“We are, as I’ve argued before, entitled to a life informed by the fundamental facts about our existence. Even the painful ones? Perhaps especially those. This truth belongs to her.”
—New York Times advice columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah, aka. “The Ethicist” concluding his advice to the inquirer who asked, “My Adopted Cousin’s Biological Parents Were Siblings. Do I Tell Her?”
Kwame is pretty clearly the best of the various “experts” who have manned the long-time feature in the New York Times Magazine; at least he’s a real ethicist, a philosophy prof at NYU. (I say “manned” because the Times has never given the post of “The Ethicist” to a woman. Go figure…) Lately, however, I’ve been a bit worried about the guy, and wondering if “The Great Stupid” is getting to him. More answers like this one, and I’ll be tempted to dub him the “Un-Ethicist,” in honor of the old 7-Up campaign branding the soft-drink as the “Un-cola.”
I’m just going to focus on the quote above and not the whole column, because The Ethicist is stating an absolute principle that is absolute hooey. The inspiration for the edict “The truth belongs to her” was the usual participant in the column, “Name Withheld,” asking whether he or she, as the only living relative who knows the actual family origins of a cousin, (or as Kwame puts it, is “the sole custodian of an intimate truth concealed from the very person it concerns) should spill the rotten beans now, when they both are seniors.
Because the dark family secret can be nothing but disturbing or worse, I see no possible benefit to anyone by revealing it to the cousin now. She knows she was adopted, but she does not know that her biological parents were brother and sister—at least that’s what the inquirer’s now-deceased mother told her “in absolute confidence.” All records are sealed: there is no way for the “truth,” if it is the truth, to come out, as all involved except the adopted cousin are dead. The clueless cousin has a husband, children or grandchildren.
Even in his (as usual) prolix answer, The Ethicist struggles to find any real benefit to the inquirer revealing the secret. Any genetic abnormalities, from which the Clueless Cousin has apparently been spared, would now be detected with modern medical screening and are increasingly unlikely with succeeding generations. So he defaults to the “rule,” encomium, or whatever he thinks it is, that the cousin must have this depressing, disturbing and useless information because “this truth belongs to her.”
Ethics Alarms 