Santa Clara University

When Kayla was making her applications, her family was in good shape financially, but just before she was accepted, she learned her father had been laid off from his job as a software engineer.  In order to send Kayla to her first-choice school, her parents intend to dip into their retirement accounts. 

Should Kayla allow them to do this, or should she go to the less expensive state university, where she was also accepted?

Here are some resources that might be useful:

Balancing kids' college and retirement saving

A Framework for Ethical Decision Making

Pay for College (CollegeBoard) 

Photo by Daniel Moyle available under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License.

Posted by Rebecca Bivona-Guttadauro

Read the full case

The other responders to this case have covered several of the ethical issues, especially how to balance the right of free speech with the harm that may come from attacking someone else’s identity.

Identity has become an increasingly important part of ethics. For a long time, ethics was much more concerned with whether some isolated action was right or wrong, and not as concerned with who was doing the action—with the person’s history, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, core values, context, and all the other things that make us who we really are and that profoundly affect what we do.

While this new dimension of identity has been a boon for ethics in many ways, there are times when it has stopped ethical reflection dead in its tracks. This happens when identity becomes something unchanging, beyond challenge, unable to be discussed, and easily offended: I am who I am, and you have no right to infringe on my sense of who I am. When I speak, I am asserting who I am in a way that you may not question.

But identity can’t be locked down, definitely not in life and rightfully not in the swirl of conversation that is college life. We may affirm something constant about who we are, but we have to acknowledge that we are always changing, too. And speech—whether it’s a poster on a dorm room door or a discussion in class—is the great engine of this change. Could the poster on Mary’s door initiate a conversation in the dorm that changes the way that Mary and James see themselves? Perhaps that conversation leads them to change their opinions of Prop 8. Perhaps it leads them to re-affirm those opinions. Perhaps what emerges is an unforeseen, diverse community on a dorm hallway previously inhabited by separate, fixed identities of the too-rigidly assertive and the too-easily offended.

Who is David DeCosse?

Agree with David?  Have another perspective?  Leave us your feedback?  Today is the last day for a chance to win $50 for the best comment on Poster Wars.

David DeCosse is director of campus ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.  His Ph.D. in theological ethics is from Boston College, and he teaches classes such as "The Ethics of War and Peace."

It's true--I like reading and writing about abstract theories of freedom in social and political life. But all that work and study is the top of the building. The foundation of the structure is attention to real life, where ethics is played out, surprising, shaded with doubt, or lit up like the sun on a green California hill. Blogs fit into that foundation.  They inhabit that space of real life where what happens hits us hard, evokes a bunch of opinions, then evokes a bunch more. Space is opened up in all this churn: Space to see things more clearly, live life more rightly.