Mental Health Day Ethics

"Hey! You're a pretty ethical guy! Isn't calling in sick to work when you're not sick kind of... unethical?"

Uh...

Ummm....

Okay. Let me take a stab at that one.

By ethical absolutes, yes. Absolutely. I lied.

But, there are mitigating factors.

First off, I am lying in a situation where I don't have a bounden duty not to lie. The relationship I have with my employer is an explicit contract: I work, and they pay me to do that work. If I don't work, they don't pay me. If they don't pay me, I won't work. And in the work I'm doing, I'm not entrusted with anything that requires scrupulous adherence to the truth. If I was a financial manager and lied to my employer about making a deposit to their bank account (say, making a deposit instead to my own bank account), that would be bad, as I am lying about something in an area where my employer has put his (her, actually) trust in me.

Second, negligible harm is incurred by everyone involved, except me. And I derive benefit from it. And that's not bad. We're not particularly busy right now, so it's not like any huge deadlines will be missed, or the guys I work with will have to sweat to make up for my absence.

Third, the only damage, if any, is to me. If I made a habit of it, my employer would start to think of me as 'the guy who's always calling out sick.' And that would be bad. I wouldn't get a raise. But, nobody where I work seems to get raises ever. (Yeah, that's a definite flaw.) So there's a disincentive there. But regardless, I don't make a habit of this. I can think of only one other time since I've been there that I did this. And I woke up with a splitting headache that morning.

But what about the rule breaking aspects of this?

Rules, as they say, were made to be broken. Seriously. You wouldn't need a rule if there wasn't good reason for behaving otherwise. For example, it's not a rule that while you're shopping at the mall that you must continue to breathe at all times. Not many people opt to asphyxiate themselves at the mall, hence there's no need for a rule. Rules that uphold the general welfare are laudable, and we should do our best to follow those rules. However, some rules serve only the interests of the rule maker. These rules apply only when it's convenient. Or when you can get away with it without too much fallout. Often, you can't quite tell which rules are which. For example, some laws that would seem to be in the interests of the general welfare actually were lobbied for and passed to appease the interests of the insurance industry. You are not beholden in any particular way to the insurance industry. The rules in question are put in place to make the life of my employer easier. And that's, y'know, tough. She makes a lot more money than I do (and has a lot more responsibility to go with it), so into every life a little rain, inconvenience and uncertainty must fall.

And I think that about covers it.

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