Flying with children poses a variety of difficulties. Aside from the challenge of managing youthful squirreliness within the confines of a crowded passenger compartment, even booking the flight might not be simple. Airline policies change from time to time, and different companies have different rules.
Imagine this real-life scenario:
You’re traveling across the Atlantic with your toddler. The airline you’re flying charges 10 percent of the ticket price to hold the child in your lap. However, that deal is only available for children under two. Your child is 26 months, just over the limit, for which the airline requires you to buy the child her own seat for 90 percent of the full ticket price.
You know the child will spend virtually the entire trip in your lap regardless, so you see paying for a seat as a waste of money. However, you don’t want to lie to the airline.
Your travel agent offers the following suggestion:
Buy the 10 percent ticket. Don’t offer any information about your child’s age. In all probability, the flight attendants will admit your family on the plane without question. If they ask your child’s age, answer truthfully. If they tell you there is an age limit, apologize for your error and offer to pay for the seat.
Grapple with the Gray
List two or three reasons in favor of following the agent’s advice.
List two or three reasons why you should not buy the cheaper ticket.
Is there another option?
Having weighed the options, what would you do?
Gray Matters
Airlines, like any business or service, have the right to impose whatever rules or charges they choose. As a patron, you have the privilege to take your business elsewhere. What you don’t have the right to do knowingly defraud the airline.
Granted, “defraud” may be a bit too strong here—but only a bit. You are being consciously deceptive even as you skirt the edge of outright dishonesty. Ultimately, you will do more damage by far to your own ethical psyche than you will save in dollars and cents.
It was for this reason that Rabbi Yaakov Kaminetzky responded to this same question by answering, “It’s not forbidden; but don’t do it.”
Once again, we find that any compromise of integrity brings us closer to the edge of the proverbial slippery slope—or pushes us entirely over the brink. The sages teach that the first time a person commits a transgression, it’s a transgression. The second time, it’s permitted. The third time, it’s an act of virtue.
The more we rationalize improper behavior, the more automatically we accept improper behavior as appropriate, and the more invested we become in defending the uprightness of our rationalized actions. Over time, we come to sincerely believe that right is on our side, even after we have long abandoned any objective definition of ethical conduct.