The headline tells the story, and the article expands on whether this is the sort of news we need right now. But I want to use it for a thought experiment. Suppose it is good to take care of a plant (or suppose it was a plastic baby, in case you are ambivalent about plants). Now, was her act of watering a fake plant for two years ethically right or ethically wrong? We feel like we want to reward her. She says, "I put so much love into this plant! I washed its leaves. Tried my hardest to keep it looking it's best." Surely that's praiseworthy! But she wasted all that time she could have spent caring for an actual plany (or baby), and surely she should have noticed that the plant was fake. So she was wrong, wasn't she? It's a classic conundrum: what to say about someone doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.
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