Monday, December 30, 2002

We interrupt the blogging holiday for this special occasion...

Y'know, Randy Cohen's (The NYT Magazine's "Ethicist" columnist) obituary for Ann Landers almost had me liking him, for a minute.

Then he pulled this:
"By presenting her views in the form of an innocuous advice column, not as politics but as common sense, she operated as a sort of stealth progressive.
"This is not an easy thing to do. Shortly after my own column began, it was denounced in several right-wing periodicals, in once case under the headline "'The Ethicist' Better Termed 'The Marxist.'" I may have suggested,,, in passing, that 'corporations donate to charity to buff their images' or 'clean air-- why not?' Apparently ideology-detecting radar has become more acute since Ann Landers began or perhaps, with the country veering so far to the right, qualifications for Marxism have been lowered substantially, like some sort of ideological grade inflation."


This isn't the first time that Cohen has feigned astonishment that the mean right-wingers picked on him and claimed that it was because of views like support for clean air. He milked this story in the introduction to his book, and then ran the relevant exerpt as an article in The Nation. It read in part:

"Virtue, it turns out, is the exclusive property of the right. This was brought to my attention just a few months after I began writing "The Ethicist," a weekly column in The New York Times Magazine, when it was denounced by four periodicals, each more right-wing than the last--the weekend Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, Reason (the presumably ironically named magazine of the Libertarians) and the online version of National Review, where it was named the Outrage Du Jour, under the headline: "'The Ethicist' Better Termed 'The Marxist.'" I may have earned this encomium by suggesting that public education was worthwhile, or perhaps by favoring breathable air. Or air. (Admissions requirements for Marxism have apparently been lowered precipitately, like some kind of ideological grade inflation.)"

Cute. And, like the comedy writer he used to be, he doesn't let a good punchline go. (Cohen has no training in ethics or any related field; the title "The Ethicist" has always struck me as making an unwarranted claim to be offering expertise rather than Landers-style common sense.) The problem is that this punchline is a crock.

I wrote one of those alleged right-wing hit-pieces, for Reason. (You can read it here.) The views for which I criticized him included that it was unethical to fire a temp worker whose shoddy performance was reflecting poorly on everyone ["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, (that is, the division of labor-- JTL) while profitable for the few, makes life miserable for the many; some political economists have called it a crime against humanity." ] and that giving to charity was morally wrong because the more charitable activity there is, the more easily the state abandons public projects. That's not warm fluffy clean-air stuff. The division-of-labor-as-crime-against-humanity line is probably what led NRO to call him a Marxist.

My beef with him then was that he kept telling people that their individual choices (to defraud or not, to fire or not, to give or not) were morally irrelevant, because of the radical injustice of the economic system. This, I argued, took him out of the realm of being an ethicist-cum-advice-columnist and into the realm of being an op-ed columnist. My beef with him now is that he feels sorry for himself that the right-wingers were so mean to him, but he lies (and keeps telling the same lie) about why that happened. He doesn't stand up for, or modify, or mention, the views that were criticized.

Cohen, of course, has a much wider readership than I do. But as long as he keeps bringing up that he was attacked, I'll keep reminding whoever I can what he was attacked for; clean air it wasn't.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"But as long as... I'll keep reminding whoever I can what he was attacked for.."

It seems you certainly will. Albeit continuing to take the argument out of context, in a very similar manner to the act for which you are criticising Mr Cohen.

'The Ethicist' columns are, in my experience, quite hard to quote on a per-paragraph basis; it is often that Mr Cohen suggests the availability of multiple, sometimes opposing courses of action based on the same ethical standpoint, but with varying degrees of external injustice, to put it awkwardly.

That 'The Ethicist' suggested giving to charity is unethical is certainly not as pungent as you would have your readers believe, if one were to read the entire response written by Mr Cohen.

In fact (particularly in more recent times than the articles for which you "reviewed" 'The Ethicist') I have found that Mr Cohen rarely SUGGESTS anything. Instead, multiple options (or sometimes non-options) are presented - with suitable qualifiers - as being acceptable. For you to present that he is saying readers SHOULD act in a specific manner is incorrect.

And although it may paint me as too left-wing for your liking, I would certainly prefer any ethical dilemmas I may have to be answered with multiple situational suggestions, rather than with your assertion (and correct me if I'm wrong) that it would never be unethical to give to charity or fire an under performing temp.

Jacob T. Levy said...

Well, the post to which you're replying is more than six years old. I've long since stopped reading Cohen; maybe he's improved since then, and become more nuanced. But in my Reason article I quoted his columns at greater-than-reasonable length, and gave dates, in order to be sure that readers could judge the material for themselves. (That's more than Cohen has done in any of his published attacks on his critics.) The columns I criticized aren't characterized by on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand nuance, and the quotations are not taken out of context.

And I stand by my claim in this 2002 post that Cohen's characterization of what his critics said was false.

That 'The Ethicist' suggested giving to charity is unethical is certainly not as pungent as you would have your readers believe,"Pungent?"

And although it may paint me as too left-wing for your liking, I would certainly prefer any ethical dilemmas I may have to be answered with multiple situational suggestions, rather than with your assertion (and correct me if I'm wrong) that it would never be unethical to give to charity or fire an under performing temp.You're wrong. Of course I think either could be unethical. And, yes, context matters. But I do not think that the context that there is a division of labor in the economy is sufficient to reach the conclusion that it's unethical to fire an underperforming temp. That conclusion would mean that context didn't really matter, since "division of labor" is hardly a particular or local or temporary circumstance.