OUR family and another share cars to take our children to school. We have one child; the other family has two, all going to the same school. What proportion of the time should each family drive?
Each family should drive half the time. You could argue, and I sense that you’d like to, that driving duties should be calculated on a per-child basis: your family has only a third of the children and so it should do only a third of the driving. That would be reasonable if you were taking them out for snacks (two children eat more, and hence cost more, than does one) or if you were a bus company trying to divide your costs equally among the passengers.
But what’s at issue here is not expense but effort, and that’s what must be equitably apportioned. When you stop at the other family’s house, it doesn’t increase the work-load if two children get into the car instead of one.
It would be different if each child went to a separate school. Then transporting the two children from your friend’s house would be more work than hauling your singleton, but that is not the case.
Things might also change if you wished to add more children to the car pool. If that other family’s second child were taking up a slot that would otherwise go to a new kid whose family would take a turn behind the wheel, then you might reapportion the driving.
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Unlike commercial transactions, necessarily governed by standardised regulations, arrangements between friends can be flexible enough to accommodate the feelings, even the irrational feelings, of the few people involved. Your sense of being taken advantage of — if indeed you have that sense — is reason enough for you and that other family to work out a mutually acceptable compromise. Surely two families can devise a plan that both find acceptable?
I might reconsider that 50-50 split if one of that other family’s children was gigantic, requiring you to expend vast amounts of petrol to haul around his enormous bulk (a guideline: have you had to install heavy-duty springs?) but, assuming that this child is not a giant mutant, I’ll stand by my original position.
Can you suggest solutions to this ethical dilemma? Or do you have dilemmas of your own? Write to: The Ethicist, Times Features, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. E-mail: ethicist@thetimes.co.uk . Readers’ solutions will be published tomorrow.
The Ethicist originates from The New York Times Magazine.