Q: Four months after he remarried, my father died in an accident. During his brief second marriage, he often told family and friends, “What’s mine is mine, and what’s hers is hers,” indicating that he wanted his estate to go to me and my brother, as stipulated in his will. (My mother died from cancer about five years ago.) But New York law allows a spouse to claim about one-third of that, and his widow intends to, despite my father’s wishes, although she has resources of her own. This is legal, but is it ethical? — Name Withheld, Long Island
A: You might think your father meant to leave everything to you and your brother, but he chose to marry in New York, where he knew or should have known that the law sees it differently. I sympathize with your disappointment but do not agree that the widow has a moral obligation to renounce her inheritance.
Had your father wanted to give less to his widow and more to his sons, he could have consulted a trusts and estate attorney before he remarried and perhaps bestowed cars or cash or country houses on you fellows. He did not. Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Hofstra University with expertise in wills and family law, says that he had still more options: “If the father and his wife had in fact agreed that neither would inherit from the other, they could have cemented that agreement easily with a written waiver.”
Q: In the developing country where I live, it is common to have household help. A friend asked me to hire a 14-year-old whose impoverished family badly needs the money. If I don’t, this child will find someone who will. In my house, her work would be age-appropriate — rinsing dishes, making beds and dusting; what we call “top work” — and she would receive nutritious meals, kind treatment and not be endangered. Or is it more ethical to forswear child labor while knowing that her need will drive her to a job that could be much more exploitative than the one in my house? — Amita Chauhan, Mumbai, India
A: It is a grim truth that many families face such dire poverty that they rely on the earnings of their youngest members. She may need to work, but she also needs to go to school to escape a lifetime of poverty.
Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit that takes an entrepreneurial approach to combating global poverty, suggests: “The employer could help the girl pay for school fees so that she can attend school and then have her come afterward to help clean the house.” Update: Chauhan did not hire this girl. She e-mailed to say, “I have a son who is the same age and thought it would be very difficult to see one child working while another was studying and playing.”
Send questions and comments for Randy Cohen to Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111, or ethicist@nytimes.com.
