Q: My wife and I frequently transport our 4-year-old and 1-year-old by bicycle. They wear helmets and ride in a trailer or bike-mounted seats. People sometimes challenge us, asking if this is safe. The chances of our being hit by a car are low, but the consequences could be catastrophic. Is it OK to take the kids by bike when our admittedly safer, albeit not risk-free, car is available? Derek Pelletier, Portland, Maine
A: Your parental duty requires you to find not the safest conceivable mode of travel, but only one sufficiently safe. If you made the former your standard, even the car would be too dicey. Guided by the latter formulation, many parents, including me, sometimes transport their children by bike. Or I did when my daughter was younger. At 23, she’s reluctant to squeeze into the little trailer.
Different parents tolerate different levels of risk for their children. There is no universal and immutable scale for your ethical obligation here. But there is a better way to describe your duty: Seek prudent, not utopian, transportation.
There are other ways this choice affects your kids and your community. If you forswear bikes and travel with them only by car, you teach them to do likewise, promoting the sedentary lifestyle that contributes to obesity and other health problems, and you express acceptance of the environmental damage cars inflict even on nondrivers.
As significant as what vehicle you deem suitable is how you use it. You are right to put your kids in properly constructed carriers and to make sure that they wear helmets. I hope that you bike safely, choosing routes with the fewest cars and, even better, those with protected bike lanes. In the longer term, you might actively promote the construction of safe biking and walking infrastructure in your community. And remember — in the car or on the bike — no cellphones, no texting, no bourbon, no blindfolds.
Q: My divorced mother and I live together and struggle financially. She was recently laid off; I work as a secretary while attending college. My father, a successful entertainer who owes us thousands of dollars in back child support, reluctantly agreed to pay my tuition. Recently the university sent me a check for $2,700, having overstated my tuition. My mother and I want to use it to pay our rent and other bills, but this feels like stealing from my father. May I cash that check? — Name Withheld, New York
A: It depends on how you spend the money. You may not squander it on riotous living, but you may apply it to your education, even broadly, to your living expenses while you attend school. You can’t study in the dark. That is something your dad has an ethical (and, apparently, a legal) duty to support.
You are entitled to this money not because he is successful while you struggle. Such rough justice would also encourage you to sneak into his house, swipe his sofa and sell it. That would be stealing; this is merely claiming what he owes you. He agreed to contribute to your education and paid the school. That the money will now be redirected to another sort of educational assistance — something he also agreed to cover in the form of child support — is neither here nor there. You need not target this cash so narrowly.
You should be transparent, perhaps sending your father an accounting that deducts this $2,700 from the back payments he still owes. If he wishes to contest the facts you have presented or this calculation of his debt or my moral reasoning, he’s free to take the matter to court or to a local philosopher.
Send questions and comments for Randy Cohen to Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111, or ethicist@nytimes.com.
