Kwame Anthony Appiah, the philosophy professor who currently writes the New York Times “The Ethicist” advice column, went off the rails (like so may other people I could name) during the Presidential campaign and the post-election freakout, but there are small signs that he’s recovering his professional equilibrium. Boy, I sure hope so.

Last week he was asked by an “emotionally and physically abused” ex-wife, now happily married, if she has a moral (she means ethical) obligation to warn the woman her ex- is now dating about his proclivities as she experienced them. She’s not a friend, but the inquirer and the girlfriend “travel in the same professional circles,” whatever that means.

“I know in my gut that my ex has not changed, and that his new partner is most likely in a similar situation [as I was],” the inquirer writes. “I keep mentally writing my ex’s new partner an anonymous email that says: ‘It’s not you, it’s him. For every time you’ve been made to feel like your desires for connection and community are wrong, I want you to know that they are not. His control over you is abuse that you do not deserve in any way.’…Do I have a moral obligation to share my experience with this stranger, or should I mind my own business?”

The Ethicist chose a provocative issue to address, but still botches this one pretty badly. “I do hope you can safely find a way to help this woman. Your concern springs from an important truth: You are uniquely positioned to understand her situation,” he writes. He can’t say that! The writer says she barely knows the woman, and her evidence that her ex- is abusing his new love is based entirely on third party accounts and surmise. Furthermore, Appiah is in a “believe all women” mode. How does he know that her perspective isn’t slanted? What did she call abuse? If she didn’t have him jailed, this is all her word against his. What I her ex- has changed? What if she is seeking to torpedo up his new relationship? What if she was the abusive one?

Imagine the woman in the photo above saying, “Trust me, I know what you’re going through, although you haven’t told me anything and we don’t know each other.”

“The Ethicist,” believe it or not, suggests that the inquirer send the woman dating her ex- an anonymous email! That’s a sure way to inject suspicion and stress into any relationship, even a healthy one. The inquirer says she worries that her intervention in the relationship might put her in danger again. Unless this guy has had a string of abusive relationships, how hard will it be for him to guess who sent the email?

Then The Ethicist suggests that “someone who knows both of you could naturally bring up your experience, creating an opening for her to recognize parallels in her own situation. This approach could offer what an anonymous email can’t — a real conversation with a person she trusts, leading to the kind of insights that actually helped you break free.” A person she trusts who is taking the inquirer’s word for what happened in that relationship, and who doesn’t know first hand what is taking place in the current relationship!

What’s going on here? The Ethicist is giving advice based on insufficient information. He has no grounds to believe what the woman who wrote him says, and there are no details to assess the seriousness of the situation from the other woman’s perspective. Absent more details, a way to learn the ex-husband’s perspective, and the inquirer’s reliance on her “gut,” which suggest hers is a perception soaked with emotion, it is unethical for The Ethicist to advise anything except “Butt out.”