The Ethicist Who Isn't.

• Author: Levy, Jacob T.
• Position: The New York Times Magazine's Randy Cohen

What's wrong with The New York Times Magazine's answer to Ann Landers.

In February, The New York Times Magazine created a new section, "The Way We Live Now," to deal with "day-today living - work, family, sour milk in the fridge - all that stuff that occupies most of our actual time." One of the new features was an advice column called "The Ethicist." Randy Cohen, an essayist best known until then for writing Slate's clever "News Quiz," would help the magazine's readers with the tricky moral problems of their family, social, and professional lives. Or at least, that was the idea.

The column doesn't seem to have made a great impression. The published letters to the editor have been mostly negative, and they aren't even of the "I disagree, but you really made me think" variety that a column about ethics ought to attract. Cohen just seems to rub these readers the wrong way.

His responses to questions about family life and social life are usually inoffensive, though they're not very different from the answers Ann Landers might give. Not, mind you, that there's anything wrong with coming up with the same answers as Landers. It's just that when The New York Times Magazine created an ethics feature rather than a generic advice column, the editors presumably wanted more sophistication and rigor than most advice columnists provide. Unless they just wanted their readers to feel more highbrow than they would reading Dear Abby.

But there is something chronically strange about Cohen's items on the ethics of the workplace and commercial life. He has told readers that giving to or raising funds for charity isn't worthwhile, because the more charitable activity there is, the more easily the state abandons public projects. He has told a supervisor that it's unethical to fire or report a temp worker whose shoddy performance makes everyone look bad.

He has even gone out of his way to take swipes at the country's political economy when by his own admission it is irrelevant to the advice he gives, as in this reply to a question about not reporting income to the Internal Revenue Service: "When New York City offers corporations multi-million-dollar tax breaks to do nothing and the Federal tax code is the least progressive it has been in decades (making it ever more possible for a housekeeper and Bill Gates to pay the same rate), it would be churlish to chide someone so hard-working and modestly paid. However, while working off the books might be justified...