Holiday from ethics

Tonight, once again, we turn to the repellent Randy Cohen, the so-called "ethicist" who writes a column for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. In Sunday's column, a writer tells him (second item) that he, the writer, used to work in an insurance company, where the only Jewish employee was a friend of his. The Jewish employee invented Jewish holidays to take off. Was it ethical of the letter writer to remain silent, when he (unlike the employer) knew these were fake holidays?

Before I tell you the answer Cohen gives, let's consider this outside the context of Jewish holidays.

The situation is basically equivalent to a far more common situation: someone has a friend he knows is regularly faking illness when he calls in sick. Does the person have an obligation to tell the employer about this? Probably not, right? That's not his job. If he was directly asked about it, though, it's not his job to cover up for the friend, either. But probably, if he stays silent, without any actual participation, he won't incur ethical guilt. (The person might have some qualms about remaining friends with the crooked guy, but that's another matter.)

This is roughly what Cohen advises. Cohen's short answer about the Jewish holidays is this: Remaining silent "was an acceptable choice. Your coming forward was permitted but not required; you had no obligation to police the vacation requests of your co-workers (or to steer your friend to the path of righteousness)."

Fair enough, but as usual Cohen just can't shut up when he gives the short answer.

The first qualification of his answer, which I think is a joke (though with him it's hard to tell): "Of course, had you been asked directly if Kasha Varnishka was an authentic Jewish festival, you would have had to reply: yes, it commemorates the glorious victory of the Maccabees over a recalcitrant side dish." Ha, ha.

Next, Cohen states what should be obvious: "This is not to justify your friend’s actions. He lied to his boss and burdened his co-workers, who presumably filled in for him while he was out cavorting."

Also good, but he still can't shut up.

What bugs me is that Cohen adds:

So says my head . . . but my heart says mazel tov! This imaginative scheme imposed a tax on ignorance, penalizing an employer for lacking even a cursory grasp of a world religion's holidays. Such a plan could encourage all of us in our diverse, immigrant nation to learn more about our neighbors, or reward them with extra vacation time if we cling to our provincialism. Diwali — real or imaginary?

A tax on ignorance? That's like saying that an employee's theft is a tax on the employer for having inadequate security. Who gives that employee the right to impose a "tax"? Or, to put it more bluntly, who gives the right to that employee to claim that his fraud has some public benefit? Randy Cohen, that's who.

We don't know from Cohen's column whether the Jewish employee was an observant Jew who observed the real holidays but also added a few of his own, or whether he was someone who just took advantage of the fact that Jewish holidays exist. That information would have added a little color to this story. But it's really not that important.

The Jewish employee's fraud is not entirely a private matter between him and his employer (and his God, for that matter, if he believes in one). The fraud, if it comes to light, exposes other Jews to unfair suspicion when they observe the holidays. In this case, we're told, the employee was the only Jew at the company, but if he had been caught, the employer would have had every reason to feel suspicious about requests from Jewish employees who were hired in the future.

Besides, if there were ever a way of planting the seeds of antisemitism in people who have no opinion about Jews one way or the other, I'd say this is a pretty good way to do it. Being a Jewish crook is bad enough; being a crook who uses his Jewishness to defraud is far worse.

Far be it from me to accuse someone of insufficient maturity, but I'm going to do it, anyway: Cohen's making light of this is pretty damn immature.

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Picking the right ethicist

To quote Dilbert, "90% of happiness is picking the right ethicist." So let's be happy by picking the right ethicist to roll our collective eyes over.

Why do people actually write to Randy Cohen, author of the "The Ethicist" column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine? Do they actually think he provides useful ethical advice? What about asking him questions that involve politics, or etiquette, or social advice, but not so much ethics?

And more important, why does he answer these letters as if they involved ethics?

As I've said before, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This Sunday's column answers two questions. The first is written by a man whose wife's sister is recently separated after 15 years of marriage and is now living with a boyfriend. The sister invites the man and his wife to visit and stay overnight. The man doesn't like the idea of seeming to bless the relationship between the sister and this fellow, whom he derides as the sister's "cohabiter du jour." The wife, whose sister it is, says is it not for them to judge.

Before I discuss Cohen's response, I'd like someone to explain why this an ethics question. It's more an "Ann Landers" kind of social advice question. One may take a moral stand here, too, but it's hard to see the decision either way as one involving ethics.

If you've ever read Cohen's column, you'll know what the response is. Whenever anyone is troubled by what we old-fashioned folks think of as an illicit sexual relationship, Cohen shows off his superior, open-minded moral code: anything goes, except perhaps sex with a Republican. (For a wonderful TV anecdote on this subject, see the beginning of this article in the Weekly Standard.)

And he can't possibly miss an opportunity, in obiter dicta, to invoke the horrors of the Bush administration: "A principled refusal can be estimable in the public arena. For example, as a protest against the war in Iraq, the poet Sharon Olds declined an invitation from Laura Bush to attend the fifth National Book Festival and eat breakfast at the White House." In contrast, he says, a protest is typically not appropriate in private life, where understanding and tolerance are required.

The second letter to "The Ethicist" begins: "Two years ago, I lived in Singapore, and my apartment was robbed." OK, technically, his apartment was burglarized, not robbed, but let that pass. The writer discovers, upon returning to Singapore two years later that the robber/burglar was punished with 10 years in the clink and 10 strokes of the cane. "The sentence seems excessive and the caning barbaric." Mind you, this is the letter writer, not Randy Cohen saying this. I guess that's why he'd write to Cohen. "I want to appeal for mercy on his behalf, but must I accept Singaporean justice? When in Asia, do I do as the Asians do?"

Probably the correct answer is "Rob him again!" But that isn't Cohen's answer. The victim should speak up, he says, with proper sensitivity to local values.

That really would not be such a terrible answer, I suppose, if it were concluded there. But that is not the job of "The Ethicist." His job is to reaffirm continually that ethics and liberal pieties are one and the same.

So Cohen concludes thus: "Such appeals cut both ways. One hundred and fifty years ago, Europeans criticized America's slave-owning and, more recently, our treatment of prisoners. It can be instructive to have one's conduct examined from another perspective." Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, anyone?

Of course, this totally undercuts his advice of showing sensitivity to local values. The victim could validly make an appeal in his specific case based on his own sense of appropriate punishment. But Cohen, having advised him thus, now seems to call for the victim to make a global attack on Singaporean justice.

Never mind this. The point of Cohen's column is not so much to guide behavior as to validate how rich, self-satisfied liberals think.

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