Am I wasting my time? How can so much of the public be so hopelessly incompetent at analyzing basic ethics issues?

Two back-to-back questions to Kwame Anthony Appiah, the philosophy prof who moonlights as the Times’ ethics advice columnist, have me wondering if its time to do something more useful, like, say, anything. Both questions involved what is ethical to write about. Both questions shouldn’t have to be asked by anyone whose judgment regarding right and wrong is superior to that of the Clintons, or Willie Sutton. Both were deemed interesting and controversial enough to be featured by “The Ethicist” as if substantial numbers of his readers are likely to be similarly puzzled by the alleged dilemmas they present.

Really? The first inquirer asked if it would be unethical for a writer to use the real life stories of alcoholics that she heard in her A.A. meetings without their consent, as long as she didn’t use their names….just their “profession, physical appearance, hobbies and other specifics.” Participating in Alcoholics Anonymous is conditioned on absolute confidentiality. The answer should be self-evident. Why isn’t it?

The second question was, if anything, even more annoying. A writer was an eye witness to a murder, who was caught. She wonders if her writing about the event is unethical. “It feels unseemly to me, if not outright wrong, to take advantage of my very accidental connection to this murder and its victim,” this inquirer writes. “I am troubled by the idea of viewing another woman’s death as ‘material.’ What are the ethics of writing about what is, at heart, someone else’s tragedy?”

What? Are professional reporters unethical when they report on a tragedy? Are historians unethical to write about the Holocaust? This is someone who confuses emotion with ethics. It feels bad to her, so it must be bad. How does someone grow up and function in society with such a confused perception of what constitutes right and wrong? What kind of society does such a rotten job of conveying how one figures out what kind of conduct is unethical?

Yes, yes, The Ethicist made short work of this one too, concluding with, “We’ll do better, in my view, if we don’t think about what happened as someone’s possession…Writing about the event you witnessed will be justified if what you write has value.”

This level of ethics comprehension should be fully learned by the sixth grade. Lately the questions Appiah has chosen to explore remind me of when quiz shows started dumbing-down their questions to keep the increasingly illiterate and ignorant American public engaged.