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The Ethicist comes to Chapin
By Andrew Seguin
 The Ethicist. The name conjures up a humorless stickler, a grave analyst, a person devoid of all warmth save for the heat generated by the synapses firing in their icy mind. But as followers of the weekly New York Times column The Ethicist know, Randy Cohen, who writes the column, is far from humorless and never cold. He guides readers through everyday ethical conundrums with wit and a sympathetic understanding of the difficulties that come with being human, rendering the daunting topic of ethics as approachable, even fun.
Mr. Cohen spoke at Chapin last week, an apt guest as “Ethical and Ethical Decision-Making” is the guiding theme for the school this year. Mr. Cohen addressed a large crowd at the TOGETHER meeting last Thursday, but before he did so, three editors of Limelight, Chapin’s student-produced newspaper, interviewed him. The girls are also taking teacher Christine Naitove’s ethics and existentialism class, so their questions ranged from the biographical to the philosophical.
“I had no training nor predisposition for the job,” Mr. Cohen said in response to a question about how he came to write the column. He explained that he had written for the David Letterman Show as well as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and that he was invited to apply for the job as The Ethicist. Much to his surprise, he was selected.
“How do you decide what’s ethical?” one of the students asked. “First the verdict, then the trial,” Mr. Cohen said. “I’d like to think that I reason my way to a conclusion though I almost never do,” he added, explaining that, in his view, much of a person’s sense of what is right is almost automatic — it comes from the values one was raised with. Mr. Cohen said that he frequently works out an argument that supports what he feels in his gut to be right.
What about consulting philosophers? “I like Samuel Johnson,” he said. “And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an astonishing document,” he added, citing it as a source he sometimes uses when writing the column. “My favorites are anecdotal rather than systematic.”
Mr. Cohen admitted that he’s sometimes wrong about what’s right, so once a year he publishes a column in which he retracts or rethinks some earlier positions. His willingness to do so indicates a mind that’s truly sensitive to the slipperiness of morality; right conduct can often be felt by instinct, but it’s also important to subject ethical questions to a long bout of reasoning.
“Writing the column hasn’t made me more virtuous,” Mr. Cohen told the students. But it’s made him think more closely about what virtue is, a process that he demonstrated is rarely easy, but always rewarding.
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