An Ethically Questionable ‘Ethicist’ at the New York Times

K wame Anthony Appiah, the public philosopher and writer, purports to offer his readers what the New York Times presents as “advice on life’s trickiest situations and moral dilemmas.” The questions Appiah fields in his twice-weekly Times column, The Ethicist, are sometimes on topics that that stir deep disagreement. In one column, for instance, an adult woman who had undergone two abortions asked whether she had a moral obligation to inform her pro-life mother about the abortions; Appiah advised that, given the “highly polarizing” nature of the abortion debate, she should evaluate whether the disclosure would bring her closer to her mother or drive her away. “You may decide simply to let this go — and to love what you love about each other,” he concluded. With this sidestep, Appiah declined to offer a straightforward ethical assessment or otherwise provide the reader with a clear answer.

Appiah’s reticence here was perhaps understandable. After all, the moral dilemma presented did not call for an objective assessment of a particular action (such as undergoing an abortion); rather, it hinged on the circumstances of the woman’s strained relationship with her mother and whether, taking into account their differing beliefs, she ought to disclose her decisions. In such a dilemma, the person best positioned to make a prudential judgment about the wisdom and importance of disclosing the abortions to her mother (and perhaps thereby inflaming tensions over a subject on which they profoundly disagree) is probably the woman herself.

The problem for Appiah is that he has adopted a similarly laissez-faire approach to situations that require objective assessment of specific actions, including actions being contemplated by readers that affect the well-being of others. In one recent query that received wide attention on social media, a woman wrote, “I strongly suspect that my husband is developing dementia. . . . I’m not thrilled about spending my retirement years as a caregiver. It’s a huge sacrifice that will narrow my own life significantly.” Her question for Appiah was whether she could ethically divorce her husband and abandon him to the care of his extended family before his dementia worsened.

Appiah encouraged the woman to explore alternative options to divorce, such as couples counseling, that might be “a way to keep the ship afloat.” But he added, “I’m not saying that you’re required to sacrifice your well-being to his.” In other words, his answer to the question of whether she should abandon her spouse as his health declined was, shockingly, something like “I hope you don’t, but if you did, it would be understandable, and I’m certainly not saying such a decision would be unethical.”

Of course, Appiah should have informed the woman that she (presumably) had pledged herself to her husband (as her husband presumably had done with her) in a way that went far beyond a comfort-based, fair-weather-only, transactional commitment. Appiah should have observed that through their promises to each other as spouses, the woman did give up a degree of her personal autonomy (as did her husband) — but that such a surrender of individualistic desires and self-interested pursuits for the sake of their relationship is something to be celebrated, not resented or feared. Moreover, Appiah should have pointed out that there was a clear ethical assessment to be made here: that it would be gravely wrong for the reader to abandon her husband because of his dementia, and that if she did so, she would carry the guilt of having done so until she rectified her mistake and returned to him.

It’s evident that Appiah does know how to consider the circumstances of someone’s personal situation while still providing an ethical assessment of specific actions. In another recent column, Appiah rightly repudiated a person’s decision to secretly add melatonin to the drinking water of her “manic” husband in order to “calm him down”: “Medicating mentally competent people without their fully informed consent is wrong. Giving drugs to a spouse in this way is an abusive betrayal of marital trust. . . . It’s a significant and ongoing wrong.”

Why the moral clarity here, but not with the woman whose abandonment of her struggling husband would arguably also constitute a significant “betrayal of marital trust”? One obvious distinction is that if you secretly medicate a person, you’re violating his autonomy; if you divorce the husband with dementia, on the other hand, you’re doing so to advance your autonomy. But this apparent reduction of ethical decision-making to what violates personal autonomy and what advances personal autonomy makes a complete mockery of ethics.

Being the most autonomous person — the person who is the ultimate author of his own life and who controls his own destiny through unconstrained and autonomous decision-making, to paraphrase the liberal political philosopher Joseph Raz — is not, and must not become, the be-all and end-all of moral and ethical calculations. A fundamental aspect of ethics is the timeless truth that we have obligations and duties to others that, in many cases, might compel us to set aside our self-interested pursuits and give up a portion of our autonomy for the sake of some greater good, such as a marriage, a friendship, our religious commitments, or helping a neighbor in need.

Appiah’s autonomy-centric values fail to account for that reality, and the quality and truthfulness of his ethical advice suffers greatly as a result. “The Ethicist,” it seems, needs a refresher on ethics.