Abortion… it’s here!

J.S. writes,

I am the mother of a fifteen year old child who is now pregnant. My child is a high-school student with no partner, and no ability to raise a child. I am not in a position to adequately care for this child while continuing to support my family. Despite my daughter’s inability to have this child without ending her highschool career, doing damage to her body, psyche and family she has stated that she wishes to keep the child. My position is that the her having this child is akin to drugs. While ultimately it is her body and her decision, I am obligated to let her know that I cannot abide by behavior that will be destructive to her future. Is it ethically wrong for me to view the situation this way? Do I have any ethical obligation to the unborn child?
-J.S.
_______________________________________________________

You say, JS, your daughter, let’s just call her JSJr, can ultimately make the decision herself about whether to abort the fetus yet you say you cannot abide by her decision. I wonder to what degree you cannot “abide” by your daughters deicision. Does not abiding mean kicking her and your grandchild out of the house? Does it mean an extended silent treatment and back-handed remarks about her soon-to-be-enlarged thighs?

If it is none of these nastier forms of disabiding and rather just a registered disapproval of her willingness to give birth when she obviously is not prepared to do so, then you may not be putting enough lean on her. There is a balance here that needs to be achieved. Lean too hard and you risk alienating her from her family (what does her father think?) which may or may not result in her having an abortion — depending on how truly dedicated she is. Pat her on the back and she doesn’t abort the fetus. Or, and this is probably the best case scenario, she isn’t even pregnant and has just lied to you to leverage some other teen-angsty agenda… maybe she just wants you to let her to go to the Slipknot concert showing at the Kansas Superdome.

As for your ethical obligation to the “unborn child,” you have none. First it’s not an unborn child, it’s a fetus. And second, as a fetus, it has no conception of itself in a different state (i.e. some time in the future). It may become conscious sometime during the latter part of the second trimester but that does not mean it sees itself as anything but a solid-state object of the world (if it can conceive of a world, or even its own perceptual universe, which it probably can’t) unable to imagine itself as a living being with desires or fears. It is not a moral agent and therefore ethically indistinguishable from a rock or a small reptile. A salamander may be said to have the same value as a fetus as they both act according to mechanical instincts without conception of themselves in a future improved position (the point of life: to improve one’s position/happiness/whatever), and so, in a vacuum, the extent to which it is unethical to kill a salamander it is unethical to abort a fetus. Other consideration, of course, apply but you asked exclusively about your obligation to the “unborn child.”
Sincerely, Michael “never-holding-public-office” Goldman

An oldie but a goodie

Johnson McCleod sends the Ethicist an old chestnut:
If God exists, why is there evil in the world?

If, IF? Well, first off, God doesn’t exist. If we are to engage your fantasy
world then what conclusion can be drawn? I assume you mean the Western unigod
known as Jahweh or Allah who is all powerful and all seeing and has only the
best intentions for humanity and the universe. In which case we come to the
paradox Homer Simpson once asked, “Can God microwave a burrito so hot he
couldn’t eat it?” There really is no answer to that question or yours, which is
why we must assume God does not exist or settle to live in a world that
naturally produces paradoxes… an untenable postion in logic, and therefore an
untenable position all around.

A fellow ethicist has proposed to me that the evil in the world may be a product
of God’s divine plan or God’s divine plan to allow humanity to fuck itself up.
If that is so and humanity is supposed to learn a lesson or develop from its
mistakes and evilness then their are much better ways of doing this than just a
sort of laissex-faire, do-as-you-please ethical free market. In a divine
welfare-state we could have an interventionist God to educate people without all
the bloodshed just like nearly all Western democracies have a universal health
system. Is it better that we fend for our own health or that a structure is put
in place to provide health-care fairly and evenly? I would say the latter. And
the fact that the 20th Century was the bloodiest in many centuries shows that
God’s plan, or plan to give us free will and come to terms with our better
natures, has failed horrificly.

Sincerely, Michael “the ethicist” Goldman

Any more questions?

Ethics Vacation

Ethics Vacation: by Jim Houghtaling. A film with important lessons, stellar special effects (walking backwards!!!), a pair of comical disembodied faces representing man’s dual nature and one seriously thick accent: What’s not to love?

Well… It is four and a half minutes long, and it begins to lag at the 20-second mark. Also, the protagonist clearly misleads the audience when he blames for his lapse on an “ethics vacation”. His ethical avatar is clearly present, dude’s just a pushover.

The real question Ethics Holiday raises is: why do these disembodied ethical spirits stick around at all? If I was an unapreciated conscience living in that snowy stretch of drab, and I had the ability to cut off for a holiday, I’d be out of there without a second thought.

The implications of “ethics vacations” could be truly far-reaching. North Dakota would be a rank den of licentiousness. Conversely, the tropical beaches favored by righteous spirit projections would see their debauchery levels plummet with all those prudish spirits bopping around. Co-eds looking to get wasted on spring break would head up to Saskatchewan, and freeze to death en masse.

Lucky for us, this remains only the fantasy of an amateur YouTube auteur. But, rest assured, if this outlandish scenario does come to pass, you’ll hear on Aethix Plexis first.

Of Ann Landers and Randy Cohen

Dear Ethicist,

I am in a moral quandry. I was under the impression that making a name
for oneself by insulting and slandering another individual was
unethical. However, you, a self-proclaimed ethicist, seem to be doing
just that. Would you care to defend your actions with an ethical line of
reasoning?

Sincerely,

Guy Who Thinks You’re An Unethical Ethicist

p.s. My housemates don’t clean up after themselves, and I used to do all
of the house cleaning until I silently stopped recently. Is it fair of
me to believe they will catch the hint and start pitching in, or am I
just dreaming? Is my action unethical, or should the blame lay with my
lazy housemates? What can I do?
_______________________________

Thanks for interrupting the writing of my Kant paper. I’m sure this is a much more pressing matter, anyway.

Apparently you haven’t been to grad school, kid. Libel (slander is spoken defamation and in grad school no one can hear you talking) and insult are the meat and potatoes of intellectual careers. All condescention aside, I don’t think I’ve been particularly unfair to Randy Cohen, ho-hum ethicist extraordinaire. When he’s right he’s boring and when he’s wrong he deserves a verbal lashing in just proportion to his mediocrity.

As for your next question you ask is it fair of you to assume your housemates will pick up their load of the cleaning, but whether you make the assumption or not has nothing to do with fairness. Instead, it’s about the facts on the ground and the history that got you there. Although (the late? can anybody tell me?) Ann Landers is the noted professional of two paragraph inter-personal solutions, I wouldn’t mind taking over her job as well as Randy’s.

Continuing to ignore your household duties would be ineffective. It’s plain by your letter that your living companions have a much higher tolerance for filth than you. What will happen is the cleanliness of the house will come to some sort of natural filth rhythm congruent with the sanitary will of your housemates. Don’t expect them to all of a sudden wake up and realize GWTYAUE isn’t doing the dishes anymore and if they want to live in a clean house they’re going to have to clean them themselves. They probably don’t even notice the difference, and if they do they wouldn’t want to expend the effort to bring things up to your standards. Such is the tragedy of the commons, which is why Communism is a superior system of living to Anarchism.

So here’s what you do GWTYAUE. What you need is some outside authority to compel each member to work in rotating eight hour shifts (according to his or her abilities, of course) until cleanliness is restored… perhaps a landlord?

Sincerely, Michael “the ethicist” Goldman

AEthix Plexis

Welcome to AEthix Plexis, the blog that has already set the ‘net ablaze, prompting deep brow furrowing and questions such as: “Does this person have any sort of qualification(s)?”

A little introduction is necessary. AEthix Plexis is an attempt to elucidate the ethical demands of the present age with philosophical depth and irreverence. That’s the aspiration at least. Right now we’re just happy to have a little fun at Randy Cohen’s expense.

The ethicist-in-chief is Michael Goldman. For the purposes of this site he is a demigod, his word indistinguishable from truth. In his slightly less illustrious everyday life he is a philosophy student and perennial also-ran in division III welterweight wrestling. He’ll be addressing the ethical concerns of readers in regular postings, as well as providing a weekly rebuttal to the New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist column and posting whenever inspiration strikes.

I’m Austin Alter, the Ethicist’s lowly assistant. I’ll be selecting questions for the Ethicist, posing my own hypothetical queries and playing devil’s advocate. My real aim is to goad the Ethicist into saying bizarre things so we can have the pleasure of watching him try to explain indefensible statements through baroque sophistry.

Send your ethical quandaries to AethixPlexis@gmail.com, everything from quotidian concerns to outlandish hypotheticals are welcome.

Enjoy AEthix Plexis.

Why does Randy Cohen hate America?

In this week’s Sunday Magazine Randy Cohen bores me to death with his first response to a wordy lawyer who uses six separate pronouns in the first sentence which is, by the way, missing a dangling conjunction in the beginning (“An attorney with experience in paternity-fraud case, I was called by a man dating a divorced woman…”) I’m making this shit up from 7th grade grammar-memory and it still sounds better than this sorry lady… Sorry in Hartford Indulging Tediousness.

The second question has a lot more zip to it.

Ahhh, gaming an Ivy League school in Philadelphia (cough! U cough! Penn). You see, Jill Blow wants to know if it was ethical for a fellow student of hers to gain admission to the prestigious Business School by way of agreeing to join some dumb sports team and then dropping out after the first practice. Some people think, Jill tells us, this track drop-out unethically gamed the college admissions to get where she really wanted to be: U Penn Business School.

Randy tells Jill that the college admissions game is a corrupt one, so chill out and stop acting like you just graduated from a prep school with top honors in hall monitoring. Or, that’s what he wish he could say. This is one of the few times I agree with Randy, but he doesn’t see the forest for the trees.

The ethical problem is not that someone got into U Penn Business School with a little help from a perhaps (Jill doesn’t say) unfulfilled sports scholarship. The problem is that one more person is going to attend the upper echelon of Business Schools in the world’s sole super-power which manifests that power through international business. Get that girl out of Business School and back onto the circuit pronto before she devalues the currency of some impoverished nation or orchestrates the next wave of relaxation of air pollution laws. Everyone knows business schools are full of jerks with Napoleonic Complexes (Complices?) and the ratio of jerks to decent, well-meaning people only increases as the selectivity of the school and the youth of the student increases. We don’t know much about this girl’s age, but when’s the last time you heard of someone over 30 getting a lead on a prestigious college track team?

What will Randy have in store for us next week? I hope, I hope it’s about computer software.

Flow My Ethics the Ethicist Said

Randy Cohen, the man who pioneered the idea of Ethicist as career choice has lost the gold. That’s why I created this blog. To give the wayward readers of the New York Times Magazine the sound and thoughtful advice they deserve instead of the warmed-up crap Randy passes off as a small plate of nutritious yet tolerable mashed yams, I offer up this blog.

Ethics is Life, not a side dish.