| Cohenfucius says ...
Largely thanks to the extraordinary influence of The Times, "The Ethicist" enjoys a high profile. One can see it as a kind of window onto the nation's ethical struggles (well, insofar as The New York Times represents the nation). How many of us receive upward of 150 letters a week from strangers about topics like how to deal with cheaters in Little League baseball? Cohen, however, downplays the importance of the advice he gives. Most readers look to "The Ethicist" not for practical guidance, but for the opportunity to reflect on ethical questions, he says. "I write with the confidence that my advice will be universally ignored. I think it's unlikely that people are going, 'What does Randy think we should do? Oh, let's do it.' … I think my task is more to help them see the question in a fresh way. It helps people clarify their own thinking just to see the questions presented in a way they might not have considered." Cohen is both amazed and disappointed by the mail he receives. On the positive side, he is "constantly surprised with the seriousness with which people take these questions. The determination to be good is very heartening. You just think that this is a country of people who take the transactions of ordinary life quite seriously and want to be good. That's terrific." But Cohen also sees a sad tendency to go along with authority. "There is a tendency in my mail to see large numbers of people who think anything their boss asks them to do is a legitimate request," he says. "I just think that's amazing and pathetic. 'Oh gee, we're sorry we can't put any protective guard around that machine, we're sorry all those guys lost their hands.'" Cohen is a liberal, and his ethical advice is rooted in liberal values--a fact that might explain the four attacks on "The Ethicist" from conservative publications over the last two years. "The fact that I'm attacked from the right is not a coincidence," Cohen says. "To me, being loathed by these four publications is like the hat trick. Because what we are writing about here is values and if I were writing things that made these thugs happy, I would be mortified. I'd really be failing. Because my values are not their values, and I wouldn't be articulating them clearly if it brought joy in the corridors of the American Spectator." Cohenfucius says ... |