Duty: In the eye of the beholder?

[Tiassa]

Source: Slog
Link: http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/old_people_god_damn_them
Title: "Save the Old Folks!", by Adrian Ryan
Date: February 28, 2008

Adrian Ryan is all worked up to a tizzy. This, as readers of The Stranger are well-aware, is nothing new. But it's a curious story he posted at Slog, and one that invites a common question: What is our duty to our neighbors?

So I was walking somewhere on Capitol Hill, late, on one of those streets dotted with old mansions, and, from the doorway of one of said mansions, the littlest, frailest old woman that ever old womaned was trying to flag me down. Not me, specifically, but anybody. She was as big as a box kite, rather hysterical, and waving a dishrag. Jesus. I knew somebody must be dead in there.

And somebody was. A few people actually. But that was much earlier.

What had happened was she couldn’t turn her oven off. That was it.

I rushed up to see, oh, dear, what could the matter be, and she rushed me into her ginormous mansion, through her rather exquisitely appointed hallway, past the closed French doors of the drawing and television rooms, into her charming little kitchen, where she kept calling me “Kiddo”, and introduced me to the stove. It was an old-ish stove, one of the knobs had gone wonky, she could no longer figure out how to manage the off switch, the burner was red hot, and she was beside her little old self. “Oh, kiddo, I was so scared, I couldn’t go to bed, oh, kiddo, what if there was a fire, I was so so so scared, no one would stop, everybody just walked by, you were the only one, oh, kiddo!”

Frankly, she was damn lucky. The street was a fucking freakshow.

(Ryan)

I'll spare you the bit about fiddling her knob (er ... I mean—damn it!), the Christmas joke, and the Marlee Matlin bit in order to skip to the issue:

I made sure she was relatively calm and that she understood the stove, and I wrote down my cell number, in case. I let myself out and locked her door behind me, and now I feel like a total turd.

This old woman cannot be left alone, let’s be frank. I don’t know how she’s survived this long. I’m going to force myself to go back there later to check on her…but…my hand to God, she is going to plotz.

(ibid)

'Tis a curious concern: he did a good deed, yet feels like a complete shit because he did not do enough. Yet, to the other, what is enough? Is it really his business whether or not she is in a home, or has home care? Is it just a matter of life as it is? Is it just her life, or what happens if a fireman dies should she have such problems again and the house burns down? Or should he be more proactive? As one commenter put it: "Look, all I'm saying is: shotgun."

Oh, and watch out for the readers' discussion about aged vagina. Talk about extraneous ....

 

[Asguard]

Im not going to answer the poll because in my case i am trained to go above what our job is and help people

However i do have a personal example along the same lines, there was a guy sitting in the middle of the road when i was picking my partner up one day. I stoped and asked if he was ok and he told me to piss off (he was drunk) so i called the police. However i didnt do what i should have and put my car between him and the traffic so that he would be safe until the police arive. I still feel like crap about it weeks later because if someone had come around the corner and hit him it would have been my fault

 

[Pandaemoni]

Why shouldn't he check in on her? That's his instinct, and it's a decent thing to do even if it's not strictly speaking ethically mandated. Me, I would go back and see if I can get some info on this lady's kids or relatives, so they can be alerted to the old lady's plight.

If they know and are leaving her to her fate, then I might even alert social services. That's not doing her any favors that she'd welcome, but it sounds like it might be for the best.

That said, duty, like all ethical principles *is* in the eye of the beholder. No two people will exactly agree on everything, and there is no real world ethical system that can be proven unarguably superior to any other.