moral dilemma
Out of context: Reply #54
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Once when I was an intern, my boss cooked up an ad campaign for a company that prided itself on selling decent clothes for very low prices. He asked me to work on the accompanying illustrations for some of the ads. The headlines were to play on famous quotes, but tweak them to be about cheap = good. Here were the only two I remember:
1. A picture of a black man speaking to a crowd "that may or may not be MLK Jr.". Headline: "I have a cheap dream..."
2. A picture of Jesus preaching his sermon on the mount. Headline: "Blessed are the cheap, for they will inherit the earth."
I told my boss that those were interesting ideas, but that I had personal ethical and moral problems that prevented me from working on those concepts. I told him I was sorry, but I just couldn't do it. So, I went home and cooked up a dozen alternative headlines, also historical quotes, that wouldn't raise ethical/moral issues for people. My boss understood and respected me for putting in the extra effort to provide an alternative.