Prom dates and breaking promises. Warning: No Scotsmen present.

In My Humble Opinion
41

Bad analogy on several levels.

  1. Sex is implied in marriage. It is explicitly off the table in Martha & Donna’s case.

2 Humperdink was planning to murder Buttercup (presumably after boffing her on the wedding night). His murderous plan was twice put into effect and only frustrated by Wesley, Inigo, and Fezzik. His attempt to murder her frees her from all obligation to him.

  1. Before knowing of Humperdink’s plotting, Buttercup agrees to marry him twice . The first time she thinks Wesley is dead and simply doesn’t care what happens to her. It’s not clear that she felt freed from that promise when she learned that Wesley was alive.

  2. Humperdink’s superhuman tracking talents reveal him as some sort of elf, probably a wood-elf, and thus Legolasian scum.

42

The first case is a DATE. Unless there are very specific terms that specify it is simply accompaniment to the prom, only with Martha, some specific details about the amount of time spent together, and the same for the dancing, and details on the kiss as well, then one or both parties are assuming it’s a real date, and IMHO that shouldn’t be part of an agreement. Nobody should go on a date with someone if they don’t want to.

43

So if I offer to do some lawn work for someone on the condition that they accompany me to dinner and drinks afterward, as long as I say “it’s not a date” then that would be fine?

44

This is correct. And the way to make sure that they aren’t ethically obliged to go on dates that they don’t want to is to not make promises to go on dates that they don’t want to go on. The only reasonable way out of this date is to come to an arrangement that Donna feels is fair. And if Donna doesn’t feel like there is an acceptable alternative, then Martha has to go through with it.

45

Besides, isn’t the fact that they mutually agreed to the date indicative of the fact they DO want to go on the date? It’s not like either one was FORCED to make an agreement, or there was coercion involved.

Actually, I’m going to use your standards from now on. I’m going to promise to go out on a date with as many people as I can for whatever I can get them to pay or do first. Then, on the night of the date, I’ll just call and say “Sorry, that agreement was unethical, and I’m under no obligation to go out on a date with you” :dubious:

46

If you do that you are being unethical in the first place. That’s the problem here. Ethics isn’t a way to force people to live up to bad agreements, or to get out of good ones.

It’s not clear what the agreement is. It’s not written down, Skald didn’t provide the dialog. A date is not just two people going to the same place at the same time, there is the concept of exclusivity, that the two people spend their time together, that they have agreed to participate in specific activities, and both of them should have the same intent. Accepting a date just to get a free meal or movie tickets is not ethical. To have a non-date both parties have to know it’s a non-date. In this case Donna wants to be seen with Martha. At a prom that’s dating activity. What if Rose is at the prom also and Martha wants to dance with her in the most intimate way allowable at this prom? Is Martha unable to do that according to this agreement? Did Martha agree to provide value from Donna being seen with her? It’s something that benefits Donna, not Martha, how far is Martha supposed to go to live up to that part of the agreement?

If Martha and Donna both agreed to the specific terms, each understanding the other, then Martha should go to the prom with Donna, and all three of them will be miserable, and Donna is supposed to figure this out on prom night and tell Martha to go with Rose, and then she finds out the limo driver is a hot college girl who’s been looking for someone like Donna and after dropping Rose and Martha off they head downtown to a really cool lesbian club.

47

Defime want. I choose to do things all the times that I don’t enjoy doing. Do I “want” to do them?

Honor isn’t about doing things you want to do. It’s about keeping your promises wehther you enjoy doing it or not.

Again, Donna’s best course is to take the money and run. Hopefully she only wanted the prom date for the sake of dancing with a pretty girl in public, because if she actually has romantic feelings for Martha she is in for a bad night no matter what happens. But Martha cannot ethically break the promise to go out with her. Going to the prom will not endanger her life, life, or safety; it will not require her to submit to any violation of her sexual autonomy; and she was in no sense coerced into the promise.

The only rationale for breaking the date is that she wants to do something else that night. That is no different than Donna blowing off the tutoring appointment to go to the movies.

There’s a line from a SPENSER novel in which Spenser and his not-quite-wife Susan are talking about some case she wants him to take on which may not get paid for. They agree that if doesn’t get paid, she has to have sex with him, while if he does, he has to have sex with her.

48

This is not good. This is the kind of things teenagers commit suicide over. The only way I could possibly see this working out with Martha & Rose going to the prom together is if they pull an Afternoon Special out of their ass and find that one shy girl in school (let’s call her Mickey) who has always had a crush on Donna and was never brave enough to ask her out. They introduce they two, Mickey & Donna fall in love, and end up going to prom together and have an awesome time.

And, Martha’s a jerk.

49

It seems to me that Martha’s obligation is to negotiate with Donna in good faith towards a mutually agreeable resolution. We have a sense from the scenario that Donna’s primary interest (held apparently above money in this case) is to increase her social standing. Being seen at the Prom with Martha was her desired path to this goal. This now conflicts with Martha’s implied obligations to her new love interest. However, there are likely to me many other paths to the same goal and one or more may be an acceptable substitute for Donna. For example, Martha could set Donna up on a date with a third party, she could help Donna campaign for class president, she could offer to throw Donna a party for her birthday or other appropriate occasion. If one or more of these would be acceptable to both Martha and Donna then everyone walks away happy.
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50
  1. DO NOT MENTION MICKEY AGAIN.

Everybody hates that shaven-head biscuit-eating kitten-smothering Smurf.

B) We cannot yet conclude that Martha is a jerk. The OP says that Rose wants her to stand Donna up, not that she has decided to do so.

ii: I seriously doubt Donna will commit suicide over being stood up. She will feel cheated , not dumped. She was not fucking Martha; she was not envisioning fucking Martha. She wanted to earn money for her car, which she did; I will say editorially that she would have been perfectly willing to tutor Martha for money if Martha could have paid it, because it would have been less work. What Martha will have cheated her out of (if she stand her up) is her leisure tim durig the spring semester. And since all three of these girls are not blinking at the idea of going to prom with another girl, they’re not living in a homophobic community where they have been derided for or forced to hide their sexual identity. Rose’s plan won’t make Donna slit her writs. It will make Donna steal Martha’s cat and shave it.

FOUR: The next person who mentions Mickey Smith will be fed to the sharks Goddamn Smurf.

51

As long as it’s not a date, then they seem to be acting in an ethical manner.

At least, that’s what Mickey told me :slight_smile:

52

It’s not? Why not?

Anyway, if someone makes an agreement of their own free will, they have an obligation to honor that agreement.

Break a deal - face the wheel!

53

Whoa. I’ve only ever watched a couple episodes; I had no idea I was striking a nerve.

Bottom line, in that case, Martha’s welshing on a debt. That’s not cool. And that ends up being a completely different Afterschool Special. I still think Martha’s best chance is to set Donna up with… um… somebody else.

54

They’re seniors. It’s the end of the spring semester. Martha has achieved her goal of passing the class that will let her graduate with her classmates Ain’t no class president election in the offing. And given that Martha could not afford to pay for tutoring, she probably can’t pay to throw a party either. (Though maybe Rose could, but I don’t ee how that’s different than paying for the tutoring after the fact)

Martha has no obligation to go to the prom with Rose. She has as DESIRE to go tothe prom with Rose.

Also, since you mention social standing, consider this. What Donna essentially did for Martha was save her from a loss of social standing, and saved her a lot of time. Absent the tutoring, Martha would have suffered the embarrassment of not graduating with her friends, and would have had to spend her summer in summer school. This cost Donna her free time during the semester and her. Seems to me that the girls are giving each other access to the graudation march in Martha’s case, the prom dance in Donna’s. Martha gets to boff her girlfriend either way, but only one way does she get to be an honorable person while doing so.

55

I don’t disagree with any of the above. My point was more that it’s not sufficient for Martha to simply pay for the lessons (or have Rose do so). She has no way of knowing if that’s the appropriate compensation without renegotiating the deal in good faith. Maybe monetary payment is where they land, but it’s hardly the only way forward here. Donna already met her immediate financial goals. What remain unmet are her social goals. It seems to me that all parties are likely to walk away happier if they can find a new compensation that addresses Donna’s real goals.

If the things I mentioned are off base it would behoove Martha to think creatively about what she can bring to the table.
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56

If Martha and Donna re close friends, she’ll want to do this. But if they were close friends, they would never have made the deal in the first place, because Donna would have helped her for free without asking for anything. (In which case the offer of a prom date would surely have come from Martha.)

I think there’s an unbreakable loop here.

I turored a lot in college (and for years afterward). Sometimes for free, sometmes for money. Freshman year I had an allegedly hot friend “Bridget” I helped for bubkis. (I say allegedy because she didn’t do it for me for some reason but I could see why others wanted to boff her.) People sometimes assumed that we were going out, which I initiaally fnd vexsome until she quiite intelligently pointed out that other girls thinking that I was her boyfriend or her very friendly ex could only be good for my dating prospects.

I’m not sure how that would work with girls, though.

57

The OP states that Donna does not agree to it. Without another agreement, Martha has to keep her word. Neither person considered the deal unethical when it was made, so that is irrelevant. You don’t get to conveniently decide something is unethical to get out of things.

Ethics do in fact create obligations. Heck, that’s all they do.

58

I’m not sure what you mean by good versus bad here – whether it’s pleasant versus unpleasant, advantageous versus disantageous, or moral versus immoral. But I’d say that ethics is all about creating obligations to do things we might not enjoy. Nobody needs prodding to do things they enjoy doing. I need no ethical reason to watch my wife undress, or not to watch Rush Limbaugh undress; I do need an ethica reasonnot to peep on Swin Cash.

Okay, so I will. Let’s say it went like this:

Does this change your judgment on the ethics of the situation, TriPolar?

59

Truly the only honorable thing for Martha to do is honor the agreement to the letter. Then have a three way with Rose and Donna.

60

They’re kids, one of them isn’t hot, lesbian porn is boring, and they’re kids.