Randy Cohen, the house ethicist at the New York Times, frequently strikes me as disappointingly shallow. Take, for example, his latest column, posing this ethical quandary:
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”.
