Randy Cohen, the house ethicist at the New York Times, frequently strikes me as disappointingly shallow. Take, for example, his latest column, posing this ethical quandary:
You’re redesigning a website and you want to include a photo of a generic customer. The client does not want the generic customer to be African-American, partly because he has never had an African-American customer and thinks it unlikely that he ever will. Is this okay?
My objection is not to Cohen’s answer (which is “no”) but to the way it’s dispensed, as if from an oracle, with no attempt at a derivation from clearly stated principles.
Here’s the best he has to offer:
Race may be a factor in selecting this photograph only if race is germane to the product or service the franchise provides. For instance, if the company sold hair-care products used almost exclusively by African-Americans, then you could rightly indicate as much through the photo you post on the Web site.
Well, okay. But why? Cohen doesn’t tell us.
Nor does he test his policy against the hard cases. Race, he says, may be a factor if it’s germane to the product or service. What if this is a product or service that African-Americans rarely purchase? Does that make race germane? Does it matter why they never purchase it? What if all—or most—African-Americans had a genetic aversion to this product? Is a race-correlated aversion morally equivalent to a race-correlated hair type? What if all—or most—African-Americans had a culturally induced aversion to this product? Is that morally equivalent to a genetic aversion? Why or why not?
I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but that’s partly why I don’t call myself “The Ethicist”.
The existence of the Randy Cohens in the world explains a lot of the popularity of Sarah Palin. As Thomas Sowell said, the standards for being able to say ‘I know how to…’ are much higher for commonplace activity than for ‘intellectual’ activity. The ethical question ought to be how to maximize shareholder value by selling stuff.
Presumably Cohen would have been one of those GM executives in the 1960s who couldn’t understand why a car that sold well in the USA–the Chevrolet Nova–didn’t in South America.
Please don’t use the Nova example. It’s an urban legend.
http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
Cohen is no ethicist; he’s just a trumped up version of Anne Landers, telling people what he thinks is the socially acceptable thing to do in a given situation. And for that purpose, I don’t think he needs to have a reason. There are no “first principles” for being polite.
The thing that bothers me most about Cohen is that I’ve never seen him cite _any_ prominent ethicist. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that other very smart people (Kant, Mill, Aquinas, Plato…) have thought about ethical issues and come up with some very interesting ideas. It would be nice he would occasionally acknowledge these philosopher’s work and explain how one might apply it to answer the question he’s been asked.
Contrast Cohen’s “The Ethicist” with Tom Harford’s “Dear Economist” in the Financial Times (http://blogs.ft.com/undercover/). Harford frequently sources both classic and new research papers. He also uses named economic theories to help explain his answer. As a result “Dear Economist” doesn’t feel like just an Anne Lander’s style advice column. When I read Hardford I don’t feel like I’m getting a stranger’s opinion, but instead I feel like a trained economist is applying his skills and knowledge in a way I might not think to. (Full disclosure, Harford does such a good job applying theory that I strongly suspect his questions are fabricated.)
Frankly, at the risk of sounding like a credentialist, I think the reason Cohen doesn’t apply theory from prominent philosophers to his questions is because he doesn’t actually know any of it.
Prof Landsberg,
I am SO happy to have read this column of yours. Years ago, when RC was slopping up columns for Slate, I could NEVER understand why people took him seriously. How gratifying to find they don’t.