Randy Cohen, author of the New York Times Magazine’s ethics column, feels like he frequently gets left out at parties.
“I’ve become a kind of professional wet blanket,” he said. “I feel like there are all kinds of fun and depraved things going on until I arrive.”
But Cohen, a one-time writer for David Letterman, and author of the The Good, the Bad and the Difference, was far from friendless when he spoke to a crowded lecture hall in Reiss last night on the difficulty of leading an ethical life, focusing mostly on people’s motivation to do the right thing. He said that philosophers trying to confront this problem have historically focused on individuals’ characters and pushed the circumstances to the side, an approach which Cohen rejected.
“When it comes to moral conduct, character hardly comes into it,” he said. “In fact, there might not be such a thing as character.”
Cohen said that the circumstances of ethics are much more important in decision-making.
He illustrated the problems of the “character” approach to ethics with an appeal to history, looking at slavery in 19th century New York.
For his paradigm of the “character” camp, Cohen described Josephine Shaw Lowell, who believed that poverty was the direct symptom of a bad character. Initially a member of the Charity Organization Society, a group which lobbied New York to arrest the homeless, she eventually founded a splinter called the Society for the Oppression of Benevolence.
“They were the compassionate conservatives of their day,” Cohen said, inciting laughter from the audience.
On the other hand, Cohen said, the “circumstances” camp deals with the facts that really affect how people act. Music downloading is a good example in the news, he said. Characterizing the Recording Industry of America’s approach to illegal music downloading as, “Let’s sue some children,” Cohen said that most people who illegally download music are not bad people on the whole, and would not slip CDs into their trousers in a music store.
“A law that makes criminals out of millions of otherwise honest people … warrants further examination,” he said. “Remember prohibition? Yeah, how did that work out?”
Solutions that change the circumstances might have more impact on the mass of illegal music downloading, he said, offering the Apple Music Store as a good example.
Psychological studies have also shown that circumstances affect ethical behavior, Cohen said, referring to the famous Stanford prison experiment in which graduate student volunteers were randomly assigned roles as prisoners or as guards. Within days, the guards were brutally abusing and humiliating the prisoners, a situation which reminded Cohen of Abu Ghraib.
“What I believe about Abu Ghraib is that the few GIs who were brought up on charges were not wicked people,” he said. He said that the prison situations in Abu Ghraib “created conditions in which that kind of conduct was all but certain.”
Students seemed impressed by Cohen’s performance.
“I thought he was very funny, very witty, very humorous,” Nick Greenough (SFS ‘09) said.
