I Owed My Sibling Money. Must I Give It to the Scamming Widowed Spouse?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/magazine/06mag-ethicist.html

Version 0 of 1.

When my sibling suffered an untimely death, my sibling’s spouse inherited a rather large estate: cash, real estate and investments. During the process of funeral and subsequent estate expenses, the newly widowed spouse feigned poverty and received thousands of dollars in donations from friends and extended family. I even offered to cover the mortgage. When we learned of the spouse’s actual wealth, my siblings and I were appalled by the deception, which made our sibling look like a pauper.

After the dust settled, and the majority of us learned we were much less well off than our sibling’s spouse, it was suggested that the spouse give all donations to a charity in our sibling’s name. This suggestion was not only ignored but followed by more demands for support from me and my well-off sister.

My dilemma relates to a project that was initiated equally between my sibling and me many years ago but which was kept in my name only. While it started off equally, my sibling was unwilling to keep up with the ongoing expenses and at one point asked to be paid off based on whatever I thought was fair. Hence the spouse’s demand on me now.

While I still don’t have a clear idea what my sibling’s share ought to be, as a tribute, I decided to make a donation to one of my sibling’s favorite charities in an amount equal to the donations that the widowed spouse received. In essence, I directed the funds donated to the spouse where they morally belong, an act that my sibling most likely would have approved of. Still, I owe the estate more, and when figuring out how much, I will include the tax benefit I will gain from the charitable deduction.

It appears that my sibling’s spouse also has limited interest in providing for their children. I surely don’t want to hand over anything to my sibling’s spouse, but to give it to the children directly would be a way of enabling the spouse to skirt the obligation to care for them.

I could continue to make charitable contributions in my sibling’s name, but what right do I have to use money belonging to others? (What I have already done may not have been entirely proper.) I could put funds in trust for the kids but would rather gift them a nontaxable amount annually. Or I could just wait until the kids need help with something critical. Turning any funds over to my sibling’s spouse would turn my stomach. Name Withheld

Sometimes a line drawing can help us see a complicated picture more clearly. Suppose a person asks you to hold on to a thousand dollars in cash for him. He dies, and his estate, including that sum, goes to his wife. Suppose, further, that you know she stole a thousand dollars from somebody else. Are you free to give the money to her victim instead? You are not. Even simpler: Suppose you’re holding money that belongs to me. You’re not allowed to take the money and pay off debts you happen to know I’ve incurred. You can’t spend the money to repair damages I’ve done. That’s my responsibility. Yours is to pay what you yourself owe.

Donating thousands of dollars to your late sibling’s favorite charity might have been a fine way to honor your sibling. But you’re not free to spend the estate’s money — the widowed spouse’s money — as you see best. And you must have some sense of what you think is a “fair” assessment of what you owe, because you know that it’s more than the amount you gave to this charity.

What you are free to do is to use your own resources to help your nephew or niece. You’re free to inform kith and kin that your sibling left the widowed spouse enough money to live comfortably without charity. You’re free to urge your sister not to give your sibling’s spouse money. You’re certainly free to reproach the widowed spouse for some truly bad behavior.

And, on your account, the person clearly has behaved badly. It’s hard to excuse indifference to your children’s interests or misleading people about your financial condition in order to extract money from them. You can have sympathy, though, with people who are insecure about their financial situation. The widowed spouse’s economic prospects, however adequate, may well be worse than they would have been if the spouse had survived.

Whether you could get away with concealing the fair value of your sibling’s share of the property, which now belongs to the widowed spouse, it would be wrong to do so. A just God might want to guarantee that the good prosper and the evil suffer and that all debts are paid. But you are not entitled to play God.

My school does not have a written intellectual-property (I.P.) policy. Recently, a student doing an unpaid internship on a website was asked by the internship supervisor to share her literature review with another student. She demurred, stating that it was her intellectual property. I know the student to be more advanced in her approach to research than most of her peers. She has also had prior experience as a research assistant. So she may have good reasons to protect her work.

The supervisor told her that her paper was the site’s intellectual property and asked a school administrator to intervene. The administrator decided that the student’s paper was actually the school’s intellectual property. This would potentially apply to all students going forward. However, having worked within various university systems, I believe it is more common to recognize such a paper as the student’s intellectual property. And as a faculty member, I believe it is our responsibility to teach students good I.P. awareness, as part of their career development.

In the absence of a written I.P. policy, who is correct? Also, as faculty, what is my obligation to our students? Name Withheld

If this student was doing the work as part of her internship, paid or not, one object of the exercise was to produce a usable literature review. Usable to whom? Well, to anyone. The object of scholarship, in the end, is to make a contribution to public knowledge. If you do normal academic research under someone else’s supervision, then it’s reasonable to expect that you will be open to sharing the results with other scholars and students. (Acknowledging the intern’s authorship, to be sure, is required by professional academic ethics.) Your restricting access to your work in order to safeguard your property rights is no more reasonable than the supervisor’s billing you for his or her advice would be. You’re free to do research privately on your own time and keep the results to yourself. But scholarship at a university is, absent special considerations, a contribution to the intellectual commons.

If the student felt that her work should have been remunerated, she shouldn’t have agreed to do it. But doing scholarly work under academic supervision is taken to be an educational opportunity for a student. Should we try to adjudicate the financial value of the student’s product against the financial value of the opportunity? That’s the wrong way to think about the situation. Turning every relationship into an exchange of commodities is part of what people are objecting to when they talk about the corporatization of the university.

None of these matters of professional ethics bear on who owns the copyright. Although copyright resides with the author if not otherwise assigned, most universities do have official copyright policies that they treat as binding on enrolled students. (Patentable I.P. raises separate issues I won’t get into here.) If you want to do scholarly work whose product is a salable commodity, you can do it outside the context of a university, unless, as is customary, your university permits you to produce academic work in the course of your employment that you may publish for profit. Even here, though, the object of the exercise is to produce shareable knowledge. Your school administrator’s copyright claim here may or may not be legally sound; either way, the university’s responsibility is to help make the work available to those who can use it to advance scholarly understanding.