I am a faculty member at a university undergoing major campus renovations, including new office spaces. Departments were asked to determine their own ways of assigning rooms, but the task is complicated by factors like seniority and rank — does someone with tenure deserve a better room? Some faculty members have greater teaching demands and might need larger rooms to meet with students. What is the most ethical way to allocate offices: seniority? Rank? Lottery?

True to form, Cohen has nothing interesting to say, and offers no rationale for his random suggestions. It never seems to have occurred to him that scarce resources tend to be allocated most efficiently by markets. If he’d done a little research, he might have found this charming account of how the economists at Arizona State solved the office allocation problem.

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More striking even than Cohen’s characteristic “ethics by pronouncement”, refusing to acknowledge, let alone address, the underlying issues, is that he doesn’t even seem to notice that these questions have something in common. He treats them as two separate reader inquiries, from two separate and non-overlapping universes. Thus it’s okay for the doctor to turn away a patient because “You cannot be forced to practice medicine” and because the patient can always find another doctor. One might wonder, then, in the case of the employer, why it’s not true/relevant/dispositive that “You cannot be forced to provide employment” and/or that the candidate can always find another job.

That’s not to say that the situations are identical. In the cases before Judge Cohen, the employer has partners who don’t share his politics; maybe there’s a relevant obligation to those partners. That thought, however, seems not to have popped into Cohen’s head during the five minutes he devoted to thinking about this column.

As I said the last time I blogged about this bozo, it’s not his conclusions I’m objecting to. It’s his apparent belief that “No you may not” is a substitute for logical analysis based on clearly stated principles that are at least stable enough to be maintained for the length of a newspaper column.

It is possible to do this stuff right. I claim to have done so in, for example, Chapter 18 of The Big Questions. More to the point, Tim Harford does it on a regular basis in his “Dear Economist” column, as my reader Jon Shea noted in comments here on this blog last week:

Contrast Cohen’s “The Ethicist” with Tom Harford’s “Dear Economist” in the Financial Times. Harford frequently sources both classic and new research papers. He also uses named economic theories to help explain his answer. As a result “Dear Economist” doesn’t feel like just an Anne Landers style advice column. When I read Harford I don’t feel like I’m getting a stranger’s opinion, but instead I feel like a trained economist is applying his skills and knowledge in a way I might not think to.

Hear, hear.

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You’re redesigning a website and you want to include a photo of a generic customer. The client does not want the generic customer to be African-American, partly because he has never had an African-American customer and thinks it unlikely that he ever will. Is this okay?

My objection is not to Cohen’s answer (which is “no”) but to the way it’s dispensed, as if from an oracle, with no attempt at a derivation from clearly stated principles.

Here’s the best he has to offer:

Race may be a factor in selecting this photograph only if race is germane to the product or service the franchise provides. For instance, if the company sold hair-care products used almost exclusively by African-Americans, then you could rightly indicate as much through the photo you post on the Web site.

Well, okay. But why? Cohen doesn’t tell us.

Nor does he test his policy against the hard cases. Race, he says, may be a factor if it’s germane to the product or service. What if this is a product or service that African-Americans rarely purchase? Does that make race germane? Does it matter why they never purchase it? What if all—or most—African-Americans had a genetic aversion to this product? Is a race-correlated aversion morally equivalent to a race-correlated hair type? What if all—or most—African-Americans had a culturally induced aversion to this product? Is that morally equivalent to a genetic aversion? Why or why not?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but that’s partly why I don’t call myself “The Ethicist”.

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