With the quality of the food served for lunch as the only complaint among the normally critical seniors, last Wednesday’s Senior Ethics Day was a success, according to Ethics Day chairman Craig Herring.

Seniors arrived at school last Wednesday morning to enjoy a breakfast catered by IHOP before going to Marymount University, where they were faced with ethical dilemmas and presented with a mock trial and video.

Real attorneys and judges were brought in for the mock trial, and the students had to decide what the verdict would be. The case involved a 16-year-old who chose to drive her drunk friend back home from a party, to prevent her friend from getting in trouble with her parents. Because the 16-year-old was an extremely inexperienced driver, she crashed the car and killed her friend.

The seniors had to decide whether the girl should be convicted of manslaughter.

“The mock trial was a good way to provoke discussion and get us involved,” senior Jackie Pontius said.

For many seniors, highlights of the day were either the speech by the motivational speaker Steve Fitzhugh, or the thought-provoking and emotional video about a rape and murder case.

Fitzhugh, a former NFL player, used stories from his tragic personal life and spoke in a tone that the seniors could relate to. Most seniors felt that it was more impressionable to hear the message that “drugs are bad” from Fitzhugh rather than hearing it from health teachers, parents, or a textbook.

“His personal anecdotes of his experience with drugs and watching what they did to people were extremely moving,” senior Chris Manitius said.

A whole new session known as “the Bad Samaritan,” was added to this year’s senior Ethics Day. The video presented the case of a college student at UC Berkley who went to a casino with his best friend. His friend assaulted a 7-year-old girl within his view, yet the student did nothing to stop him. His friend ended up raping and killing the young girl, but the student did not tell anyone for three days.

“The whole idea [of the session] was to let students know where to draw the line,” Herring said.

Students were asked to discuss whether there should be a law of morality that applies to everyone which would say if one sees someone committing a crime, they are obliged to interfere.

The video had been shown at other schools for their Ethics Days, and Herring decided to test it at McLean. According to Herring, it generated a lot of good reaction. The video elicited strong emotions from seniors, which provoked serious discussion.

“It sort of eliminated my naïve impression of the world and of people,” Manitius said.

Ethics Day was an experience for seniors still coming to grips with ethical questions and hard choices that they will face in college. Even among seniors who felt they had not learned anything new, the consensus was that Ethics Day was worth it.

“Senior Ethics Day mainly affected me by reinforcing my philosophy of moral relativism,” said senior Eric Epstein, who had at first been skeptical of Ethics Day. “I enjoyed being faced with a question and not being able to fit it into any moral framework I was familiar with. That made the experience rewarding.”