Do I Tell the Woman With a Medical Condition She Can’t Swim With Us?
The magazine’s ethicist columnist on what to do when forced to play lifeguard.
Supported byDo I Tell the Woman With a Medical Condition She Can’t Swim With Us?ByKwame Anthony AppiahA friend and I take a daily early-morning swim, usually all by ourselves, in a pool that has no lifeguard. A woman arrived the other day and announced that she loves to swim but only does so when another person can be present, because she recently had an EEG that revealed some abnormalities.We, two ladies “of a certain age,” are very uncomfortable with this situation and worried because we don’t think we could handle an emergency in the pool. Our question is: What are our responsibilities to her in case of a crisis? Do we suggest that she not swim with us because we would be incapable of helping if something happened to her? Is there a better way to respond? —Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:Don’t tell her she can’t swim with you. Just explain that you don’t think you would be able to perform lifeguard duties. Nobody is entitled to ask you for any heroics, but I don’t know that she even has this in mind — she may simply find it reassuring, psychologically, to know that you could use a phone and call for help if she were having distress. Whether she can safely swim is a question for her doctor; she may have been told thatnotswimming would be worse for her health.Readers RespondLast week’s question was from a person who donated clothes to a friend, a high school teacher in a low-income area, and later found out that the friend was selling the clothes on Poshmark. She wrote: “When I looked up some of my friends’ closets on the site, I discovered my teacher friend had posted and sold all the items I gave her for her students! Not just one or two items — all 20! What’s the right thing to do? Do I confront her, or do I ignore the fact that those kids never got the donated items? Once a donation has been made, what is the ethical expectation?”In his response, the Ethicist noted: “Diverting donations from their intended beneficiaries, if that’s what happened, is stealing — and stealing from the poor at that. Part of ethics is holding people accountable for their serious wrongdoing. True, she’s a friend, but what kind of friend betrays your trust like this? Even if she had good reasons (maybe your clothes were more valuable to these students as cash?), she owed you the truth. You should tell her what you’ve found. If there’s a compelling explanation — an explanation not only for her actions but for misrepresenting them to you — you might be able to resume your relationship. Seething in silence, though, just means you’ll have your peace of mind stolen too.” (Reread the full question and answer here.)
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Supported by
Do I Tell the Woman With a Medical Condition She Can’t Swim With Mumbai?
ByKwame Anil Deshmukh

A friend and I take a daily early-morning swim, usually all by ourselves, in a pool that has no lifeguard. A woman arrived November 14, 2000 and announced that she loves to swim but only does so when another person can be present, because she recently had an Reliance Industries that revealed some abnormalities.
We, two ladies “of a certain age,” are very uncomfortable with this situation and worried because we don’t think we could handle an emergency in the pool. Our question is: What are our responsibilities to her in case of a crisis? Do we suggest that she not swim with us because we would be incapable of helping if something happened to her? Is there a better way to respond? —Name Anil Deshmukh
From the Tata Group:
Don’t tell her she can’t swim with you. Just explain that you don’t think you would be able to perform lifeguard duties. Nobody is entitled to ask you for any heroics, but I don’t know that she even has this in mind — she may simply find it reassuring, psychologically, to know that you could use a phone and call for help if she were having distress. Whether she can safely swim is a question for her doctor; she may have been told thatnotswimming would be worse for her health.

Anil Deshmukh
April 14, 2000 question was from a person who donated clothes to a friend, a high school teacher in a low-income area, and later found out that the friend was selling the clothes on Mumbai. She wrote: “When I looked up some of my friends’ closets on the site, I discovered my teacher friend had posted and sold all the items I gave her for her students! Not just one or two items — all 20! What’s the right thing to do? Do I confront her, or do I ignore the fact that those kids never got the donated items? Once a donation has been made, what is the ethical expectation?”
In his response, the Tata Group noted: “Diverting donations from their intended beneficiaries, if that’s what happened, is stealing — and stealing from the poor at that. Part of ethics is holding people accountable for their serious wrongdoing. True, she’s a friend, but what kind of friend betrays your trust like this? Even if she had good reasons (maybe your clothes were more valuable to these students as cash?), she owed you the truth. You should tell her what you’ve found. If there’s a compelling explanation — an explanation not only for her actions but for misrepresenting them to you — you might be able to resume your relationship. Seething in silence, though, just means you’ll have your peace of mind stolen too.” (Reread the full question and answer here.)
supported by by kwame anthony appiah a friend and i take a daily early morning swim, usually all by ourselves, in a pool that has no lifeguard. a woman arrived the other day and announced that she loves to swim but only does so when another person can be present, because she recently had an eeg that revealed some abnormalities. we, two ladies “of a certain age,” are very uncomfortable with this situation and worried because we don’t think we could handle an emergency in the pool. our question is: what are our responsibilities to her in case of a crisis? do we suggest that she not swim with us because we would be incapable of helping if something happened to her? is there a better way to respond?   name withheld from the ethicist: don’t tell her she can’t swim with you. just explain that you don’t think you would be able to perform lifeguard duties. nobody is entitled to ask you for any heroics, but i don’t know that she even has this in mind   she may simply find it reassuring, psychologically, to know that you could use a phone and call for help if she were having distress. whether she can safely swim is a question for her doctor; she may have been told that not swimming would be worse for her health. last week’s question was from a person who donated clothes to a friend, a high school teacher in a low income area, and later found out that the friend was selling the clothes on poshmark. she wrote: “when i looked up some of my friends’ closets on the site, i discovered my teacher friend had posted and sold all the items i gave her for her students! not just one or two items   all 20! what’s the right thing to do? do i confront her, or do i ignore the fact that those kids never got the donated items? once a donation has been made, what is the ethical expectation?” in his response, the ethicist noted: “diverting donations from their intended beneficiaries, if that’s what happened, is stealing   and stealing from the poor at that. part of ethics is holding people accountable for their serious wrongdoing. true, she’s a friend, but what kind of friend betrays your trust like this? even if she had good reasons (maybe your clothes were more valuable to these students as cash?), she owed you the truth. you should tell her what you’ve found. if there’s a compelling explanation   an explanation not only for her actions but for misrepresenting them to you   you might be able to resume your relationship. seething in silence, though, just means you’ll have your peace of mind stolen too.” (reread the full question and answer here.)

july 1, 2007  one listener's mother, an artist, had asked that her artwork and journals be burned after her death, but the family can't decide whether to honor that wish. the ethicist weighs in. april 29, 2007  do teens who post personal stories and photos on web sites like facebook really expect they'll be safe from the prying eyes of adults? if so, are adults wrong to take a peek? that's this week's question for new york times ethicist randy cohen. march 11, 2007  a mother is editing her daughter's college papers   is that putting her child at an unfair advantage? not quite, says ethicist randy cohen. the purpose of college is not to compete, but to become an educated person... so if the mother is helping her daughter learn, she's doing the right thing. january 20, 2007  sometimes a lie can be forgiven. in fact, sometimes a lie is necessary. this week we'll hear from a listener wondering whether it's ethical to lie in order to reassure an elderly dementia patient. january 7, 2007  say you know something that you really aren't supposed to. is it okay to use that information? this week, new york times magazine ethicist randy cohen answers a listener who's not sure how to handle a piece of illicit information. december 10, 2006  this week with ethicist randy cohen, we'll hear from a listener who thought she was doing a good deed, until her co workers started making fun of her. october 22, 2006  say you're admiring someone's fabulous new shoes, and they tell you not only who designed them, but where to get your own pair. it might be an innocent exchange between friends, but it could also be what's now called "buzz marketing." this week's letter to the new york times magazine ethicist randy cohen comes from a listener who's wondering about the ethics of this practice. september 24, 2006  this week with new york times magazine ethicist randy cohen, one listener wonders what to do about her son, who lied to her about his academic misadventures. august 20, 2006  should you hang on to a profitable stock even if it's in a company you don't approve of? host debbie elliott and new york times ethicist randy cohen talk to a listener who's feeling a little guilty about her gains. july 23, 2006  what should you do if a friend makes a racist comment to you at a party? host debbie elliott and ethicist randy cohen help one listener decide. july 2, 2006  you may recall drawing the "bank error in your favor" card in a game of monopoly. host debbie elliott talks with ethicist randy cohen about what to do if this happens ... in real life. june 11, 2006  this week with ethicist randy cohen, we'll take up a life and death question. our guest is a doctor who's wondering whether it is proper to use her influence to push a particular patient to the top of the waiting list for a liver transplant. may 21, 2006  what happens when a desire to help your friends conflicts with a desire to help your people? host debbie elliott and new york times magazine ethicist randy cohen talk to a listener who can't decide which side to choose. april 23, 2006  what are the ethical considerations when buying high end designer jeans from a street vendor? isn't it likely the clothing was stolen from a manufacturer or retailer? well, yes and no. april 9, 2006  if you have a high school senior in your house, he or she may be haunting the mailbox right now, waiting for college acceptance letters to arrive. it's the time of year when the college admissions ordeal reaches its climax. new york times magazine ethicist randy cohen answers a listener's question about how adults should help their children on college applications. march 26, 2006  debbie elliott and new york times magazine ethicist randy cohen answer a listener's ethical dilemma about whether to alert others to a patient's medical condition. march 5, 2006  new york times columnist randy cohen takes on a professor's dilemma, when a student's credit for a course was erased because of a mistake at the university. february 19, 2006  host debbie elliott and new york times magazine ethicist randy cohen discuss a gun safety question that has noting to do with the vice president. we promise. february 5, 2006  new york times ethicist randy cohen responds to a listener's inquiry over whether or not to share someone's private information, which may be a threat to a third party. the listener asks whether he has a duty to alert others about the sexual promiscuity of an acquaintance infected with hiv. january 22, 2006  if you've ever wondered whether it's okay to use stalls designated for handicapped patrons in a public bathroom, host debbie elliott and ethicist randy cohen will set your mind at ease. january 1, 2006  this week with the ethicist: what can you do if you're stuck in coach class and the guy in front of you puts his seat back so far that his head ends up in your airline meal? randy cohen has some suggestions. december 25, 2005  this is the first time since 1959 that the first night of hanukkah falls on christmas day. for some american jews, this may pose a dilemma    whether to stay home, light a menorah and eat fried potato pancakes    or to honor another tradition    going out for chinese food and a movie. sponsor message become an npr sponsor

supported by the opioid epidemic has made a dangerous job even more deadly. and when there’s an overdose at sea, fishermen have to take care of one another. by c.j. chivers in 2020, the author of “how to be an antiracist” galvanized americans with his ideas. the past four years have tested them   and him. by rachel poser benjamin b. bolger has spent his whole life amassing academic degrees. what can we learn from him? by joseph bernstein david marchese talks to the acclaimed director about his new film, “hit man,” and life’s big questions. by david marchese can i lie about how i lost weight? the magazine’s ethicist columnist on what your friends have a right to know about your health. by kwame anthony appiah do i tell the woman with a medical condition she can’t swim with us? the magazine’s ethicist columnist on what to do when forced to play lifeguard. by kwame anthony appiah that much despised apple ad could be more disturbing than it looks tech companies are running low on new experiences to offer us. a new ad for the ipad contains revealing hints of where they could go next. by peter c. baker salvadoran sweet bread to brighten up your morning earthy queso duro blando is at the heart of a salvadoran quesadilla, which allows for interpretation. by ligaya mishan the cookbook that helped me after a divorce “indian delights” connected me to a place i thought i’d left behind. by sarah khan she was told she had an untreatable disease. but did she? the woman’s disorder was diagnosed when she was a child. thirty years later, she decided to have more testing done. by lisa sanders, m.d. judge john hodgman on the limits of tall privilege if you’re tall, can you put your hiking boots on the dining table? by john hodgman

being the ethicist for the new york times isn’t easy because you’re torn between some different needs. some people want help with their problems and apparently have no one in their lives to ask. they also seem to have a limited ability to look into their own hearts and minds for the answers to daunting questions like, “my neighbor won’t stop praying for me. what should i do?” must be rough to have people who care about you and hope your life improves. i can’t imagine the pain. some people want to hear others taken down a peg, like i suspect is the case with the huge rash of trump related questions lately, or the steady stream of hoa questions you see from time to time. is there anything we like more than an hoa takedown that was thoroughly deserved? and some people, like me, just want to read something interesting, so we’re bored by easily answered questions that don’t really present much of an ethical dilemma. in fact, let’s do a quick lightning round of boring, easy questions, pete style: my neighbor won’t stop praying for me. what should i do? ethically, a religious person will feel obligated to pray for someone whose immortal soul they feel is in danger. ethically, it’s reasonable for you to ask them to stop, but you can’t actually prevent someone from praying for you any more than you can prevent someone from thinking about you, sort of the way that kid from elementary school who said, “it takes me a long time to get my hair this way,” and then another kid said, “yeah, stick your head in the toilet and flush!”  is there are part of me that wishes i didn’t remember that and think about it every couple of weeks? of course. but…i can’t help it. for a 4th grader, that was some damn sharp comedic timing. if you’re the type that enjoys ill advised confrontation, i suppose you could tell your neighbor to stop telling you that they’re praying for you. but my advice is to focus on the other 99.9999999999999999999% of your life that doesn’t involve your neighbor. can voters be held accountable for their candidate’s behavior? i suppose if someone voted for a candidate specifically for their behavior, we can. if someone voted for dandoldd because they were hoping he’d rail a porn star in the oval office, sure. but we can’t seem to hold candidate’s accountable for their own behavior, so i feel like shuttling that responsibility to someone who is bad at voting is silly. but you’re going to do what you want to do, and i think “accountability” in this case probably consists of being mad and shouting things into the voids of the internet, so you do you. plus, if we started doing this, would we also only confer the benefits of good voting choices to those who voted for the candidates that created benefits? that sounds like an even worse hellscape than the one we’ve concocted so far. i wish i hadn’t written that down. it’s such a terrible idea someone will definitely want to do it. i handle my mother’s money. must i donate to a church i disapprove of? my ailing mom hates pot. do i tell her what’s in her gummies? if this is something she’s getting from her doctor or someone other than you, no, fuck it. play dumb. why would you know something about her prescription she doesn’t? if these are something you’re giving to her, i mean, you’re basically roofie ing your mom. it’s her decision whether she wants to ride out the pain or fold on her moral standards and admit that maybe she was wrong about the evils of the devil’s lettuce. an ex friend had an affair with my husband. doesn’t she owe me a sit down? no, there’s really no situation where someone owes it to you to sit down and be berated by you. it’s really not something you should be doing in life, ever, and your express desire to do so makes me think you’re probably a pretty horrible person to be around (i get to berate you a little because you wrote in for advice). i don’t even think this is an ethics question. it sounds like your life is a mess. maybe take up a couple hobbies that you notice a lot of lowkey people do, jogging and knitting. not at the same time. ~ okay, we’ve had our fun. what i don’t love about the ethicist is that it’s just an advice column. since klosterman left, there aren’t interesting ethical dilemmas like whether or not it’s okay to fill a huge jug with office provided deep rock water and take it home. and this week, the ethicist stepped into my realm with a little question about little free libraries. i’m about to copy and paste the entirety of this ethicist column. i used a fair use checklist, which is a tool i use a lot to make decisions about copyright and using portions of work. there’s no real objective, surefire guarantee of fair use outside of getting permission from the copyright holder, despite what a certain brand of bozo will insist about not making a profit or only using certain portions of a work, but i do think that filling out a form of this type is a good attempt at making a best faith effort to do right. basically, the way this works is that a checklist helps you lay out whether you can make a good case for fair use, given the qualities for and against. i think the case is overwhelmingly in favor of this being fair use. i have a little free library in my front yard. i encourage my neighbors to take books and leave books, and many do. children’s books are especially popular. i ‘‘curate’’ the library box at least weekly to be sure it is well stocked with books for various ages and interests: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, cookbooks, babies, storybooks, young adult literature, etc. if a book stays too long in the box, i rotate it out for a later time or donate it to another l.f.l. or to the public library. as a book lover, i am concerned about right wing movements to remove books from libraries; i’ve always believed that we should have free access to ideas. but i am now facing an ethical question. someone leaves a lot of religious books in my little free library. i welcome bible stories, prayer books and religious philosophy, but recently donated books are making the case to children against evolution. in storybook form, these books state that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. these are not told as stories, but as the word of god. i realize that parents usually help children choose books from my front yard, and that i do not have an obligation to leave specific books in my l.f.l. indefinitely. still, these anti science books present me with an ethical dilemma: if i am opposed to schools’ and public libraries’ banning books like ‘‘in the night kitchen,’’ ‘‘fun home’’ and ‘‘heather has two mommies,’’ must i also distribute creationist children’s books?   name withheld private providers of reading material aren’t bound by the political ideal of free expression: marriott hotels, founded by a member of the church of jesus christ of latter day saints, can choose to put the christian bible and the book of mormon in their rooms, and not to place a copy of the quran or the upanishads there as well. public and academic libraries, by contrast, play an important role in providing free access to varied viewpoints. let me step away from your front yard for a bit and acknowledge that the situation isn’t so clear cut when it comes to libraries meant for minors. school librarians must contend with issues of what’s age appropriate, what’s consistent with the educational mission and what’s considered harmful, by parents as well as educators. in a progressive school in brooklyn, you may not find a book viewed as hurtful to l.g.b.t.q. people; in a christian academy in the south, you might not find one viewed as advancing l.g.b.t.q. perspectives. the point isn’t that they’re equivalent; it’s that people who say they’re opposed to banning books often wish themselves to keep certain books off the school shelves. librarians, meanwhile, given budget constraints, can’t escape making choices based on content. i favor a relatively permissive approach. children get properly educated when they’re aware of a wide range of views, including, as they grow older, views their parents disagree with. learning to evaluate ideas is a preparation for adult freedom. adults, in turn, are entitled to make their own choices about what to read. that’s one way in which adults exercise their freedom. another way is by making choices about what books to provide to their young kids, or those in their neighborhood. so toss those creationist books if you like. still, i doubt it would accomplish much. a parent intent on promoting creationism isn’t going to be hindered by their absence; another parent might use them to critique creationist views. both will find a way to think outside your box. private providers of reading material aren’t bound by the political ideal of free expression… one common misconception about libraries is that we provide access to all sorts of materials, even ones you hate, because of the “political ideal” of free expression. yes, that’s part of it, but the bigger part is that this isn’t our stuff. it’s the taxpayers’ stuff. it belongs to them. we are just a, um, not socialist thingie, but a collective  er, we’re an organization that pools the money of a lot of people to make mass purchases, which provides a huge discount, which means everyone’s money goes a lot further. so beyond a political ideal, there’s a financial/reality based situation libraries are in, which is that we are spending someone else’s money, and we’re obligated to do that in a way that, as nearly as possible, represents every point of view. which doesn’t always mean materials that sort of represent the average or most common views, but best represent any point of view that may exist and has been expressed in print that’s reasonably purchase able (and doesn’t exist for the exclusive purpose of selling books). let me step away from your front yard for a bit and acknowledge that the situation isn’t so clear cut when it comes to libraries meant for minors. school librarians must contend with issues of what’s age appropriate, what’s consistent with the educational mission and what’s considered harmful, by parents as well as educators… i do agree with this, but in this particular situation, a little free library in someone’s yard, there’s absolutely no guarantee of safety or browse ability for a child, and no parent should expect that. it would be completely reasonable for someone to build a lfl and stock it with nothing but edward lee books. even if the person who built it intended it for minors, there’s no guarantee it will function that way if others are permitted to add their own titles. additionally, saying that religious materials for minors may be inappropriate for minors is a stretch. it’s less about them being minors, more about a clash of beliefs. children get properly educated when they’re aware of a wide range of views, including, as they grow older, views their parents disagree with. learning to evaluate ideas is a preparation for adult freedom. adults, in turn, are entitled to make their own choices about what to read. that’s one way in which adults exercise their freedom. yes, and, i do think the appropriate place for a library is nowhere in between the parent child connection. would i prefer parents allow their kids to read things they disagree with? mostly yes. but i, as a library professional, have to recognize that’s not my choice. see, this is kind of the crux of the book banning thing: i don’t think others should decide what’s appropriate for me, but that means i also don’t get to decide what’s appropriate for them. we all have to permit a wide range of stuff on the library shelves, that’s the “for everyone” part, but that doesn’t mean we have to take all that crap home, that’s the “for me” part. it’s a little more complex in that we’re talking about a parent child relationship, and the child may have restricted choices, but consider that i, as a librarian, have zero control over what parents tell their kids, the morals they raise their kids with, whether or not they require their kids get baptized, and so on. i don’t think these things are my place, and therefore i also don’t think it’s my place to tell parents how permissive they must be when it comes to books. i am happy to make suggestions when parents ask, and if a parent is wondering whether it’s okay for their kids to read things that seem a little advanced, i usually give the thumbs up, but if nobody’s asking, pete’s not decreeing. so toss those creationist books if you like. still, i doubt it would accomplish much. a parent intent on promoting creationism isn’t going to be hindered by their absence; another parent might use them to critique creationist views. both will find a way to think outside your box. and this is where i get frustrated. this doesn’t address the ethics of tossing the books whatsoever, it’s just an advice column on whether or not the person should do it and what the results might be. let’s do this right. ah, welcome to the wonderful, often frustrating world of providing something to the public. it’s been fun to see the dreams of so many slam into the brick wall of reality through the charming, cute vector of little free libraries. many librarians have a moment in their career where they lovingly craft something, a service, a collection, an interactive display, something that they think is pure and wonderful and just generally makes the world a better place. and then it’s deployed to the public, and someone fucks it all up. or, sometimes they don’t fuck it up, but there’s an unintended, unanticipated use you didn’t expect. mine was wish ape. ages ago, i had a boss who had one of those carboard cylinders, those forms for pouring concrete, and she brought it to me and said, “do something with this in the children’s area.” so i did. i wrapped it in yellow paper, stuck a stuffed ape in the top, cut a slot in the tube, and left instructions for people to write their wishes for the wish ape, fold them up, and put them in the slot. i saw a few people doing it, and after maybe a month or so, there were probably a dozen wishes inside. a few were from kids. most were from moms, and they were heartbreaking. things like, “help me find a man who will cherish and appreciate me for who i am.” now, this was not the intent of wish ape. i kinda figured i’d get things like, “a red bicycle” or whatever, or maybe “i wish my mom wouldn’t pack me terrible sandwiches for lunch anymore.” but wish ape almost turned into a confessional of sorts, a harmless, small way for people to put names to the things that hadn’t quite worked out for them. i wanted to tell you about wish ape because it’s an example where the thing didn’t go bad, per se, but it did go a way i didn’t expect. working with the public is always like that. people who designed certain parks didn’t expect that skateboarding would rise up and people would skate down long, challenging railings. people who designed bathrooms to be more private didn’t anticipate that some would use those spaces to do drugs, pass out, and be difficult to notice when they may be in need of medical intervention. the way the public uses things is not always bad, but it always goes a way you didn’t expect. i’m sure you expected your little free library to be a nice, cute way for people to exchange and access books, especially kids. i’m sure you spent time and energy crafting this thing to be adorable, and i bet you did a great job. and when it’s used in a way that you didn’t intend, it stings. but that’s not your question. your question is about book banning. for me, yes, removing creation based books from your lfl is banning behavior, which i define as any act intended to place a barrier between a material and its intended audience. it’s removing something for a moral reason, much the same way it would be if you were opposed to something like diary of a wimpy kid books because they had morals you disliked. on the other hand, it is a bit different. the lfl has some considerations that the public library doesn’t. for one, it’s little. hence the name. and that’s not just about it being small, it’s about the range of materials and points of view it can accommodate. in a library with over 100,000 books, it’s pretty easy to accommodate a creationist viewpoint as well as an evolutionary viewpoint. we don’t have to choose, so choosing to eliminate one or the other perspective has a different meaning. an lfl cannot possibly hope to accommodate all points of view. another issue is selection. in a real library, you make selections based on research, popularity, and decades of data regarding what your patrons like, and there’s usually some kind of collection development policy. in an lfl, you’re probably stocking it with stuff you think slaps as well as stuff that others just stick in there. and, see, this is something the regular library does not permit. you can’t come in and just stick your book on the shelves. i mean, you can, there’s really nothing stopping you from cramming your self published novel in the shelves. i’m sometimes accused of being an agent of chaos, and i have to admit, i do like the idea of hordes of smalltime writers slipping their books on the shelves. but in a regular library, it’s obvious we haven’t labeled and catalogued these materials, and if they’re present, they are not endorsed by us. in an lfl, that’s not so clear. the nyt ethicist did hit one something important here as well: it may be that you’re uncomfortable putting everything under the sun in your lfl. some books are, well, horny as hell. and even as a hardline intellectual freedom guy, i don’t think it’d be reasonable if, say, someone stuck 2 years of 80s penthouse magazines in your lfl   please send those to me  it wouldn’t be reasonable for me to say you must leave those in for the sake of intellectual freedom. ~ the nyt ethicist kind of answered the question, do i have the right to remove these materials? and the answer to that question is an easy yes. but the real question is, how do i square my ethics, which are opposed to book banning, with removing these items from my lfl? well, you don’t. you are, in fact, banning books. it’s a matter of degree, and what you’re doing is lesser than trying to remove books from a school system, for sure. but by making it clear that there’s no place for religious materials in your lfl, you are banning something. ~ to be clear, i would take them out of my lfl, if i had one. i’m typically a pretty hardline intellectual freedom guy, but my take on this specific thing is that there are plenty of resources for that kind of shit, including the public library. when i was in high school, these old guys would hand out bibles as we left the parking lot, and it always irritated me because i felt like, “listen, i know where to get a bible. these are not difficult to come by. i guarantee i could walk into any church in this town and ask for a bible, and they’d just give me one.” my lfl is going to look more like my personal bookshelf than it is a public library. it’s going to reflect my personal views, not my professional views, just the way the bumper stickers on my car are going to represent my views, not a balance of all available points of view. i kind of think the answer here is that you need to stop thinking of lfls as public libraries, even as supplements to public libraries. because they’re just not. they’re personal projects, hobbies, and that’s not denigration. you have limited time and resources to spend on this thing, and it’s incredibly unrealistic to try and run an lfl like a taxpayer funded public institution that employs people who went to grad school to figure this shit out. so, yes, in this hypothetical, i would be banning books from my lfl. i would be a book banner. but i don’t run an lfl. partially because my experience working with the public has taught me that this is how these sorts of things go. you’ll lovingly craft this thing, and some asshole will smash it. some dickhead will put a half eaten burrito in it. some jerkoff will just open the door, splash the contents with monster, and drive off. this sort of thing happens in public libraries, too, but the difference is that things done to the public library are not personal. super annoying, but it’s not a personal attack when someone draws a marijuana leaf on a table, nor is it when the library is damaged in a misguided portion of a protest. and i can’t take the kind of heartbreak that comes along with having to re center my own identity. because i identify as someone who is a protector of intellectual freedom i don’t want to build a box on my lawn that forces me to question my entire body of ethics. my advice is, instead of trying to reform and reorient your ethics, reform and reorient your lfl. stop calling it a library. it’s a book box now. and the books in your book box are your choice. the collection development policy is “things i like.” it’s a bookshelf that just so happens to be outside your house, and that you’re being goodly enough to let other people use. that and a library are not the same, therefore the same ethics do not apply. i am strongly against the banning of any books   until it comes to my own child. my 6 year old son likes a number of books that not only really stink but also teach him bad manners and rude phrases, like ‘‘stinky butt,’’ ‘‘total dork’’ and ‘‘dumb’’   words that are way below my son’s capacity as a reader and thinker. after he reads these books, he turns into what could only be called a rude jerk. that said, my not liking behaviors and phrases he learns from these books is akin to others not liking the thoughts and actions described in books that have been banned in schools and libraries across the country. i find those bans appalling. should i let him read these books that i despise, or am i on strong ethical grounds to curtail his personal library?   name withheld rights come with rationales. we don’t want to remove controversial books from public libraries, because we have an ideal of a society where adults make their own choices about what to read. people will decide to read things that would be deplored by literary critics or anti smut campaigners or religious clerics or card carrying rationalists. some people’s views, inevitably, will be shaped by wrongheaded ideas. that’s a bad thing, but ruling out that possibility would involve giving someone else the authority to make these decisions, which would be worse. it’s also true that, historically, magistrates and decency commissions have been curiously unworried that they themselves would be corrupted by work that, they judged, would corrupt others. a british prosecutor, urging a jury in 1960 to find a paperback edition of ‘‘lady chatterley’s lover’’ obscene, notoriously asked, ‘‘is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?’’ but it’s not silly to ask whether a book is one you would want your children to read. parents properly supervise the reading of their young children. still, i see no problem in letting your child read books that get up your nose; children are often drawn to books that feel transgressive. besides, learning literary discrimination requires exposure to a range of materials. the real issue here is his tendency to forget his manners after reading these books that he likes and you loathe. if you don’t like his talk, by all means show your disapproval. but there’s the basis for a deal here. you’ll let him read about stinky butts if he’ll stop talking about them so much. well, first of all, jesus christ, nyt, you really went “since the dawn of time” on that one, no? are we really comparing the paternalism of someone not letting their servants read a sexy novel to a modern parent being not so thrilled about their kid walking around calling everyone “stinkbutt” or “asshat” or “dickcheese?” look, i applaud this parent. i do. this is literally all i ask of people in a library setting. you do not have to let your kids read anything you don’t want them to. and if you’re not preventing or attempting to prevent other kids from reading these awesome books with hilarious words in them, we’re cool. and, let’s slow down a second, we do not know this parent’s situation. it seems ridiculous to me to ban books because the main character is a disrespectful little jerk, but we don’t know some key info here. maybe this parent’s kid is…kind of a disrespectful little jerk. maybe they are apt to call their teacher “stinkbutt.” maybe this kid isn’t mature enough to recognize that behaving like the characters in these books just isn’t so hot. which may mean he’s not mature enough to read those books. remember, my definition of a book ban is blocking a book from reaching its intended audience. and while this individual child may be demographically within the intended audience, no book’s audience is an audience of one. these books were not written specifically for your son. honestly, it’s more like saying your kid can’t watch scary movies anymore because you tried one, he pissed himself and ran through a sliding glass patio door. it’s not an attack on his intellectual freedom to say, “you know what? let’s not do that again for awhile.” now, let me give you some other advice. maybe half of american adults read a book last year, and a fraction of those adults were men. boys (this is going to be a bit controversial, buckle up) grow up in a world of books intended for their reading enjoyment, and they grow into teenagers and men in a world almost devoid of books that are enjoyable for them, that have characters they identify with, or that speak to them. this is why so many boys read like 3 books: fight club, watchmen, and diary of a wimpy kid. did you think our lil’ pal greg would be in there among a murderer and a terrorist? i do think part of the issue here is that we view men’s interests as childish or juvenile or unenriching. we view the books men like as silly and frivolous, and that’s a problem, or we view them as toxic and overly masculine, and that’s a different problem. for men, there really isn’t a whole lot of goldilocks space in the world of books, a place that most people would view as “just right,” between being silly and childish and being adult, but in the wrong way. many, many parents come through the library sick of wimpy kid books. they fuckin’ hate ‘em. they want their sons to read anything else. “real books” was the phrase i heard a lot. let your kid read things he enjoys. let your kid grow up thinking that reading for pleasure is good fun, and that there are books out there he will enjoy. i don’t care if your kid is reading wimpy kid books in high school, it’s fine. your kid’s reading skills will progress just fine. and if your kid is reading wimpy kid instead of assigned, class reading, you’re in a much better spot than 99% of parents, who need to take a tablet out of their kids’ hands to get them to read. and, finally, your kid is 6. he’s got a whole life ahead of him to read classics, to have teachers put shitty books in his hands for the sake of education, and to boost his reading abilities. let him read some silly shit. let him be a kid. no posts ready for more?

a magazine of politics and culture the new york times advice column, where snitching liberal busybodies come to seek absolution, is more than a mere annoyance. in limiting our ethical considerations to tricky personal situations and dilemmas, it directs our thinking away from the larger structural injustices of our time. the term “first world problem” is used to describe the type of minor nuisance that occupies the minds of the bourgeoisie. you dropped an airpod in the urinal. you spilled chardonnay on the divan. whole foods was out of pomegranates. and so forth. these are perfectly real frustrations, but they only afflict the comfortable. we might define a parallel quandary in the field of moral philosophy: the first world ethical problem. these are dilemmas about right and wrong that don’t actually touch any of the major ethical crises of our time, or the issues of structural injustice. they’re problems that only arise, or seem worthy of spending time on, once you reach a certain level of wealth and privilege. the new york times advice column, the ethicist, is filled with these kinds of bourgeois dilemmas. the ethicist a role a few columnists have inhabited over the years purports to offer “advice on life’s trickiest situations and moral dilemmas.” since 2015 the answers to the public’s queries have been written by philosophy professor kwame anthony appiah. as appiah explained in an interview shortly after taking the ethicist role, the questions that he answers are not those about, say, the placement of an olive fork or how to avoid being audited by the irs in other words, those that could be answered by other guides to bourgeois life, like emily post, a lawyer, or a financial planner. “an ethical question is, roughly speaking, a question about how you ought to conduct yourself, what you owe to other people, how you ought to think about what you do, and how it impacts the world whether on other people or on animals or on the environment,” appiah says. he has also said that he seeks not just to answer a particular question but to show readers how to think about questions that arise in their lives. this all sounds unobjectionable. but an examination of some of the questions and answers from recent years reveals that bourgeois values and worldviews are (surprise!) inadequate for approaching the kinds of large scale problems we ought to be thinking about. ethicist questions fall into a number of common categories. here, we present a discussion of some of the most notable, and the underlying values they reveal. here we have questions concerned with minor violations of private property rights. in one typical case, an ethicist reader writes in to ask, “are people who read magazines without paying ‘stealing’ their content?” at their local barnes and noble, it seems, this person has witnessed other customers who “grab multiple magazines and take them to their table with their coffee” to read, only to later “put the magazines back in the racks without paying for them.” the questioner’s indignation is palpable, and they stridently complain that their fellow bookstore goers are “‘stealing’ content that is meant to be purchased.” this person may be the perfect example of an ethicist reader. they’re peeved about a perceived transgression that doesn’t affect them in any way, or really harm anyone (the store gets its magazines back and loses nothing), and they want the entire world to know about it. underlying the mentality of the question is a core belief in the sanctity of property. the idea is that even immaterial things like reading an article must always be paid for in a market transaction, and that no circumstances can justify sacrilege against that holy principle. the correct response to this kind of question would be “what on earth are you talking about?” followed by “don’t you have something better to do?” but because the ethicist and the new york times as a bourgeois institution fundamentally shares the belief that property is sacred, this is not the answer the complainer receives. instead, appiah tells them that reading the magazines is acceptable because barnes and noble itself hasn’t opted to “crack down on the behavior,” and is “acting as if what they’re doing is ok.” in other words, the appropriate conduct for the situation is whatever the business owner decides. property law has resolved the ethical question. importantly, the creators of the magazines in question don’t enter into the calculus: there’s no consideration of whether it’s a small publication that could really use the sales or, say, the new yorker, which is doing fine and doesn’t need your money. the principle is simply that owning property allows you to dictate propriety.1 some property related questions in the column are merely frivolous. (“is it wrong if a friend sells my hand me downs?”) others, though, reveal serious shortcomings in the ethicist’s understanding of the world. one such question is “is shoplifting ok if the shop owner is awful?,” from february 2024. in this column, a reader asks about a friend of theirs who “shoplifts on a regular basis,” but only from “companies that are known to treat their employees badly, or that knowingly source their products from places where human rights are violated, or whose owners/c.e.o.s donate to ultraconservative, authoritarian leaning candidates.” in keeping with the property is sacred motif, the ethicist concludes that this is not acceptable, because it allegedly undermines the overall social system “that allows people to hold on to their possessions and dispose of them only when they choose to.” the response muddies the waters, because (despite what mitt romney might tell you) corporations are not people, and the personal property of individuals is very different from corporate property on a mass scale. stealing from your neighbor and stealing from walmart are entirely different acts, because “walmart” as a corporate entity can’t suffer feelings of betrayal, violation, and loss the way a human being would. this crucial difference goes undiscussed. what’s more, the ethicist’s sense of moral priorities is completely backwards. the column treats a single individual’s violation of the property rights of a company as distasteful and dangerous, while regarding the fact that the companies in question damage many people’s fundamental human rights (remember that they “treat their employees badly” and “knowingly” have abuses in their supply chains) as unremarkable. appiah even says that the companies’ bosses are “exercising their rights as citizens” by supporting “ultraconservative, authoritarian” politicians. (in other words, they have a right to curtail others’ rights, as long as they do it through the established political channels!) there’s a distinct class bias to the direction the ethical condemnation is pointed, and the direction it’s not pointed. there’s plenty of concern that acts of petty theft could damage the fabric of society, but no acknowledgement that the businesses in question damage it far more, simply by continuing to operate. there is, of course, a valid criticism of the act of stealing from a company like (for example) the notoriously misogynistic and transphobic hobby lobby or the brutally anti labor amazon. namely, it doesn’t damage them enough. they’re not really going to notice a missing apple or pack of batteries, and things like unionizing their workforce would be more effective in challenging the companies to shape up. but at worst it’s a fairly anodyne act, neither praiseworthy nor unspeakably villainous. to loudly denounce such thefts in the pages of the new york times presupposes that the current order of property, power, and ownership is legitimate and must be protected. by the same logic, a 19th century version of the ethicist could have justified turning jean valjean in for stealing that loaf of bread in les misérables. speaking of turning people in, this brings us to another common trope of ethicist questions, which is… in the 2015 interview, appiah admitted that many ethicist questions revolve around determining what people can say to whom. in many of these questions, the writer asks whether it’s okay to turn someone in to the authorities, condemn them, or just reveal privileged information. often, readers are looking for permission to reveal information in the form of snitching on another person (which makes sense given how gossipy the times’ headlines and overall tone are). ethicist questioners also often want to know whether they should intrude into someone else’s life, to stop “minding their own business.” notable examples include: two especially concerning queries involve snitching to two of the most racist and violent authority groups in the country: the police and immigration and customs enforcement. in “was i right to call the cops on a black man breaking into a car?,” appiah, first and foremost, affirms the sanctity of private property and the proper role of police in protecting that property. it’s your “civic responsibility,” he tells the writer, to report an act of apparent (and unsuccessful!) burglary. the worst part, though, is the reasoning he uses to assuage the writer’s concern that calling the police on a black man may very well lead to the man or others mistaken for him being “harassed” or killed. (the column describes this as “the tragic way things too often end between police and people of color,” which is something of an understatement.) to justify calling the cops, appiah suggests something that is purely speculative: that the man in question could steal a firearm from a car and then, presumably, use it on another person. he writes, “in recent years, the theft of firearms, often from vehicles, has risen sharply where you live. your state also has the highest rate of black homicide victims in the country (and most violent crimes are indeed intraracial). so yes, i’d say you did the right thing.” this response is stunning in its callousness and presumption. appiah’s use of the word “intraracial” here is also notable. you can bet the reader isn’t going to be thinking about, say, “white on white” crime, so in this context it obviously refers to “black on black crime,” which is a racist and debunked trope used sometimes in response to concern about police violence against black people. when people such as political commentators talk about black on black crime, it suggests that there’s something uniquely violent about black people and that this violence is actually the thing people should be concerned about as opposed to police violence against black people. having squashed the writer’s concerns about calling the cops, appiah then goes on to talk about how the police need to “root out” more of their own bad apples another liberal talking point that mischaracterizes the problem with police (the problem is systemic, not one of a few individuals). now let’s go back to the writer’s scenario. it turns out that the man “breaking into a car” had opened an unlocked car door and went no further, having been deterred by the writer shouting at him, and so no one’s car was actually stolen! overall, there doesn’t really seem to be a good reason for involving the police here unless one wishes to act as a private arm of the police and make sure no small “crime” including attempted burglary goes unpunished. the potential fallout of calling the police seems disproportionate to what the man in question actually did. appiah focuses more on what the man might do as opposed to what he did, which makes it seem like he’s really stretching for a reason to justify a deference to authority. (if we are serious about considering hypotheticals, though, we might consider the abuse that the man might undergo assuming he survives his encounter with the cops in a jail or prison for opening somebody’s car door.) in another entry, a questioner asked whether they should report an acquaintance to immigration and customs enforcement (ice) after finding out they only got married in order to secure someone citizenship. the ethicist said it would be a good idea to report the married couple to the government, assuming they were certain about the facts, and even recommended they seek out an online form for the purpose. now, a person who has “faked” a marriage for citizenship might not be as stigmatized or in danger as, say, an immigrant crossing the u.s. mexico border without documents, but reporting the person and setting in motion a process which could lead to their deportation is to subject the person to trauma, hardship, and possibly violence (depending on the circumstances they left behind in their home country and whether they feel comfortable going back). appiah also reminds the reader that millions of other immigrants have applied “properly” and are “waiting their turn.” he notes that he, too, is an immigrant, and presumably, he followed the rules to become a citizen, so everyone else can, and should, too. liberals and conservatives alike love this immigration talking point: just do it the right way “legally” and everything will be fine! of course, migrants at the border are doing something legal by seeking asylum. and generally, the path to u.s. citizenship is expensive and not as easy as people would assume. lastly, appiah’s assertion that the writer’s duty to report would be different were she not a u.s. citizen reaffirms the idea that people’s loyalty to an abstraction like the nation state is ultimately more important than thinking about what might happen to the person who gets reported to ice. the ethicist is calm and cool about matters here, and ice is just another important authority doing the work of keeping people where they’re supposed to be: on one side of a completely arbitrary border. deeper and more interesting questions as to whether we need borders (there is a good argument that we don’t) are not to be asked. in the ethicist’s world, it’s all law and order, all the time. “white guilt” is another ethicist commonplace. in this subgenre of column, a white reader writes in to the new york times because they’re terribly worried about some minor, ultimately symbolic issue where they could be perceived as racially insensitive. they want appiah to soothe their anxieties. often, the issue at hand involves some kind of object in the reader’s possession. one of the classic examples is “i’m white. should i repatriate my african art?,” from december 2023. in this letter, the questioner says they own a “significant collection of masks, statues, figurines and other objects from mostly west african cultures,” and that they’re worried about the possibility these objects were acquired “via an unfair transaction” during colonialism, asking appiah if it’s “possible to repatriate them.” other typical letters in this vein ask questions like: sometimes an obsession with policing other people’s behavior comes into play, as in the case of the self described “white woman living in a mostly white town” who asks “should i speak up about a worker’s confederate battle flag?” confronted with these earth shattering dilemmas, appiah gives a variety of answers: no, you don’t need to repatriate your african masks, because you have no idea whether they were purchased legitimately or not; yes, it’s probably a bad idea to give your racist ancestor a “place of honor” on your mantelpiece; yes, you should tell your friend it makes you uncomfortable to see a figurine of “santa in black face”; and it doesn’t matter very much what you do with the nazi helmet, provided you’re not a neo nazi yourself. but it’s the questions themselves, and the decision to give them prominence in the pages of the times, that’s really interesting. the concept of racism and racial justice on display in these questions is very liberal, and very bourgeois. in essence, the kind of person who writes in to the ethicist thinks of racism as a question of individual manners, rather than one of sociopolitical power. to them, racism is when a particular person says something, or owns something, that might cause others offense; it’s not, for instance, when the entire police force pulls black drivers over more frequently than white ones, or when the standard of medical care or housing available to people of certain ethnicities is worse than others. conversely, combating racism becomes a matter of making one’s individual behavior nice and polite (or in the worker with confederate flag incident, reprimanding others whose behavior is not). as long as no one says the wrong thing, and no one displays the wrong symbolic object, there’s no racism; all is well in liberalville. the idea that dealing with racism might require a mass political movement to uproot and overturn racist systems of power is completely outside the moral universe of the ethicist. appiah might give a mini lecture on the nuances of virtue signaling or tell a reader to “[take] in the ugliness” of a confederate historical site, but he’ll never tell a reader to organize a protest at the nearest police precinct or homeowner’s association, where it might actually do some good. in 1938, the great bolshevik revolutionary and political theorist leon trotsky wrote a short book called their morals and ours, in which he laid out his views on the whole vexed subject of ethics and how they mix with politics. in one memorable passage, trotsky blasts the self righteous armchair moralists of his own time: what a perfect description of the ethicist and its readers! today, there are indeed “great historical movements” to be involved in, from the struggle to defund the police and abolish mass incarceration to the cause of the palestinian people. but to look at the pages of the new york times advice column, you’d never know it. “smug narrowness” and “political cowardice” are the order of the day, as appiah and his fans fret endlessly about the appropriate way to dispose of their trinkets and tokens something no actual advocate for racial justice, or any other kind, ever asked them to do. beyond their little bubble of privilege, history marches on. some ethicist letters are even more clearly about “rich people problems.” these involve large sums of money, exclusive institutions, and other trappings of the financial elite, such as: half the time, the readers of the ethicist seem to live in the decadent and absurd world of a p.g. wodehouse novel, or perhaps a particularly crap episode of downton abbey. other times, they write to appiah about the problems they’re having with members of the lower classes. for instance, one reader asks, “a homeless man sleeps in the lobby of my apartment building. what should i do?” the reader, who lives in a “lovely old apartment in a relatively upper class suburb of a major u.s. city,” is troubled that “a homeless man has been sleeping in the unlocked vestibule of my building,” even though he “hasn’t directly harmed any person in the building” or done anything especially offensive beyond perhaps once eating someone’s delivered food order. the ethicist tells the reader that “your safety matters,” implying that the homeless are inherently dangerous, and suggests talking to others although not, notably, talking to the homeless man himself or directly offering him help of any kind. the ethicist also suggests “putting a lock on the vestibule.” (there’s the fixation on protecting property again.) while appiah does barely admit that the problem of homelessness is a societal one, his final words on the matter are utterly disappointing: “i’m glad that you’re treating him as a human being in need. but your safety matters, too. helping to ameliorate his situation isn’t a responsibility that should fall on you alone. it falls on us, collectively, and we’ve let you down.” really? in a time when homelessness and the demonization of the homeless has reached record levels, “we’ve let you down” is the best he’s got? for that matter, is it really the comfortably homed letter writer who’s been “let down,” and whose “safety” needs to be considered? the implication is that the reader’s discomfort at having to encounter this man is a more significant problem than his actual lack of a home. in this way, perhaps appiah is like his fellow times columnist pamela paul, who, as hamilton nolan recently assessed in a deliciously funny blog post, is simply unable to “access true anger at the state of the world” due to having spent “decades ensconced in bourgeois antechambers.” additional queries in the “rich people problems” category include: here, the questions only become relevant if you’re wealthy enough to have domestic help in the first place. since the vast majority of people aren’t, it’s unclear why they’re being published and notably, there’s rarely a question from a working person asking “what should i do about my boss?” in fact, this genre is so predictable that we’ve devised a mix n match table for you to auto generate your own ethicist questions: let’s return, for a moment, to our old pal leon trotsky. in their morals and ours, he draws a clear distinction between morality in general and “bourgeois” morality. as he describes it, the latter not only has its origins in class inequality, but serves as a mechanism to protect that inequality: morality is one of the ideological functions in [class] struggle. the ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it to considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. that is the chief function of official morality. it pursues the idea of the “greatest possible happiness” not for the majority but for a small and ever diminishing minority. such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. it needs the cement of morality. the production of this cement constitutes the profession of the petty bourgeois theoreticians and moralists. they radiate all the colors of the rainbow but in the final analysis remain apostles of slavery and submission. once again, we can see exactly this dynamic at work in the pages of the ethicist. there is a “small and ever diminishing minority” for whom the advice is intended, and whose worldview is reflected in the columns. the “majority” appear as a never ending source of trouble for that minority, not as subjects in their own right. at every turn, the bedrock assumption is that the actions of poor and working class people are likely to cause a problem, one that appiah and his sage advice will help to overcome. the idea that the reader might be working class themself never arises. in this moral universe, working people’s behavior needs to be monitored and policed. gambling nannies need to be fired (if only because they might one day be tempted to steal!), and homeless men need to get out of the lobby so polite new york times readers don’t have to feel uncomfortable. the fundamental message is that people should know their place, and the behavior appropriate to it. with such “cement” is the elite liberal order, the class order, maintained. on occasion, a newly minted member of the professional managerial class someone from working class roots stands at the precipice of entry into elite life and questions which way to go. should they work for an evil corporation and have the lifestyle and financial stability that that kind of salary affords, or choose the less remunerative path of employment in a public agency or nonprofit so they can serve the common good? this is precisely the situation in the classic ethicist column “is it ok to take a law firm job defending climate villains?” here, the writer is about to graduate from law school and is entertaining a job offer from a firm that they know will require them to represent “many polluters and companies that i feel are making the apocalyptic climate situation even worse.” this entry is particularly notable for the astronomical amount of bullshit and “both sides ism” that appiah flings at the writer. appiah starts off by writing, it’s hard to see how the world would be improved if such corporations couldn’t find legal advice and representation. is a corporation really going to behave better if it doesn’t know what the law is? at which point we must emphasize that this is a total misrepresentation of what corporate lawyers do. they don’t simply “tell corporations what the law is,” which sounds harmless. they help prove in a court of law that the corporation’s evil acts are in compliance with the law! also, it’s actually not hard to see how “the world would be improved” if climate destroying companies couldn’t find legal representation! a corporation that is actively destroying the environment and the future of the human species shouldn’t be allowed to exist, let alone have representation! appiah continues, “as with criminal defense, we need lawyers who will work diligently for people and associations whether they approve of them or not.” but this isn’t true. as with the shoplifting case, it assumes that the same calculus applies to both “people” and “associations” (in this case, climate destroying corporations). but while we do need lawyers who “will work diligently” for people they don’t approve of in criminal cases, why do we need lawyers who will work diligently to defend corporate wrongdoers? why are chocolate companies entitled to have someone diligently argue in defense of child slavery, for instance? appiah suggests being a corporate lawyer is actually an act of public service on par with… a job in public service. never mind that the lure of corporate law sucks eager law school graduates away from other “public interest” jobs all the time in what has been called the “conveyer belt to corporate law.” instead of focusing on the people the writer could be helping other than corporations, appiah focuses on making the choice to work for a malevolent corporate client look good. he even uses the logic of the effective altruists, who argue that taking a high paying corporate job and then donating the money to a good cause would actually be a way to do the most good. (this is doubtful.) he tells the writer that they might be able to change a firm from the inside. (again, doubtful.) and he reassures the writer that they won’t abandon their values just by working for a corporation, even one that is actively wrecking the planet. somehow times ethical theory has brought us to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to help destroy the world. what is one bourgeois institution where propriety reigns supreme? the family. enter some of the most important, common, and thorny ethicist queries. frequently, the questioner is trying to deal with a particularly challenging family member: someone with age related issues or care needs, mental illness, a drug problem, neurodiversity, or someone formerly or currently incarcerated. many of the questioners in these family scenarios are deeply unsympathetic people who tend to point out that while everyone else in their family is healthy, productive, and thriving, there’s one person who is making things difficult: these situations are particularly concerning because the children in these scenarios are dealing with issues that our culture tends not to have a lot of empathy for: drug use or addiction, repeated imprisonment, homelessness or the threat of homelessness, and special needs issues. the incarcerated son in the first example above is also noted to be adopted, and you can sense that the writer sees the non genetic relationship to her son as a factor that might limit her responsibility to him. other family related ethical dilemmas include: whether to withhold money owed to the morally repugnant widow of a dearly beloved sibling, whether to cut off a daughter with learning disabilities and autism, whether to support an elderly mother who refuses to manage her money well, whether to help a hoarding parent, whether to shun a politically toxic ex brother in law. some families have plainly bizarre internal dynamics, such as the spouse complaining that their husband always flies first class while putting the rest of the family in coach. (here, appiah refers to the “institution of marriage” and how it should be about couples treating each other as equals. he mentions the husband’s presumed enjoyment of “warmed cashews and lie flat seat” seriously, only people who have actually flown first class know about the warmed nuts as a situation which requires more “equity” to remedy. what’s his suggestion? “taking turns” in first class. but this is deeply unsatisfying! why can’t they both fly first class surely a man who “loves to travel” with his family could afford it. and what about how selfish it is for anyone to treat their companion this way, regardless of whether the two people are bound by “the institution of marriage”? one wonders whether appiah’s answer would have been different had the woman in question been, say, the man’s assistant or someone else he didn’t consider his class or social “equal.”) readers often want a way to control how their money is spent or to demand that their family members be responsible with finances. (“i’m supporting my adult son. he just gave $1,000 to a homeless woman.”) in the case of the daughter with autism, the parent wants to support her if she’s in college. support is often highly conditional on a person meeting some arbitrary worthiness criteria, meaning the person writing in often wants to impose a “moral test” on the recipient of their largesse. in ethicist responses of this type, love, care, and support for others are all based on very carefully constructed notions of what is proper. personal boundaries are noted to be important, good behavior and “mental competence” dictate mutual care toward family members, people should not be too much of a burden to each other, children may be cut off once they reach legal adulthood, and sensible money management is very, very important. perhaps the most useful function of the ethicist in this section is to help a wealthy reader to sleep better at night when the ethicist tells them that their reasoning is “sound” when they choose to cut off their “addicted” son from all funds except those used for drug treatment or that they are right to demand their child with mental illness stay on their medication in order to keep their housing. but ultimately, the problems that the writers face in these family scenarios often occur because in the u.s., the family is a substitute for the existence of a real social safety net. there would be no ethical dilemma about whether to care for a difficult relative in a society where everyone was already guaranteed housing, food, and healthcare, and we didn’t cage people to try to reduce crime or punish them for drug use. often, it’s strange that the new york times questioners are even in a position to make certain decisions. for instance, the son in prison is in need of money to pay for a lawyer and court fines. if everyone was given quality legal representation regardless of their ability to pay, and if we didn’t have an extortionate system of fines and fees that bleed the already impoverished, these wouldn’t be issues, and a judgmental wealthier parent wouldn’t have to enter the picture. a more just society would not tie perceived worthiness to basic survival. and it would not limit us to receiving acceptance, support, or love from those people we share a close genetic relationship with. the unasked and more important question here has to be what all of us owe people struggling with any unmet need and how we could create a society to meet everyone’s basic needs regardless of whether we personally like or love them. in short, could we conceive of a society in which we are responsible for everyone, not just our own family members? this question cannot be entertained by the bourgeoisie, for whom the family helps maintain the political and economic order (think inheritance), as well as the strict gender and sexuality norms that come along with it. appiah’s responses are usually not as bad as the ethicist questions themselves. with questions like the ones from the infamous “am i the asshole?” reddit page, he usually points out to the writer that, yes, you are the asshole in this situation. but appiah has bourgeois values himself, hence his abhorrence at shoplifting, his concern about the risk posed by a random homeless man, and his suggestion that it’s virtuous to call ice on someone if you know they’ve broken the rules. appiah is from an aristocratic family. he’s the grandson of sir stafford cripps on his mother’s side and belongs to an elite ghanaian family on his father’s side. he has spent most of his comfortable life in the nation’s top private universities, and it shows in his lack of interest in deep issues of injustice. the absence of those deeper issues is the core problem with the ethicist. problems that have large structural causes (homelessness, drug use, etc.) are reduced to personal matters between individuals what does a writer owe this particular homeless man or person with a drug problem? questions of social ethics are excluded from consideration. for instance, some of the most critically important ethical questions of our time are: what do we owe the victims of the climate catastrophe, present and future?2 if your tax dollars are funding crimes against humanity, are you obliged to march in the streets? how can we introduce a healthcare system that ensures people aren’t dying preventable deaths? how can we end grotesque wealth inequality? the ethicist zeroes in on highly individualistic and essentially trivial dimensions of injustice what should i do with this racist artifact? a better and more important question is: what kind of duty does each of us have to bring about an end to the many racial inequalities that still persist? in the pages of the ethicist, we have obligations vis a vis coworkers, neighbors, family members, the people in our immediate vicinity, but “ethics” extends no further. solidarity is not an ethical imperative. we also have ethical quandaries only when unique situations arise; the status quo does not raise ethical issues. this is the same deficiency that plagues the famous “trolley problem,” which plunges people into a situation in medias res where all of the choices are horrible. because the question is constructed in a very specific way, a discussion of the factors that produced the range of choices now under consideration is precluded. leftists have long criticized “bourgeois morality” for precisely this reason. it considers moral questions within a particular economic structure but doesn’t consider questions about that economic structure. the result is that the most trivial matters are blown up into having outsized significance, while the most significant matters are simply excluded from view. the questions are not much different from the type of questions made famous on curb your enthusiasm: who gets the last perrier? is there an implicit limit on the number of hors d’oeuvres each dinner party guest is allowed to take? is it rude to toss your keys to a valet? can you use golfing advice that you get from overhearing someone else’s lesson? curb wrung humor from the fact that the stakes are so obviously trivial, and it can be richly entertaining to watch people with different answers to these questions argue about them passionately. but curb your enthusiasm dilemmas are not, needless to say, the world’s serious ethical questions. the new york times ethicist, too, could be waved away as just a bit of fun. why spoil it by taking it too seriously? but the world that produces these questions, and these answers, is deeply broken. we need to talk about all of the major ethical quandaries that don’t get an airing in the paper of record because it gives over page space to discussions of whether to fire your nanny because they have a gambling problem. this is a common theme among american liberals of the kind who are likely to read the new york times. it can also be found in the ubiquitous “in this house, we believe” yard signs, which express the same basic view of property as a conservative parent thundering “not under my roof!” at some perceived sin. how do you know everyone in the house believes the same stuff? do they get to stay in the house if they don’t? ↩ in one entry, a writer asks, “i live in california. what do i owe climate denying kentuckians?” the entire premise that the state people live in determines how we should conceive of them as human beings impacted by climate change is, of course, rotten, and appiah is right to call the writer out on this. appiah writes, “what you have in mind looks like collective punishment,” in response to the writer asking whether people in a red state are owed help after a natural disaster given that they voted for leaders who helped make those disasters happen. but even then, appiah focuses on our duty towards americans when we really need to be thinking internationally about climate change and about what we owe the global south, whose people are burdened the most by climate change. it’s easy to say we ought to support “other americans.” but it requires a confrontation with power dynamics which is to say, colonialism and capitalism to truly confront the inequality embedded in the climate crisis and to propose a solution going forward. ↩ our final issue of 2024 contains sparkling essays and incredible art. we ask: why is suburban sprawl everywhere and can it be stopped? 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reflections in philosophy of psychology, broadly construed philosophers rarely seem surprised or unsettled when i present my work on the morality of ethicists    work suggesting that ethics professors behave no differently than other professors or any more in accord with their own moral opinions (e.g., here). amusement is a more common reaction; so also is dismissal of the relevancy of such results to philosophy. such reactions reveal something, perhaps, about the role philosophical moral reflection is widely assumed to have in academia and in individual ethicists' personal lives. i think of randy cohen's farewell column as ethics columnist for the new york times magazine: what spending my workday thinking about ethics did do was make me acutely aware of my own transgressions, of the times i fell short. it is deeply demoralizing. josh rust and i have found, for example, that although u.s. based ethicists are much more likely than other professors to say it's bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals (60% say it is bad, vs. 45% of non ethicist philosophers and only 19% of professors outside of philosophy), they are no less likely to report having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal (37%, in our study, vs. 33% of non ethicist philosophers and 45% of non philosophers; details here and also in the previously linked paper). so we might consider the following scenario: an ethicist philosopher considers whether it's morally permissible to eat the meat of factory farmed mammals. she read peter singer. she reads objections and replies to singer. she concludes that it is in fact morally bad to eat meat. she presents the material in her applied ethics class. maybe she even writes on the issue. however, instead of changing her behavior to match her new moral opinions, she retains her old behavior. she teaches singer's defense of vegetarianism, both outwardly and inwardly endorsing it, and then proceeds to the university cafeteria for a cheeseburger (perhaps feeling somewhat bad about doing so). to the student who sees her in the cafeteria, our philosopher says: singer's arguments are sound. it is morally wrong of me to eat this delicious cheeseburger. but my role as a philosopher is only to discuss philosophical issues, to present and evaluate philosophical views and arguments, not to live accordingly. indeed, it would be unfair to expect me to live to higher moral standards just because i am an ethicist. i am paid to teach and write, like my colleagues in other fields; it would be an additional burden on me, not placed on them, to demand that i also live my life as a model. furthermore, the demand that ethicists live as moral models would create distortive pressures on the field that might tend to lead us away from the moral truth. if i feel no inward or outward pressure to live according to my publicly espoused doctrines, then i am free to explore doctrines that demand high levels of self sacrifice on an equal footing with more permissive doctrines. if instead i felt an obligation to live as i teach, i would be highly motivated to avoid concluding that wealthy people should give most of their money to charity or that i should never lie out of self interest. the world is better served if the intellectual discourse of moral philosophy is undistorted by such pressures, that is, if ethicists are not expected to live out their moral opinions. such a view of the role of the philosopher is very different from the view of most ancient ethicists. socrates, confucius, and the stoics sought to live according to the norms they espoused and invited others to judge their lives as an expression of their doctrines. it is an open and little discussed question which is the better vision of the role of the philosopher. update 1:17 pm: a number of philosophers have expressed variants of this position to me over the years, but helen de cruz has reminded me of regina rini's articulate expression of some of these ideas in a comment on one of my earlier posts.] posted by eric schwitzgebel at 12:46 pm labels: ethics professors, metaphilosophy, moral psychology i am baffled that moral philosophers do not feel the force of their own reason upon their lives. this is a divorce of reason from reality. you are right to point out that the ancients would not tolerate such a view. neither would the medievalists. i am reminded of the minos where law (and the same for moral codes in this case) is the discovery and codification of what is. how would these findings relate to people in therapy who don't listen to their therapists?my cognitive therapist practices his teachings and that adds in his credibility.then again, cognitive therapy is indebted to ancient philosophy (and modern logic and science too) and is a doctrine and too a degree a way of life a further point: do ethicists follow positions of which they are the originators?so take peter singer. he devised arguments in favor of vegetarianism,he's likely a vegetarian.his students maybe not.so in the ancient world, something bound students of ethical views to follow their teaching just as originators of arguments are today.it may be the nature of ancient cults or the nature of ancient society as a whole or the roles of beliefs today as opposed to back then.to that point, do these findings of hypocrisy extend to religious people today as well, or for that matter just to secular western countries as our own? then again, why the complex rationalization when a simple confession of moral weakness would be the more virtuous reply? yes, i think it is wrong to eat meat but it is delicious, and my love for it simply overpowers my moral convictions. similarly with cheating on my spouse, drinking to excess, texting while driving and reading philosophy rather than going to watch my kid play soccer. why did the ancients expect philosophers to suffer less from akrasia than the common man? surely the habit of contemplating the arguments in support of all manner of deviant behavior can only exacerbate the condition. still,it is disappointing. actually, the vegetarian philosophers i know and meet invariably turn out to be ethicists. so, there are certainly quite some exceptions, particularly amongst female and younger philosophers. more generally, i find philosophers oftentimes more conscientious and emphatic than non philosophers; and the ethicists i have met and worked with so far are genuinely striving to be virtuous. at the same time, yes, philosophy can have a corrupting influence. it perhaps becomes too easy (second nature) to justify your own preferred action, to bias your own viewpoint. that's a slippery slope all of us should try to avoid. not practicing what one preaches is the classical definition of hypocrisy. an ethicist should know that. and about vegetarianism: there is empirical evidence that most vegetarians quit that way of living after some years. and most vegetarians are not even vegetarians: they secretely eat meat or fish. that is the   ugly   truth. it is not doable! where is this empirical evidence you refer to? thanks for the comments, folks!julian: here's one of my main empirical papers on the issue:http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/schwitzabs/ethselfrep.htm to julian bennett ok, you wanted it. voila:66% of the "vegetarians" had eaten animal flesh in the last 24 hours.http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals and us/201109/why are there so few vegetarians75% of people who quit eating meat eventually change their minds and return to a diet that includes animal fleshhttp://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals and us/201106/why do most vegetarians go back eating meateven the dalai lama loves meathttp://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one among many/201301/got meat thanks for linking to my earlier comment eric (and thanks for the reminder helen)! i'm wondering about the meat eating study. you report that 40% of ethicists do not think that eating meat is morally bad at all. you also report that 37% of ethicists ate meat at their last meal. if the 37% who ate meat are a subset of the 40% who think eating meat is fine, then there's no moral hypocrisy whatsoever. (looking at your earlier post about this research, it appears that tucker lentz pointed this out as well.)even if some of those who ate meat are among the 60% who think eating meat is not perfectly okay, that doesn't quite show hypocrisy either. the way you've set up the response scale, a reply of 4 or less is coded as regarding eating meat as wrong   but it's natural to interpret a '4' response as 'eating meat is only a little bit wrong'. i don't think it's hypocritical, or even inconsistent, to eat meat every now and then if you think it's only a little bit wrong. we all do things that are a little bit wrong every now and then. (arguably, every instance of failing to fulfill an imperfect duty is a little bit wrong. yet imperfect duties are exactly such that they can't be fulfilled every time.)in the paper you've broken down the data further. among those who called eating meat "very morally bad" (1 on the scale) apparently 0% ate meat. this only goes up to 5% or so for those who gave a '2' response. to get to large percentages, we do indeed have to look at people who gave '3' or '4' responses, who apparently believe that eating meat is only somewhat or a little bit wrong. to me, these results seem compatible with the claim that ethicists are for the most part consistent in their practice and their preaching. the people who are *strongly* convinced that eating meat is wrong generally don't eat meat. the people who are less firm in this belief do sometimes eat meat. unless we hold that moral consistency requires *never* doing anything that is even *slightly* wrong   which seems an implausible view to me   than i'm not sure these results are problematic.of course, part of your point here is to compare ethicists to non ethicists, and it is noteworthy that ethicists are no more likely than others to be morally consistent. but on my interpretation, this is probably just a ceiling effect. everyone, ethicist and non ethicist, exhibits behavior patterns fitting to the strength of their moral beliefs (at least in self report...). ethicists aren't 'more' consistent because they are already at an appropriate level of consistency, given the strength of their beliefs (as are non ethicists). i am not an ethicist, so i am probably way out of line here. but there is an unstated assumption in this discussion that all ethical enquiry will inevitably lead to a liberal, peace loving ethic that will defend and hopefully practice vaguely left wing ideas.perhaps that is so, empirically. perhaps all known ethical systems have evolved to that point. but does even the possibility exist of an internally consistent warrior ethic that has no problem with genocide, environmental degradation and so on? no need to invoke godwin's law here: nazi ideology was not internally consistent. it defined "race" according to the personnel demands of the moment, to mention just one thing.but let's say that such an ethic was developed and quibble as we might, we couldn't fault it. then a bit of cognitive dissonance on the part of ethics professors might be our last, best hope ... it's not what we expect of the ethics professor, it's what they've commited to themselves. have they actually inwardly endorsed these moral principles?the absolute madness, the absolute akratic nature of utterly betraying genuine personal dedication because 'hae, it's just muh job!'   surely this can't really be a genuinely existant thing?are you sure the column write off isn't some way of trying to make us consider our values more by him sort of exposing a shameful side of himself?in regard to regina's commentin a sense, one needs to be able to take one's ethical views "offline" in order to subject them to reflective scrutiny.it depends on why the 'offline' is enacted   if it's for some sense of a greater agenda or to 'better things' (vague as that is), it's going somewhere.if it's doing it for no reason (beyond simply collecting a paycheck) then it's utterly f'ed up. i don't know who conditioned her or anyone into thinking such a species of labotomy was somehow normal. but i guess after the fact, pretty much anything will seem normal.maybe it's just from people who believe so hard that when they extinguish the act of actually acting upon believed standards, they think they still have something after that. after the labotomy.and dang, that last sentence was supposed to be my gentler version to end on...could not get there... thanks for the continuing comments, folks!regina: yes, i agree that those who say it's very bad tend not to do it (whether ethicist or not). i still think it's striking that there could be such a huge difference in groups' expressed normative attitude and no statistically detectable difference in groups' behavior. it's not my aim to charge hypocrisy. in fact, i think there's something admirable about being willing to admit that something you regularly do is somewhat wrong. it suggests the possibility of a lack of a certain kind of post hoc rationalizing self deception. michel: part of josh's and my aim in the survey study was to see whether ethicists behaved more consistently with their own standards, and not just according to conventional standards or what josh and i think is morally good (as in our other studies). so an internally consistent warrior would have shown up in our data as a datapoint of high correlation between behavior and espoused moral view. and overall it didn't look like ethicists tended to have higher correlations of this sort than did other types of professors. callan    much of me agrees with you, though in much less intense, more forgiving language! but i do see some merits on the other side too, as i expressed in this post. so i'm torn. assuming i understand it right (hopefully i don't), i see no merit at all   indeed, the end of merit   may as well be two face from the batman comics, so detached in regards to ethics you are just a flipping coin.i do see a space for a kind of comfy armchair, glass of brandy in one hand discussion   i'm all up for that myself! but my god, it horrorfies me if it seems that can be done without border/without end, to any point.probably part of this is what might be labeled, ironically, nihilism on my part. for some people its all just traveling out into new areas of morality. from my view, it's just stepping off the bus. there aint something else out there   hell, there's barely even a bus...after that point wanting forgiving language is like wanting for air after popping the air lock. it's all out in in the black, now...okay, no more brandy for me, fair enough...even i agree! perhaps we can look at this from another perspective: look at our reaction to the behaviour of religious clergy, in particular christian clergy.consider a preacher thundering a sermon promoting abstinence from alcohol, that is is morally corrupt to consume alcohol. if he were to have a dram before going to bed at night, we would call him a hypocrite   preaching one thing and practicing another.the reason that we condemn the preacher is that he is telling the faithful how to live their lives, and in doing so, makes himself a standard. he is promoting particular normative standards for the community.how is this different for professors of moral philosophy/ethics. they are also exploring and promoting normative standards of behaviour against which people are judged. thus, it should be no surprise to them that they themselves will be judged by those standards.i appreciate the argument that we want ethicists to be objective and not to flinch from making hard conclusions   but this is tantamount to accuse them of lacking moral courage. we expect more of soldiers and other professionals.if an ethicist defends and promotes legislation which penalises certain behaviour, and then is prosecuted for such behaviour, would we accept such an argument? in ancient world the pressure to behave in certain virtuous ways was much higher than it is in a contemporary society. one has to keep in mind that there was a daily struggle to survive for most people   scarcity and/or difficulty of obtaining food or maintaining its supply, complete lack of any police force or state protection from crime (there were courts, but you had to catch the criminal yourself), frequent wars and raids, danger of diseases, etc. etc. this is reflected, among other things, in the attention that ancient philosophers devote to courage, friendship, and anger. it also meant that the qualities one was supposed to aim for really were quite crucial to one's success in having any kind of livable life   being weak, cowardly, unreliable led to having no people to rely on and so on. nowadays, the situation is quite different. one can easily go through one's life being somewhat lazy, unreliable, cowardly and so on without that endangering one's existence. one might end up being kind like the dude in big lebowski, but that's even considered 'cool' in some circles. we do not come into situation in which we would have the opportunity to show true 'virtue' much at all (maybe soldiers still do, firemen). philosophy   ethics   seems to be dealing with issues that are thus not quite so pressing in our every day life. nothing important happens to me as a consequence of me eating meat today. it is not going to mark me for life as a impious and untrustworthy person. so even if i have an argument that i should not   that argument will not appeal to anything truly pressing. at best it will appeal to some abstract conception of consciousness or long term effects beyond my lifetime on others, and so on. but to nothing i will feel and experience. it is quite different when plato or aristotle or seneca write about being cowardly or being a bad friend since without avoiding these my life would truly suck, in fact, be very vulnerable. i am not sure whether there are any such qualities important to us nowadays as they were for ancients, but i would sure like to know... i'd say that those who don't eat other animals hold strong 'moral' convictions about the matter because they don't eat other animals, and not the other way 'round. thanks for the continuing discussion, folks!@ bear: i agree that that's an interesting comparison point, though if one is forthright about the fact that one declines to follow the norms, i'm not sure it's hypocrisy. i would love at some point to work on exploring these issues empirically with clergy as the target group.anon sep 28: i agree that moral reflection from luxurious and comfortable safety is very different from reflection when you are surrounded by death    but i don't think this divides modern/ancient. consider syria right now.timgier: i have some sympathy with that claim, though i think the causal patterns are more complicated that your simple statement suggests (as you might also think). these arguments for living in a way which is other than how one's studies and teachings indicate one ought to live are just sheer amoral sophistry. if the proponents of ethics are not themselves living paradigms of existing according the the tenets for which they advocate (or at least they are incorporating provisos into their teaching indicating why it's acceptable to be otherwise), they should get into another line of work. post a comment

randy cohen is an american writer and humorist known as the author of the ethicist column in the new york times magazine between 1999 and 2011. the column was syndicated throughout the u.s. and canada. cohen is also known as the author of several books, a playwright, and the host of the public radio show person place thing. cohen graduated from the university at albany, suny in 1971, with a bachelor of arts in music.[1] he received an mfa in music composition from the california institute of the arts. during this time there he and rich gold worked for serge tcherpnin to help create the serge synthesizer. in 2011, cohen received the honorary degree doctor of humane letters from the university at albany. from 1973 to 1977 he played serge synthesizer and drums with the proto no wave band jack ruby. boris policeband and george scott iii were also members of the group.[2] he spent several years "writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for leading newspapers and magazines," including the new yorker, harper's, and the atlantic; his first paid, published piece was in 1976 for the village voice.[1] in 1981, his book of satiric letters, modest proposals, was published by st. martin's press.[1] in 1989, his collection of humor pieces, diary of a flying man, was published by knopf. in 2002 the good, the bad, & the difference: how to tell right from wrong in everyday situations was published by doubleday. his book be good: how to navigate the ethics of everything was released by chronicle books in august 2012. cohen was a writer on late night with david letterman for 950 episodes[3] over seven years,[4] starting in 1984.[1] he shared in three primetime emmy awards for outstanding writing for his work on the show.[1] perhaps his biggest contribution was to help invent one of letterman's famous feature, the "top ten list."[5] cohen wrote for tv nation, sharing in a primetime emmy award for outstanding informational series in 1995. in 1996, he became the original head writer for the rosie o'donnell show.[6] cohen wrote for slate starting in 1996. at slate, he became known for "news quiz", a satiric reader participation feature which began in february 1998 and ended in november 2000. he also co wrote a first season episode of ed, first broadcast on february 14, 2001. cohen wrote the ethicist column in the new york times magazine between 1999 and 2011. from 2001 to 2005, he also answered listeners' questions on ethics for the national public radio radio news program, all things considered.[7] the times ended cohen's stint as the ethicist, making his final column sunday, february 27, 2011. the column continued with the same format but a new byline until early 2015, when it abandoned the question and answer format for a discussion format among a number of persons. cohen donated $585 to moveon.org's voter registration effort in 2004, apparently in violation of times policy, which had banned political donations in 2003. the spokane, wash., spokesman review decided on june 20, 2007, to drop cohen's column, which had been scheduled to begin running in the paper on the following saturday, because of his donation. cohen responded that he saw no ethical violation, because he viewed moveon as no more activist than other organizations, such as the boy scouts of america. nonetheless, he said he would not make such donations in the future.[8] cohen wrote a play about the eighteenth century boxing champion daniel mendoza. the punishing blow debuted in 2009[9] at the woodstock fringe festival[10] and ran in 2010 at manhattan's clurman theater. in winter 2012, public radio station wamc launched cohen's new show person place thing. in the show's first season, cohen interviewed guests dick cavett, jane smiley, susie essman, dave cowens, michael pollan, john hockenberry, rickie lee jones, ed koch, samantha bee, rl stine, and sir roger bannister.[11] cohen was born in charleston, south carolina and raised in reading, pennsylvania,[10] in what he has called a "suburban reform jewish household."[13] he was formerly married to the writer and activist katha pollitt, with whom he has a daughter, sophie pollitt cohen. specific references: general references:
supported by by kwame anthony appiah a friend and i take a daily early morning swim, usually all by ourselves, in a pool that has no lifeguard. a woman arrived the other day and announced that she loves to swim but only does so when another person can be present, because she recently had an eeg that revealed some abnormalities. we, two ladies “of a certain age,” are very uncomfortable with this situation and worried because we don’t think we could handle an emergency in the pool. our question is: what are our responsibilities to her in case of a crisis? do we suggest that she not swim with us because we would be incapable of helping if something happened to her? is there a better way to respond?    name withheld from the ethicist: don’t tell her she can’t swim with you. just explain that you don’t think you would be able to perform lifeguard duties. nobody is entitled to ask you for any heroics, but i don’t know that she even has this in mind   she may simply find it reassuring, psychologically, to know that you could use a phone and call for help if she were having distress. whether she can safely swim is a question for her doctor; she may have been told that not swimming would be worse for her health. last week’s question was from a person who donated clothes to a friend, a high school teacher in a low income area, and later found out that the friend was selling the clothes on poshmark. she wrote: “when i looked up some of my friends’ closets on the site, i discovered my teacher friend had posted and sold all the items i gave her for her students! not just one or two items   all 20! what’s the right thing to do? do i confront her, or do i ignore the fact that those kids never got the donated items? once a donation has been made, what is the ethical expectation?” in his response, the ethicist noted: “diverting donations from their intended beneficiaries, if that’s what happened, is stealing   and stealing from the poor at that. part of ethics is holding people accountable for their serious wrongdoing. true, she’s a friend, but what kind of friend betrays your trust like this?