The Ethicist Who Isn't

What's wrong with The New York Times Magazine's answer to Ann Landers.

Jacob Levy from the December 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

For example: In response to the question about how to handle a poorly performing temp, Cohen declared, "if anyone's acting unethically here, it's your boss; it is ignoble to force people into soul-deadening, pointless, poorly paid jobs....Organizing work into tedious, repetitive tasks, while profitable for the few, makes life miserable for the many; some political economists have called it a crime against humanity." In other words, as long as we have a division of labor, ethics is inapplicable to decisions we face about who does what job. In the face of "a crime against humanity," how could there be anything wrong with submitting fraudulent resumés, evaluations, or timecards?

So Cohen frequently fails to provide the advice that his correspondents are looking for. He shrugs his shoulders and says that, until we live in a more egalitarian society, our individual decisions just aren't that morally significant. In his August 1 column, he wrote that "the goals determined by individual moral choice can sometimes be achieved only by acting in concert with others; the dictates of ethics are sometimes best expressed as politics." This is a recurring theme: His correspondents are damned if they do and damned if they don't, so the only serious ethical demand on them is to get out there and vote for politicians who will raise taxes and increase social spending.

That isn't expressing ethics through politics. That's saying that ethics is irrelevant and only politics matters.

In a truly remarkable broadside against charity, Cohen wrote, "When a thief, having stolen your wallet, hands you back carfare, it's tough to mutter much of a thank-you. Similarly, nice as it is that Bill Gates gives money to libraries, a decent country would tax Microsoft at a rate that lets cities buy their own books."

Lots of people--even readers of The New York Times Magazine--could believe that corporate income taxes should be raised without thinking that those two cases are remotely similar. The mugger at the time of mugging is your enemy; he's placed himself outside most ethical constraints on how he can be treated. To place Microsoft in the same category is radically wrongheaded. If it weren't, reading and writing about workplace ethics would be a waste of time.

If Cohen were right about the radical injustice of American society, there would be no point in being an ethicist--and no point in publishing a column about the moral decisions of "day-to-day living." By his own lights, he should quit bothering with the irrelevant decisions individuals make and start writing op-eds about collective political decisions.

But many of his readers think that they live in a reasonably just, reasonably decent society. Even though they disagree among themselves about what justice ultimately demands, they don't think that they face such radical injustice as to make ethics irrelevant.

If they're right, then the moral decisions they make in their working lives do matter, and they are to be commended for taking those decisions seriously. The New York Times Magazine has promised to offer them some helpful insight in making those choices.

If it really wants to do that, it should hire an ethicist who thinks we live in a society where ethics have a role to play.

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