April 30, 2004

Today is the day to get high in the lower 60's.

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Today's interviewee is one of the main reasons I open the Sunday New York Times. For several years he's been lending his wit and wisdom to The Ethicist column. Of course, that's not all (is it ever?) He's an award-winning television writer, having worked on the Rosie O'Donnell Show and Late Night with David Letterman, and is the author of several books. I'm sure he's invented cold fusion or something too only he was too modest to tell me.

The Randy Cohen Conversation: When It's On the Phone, the Script Goes Out the Window

How do you decide which letters to answer?
I pick the real easy ones and throw the hard ones away so I don't look like a big dumb monkey. I try to pick the ones that will be of interest to the reader. That's the beginning and end of it. Not knowing what other people will think, I assume that what's of interest to me will be of general interest. Now even after five years I'll receive a lot of wonderful questions but they might be too similar to something I've already done.

Do you ever answer directly to a letter, outside the column or radio show?
I used to, much more than I do now. During the first three years of the column, I answered all the email I received. Both people asking questions and people criticizing past columns. It was enormously instructive but it just became more than I could cope with, especially once the column became syndicated; the mail really increased.

You'd research every query, then?
"Research," I like that. It's flattering. What I would do is dash off something rather cursory. And now I'm obliged to limit myself to answering questions that I think have a pretty decent chance of ending up in the column. I still answer all the critical mail. Anyone who has commented on a past column gets an answer. But the new questions-and even when I reply, it's pretty cursory-they sort of go into a pile and when I run out of questions I pull out the new pile and sort through them and send them to my editor and he'll make sort of preliminary comments. So I've got something that-oh, it doesn't deserve to be called a first draft, it's shallower than that but there's some sort of response, and the editor will make some notes. He may toss out some questions for one reason or another that he thinks are no so interesting. From that, we make a file of thirty questions that I'll be turning to over the next few months.

In your personal life, do people come up to you with ethics questions? Do you mind this or is it a pain?
Yes, it's quite odd! What seems really strange is when it's people who've known me for years, before I've had the job and wouldn't have given me two cents for my opinion, and quite rightly, but now I'm with the New York Times even those people will ask my opinion.

Maybe getting a byline makes you smarter.
I sometimes think the Times could pick any dog off the street and it'd be the Ethics Dog and people would ask the dog advice. Among the people who don't know me, there's the doctor at dinner party question. And I say what my doctor says to me: "Take off your clothes, hop up on the table and we'll see what we can do."

So you do mind, then.
It's bad, because should I go to these parties (and I don't go to nearly enough and if you know of some good ones please include me), there is a feeling that there's no "Off-Duty" sign that I can wear. There's been a fantastic amount of debauchery going on, apparently. It's terrible.

Why do you think most people write you? Is it because they want to make the right choice or they want to feel better about themselves or they want to win a bet?
I wish there were more gambling letters. One of the things I've noticed is that often when people write to me, you can tell by the way they've structured the question that they kind of know the right answer. They know what right conduct is but they're not sure why, and they're hoping I'll lay out an orderly and reasoned case for it. That's one whole class of letters. There are some where they genuinely don't know the answer. Those are usually the really hard ones and I don't know the answer. And then there are definitely rationalizations where somebody is proposing to do something quite wicked and hoping that the NYT to endorse it.

It seems to me that people ask for rationalizations to things that are just better not to even speak about, like "I steal my neighbor's trash."
Right, you'd think that'd be a source of shame that you'd be working very hard to keep quiet. Don't talk about it in the paper.

Have you ever received a query that made you want to go to the police? Do you feel an obligation to do so?
No, it hasn't come up, and I know it's remotely conceivable that it could happen.

Dear Abby did it once, right?
Yeah, and she got in a lot of trouble for it. She got some guy in a lot of trouble when she decided, quite in an alarmist way, that he might be a child molester. It was nothing of the kind. Once you call the cops on someone for that kind of thing you really cause a big upheaval in their life. There's an obligation to do that. I'm not a priest, I don't have to keep these things confidential and if I received something that suggested someone was about to do harm to another person, I would feel obliged to do something about it but it just doesn't happen.

Have you ever written to an advice columnist? If not, whom would you write to?
No, I have not, but I would write to Dan Savage, who I think writes the best advice column in the business. He's really smart, he's really funny, he's full of passionate convictions, he's full of human warmth, and I just think he's terrific.

I like that nothing is sacred in his column.
Yeah, he certainly lacks pomposity but I do think something is sacred-his genuine esteem for human happiness and the people who write to him-that's admirable. He's a humanist in the best sense. Then there are people like William Bennett who can just be hardheaded and cruel.

Have you ever given advice and then changed your mind afterwards?
It happens all the time. I make it a habit once a year doing a corrections column. It's a result of the correspondence with the readers and the critical comments of the readers. Email is such a great thing in many ways and it changes the relationship of the writer to the reader. People would write letters in the past and it would take least a few weeks…you can tell when the column arrives at people's houses because I start getting criticism. I only have 600 words a column and generally do two questions so my job is to oversimplify. I get letters from people right away who will point out an aspect of a question I may have missed or point out illogic in my thinking. And I'll almost learn something deep in my understanding. And two or three times a year I'm persuaded that I really got one wrong.

Who mostly writes in? Are they lawyers or philosophers?
It's all over the place, as varied as the readership itself. Sometimes if the question pivots on a specialized knowledge, like on matters of law or medicine, I definitely hear from the practitioners. They inevitably know more than I do although they're not inevitably right. Those kind of letters are usually particularly interesting because in some ways I'm a journalist of ethics, I'm meant to be a generalist and when you write about a field where people have specialized knowledge, they must know more than you, and you can benefit from that. A lot of them are just angry cranks who write these letters, "Dear Sir, I am appalled." A lot of it is the fault of email-it invites a kind of vituperative tone that nobody would take to your face. Email doesn't really convey tone and it's so anonymous and so easy to hit 'send.' It's amazing how often if you're the calm one and you write back. I used to respond in kind-I thought if they could be nasty, I could be ten times nastier; I'm a trained professional. But then I switched and I started writing very moderate responses and I have to say, that Jesus had something going for him: didn't he say a soft answer turn away wrath? They apologize! They'll say, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it." But these are questions of fundamental values I take up and these are things over which honorable people will differ and sometimes quite furiously.

Do you handle queries differently when you discuss ethics on NPR than when you're writing the column?
The method is different, but the ideology is the same. When I do the NPR spots I know what the question is going to be ahead of time since they have to line up the caller and everything but I just make a few notes because I think that conversational tone is so important and the host will also often have interesting things to say. And then when you get the person on the air, they'll often have interesting things to say, especially when the host says, "Well, what did you think of The Ethicist's advice?" and it's sometimes quite painful when they say "Well I didn't think it's very helpful at all" but it's more conversational, both in its town and its message. And the column's just me with the writing, more polished and concise.

Isn't it hard to speak to somebody person to person though and tell them what you think is right?
So far I don't think I've offended anyone too badly and I try to be tactful and the people who are calling in are asking what I think so I get to tell them what I think but in a gentle way. I think that when somebody exposes themselves like that it's not really right to slap them around.

I asked some friends if they had any questions for you, and one wanted to know, "Is your sense of ethics grounded in a principled absolutism, or in a pragmatic relativism?" I didn't know what this meant, so for those of you who don't either, "What is the foundation of your ethics? Is it a belief that there are absolute moral values of right and wrong, and that ethical behavior is grounded in one's degree of adherence to principles derived from those values? Or is it a belief that moral values are relative and contingent, and that ethical behavior is grounded in a more pragmatic approach to achieving a consensus based on prevalent cultural values?"
The way you phrase the question dictates the answer. It's a legitimate question, but I just don't like the way it's phrased. Anyway, it's neither. Those are not the only options. Anyway, not to sell books, but if your friend would like to stop by a Barnes and Noble and look at the introduction of my book it'll sort of lay out a bit how I approach things.

What was one of the most unethical things you've ever done?
Oh, I would never tell. There's no reason to advertise my failings-they're all too apparent to somebody who knows me. I'm not casting stones. One of the things I try to do in the column is discuss a course of action that someone is considering, and not to judge the person. That's not my job. I'm not deciding who gets into heaven. Ethics is about right conduct, and that can be discussed, and when you answer, you try to do it universally. You have to make a reasoned argument for it and it should be impersonal.

Is this Ethicist illustration supposed to be you, or is that just an artist's rendering of an ethical person?
Oh, God. When I first got the job they had me send over some snapshots and they said "Our, illustrator is going to do a caricature of you." And it doesn't really look like me-it looks sort of like Michael Kinsley. I didn't know what to make of it. And then I thought in my paranoid fashion that it's the ethics logo, it's the Uncle Ben of ethics, the Betty Crocker, its real purpose is to remind me that my job is hanging by a thread, that they could have me out of there, stick someone else in there and the little logo would give it the continuity and no one would know I was gone.

Do you ever do that pose with the fingers pressed together?
I'm standing like that now.

What's the difference between ethics and morals?
Nothing. Although some people say that morals describes your fundamental, philosophical beliefs and ethics is the way you put those beliefs into practice. But that's a very casual usage. I think they're synonyms. One's Latin, the other's Greek.

You've won four Emmys. Where do you keep them?
It's very tricky, deciding where to put them in your apartment in a way that says you attach no importance to them. But it also has to be a place where no one coming in can miss it. Were you to enter my apartment (call first), there are bookshelves in the foyer, and the foyer is only four feet deep, so that you're quite close to the bookshelves so if you passed by them and turned your head up, you'd see them. And the other one is at my mother's house in the country.

Perusing some comments made about your book, it seems that there are some readers who think there is a bias in your ethics and writing. What are you normally accused of and is there any truth to it?
I think of myself as being quite unbiased. I certainly have politics as does every other person on this earth but I think that it would be a mistake to confuse having an opinion with having a bias. I would think that if you were an adult and you didn't have opinions on the great issues of today, you would be an idiot. But to have those views is not the same as having a bias, so I don't, at all, have a bias. This comes up sometimes: people will write to me who say that there is a distinction between politics and ethics and it's certainly true that the more I do the column, the less I believe that to be true. That, as it should be, that values that would lead you to certain conclusions are also to be reflected in your politics. Otherwise, you'd be a hypocrite, wouldn't you?

There are three books you wrote on Amazon that don't really say what they're about. So can you tell us about "Why Didn't I Think of That," "Modest Proposals" and "Easy Answers to Hard Questions"?
The description on Amazon probably describes it-out of print. Why Didn't I Think of That? was something I did with a woman named Alexandra Anderson a long long time ago and it was a collection of other people's million-dollar ideas. The kind of thing where you think that everyone has one in their head but they're often very entertaining and ingenious. So that was that, a little throwaway project, and people did throw it away.

Modest Proposals was funny letters to famous people, mostly to politicians and corporate bigshots. What it was was humor in the form of letters. But they're genuine-I would write to Strom Thurmond and it would essentially be a little satirical piece about something he did but he would write back. So it was all meant to be barbed and funny but his writing back would make this incredibly great contact and they wouldn't know you were making a joke. Sometimes they'd put themselves inside the joke and play along. So it's a collection of letters and their replies.

Easy Answers to Hard Questions: That was a little throwaway thing too. That was a series of pieces I'd do for New York Magazine, a million years ago. They're figures of speech and clichés: "How quick is 'quick as a wink'?" So then I'd call up an ophthalmologist. It was a kind of nonfiction humor but all these figures of speech I would find accurate, honest answers and hopefully it was funny.

Then there's Diary of a Flying Man.

But Amazon has a description of that one . So when people want to go look at it they can just go do it themselves.
Yeah, lazy bastards. You can't do everything for them. You're only one woman.

Do you miss writing the News Quiz in Slate?
Yeah, very much. That was really fun.

Were you able to do much writing there that you can't do for the column?
I could generate the topics there, but here I can only answer questions from readers but that was my little playground, writing the quiz, and the participants were wonderful. I got to write a funny little essay every day and they were just enormously fun and the people who did the quiz were just so terrific-they were so smart and funny. My job was to provide setups and they would provide punchlines. I thought, "This is my job! This is great!" Really fun and I've stayed friends with people who did it-I'd throw News Quiz parties now and then.

What did you like best about writing for television?
I liked going to the office. Writing is such solitary work and TV was so social in all these wonderful ways. So you'd go there and you'd have colleagues and you'd wander around the halls and chat with them and sometimes during that conversation you'd have an idea. Before Letterman I never really worked on a collaborative enterprise that was so much fun. The person who did the props, she was brilliant, Paul, who did the music, was so smart. None of these were people I'd ever be friends with in my normal course of life and yet together these people put on a show every day. It was just a real treat to be a part of it.

You've written books, for TV, online and more. Of all the work you've done, what are you the proudest of so far?
Well the two jobs that were really lifechanging were working for letterman and getting the Times job. I'm just enormously lucky to have either of them.

How does it feel to be the 94th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
Well frankly it's disappointing-I was aiming for 100. So I'm a little let down. If I do something really worthwhile under a different name, soon, then maybe you can come back.