Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Ethicist” of the New York Times Magazine, doesn’t read Ethics Alarms so he isn’t conversant in two core EA concepts: signature significance, the fact that a single example of conduct can be enough to make a definitive judgment about an individual’s unethical nature, and The Julie Principle, which holds that once you recognize an individual’s flaws, you can accept them and continue the relationship, or use them to decide the individual is too flawed to tolerate, but it is pointless to keep complaining about them.A question from a disillusioned wife this week raised both, and “The Ethicist” acquitted himself well without directly acknowledging either.
“Theresa” revealed that her husband had tossed a banana peel out the passenger’s side window while she was driving on a highway. She protested, emphasizing her objection to littering and his setting a bad example for their 13-year-old in the back seat. He rationalized that the banana peel would “biodegrade”,“ and as if that wasn’t lame enough, defaulted to “I’m an adult, so I’ll do as I want.” After the incident, “Theresa” showed him an article about the dangers of throwing garbage on the street, plus a copy of the Massachusetts law declaring his conduct illegal. Her husband responded with, “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”
“He refuses to acknowledge that he made a mistake or change his behavior,” “The Ethicist’s” inquirer wrote, adding that the deadlock on the issue is making her question her marriage.
At the outset, I have to agree that the episode might make me question the character of someone I had just met—not merely question it, in fact, but perhaps make a confident diagnosis: this guy is an asshole, and the sequence is signature significance. The only feature of the story that possibly rescues it from being signature significance is that it can be broken down into components:
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