By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
So what does it take to become an authority on ethical behavior in this country? Not a lot, apparently. At least that was the case for Randy Cohen, whose weekly column “The Ethicist” appears each week in The New York Times Magazine, as well as in syndication in the Seattle Times. But that’s not to say he didn’t know what he was doing.
“The editors invited a bunch of people to audition for the column,” Cohen recalled to JTNews. “Many of those people — most of those people I believe — had more plausible ethicist credentials: they had strong philosophy backgrounds, and, I think, taught at the university level.”
Cohen, however, had written for the Times Magazine and other departments at the Gray Lady, as well as having served for a stint as the lead writer on the “Rosie O’Donnell Show.” That was back in the late ‘90s, and he’s been steeped in figuring out how to do the right thing ever since.
Cohen will serve as the keynote speaker at the Jewish Family Service of Greater Seattle’s “Community of Caring” luncheon on Tues., May 6.
It’s Cohen’s ability to pull humor out of what can be some pretty sticky situations that likely helped him get his job, but it’s the way he gives his subjects so much to think about that keeps his readers with him.
Cohen said he receives a couple hundred e-mails each week — about half with questions wanting help and about half telling him why he was wrong in the previous week’s column.
“It varies from week to week when I’m particularly wrong, and I get more mail [then] pointing out how foolish I was,” he said.
Hearing from readers is what Cohen believes is one of the wonderful things about his column — the inclusion of his e-mail address at the bottom of the page makes a world of difference in how he interacts with his readers.
“It changes your relationship to the reader from being the authority figure who writes to being part of the conversation. The column [is] very, very short, and when people respond to it, they often point out aspects of a question that I’ve missed, or whole lines of reasoning I’ve neglected, or challenge my reasoning or conclusions,” he said. But everything, he added, comes “with the sort of wonderful tone of ‘We’re all in this together.’ And that is great. For me that makes it enormously fun.”
Cohen culls a dozen or so of those e-mails each week, writes some cursory answers, and then a back-and-forth with his editor begins. If he talks to experts, it’s solely for technical purposes.
“I’m not consulting any experts on moral reasoning,” he said. “That’s sort of my job.”
While a column about ethics can spur conversations outside of the sphere of the newspaper, people with questions shouldn’t expect an answer in a pinch. Cohen generally doesn’t do personal ethics interventions, and of the two or three situations that make it into the paper, some can sit for weeks or even months as he ponders how to respond.
“It’s not really sort of a moral 911, it’s a moral ‘Call your precinct,’” Cohen said. “I would say a fairly small percentage of them, a fairly small percent of the time, are people facing a question that they have to have by that afternoon.”
Oftentimes, Cohen said, the questions are phrased in such a way that the correspondents know the answer, they just want to “make a reasoned case as to why it’s right thing to do.”
And Cohen never knows whether these people are consulting a therapist, or a priest or rabbi, or a friend at the same time. And if they are, he said, that’s just fine. The more people answering these sorts of questions, the better, he believes.
“I don’t think we’re competing for the same scarce resources of people who have committed moral transgressions,” he said. “There seems to be an infinite supply of such people. We’re in a growth industry.”
So has he come across any questions that have stumped him so completely he just gave up on them? “I’d be ashamed,” he said. “I’d have to resign, wouldn’t I? The ones most worth taking up are the ones that are [the] most challenging. The easy ones, the answers are obvious to everyone.”
Cohen, who lives in Manhattan, had his own ethical values tested recently with the sex scandal surrounding his now-former governor, Eliot Spitzer — though not in regard to Spitzer’s behavior.
Where his views changed was in how he viewed prostitution as a crime. Previously he had thought of it, if at all, as an economic transaction between two individuals, “and [that] the government doesn’t really have a stake in it.” For centuries, he pointed out, marriage was seen the same way. Subsequent thought changed his mind.
“I’ve come to see it as a worker’s rights issue,” Cohen said. “In Sweden, as I understand it, they bust the john and they bust anyone…in the pimp or pimp assistant role. There’s no criminal charge against the prostitute, on the theory that the prostitute is the exploited worker entitled to the protection of the state.”
If the sex trade were a free choice, he asked, “Then why don’t we see more Harvard MBAs going into prostitution?”
But will readers see this in a column? The Times, Cohen said, is painstaking in its fact-checking, so unless Spitzer himself, or the unwitting escort that led to his downfall, writes in a question, probably not.