| Being The Ethicist
What is it like to be The Ethicist? "Having the job, I'm less inclined when I go to the supermarket to steal meat, you know," Cohen says. " I'll not now take a packet of lamb chops and stuff it down my trousers. I'm not saying I ever did that, nor was ever inclined to do it, but it would just be so embarrassing to get caught in that sort of thing now. So it's entirely out of the question." People treat you differently when you write an ethics column, Cohen has learned. "Friends who wouldn't have paid the slightest attention to my opinion to the rightness or wrongness of directions, now will ask me, 'Oh, I've been having this problem. Do you think I should do this, or do you think I should do that?'" Then there's the peculiar feeling when he goes to a party that "all the really fun stuff" happened just before he got there. "You know, that everybody has stopped doing the wicked things." "People ought to be throwing temptation in my path. They ought to see the job as a kind of challenge," Cohen says. "And you know, spectacularly beautiful creatures ought to be offering me the most fantastic and alluring temptations to see if I'll crack. And I assure you I will." The Ethicist has another fantasy. In it, he receives a letter in his mailbox that reads, "Dear sir, I am the leader of a powerful Western nation. Although a champion of Democracy, I received far fewer votes than many other candidates. And yet because of the electoral rules I now hold the highest office in the land. Am I ethically obliged to step down?" Unhappily for The Ethicist, such letters tend to be addressed to a more senior advice giver--say, William Rehnquist.
React > Being The Ethicist |