NY Times’ ‘Ethicist’ Randy Cohen needles readers to do the right thing

by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Staff Writer

To paraphrase the bard, some are born to notoriety while others have it thrust upon them. Randy Cohen, a.k.a. “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, falls into the latter category.

Cohen had the high-visibility post thrust upon him six years ago, after editors selected him from among several candidates to write its weekly advice column. “I assumed there was some kind of clerical error,” says Cohen, who was a humorist and television writer with no background in theology, law, or philosophy.

On May 1, rather than end their Passover holiday in more traditional ways, more than 100 ethically curious gathered at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange to hear Cohen discuss his experiences — and defend his enterprise.

He made no apologies for his lack of formal credentials (he was a music major in college); he sees it neither as help nor hindrance. “[Ethics] is presenting a series of questions that in a democracy every ordinary citizen has to deal with; it’s not a set of questions for specialists,” he said, noting that he frequently consults those in areas such as medicine or the law, where he feels unequipped to answer on his own.

Writing under the Times’ “awesome power” certainly gives weight to an ethics column. “If the Times wanted to pick a dog in the street and say ‘You’ll be the ethics poodle,’” people would ask that dog advice,” Cohen cracked. “And I’m that poodle.”

During the program, part of TSTI’s Conversations series, Cohen compared himself to another paragon of advice: “Dear Abby is a woman of towering moral authority…All she has to say is ‘Shoot the dog,’ and that’s good enough for [her readers]…. I have to actually make up a logical, coherent, reasoned case why you should shoot the dog…which you shouldn’t do, by the way, no matter how wicked the dog is.”

In an interview with New Jersey Jewish News prior to the discussion, Cohen noted the type of questions he received over the years has not changed much; people often try to obtain absolution or affirmation for their questionable behavior. A mild turning point came after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. “Questions started turning vile, paranoid, and xenophobic. Things like ‘I think my neighbor is [Arabic]; should I turn him in?’”

The most common type of question, he later told the audience, falls into the category of “Do you tell?”, whether about a coworker who’s taking kickbacks or someone cheating on a spouse. Cohen noted that although there are certain “duty to report” situations required by law — teachers or doctors, for example, must report cases of possible child abuse — in the larger part, there are no such obligations on ordinary citizens. “If you see a guy kill a guy, the law doesn’t require you to come forward.

“We know that what is legal and what is ethical is not necessarily the same thing,” he said, offering his personal belief that “You do have an ethical duty to report wrongdoing when coming forward will prevent serious, imminent harm to another person.”

“If you see someone heading to my house with a gun, call 911,” he requested.

The next most common type of inquiry is actually “cheap rationalizations…You can tell from the way the question is phrased that the person … knows that they’re proposing to do something unbelievably wicked that they hope The New York Times will endorse.”

‘Resolutely secular’

In his interview with NJJN, Cohen marveled at his good fortune. He estimates he receives “a couple of hundred” letters and e-mails a week, although there are only about “50 basic questions,” he said. “We though we could milk [the column] for two years or so.”

Born in Charleston, SC, Cohen grew up in a Reform household in Reading, Penn., where his family “always did Friday night Shabbat; we lit the candles, said the prayers, went to services.” He was a bar mitzva and was confirmed, “and, like many young people, that’s when I stopped going.” So these days, “I take a resolutely secular approach to the column.”

Cohen, 56, works out of his Manhattan apartment, where he lives with his daughter, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen, a student at Stuyvesant High School. He enjoys speaking to groups like the one at TSTI “because it gets me out of the house.” His audiences consist of a mix of student, religious, and business organizations. One particularly unusual setting came at a gathering of Republican members of the Pennsylvania state legislature. “I hadn’t seen that many burly white men come out of a building since I went to a hockey game.”

Turning the conversation to sports, Cohen, a basketball fan, said that the use of performance enhancing drugs posed no ethical problems for the athlete, as long as nothing in the contract restricted such use. The burden, he said, fell on team owners for allowing players to jeopardize their health.

He evinced special distaste for one of sport’s biggest names. “I can’t stand Tiger Woods,” Cohen stated unequivocally. “His lack of a stand at the Masters a few years ago [when women were trying to break into the “old-boy” network of golf’s Tiffany event] was hideous. For what? For the sake of a few endorsements?”

His previous work as a writer for David Letterman’s Late Night was excellent training for his current gig. “Late Night was a moral enterprise,” he said, noting there were strict guidelines for which celebrities could be “attacked” for amusement. He also worked as a writer for Rosie O’Donnell’s TV show and on Good Morning America. Cohen has received four Emmys for his television work.

While there are no plans for a sequel to The Good, The Bad and The Difference (Random House) a collection of “Ethicist” columns, Cohen held out faint hope for a television series based on his experiences, a la CBS’ The Dave Barry Show, a sitcom about the life and work of the award-winning syndicated humorist.

The biggest laugh of the night came when Cohen was asked if it was ethical to continue to use the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal for comic material. “It’s ethical but it’s hackery,” he said. “It’s not like [Clinton] took us into a war or anything.”

Ron Kaplan can be reached at RKaplan@njjewish news.com.