The New York Times has a column by a wellness expert who reveals that Kipling Williams, emeritus professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, has found that giving a loved one “the silent treatment” is cruel and constitutes punishment. So do a bunch of other experts quoted, but this guy has supposedly studied the effects of the silent treatment for over 30 years. That’s his big takeaway? Apparently so. As my old dead friend Scott Wheeler used to say (ironically, I lost contact with Scott because he engaged in conduct I could not forgive or forget so I cut him off, and he knew exactly why) “Who doesn’t know that?”

Slow day at the Times? From the article: “Some people think the silent treatment is a milder way of dealing with conflict, said Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. But it isn’t, she explained. ‘The silent treatment is a punishment,’ she said, ‘whether you are acknowledging that to yourself or not.’For the person who is being frozen out, it creates “anxiety and fear, and feelings of abandonment,” Dr. Saltz said, and it often causes a “cascade of self-doubt, self-blame and self-criticism.”

Who doesn’t think refusing to speak to a freind or loved one is intended as a punishment? What else would it be, a game? We don’t need experts to apply their lofty degrees to phenomenon that it doesn’t take an expert to understand, and “the silent treatment” is a perfect example. Experts say farting in public is offensive! Experts say talking loudly during a movie is inconsiderate and rude!

We’re all supposed to be adept enough at determining right from wrong—you know, that ethics thingy?—to come up with the reasons for our aversion to some things, and the wisdom not to engage in them, on our own. My wife would occasionally announce that she wasn’t speaking to me, but it was only code for “I’m really mad at you, you asshole!” We both knew that our mutual facility with and addiction to verbal communication made that an empty threat. And we also knew—without experts!—that it was a rotten way to treat each other. We also never punched each other in the nose.

I haven’t visited The Ethics Sage, Steven Mintz, lately so I decided to check in. Coincidentally, he felt this month that it was necessary to explain that “ghosting” someone was as unethical as it is uncivil. “Ghosting can leave emotional scars and do damage to the recipient’s self-esteem, especially if they have a fragile ego,” he writes. “Should you care about how your avoidance affects others? Yes, if you want to be a good person; someone who is caring, considerate, and empathetic. After all, as The Golden Rule commands: Treat others the way you wish to be treated. There are other versions of the Rule. The one most appropriate for ghosting is: ‘Don’t do something to someone else that you would not want done to you.’ I like this version because it denotes a positive obligation to treat others ethically.”

Again, nobody who has two scruples to rub together should need an ethicist to explain that. I also feel like I should summon Bruce from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive to say…

I first posted regarding ghosting—a ghosting posting!—in 2013. It wasn’t to proclaim “Eureka!” over my figuring out that the practice was unethical, but to rebut a Slate writer who argued that being polite, fair and civil was too much trouble and a useless social norm. I felt it was my duty to identify Slate’s jerk as one, because “unethical people who do unethical things feel much better about themselves if nobody calls them on it, so they can maintain, as one recent commenter did here who was, I’m proud to say, chased away by the rest of you (and me) with torches and pitchforks, that ethics is “100% subjective”—Translation: ‘If I want to do it, it’s ethical.’”

The last time i visited the ghosting phenomenon was in 2022, not really about ghosting but about the “ethical duty to explai”n when you are going to take adverse action against someone rather than letting them wonder, “Why? WHY?” After telling the story of how a bar association who had promised to engage me suddenly stopped responding to my emails and calls rather than just telling me, “We’ve changed our minds,” I wrote,

“This conduct, which I know is common, is a straight Golden Rule violation. There can be no excuse or justification for it….All they needed to say was, “We’re sorry, but we are going in another direction now.” How hard is that? It’s simple decency, and the way anyone would want to be treated rather than being left in the dark….you don’t treat someone like that, because you know how much you would hate being treated like that.”

That analysis, however, certainly didn’t require any training as an ethicist. It just required having functioning ethics alarms, as should we all.