Too bad Prof. Appiah doesn’t read Ethics Alarms…

A particularly clueless inquirer of the Times Magazine advice columnist “The Ethicist” asks…

“I volunteer for a small nonprofit organization picking up free food from pantries and delivering it to an impoverished local community. Recently I learned that one of the directors of the organization lied to food pantry personnel to obtain more food for our clients. The pantry normally allocates one bag of food per week for each family. Our director said we were delivering to twice as many families, so each family actually received two bags a week. When asked to provide the names of the clients we were delivering to, our director gave fake names.

“I’m uncomfortable with lying to sister organizations so we can procure more food than our families would receive under the established rules. And I worry that the extra bags for our families mean that other needy clients don’t get what they need.

“When I discussed this with another volunteer, they reminded me that one bag of food could never feed our large client families and that the director’s intentions were good. Please help me sort this out.”

Both the fact that anyone would ask such a question and that a philosophy professor thinks enough readers wouldn’t know the answer makes me again wonder if I’m wasting my life trying to advance the cause of ethical decision-making.