The most recent thing I heard is where someone with an advanced college degree wanted to discuss the ethics of helping her niece with college admissions essays. He basically said that anything beyond the most basic tossing around of ideas was out of bounds—no editing, no phrasing, no spellchecking, no anything involving a pen (I’m not kidding, he actually said that if it involved a pen, it’s out of bounds). This ignores the fact that if multiple people in the house have earned multiple college degrees, they have much more of a clue about what helps than someone in even the best high school there is. His argument was that it was unfair to all the kids who didn’t have such help available to them. I say phooey. If/when I have kids, my allegiance is to my offspring and/or spawn, not the next person over’s. This is not a level-playing-field issue, it’s a get-into-the-best-school-possible issue, and if he doesn’t understand the difference, he should refrain from shooting his mouth off.

Pretty much all of his advice that I’ve heard is of this quality.

Of course, I take home $28 an hour, so maybe that $50 seems like more to me.

What, huh?? Was that an attack on Cohen, an attack on Rawls, or praise for Cohen? Justify that assertion?

You have an interesting theory of ethics. The lawyer that makes $200/hr is only obligated for 1/40th of the effort of someone on minimum wage.

Which way does it work exactly? People who earn more don’t have to be ethical or unethical people will naturally earn more?

no, of course, I read jacob’s piece, and was surprised, because his characterisation (with actual textual support) was quite different from my vague impression (for which I can give no support whatsoever, as I admit). That’s why I said “that’s interesting”. If I had the energy I could certainly go back and find a bunch of places where he is downright wrong (whether right or left) but I don’t know if they’d support my vague impression (which is, I’d add, more recent than jacob’s careful study!). But… I can’t be bothered, I really don’t care about him!

If I may play psychologist, it sounds to me like some of Jon Mandle’s colleagues have made of Cohen a displaced object of their own self-doubt. Could it be that the spectacle of a man hanging out an “Ethicist” shingle at the New York Times, and dispensing free advice – or close to free, at least – helps to heighten the uncomfortable suspicion that a professional Ethicist, credentialed or not, is an alleged master of a science that doesn’t really exist?

It’s fine to say that what Cohen in only dispensing his “opinion”. But I assume he asserts propositions in such a way as to suggest that they express certain kinds of knowledge, does he not?

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

But there is something chronically strange about Cohen’s items on the ethics of the workplace and commercial life. He has told readers that giving to or raising funds for charity isn’t worthwhile, because the more charitable activity there is, the more easily the state abandons public projects. He has told a supervisor that it’s unethical to fire or report a temp worker whose shoddy performance makes everyone look bad.

He has even gone out of his way to take swipes at the country’s political economy when by his own admission it is irrelevant to the advice he gives, as in this reply to a question about not reporting income to the Internal Revenue Service: “When New York City offers corporations multi-million-dollar tax breaks to do nothing and the Federal tax code is the least progressive it has been in decades (making it ever more possible for a housekeeper and Bill Gates to pay the same rate), it would be churlish to chide someone so hard-working and modestly paid. However, while working off the books might be justified ethically, working on the books is actually a better policy financially, thanks to the Earned Income Credit and the Child Tax Credit.”

There’s also of course something that grates when a paper with the NYT’s record of unrepentant misrepresentation runs a column titled “The Ethicist” with a brief that is designed never to be even remotely applicable to its own behavior (either as a corporate body or as instantiated in the work of individual employees). It just reinforces the “We only write about motes” impression.

Now there’s a solid criticism.

“A mistake was made in my favor, how much effort must I take to correct it.” The answer was “All that it takes.”

Example: A bank error led to an extra $50 in my bank account. Do I have to go the bank, wait in line, and get it all fixed, or can I keep the $50.

Answer: Wait in line, etc. If they don’t clear it up the first time, send them a check. You are ethically responsible to give back money given to you in error.

My Response: This (and all of his comparable answers) does not take into the monetary value of your time. If I am a lawyer, and can bill, say, $200 an hour, then spending an hour in the middle of the day fixing someone else’s banking mistake gives them their $50 back, and costs me $200 that I could have either spent working, or with my family (which I value at over $200 per hour, or else I could spend evenings working too.) The bank will not reimburse me for my time, so acting “Ethically” doesn’t make things even, it just puts me out $200, instead of up $50. Maybe the right answer is really “You have to be out $200,” but the column doesn’t even address the topic.

The ethics (or at least the ethical calculations) of a writer who is paid by column, not by hour, and is necessarily different from that of a lawyer or carpenter or other hourly wage slave.

If you spend some time studying the judicial system in this country, it is hard to avoid that this society is fundamentally unjust. At least some of the people who read the Ethicist, it seems to me, don’t like being reminded of that fact, or the rapaciousness of capitalism.

The other thing that bothers people about the Ethicist seems to be that he doesn’t operate according to God-given commandments – a lot of his ethical advice is situational and depends on weighing the specific circumstances of each case. For reasons I have never been completely able to understand, this bothers many people. There seems to be a great need for inflexible moral codes so that people don’t have to think in their daily lives.