obligation to her.
Or you might offer her one month’s severance pay: You save some money; she saves some time.
But she must agree to either option; you may not simply impose them on her.
Medication question
My 9-year-old son, who has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), was prescribed medication and is doing much better in school and plays much better in his midweek Little League baseball games.
He does not take medication on weekends.
Would it be ethical to give it to him on a Saturday if he’s pitching in a big game?
His doctor sees no health risk.
In fact, by keeping the dosage constant, my son might be more comfortable, avoiding the “ramp up” and “ramp down” effect.
— Name Withheld,
Parsippany, N.J.
Some drugs used to treat ADHD can indeed improve nonclassroom performance.
Hence the popularity of similar, illicitly acquired stimulants in many endeavors.
Should your son use his meds not as intended, but as a performance-enhancing drug for baseball?
Luckily, I have Mark McGwire right here, and he’ll continue writing this response. . . OK, I don’t have Mark McGwire.
I have Roger Clemens. Of course not. I have an overdeveloped sense of sarcasm.
Overdeveloped naturally, not via sarcasm-enhancing drugs.
And I have confidence that we both know the answer to your question. In ethics, intention counts.
Here, yours is to give your son a drug he wouldn’t otherwise take on game days, with the sole purpose of his gaining an advantage on the field.
That’s the difference between a side effect and an effect, between medicating and cheating, between ethical and unethical.
The distinction is not always so clear. Had your son’s doctor recommended that your son take his meds all week long — a reasonable prescription, as the doctor himself suggests — your son would still gain an edge in his ball games, but that would not be unethical.
Nor would he be regarded as a cheater if (when he got a little older) he underwent Lasik surgery to improve his vision.
But what if he deliberately raised it to 20/15, better than normal, to improve his game, something Tiger Woods is said to have done?
There is a quandary here, one that will be increasingly tough for parents, teachers and coaches to sort out.
And I don’t mean citing Tiger Woods in the context of moral reasoning.
