Randy Cohen

Like many people must, I get some kind of pleasure that I don’t completely understand from reading advice columns, and the New York Times Magazine’s The Ethicist has long been one of my favorites. Answers are opinionated but based on reason usually balanced by common sense, so they are not so much dictates as starting points for further thought or lively discussions around the breakfast table. Randy Cohen was the original Ethicist and he held that job for 12 years, but I never knew his background which includes writing for late night TV, an interesting prerequisite. Here he opines on numerous issues, including some of my favorite conundrums--questions of animal rights, the proper response to athletes using performance enhancing drugs, and how to balance respect for other cultures with support of human rights tenets that those cultures don’t abide by.

In some of the more interesting sections he writes about some of the general principles behind ethics itself. People are not crudely divided into honest and dishonest, he says, different circumstances elicit different behaviors in all, meaning among other things that we should not test people by tempting them to stray. Examining smaller issues of ethics is a way to learn something about a culture by looking at its unguarded moments and as individuals we should avoid even nominal ethical lapses because they can have a coarsening effect on our awareness and judgments.

This is not the kind of book you’d want to read straight through, but since it’s full of short queries and responses it’s perfect when time is limited or when the reader is likely to be interrupted. I read an advanced review copy of this book.… (more)