Boy, I got my post being nice to Randy Cohen, “The Ethicist” of the New York Times Magazine, up just under the wire. Monday, new Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren fired him, and announced that the NEW “Ethicist”—the identity is a little like “the dread pirate Roberts”—will be Ariel Kaminer, most recently the Times City Critic.
She, like Cohen when he was hired, has no professional or scholarly ethics background. If I was in a cynical mood, I might suggest that the New York Times doesn’t take ethics seriously enough.
I didn’t always agree with Cohen, who sometimes let his politics get in the way of his ethics advice, but I never missed his column, and often got a kick out of his wit. It is said that he’s trying to land an ethics program on NPR, another media organization that needs all the ethics it can get.
Good luck, Randy.
Ethics Alarms 
What professional or scholarly ethics background is necessary to write about ethics? Aren’t the main qualifications being able to tell ethical behavior from inethical behavior and being able to convey the difference in a manner that is accurate and understandable?
I’m not trying to make light of the difficulty of those tasks, as they do require specific skillsets, but unlike rocket science, or world politics, it doesn’t seem like the kind of field that requires much official training.
I agree with you, for the most part; I was needling the times. Although Cohen, when he failed, did so because he sometimes discarded any legitimate ethical analysis for seat-of-the-pants “it feels good, so do it” answers, which were annoying and sometimes embarrassing. It isn’t rocket science, but ethical analysis is a systemic process,,,some formal experience with the structure of ethics codes, for example, should be a requirement. Cohen really stepped in it when he ventured into professional ethics, like legal ethics. As with other areas, not knowing something wasn’t the problem; it was usually not knowing that he didn’t know.
I like the outsider perspective in most cases (It’s easy to not think critically about your own group), but at least being able to know when you need to find specific knowledge (and where to do it) is a must. Someone with some history in the world is more likely to be able to do that.