What are the ethics of (a) offering sweets to children not your own and (b) submitting to blackmail? I thought I’d ask because millions of us are going to be faced with the issue today. It’s Halloween, in case you’re living on Mars. Whatever we may think about this ghastly American import (see Damian Thompson’s blog post, to which I say Amen) we’re stuck with it. My wife reminded me to go out and buy a few packets of sweets. We forgot last year, and though our defiance was not punished with a hail of eggs against the frontage of the house, we might not be so lucky this year.
So much for submitting to blackmail. Now the other part. Handing out sweets to children (I’m damned if I’m going to give them money – besides my own two have taken all that) has become an uncomfortable business these days. As all football fans know, there is a certain Premiership manager who is alleged by opposing fans (without the slightest vestige of truth) to make a habit of pursuing children with a packet of sweets and an ingratiating smile. I do not wish to be confronted either with PC Plod or with a huge bloke with a shaven head and lots of tattoos, brandishing a packet of Maltesers and asking me what the hell I was doing offering them to little Tyson. And it’ll be no better in the more upmarket areas of town. Except that there, in addition to PC Ponsonby-Plodde, it’ll be a revolving-eyed harridan barking that little Jocasta has gone down with 57 different allergies and it’s all your fault.
Perhaps it’s better to pull up the drawbridge and to risk the eggs. No concessions to terrorists!
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