help with one more ethical dilemma

[MedicalJustice]

i know there have been so many posts about this but i still havent found one that I can use.

this is the best one i got so far:

in high school, i saw a friend of mine carry a marijuana pipe. he wasnt listening to me when i told him it was a bad idea. i went to a religious high school and if caught, hed likely get expelled. but i didnt do anything about it because a-i didnt want to compromise our friendship and b-i was only a sophomore and felt awkward being a police man...not to mention that it would have destroyed my image to most of the students for the next two years
so i decided to let him get caught on his own.. which he did. his friend who owned the weed got expelled and he almost did.

i feel like i took the morally wrong approach on this one, is it still ok to use if i reflect on it and explain what i should have done?

thanks

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[bcat85]

No? Why would you write about something in which you made the "wrong" moral decision?

 

[MedicalJustice]

No? Why would you write about something in which you made the "wrong" moral decision?

thats why im struggling to find a good idea. i thought if i wrote about making the wrong decision but learning from it, i might be able to get away with it

 

[175961]

Write about an instance where you made the right choice???

 

[Bearferret]

I think it's totally acceptable to talk about a time you made the wrong choice, unless the question explicitly states otherwise. Now, I wouldn't talk about it if the choice you made was particularly damning, or if it was, say, a felony, but this seems fine to me.

As long as you can make clear that you know in retrospect that it was the wrong choice, that you've learned from it, and you're better prepared for ethical dilemmas in the future (it would be great, but probably not necessary, if you could provide a very quick example of a later instance in which you made the "right" choice and credit it, at least in part, to the lessons you learned the first time through).

I'm no expert, but I think that's actually a good bit more interesting and compelling than someone just tooting their own horn on how they took the high road (although that's fine too, I'm sure).

 

[closer23]

.

 

[tabrazinski]

How is that the wrong choice? Do you truly believe you should have been policing the HS campus for weed at that time? Apparently he ignored you when you told him it was a bad idea to have weed on the school grounds, so what else could you have done? Turned him in? Threatened him with a knife? I don't get this.

yeah i don't really see this as your moral responsibility either way. but maybe that's just me.

 

[whoknows2012]

I agree that especially at that age it is DEFINITELY not your moral responsibility to make sure a friend of yours doesn't make a bad decision. When it comes to friendships, however, yes I think it was smart of you to tell him that its a bad idea to carry around a "marijuana pipe," but in the end its your friend's life and he does not have to listen.

On another note, if I were on an admissions committee and I read an essay about this situation or something similar, I would tend to think this applicant is quite immature. I am not saying that you are in fact immature, I am just saying that an essay with this approach may come off as a bit juvenile in terms of your ideas about society..etc.