Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 68

Must you stay? Can't you go?

In one of his memoirs, the actor Charles Grodin tells the story of being on the set of a movie with Candice Bergen. As the cameras were being set up in the main hall of a castle outside of London, he and Bergen were sitting together in an adjacent room.
Shortly after that sat, an Englishwoman appeared, Grodin writes. "She said, 'Did someone ask you to wait in here?' 'No,' we answered, a bit taken aback. She responded: 'Well, it would be so nice if you weren't here.'"
While a proper Englishwoman is not the bearer of the message, it seems that "You're not invited" messages are increasingly sent to friends or relatives who have not made the list of invitees to an upcoming wedding. I've yet to receive one myself, since my friends have the good graces to simply not invite me when they would prefer me not to be at their special day.
But event planners or the couples themselves have increasingly been deciding that rather than simply battling out a list of invitees and sending invitations to those who made the cut, they want to send a little something special to their friends and relatives who didn't pass muster.
Rina Raphael, a writer for Today.com also reported "variations of this trend," where some couples tell friends that they're on "the B list." If a preferred guest dings the couple on their invite, the friends on the B list are told they'll be in.
It used to be de rigueur -- and presumably still is in many circles -- to send wedding announcements after the wedding had occurred to let folks who hadn't been invited know you'd tied the knot. But the practice of alerting people ahead of time to something they're not going to be getting that they didn't ask to get in the first place appears to be new.
So is it the right thing to notify people about something they're not going to be invited to when you know that there's a good chance you'll hurt them more than if you simply didn't invite them?
Sometimes being overly forthcoming can clearly be cruel. A doctor must decide, for example, just how much clinical detail to provide when talking to a dying patient. Sissela Bok, the author of Lying: MoralChoice in Public and Private Life (Vintage Books, 1989), once told me: "There's great room for discretion, for knowing when not to speak."
Not netting an invitation to the wedding of the season and being informed you're dying are hardly synonymous. But the non-invitation invitation raises the question of whether deliberately doing something that is likely to exacerbate hurt feelings is the way we want to choose to behave with our friends.
Obviously, it's the bride's and groom's choice. But if they truly want to take the feelings of their non-invited friends into account, there's no valor in rubbing salt in the wounds. The friends may be hurt enough once they learn they haven't been invited. The right thing to do if you don't plan to invite someone to a wedding is to simply not invite them. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  (c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Stand by your grade

My stock response to the question, "Can't they sue me for that?" -- and it gets asked far more often than I would have anticipated -- is, "They can sue you for anything. Whether or not it gets tossed out of court is a whole other story."
Attention was drawn earlier this month to a college student who sued her professor because she gave her a C-plus in a course she took in 2009, making the student unable to complete the coursework for a professional degree she wanted that would enable her to become a licensed therapist. The professor had deducted the full 25 percent of the student's grade for class participation.
When protesting the grade to the professor and the college went nowhere, the student decided to take the professor to court and sue her for $1.3 million in earnings she would never see as a result of not getting the grade she needed in that course to get the degree she wanted.
While a judge initially allowed the case to proceed, he eventually ruled that the grade should stand. The defendant's lawyers had argued that the U.S. Supreme Court barred courts from interfering with colleges on such matters.
The question that looms large here is whether, given how wronged she felt, it was the right thing for the student to bring the lawsuit in the first place.
In the interest of full disclosure, I, too, grade papers for a living at my full-time job. So while I have sympathy for any college instructor who must do the same, I believe that professors owe it to their students to commit to trying to teach them when they come to your course. While it's amusing, I don't entirely agree with the sentiment behind the story of the graduate student who tells her business school professor that he should treat her better because she's his customer only to have him respond, "No, you're not my customer. You're my product." Good teachers should be willing to work at least as hard as their students do.
Teachers should not have to live in fear of students who receive the grades they deserve for the work they do but don't happen to want. Students have every right and should question their grades if they believe the grades are inappropriate -- or even if they simply want to know how the grades were calculated. And teachers should be prepared to explain. Sometimes teachers make mistakes. Often they don't. If a student wants to take the case to higher-ups at the school when they believe they're not getting a fair response, that's fair game, too.
If the student truly felt that she was wronged and that no one at the college (where her father also happens to be on the faculty) fairly addressed her concerns, she had every right to seek justice elsewhere. A judge saw fit to rule that the C-plus grade should stand, leaving it to the college to make the final determination about the fairness of the grade.
Professors shouldn't take the ruling as an indication they have no responsibility to grade thoughtfully and responsibly. Sometimes, however, C-pluses are legitimately earned. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

My $500 hamburger

This is the story of what my wife, Nancy, likes to call our $500 hamburger.
In early January, I received an email from Sven, the fellow who is in charge of development -- a more refined term for "raising cash" -- at the undergraduate college I attended. Sven was going to be in my city and wanted to know if we would have time for him to take us to dinner. We agreed to meet at 6:30 p.m., at a restaurant in our neighborhood.
Sven was waiting for us when we got to the restaurant. The three of us talked for a bit about news of the college since we'd last seen him. We ordered our food. Nancy chose what, at $12.50, seemed to me a slightly overpriced hamburger from the menu.
As we waited for our food, talk turned to various efforts under way at the college. I mentioned that years earlier I thought I had given to a fund that Sven mentioned. He told me he could check if I wanted and then took out his smartphone to consult an application that allowed him to see what every alumni had given annually to the college for at least the past two decades.
Sure enough, I'd given to that fund in honor of a former professor. But just underneath that entry was an indication that in 1999, I had pledged $500. Next to it was the notation "not fulfilled." In other words, this deadbeat sitting across from Sven hadn't paid up on the pledge.
"That can't be right," I said.
Sven showed me the phone again.
I'm among those people in the U.S. who try to give regularly to education and other not-for-profits without a political agenda. (I don't give to candidates or elected officials.) According to the Giving USAFoundation, the amount individuals gave in 2011 was $217.79 billion, up 4 percent from 2010. Giving to education, the second-largest recipient of donations, increased by 4 percent to a total of $38.87 billion that same year.
I don't like to be called out as someone who reneges on a pledge. As I again told Sven that I couldn't possibly have missed the mark 14 years ago, I noticed that every other donation we made over the years was carefully noted with precise detail.
Sven wasn't trying to shake me down for the cash. He wasn't even making a big deal over it. I got the sense that he found it somewhat amusing that it bugged me so much to have discovered a blemish someone noted on my record.
But before I could continue arguing how this couldn't be, Nancy had slipped our checkbook in front of me. "Make good on that $500 pledge you made," she said. "It's the right thing to do."
Clearly, she was right. The pledge had been made whether I remembered making it or not. Sven quickly loaned me his pen.
Within a week I received a nice note from Sven thanking me for my donation of $500 in 1999. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

What subjects should expect from writers

When I began writing a column on ethics almost 15 years ago, my approach when I wanted to interview someone was to identify myself, tell the person where the column appeared, and then start in on the questions. It was only after the third column appeared that I realized this wasn't enough.
In that column, I wrote about a particularly noble act someone had taken in the workplace. An employee had offered to donate a kidney to her boss. I wrote about how altruistic an act this was, but also focused on how the act could change the relationship between the employee and her boss -- and that this had never been discussed by them or anyone else within the company. I believed then and still do believe, that it should have been.
My mistake was that I had not revealed to the subject of that column, or the handful that preceded it, the nature of the type of column I write: that I look at ethical choices people make and how they go about making them. The subject's reaction to the piece about that noble workplace act was not positive. She suggested I was calling her intentions disingenuous, that somehow I was suggesting she was trying to curry favor with her boss and ensure job security in the process. I didn't write that in the column. I believed then and still do now that what she did was altruistic.
So, where did I go astray in doing the right thing by my subject?
Writer Tracy Kidder and his longtime editor, Richard Todd, explore the implications of letting writers into a subject's life in their recently published book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction (Random House, 2013). They believe that it's important for writers to help their subjects think through these implications. They stress that it's essential for writers to be clear with their subjects about the nature of their relationship.
The writer, they argue, should "assume that all potential subjects don't understand what they might be getting into" by talking to a writer.
"Explain to subjects," they write, "that there is no predicting how you will portray them or how they will feel about their portraits, or how readers will judge them, and that they can't determine any of this because you cannot give them control over what you write."
I wish I had had their advice prior to writing those first few ethics columns, because what Kidder and Todd advise is exactly the right thing to do. Since that experience writing about the noble act of the altruistic employee, I now make very clear to anyone I interview for the column who isn't already familiar with it that I write about how people make ethical decisions or how they might make better ethical decisions.
This caveat to subjects doesn't change what I write about or how, but it better prepares subjects for what to expect. Doing this often results in a more focused and better interview -- but, more important, it's the right thing to do. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

An expensive drinking lesson

"What price honesty?" asks a reader, who describes himself as a senior citizen from North Carolina.
Recently, he was asked by his son and grandson to join them on a trip to a fast-food franchise.
"I ordered a chicken sandwich and water," he says. The water button on the self-serve fountain-drink dispenser was quite small and located on top of the lemonade option. "Somehow I filled up my cup with lemonade that I didn't want."
He also hadn't paid for it, so he went back to the ordering station to tell an employee there about his mistake.
"How much do I owe you?" he asked her.
"$1.70," she replied.
"That much?" the reader asked.
"Yes," she responded.
He gave her the money and that was that, he writes. No thanks, no other options, no comments on being honest since she never would have known he filled his cup with lemonade rather than water if he hadn't told her.
"Now, I feel more stupid than honest," he writes, asking if he did the right thing.
Given that the fast-food franchise lets customers fill their own cups, it would have been simple for the reader to simply empty his cup of mistakenly poured lemonade, rinse the cup out, and then fill it with water. If there was no sink or receptacle in which to drain the lemonade, he could have simply walked outside to pour it out, and then returned to fill the cup with water.
While his honesty was noble, there also would have been nothing wrong with him spilling out the lemonade and simply refilling his cup.
He went above and beyond in returning to the ordering station to tell the employee of his mistake. The right thing would have been for the employee to check with a manager before insisting that the customer pay for what was clearly an honest mistake. He wasn't requesting a new cup, so it wasn't a matter of the employee worrying that the cup count might be off when they took inventory.
My reader also would have done well to ask to speak with the manager if the employee didn't offer to check on her own.
Still, the reader's impulses were good in wanting to be honest about his mistake. That he was penalized for coming clean sends a terrible message to an honest customer. It suggests that simply concealing mistakes in your favor could be the way to go since doing otherwise might cost you. It falls dangerously close to the cynical wisecrack that "no good deed goes unpunished."
But my reader takes no such message from his experience. He did the right thing by wanting to be honest and concedes that he knows what he did was right and that the employee was wrong in not forgiving the mistake.
Ultimately, such bad judgment on an employee's part hurts the business, something my reader knows.
"Whether or not I did the right thing," he writes, "I won't be going back to that franchise again." 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Looking a gift card in the mouth

I dread the day our dentist closes up shop. It took a long time for us to find one we truly liked, but once we found our current dentist my wife and I have been going to him for decades. His location isn't convenient, but he's a great dentist and we're committed to going to him. (It doesn't hurt that our grandkids now live close by his office and that he was a Cy Young Award winning pitcher in the late 1960s who regularly donates signed baseballs to our grandkids' school's annual fundraiser.)
Not everyone, however, is as willing to overlook the inconvenience of how long it takes to get to a good dentist.
A reader from Columbus, Ohio., recently switched dentists precisely because of the inconvenience of his location. The dentist's response raises a question of how to respond to a gift intended to keep your business when you have no intention of returning.
"We've gone to the same guy for years," the reader writes, mentioning that her husband has gone to him since he was a young kid and that her parents-in-law still go to him. But their dentist is located across town and with traffic, it's taking longer and longer to get there.
"We like the guy, but it's just not convenient anymore as our lives get busier," she writes.
So she called and spoke to the receptionist, explaining the situation and canceling their future appointments. The receptionist nicely offered to send their files to their new dentist.
The following weekend they received a handwritten letter from the dentist asking them if there was anything he could do to get them to come back. His note indicated that he just doesn't "lose patients" and that he hoped they would continue coming to see him. Enclosed was a $25 Visa gift card.
"We do really like the dentist, but don't intend on going back to his office," the reader writes. She plans to reply to his note to thank him for his service and to explain again about his location being the issue.
"Should I return the gift card?" she asks. "Or should I keep it?"
The reader made clear to the dentist's receptionist that it was his location that resulted in their switch. While the dentist's gesture may be kind, there is no obligation for the reader to return the card. There were no preconditions established in the dentist's note. He included the note both as a thank you for their patronage over the years and as an incentive to ask them to reconsider leaving his practice.
Writing a note thanking the dentist and again explaining that it is his location and not his service that has caused them to leave is a nice gesture. They can also tell the dentist that they will gladly recommend his services to other prospective patients.
But the right thing is to treat the gift card as a gift and do with it whatever they like, whether that's to spend it, contribute it to a local charity, or give it to their parents to pay part of their next dentist bill. They can even return it if they want to. But what they do with it is their own guilt-free choice to make. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School .
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Am I my neighbor's tax keeper?

Most people want things to be fair. If you have to follow the rules, so should they, goes the thinking. So if someone doesn't follow the rules, is it your responsibility to call them on it? Or, in the case of a couple of readers from different parts of the country, is it your responsibility to turn someone in if you suspect they are cheating the government?

A reader from New York has a hard time believing that the Internal Revenue Service will catch everyone who evades taxes. She writes that she knows a couple claiming to make $100,000 a year who brag that they pay no taxes since they are "under the radar."
They say the government won't catch them because the couple's son, who is in business with them, pays them under the table, writes my reader. "My husband and I have always paid our taxes and can barely make it from paycheck to paycheck. Yet they live high on the hog and have yet to be caught."
The same reader reports that someone she hired to work for her will not reveal a Social Security number so she can fill out the proper forms to file on what she paid her. "I want to report her income as soon as possible, so I don't face penalties because she is irresponsible."
Another reader in Ohio writes that her neighbor runs her own service business, but that she has not reported any income for at least five years.
"We live in a good school district and I struggle to pay federal, state, city and school district taxes as a single parent," the Ohio reader writes. "It seems unfair that she would not have to pay her fair share."
But the reader continues that there seems to be some unwritten code "that keeps telling me I should mind my own business and not turn her into the tax authorities, especially since she considers me a friend."
She wrestles with whether turning her into the IRS is the right and patriotic thing to do or if it's in some way wrong in this case.
My take on the right thing to do when facing such questions has always been that the first response, especially when it's a friend telling you of their tax evasion, is to express your discomfort with what they're telling you and encourage them to right the wrong. In some cases, it's difficult, unless you observe the actual documentation, to know if the person claiming to avoid paying taxes is actually doing so or if they get some sort of perverse joy in claiming they're getting away with something that others aren't.
But if there is proof that someone is cheating and direct confrontation either seems unsafe or doesn't result in any change, there are avenues for reporting the cheat. Both the IRS (with Form 3949-A) and the Canada Revenue Agency (through its online Informant Leads Program) provide avenues for reporting.
If there's proof that someone flagrantly cheats on his or her taxes and that person flaunts the fact that they are doing so, then the right thing is to let them know you believe it's wrong and to remind them that breaking the law is generally frowned upon by federal revenuers, as evidenced by the routes given to citizens to report such scofflaws. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

If you don't speak up against bad public behavior, who will?

Do you ever speak up against bad public behavior?
At least a couple of readers think you should.
A reader from Helper, Utah, writes that a few years ago she was at a fast-food restaurant with her children and saw a group of teenagers sliding down the slides on food trays. "They were big kids and going very fast on those trays," she writes. "You couldn't miss what was happening since the noise was incredible."
My reader writes that she immediately walked right up to the group and chewed them out. "I told them they didn't belong in there, that what they were doing at their size and at those speeds would kill any kid they hit. I ended that if they didn't leave immediately that I wasn't calling the manager, I was calling the cops."
The teenagers left.
"The other parents in the room thanked me," she writes. "None of them said 'boo' to those teenagers. They just got their kids away from them and let the teenagers take over."
Another reader from Columbus, Ohio, writes to tell me about the time a couple of summers ago he was driving his Honda CRV down the main highway in his city. A young woman driving in a red Mercedes convertible passed him in the right-hand lane and then, he writes, she cut him off while exceeding the speed limit by what he estimates was at least 30 miles an hour.
As the light ahead of them turned red, the red Mercedes pulled into the left-turn lane and stopped for the light.
"I pulled next to her while waiting for the light to turn green," my reader writes. "I looked down at the young lady thinking that I would 'glare' at her to show my displeasure at the way she was driving."
As he looked down, the driver looked up and glared back at him.
"What are you looking at old man?" he says she asked him.
"You're using your cellphone, smoking, not signaling to turn, and driving like you want to die. You'll never be an old woman," he recalls telling her, noticing as she pulled away to make her left turn that her turn signal wasn't activated again.
Did my readers do the right thing by confronting those misbehaving in public?
The driver wasn't wrong to say something. Given the litany of bad behavior he noted, it's not clear that what he said would keep the red Mercedes driver from continuing to be a menace as she drove on. But he spoke up.
The mother in Utah saw a situation that others chose not to confront and decided to tackle it head on. Her actions resulted in rescuing the play area for the children for whom it is intended. That other parents stood by and didn't say anything might not have been ideal, but that they were there when she confronted the teenagers should have given her some comfort knowing there were many standing by in case the teenagers weren't so compliant.
When someone's public actions threaten the safety of others, particularly young children, the right thing is to speak up. Doing so without adding to their or your own safety risk wherever possible is the wise course of action. But if you don't speak up to bad behavior, who will? 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

We may speak resentment, but our actions reveal the truth

Awhile back, I wrote about a reader who had found $200 scattered about the parking lot of a bank. She walked into the bank and asked the manager if anyone had called in to report the lost cash. The manager had gotten a call and the reader turned over the money and the manager saw that it was returned to the loser.
My reader was disappointed that the loser never took the time to thank her. A bit down on her luck and $196 overdrawn in her checking account, she began to doubt whether she had done the right thing by returning the money. I, and readers who wrote in after the column ran, assured her that she indeed had, even if the loser failed to acknowledge her efforts.
One reader, however, felt different. "I can say without a doubt that if I found money now, I would not say a thing and would think to myself, 'This is my lucky day!'"
It turns out, he writes, that he had once found a wallet outside of a man's car. He checked a nearby sports bar and learned that the man who belonged to the wallet was there watching Thanksgiving Day football games. "I did not look inside the wallet because I knew if there was a lot of money in it I would have had a really hard time doing the so-called right thing," he writes. So he went inside the bar and asked who drove the car out front. The man identified himself and the bartender looked at the ID in the wallet to confirm it was him.
"He was very thankful and even bought me a drink," my reader writes, "though to this day I regret doing the right thing."
Instead he writes that he should have taken whatever money there was and dropped the wallet where he found it. "He had a nice truck and was taking the day off to watch football and drink while I was working my crappy job, not owning a car, and in debt. He was obviously in a much better financial situation than I was."
The reader would "only feel bad about taking money from someone as poor as I am," though if that person didn't at least say thanks, he'd rethink whether to ever return a found wallet.
When asked about values, I regularly tell people that I can't change a person's values -- whether through a column or a class I might be teaching. What I can do is try to help people sort out what their values are.
While it might be understandable to feel that it's unfair for others to have more than you might have, the values that my reader acted on at the time were to do what he believed was fair. The wallet he found was not his. He knew the owner might be in the nearby bar so, regardless of his resentment over his plot in life, he did the right thing and made the effort to return the wallet to its rightful owner.
His actions speak louder than his words after the fact. Ideally, they will continue to do so if he's faced with a similar situation in the future. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Who's responsible for cleaning this stain?

Every December for the past 10 years, a reader has ventured on a holiday outing with her daughter and two grandsons to take in some festive show. Over the years, the destination has ranged from performances of The Nutcracker ballet to stage performances of It's aWonderful Life and all sorts of shows in between. After the show, the crew typically takes in the city's Christmas lights and any store windows that might have been decorated.
This year, the reader decided upon a performance by the wildly popular Blue Man Group , a show that near as I can tell is built around three men in blue makeup doing inventive things on stage with PVC tubing, Jell-O, toilet paper and assorted other food items. Since the grandsons are now 11 and 14, it seemed an age-appropriate and festive rollick.
For those of you who have been to a Blue Man Group performance (I haven't), you'll know that audience members in the first several rows are given rain ponchos to wear since at some point in the show various stuff (liquids, foods, Jell-O) are flung into the crowd. Since they would be slightly dressed up for the theater, my reader steered clear of those seats.
As she suspected, the boys loved the show. But as she was leaving she noticed that pieces of masticated banana that had been thrust upon the audience manage to get on her winter coat and leave spots. Not wanting to ruin the moment by complaining to an usher or box office attendant, she broke away from the boys for a second and, explaining that she deliberately hadn't sat in the rain poncho seats, asked a theater manager if she knew how to get banana stains off of a wool coat.
"Some water should take that right out," the manager responded. It didn't.
Now, she was faced with having to have the coat dry cleaned to get the stains out. Since it had a fur collar, the cleaning bill wouldn't come cheap.
"Should the theater be responsible for the cleaning bill?" she asks.
Looking online at the ticket policy, the Blue Man Group does feature a statement on its website similar to those you see on the back of sporting event tickets that indicate your acknowledgment that, say, if you get hit by a puck, it's not the events' responsibility or liability.
Still why give out rain ponchos to only some audience members when others might be in a banana's way, as well?
The right thing would be for the theater to warn all patrons when they purchase tickets that they might not want to wear their finest garb. Better still, it wouldn't limit its distribution of rain ponchos to just the first few rows since banana clearly has a way of spilling further into the audience. But given its disclaimer, I'm not convinced the theater is responsible for footing the cost of a cleaning bill.
Still, a spokesman for Blue Man Productions says that while they have no formal policy covering people outside the poncho seats who might get splattered, they "have for years paid for dry cleaning when appropriate."
So there's no harm in my reader asking, but if the theater declines, then it's on her to eat the cost. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.