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Is Setting Up an Offshore IT Help Desk Ethical?
theodp writes "Except for a few odd jobs,' wrote an advice seeker to The Ethicist (NYT, reg. may be required), 'I had been out of work for nine months when I was offered a job setting up an [IT] offshore help desk. Would it be ethical to accept the offer?' Randy Cohen, who pens The Ethicist column for the Times, not only advised the job seeker that it was indeed okay to help co-workers lose their jobs, but also seemed to suggest that it would be unethical for him not to offshore the jobs, saying: 'Some people feel we have a greater ethical duty to those closest to us — our neighbors — but in an era of global trade and travel, that is a recipe for tribalism and its attendant ills.' The job seeker, who noted his father's auto-industry job was outsourced, chose to ignore Cohen's ethics advice — as well as his own wife's — and declined the job out of principle. He continues to seek work. Comments?"
One of my pet peeves since Randy Cohen started the column is that he's calling himself an ethicist when he really isn't. It's like calling yourself a doctor or lawyer when you're not, and giving people medical or legal advice that gets them into trouble.
It's part of the old newspaper mindset, "A good reporter can cover X even if he doesn't know anything about it, he'll just pick it up when he goes along," when X is a country where he doesn't speak the language, technology, politics, the drug war, health care, etc.
There actually is such a thing as an ethicist. I'm most familiar with medical ethicists, who are often employed by hospitals and academic medical centers. I've taken courses and gone to lectures on medical ethics, and I learned a few important non-obvious things.
An ethicist isn't like a doctor or rabbi who tells you what's right (according to God). The job of an ethicist (at least a medical ethicist) is to get the facts, figure out the logic of the situation, clarify the problem for you, and let you make your own decision. They also have to point out to you that different people would have different values and opinions, and you have to decide for yourself.
For example, back in the 1950s, when a pregnant unmarried woman went to a doctor, depending on who she went to, the doctor would tell her (1) you have to deliver the child and give it up for adoption or (2) You have to get an abortion so you can continue with your education/career. Later on, some doctors came up with the innovative idea that you should lay out the facts and options, and let the woman make her own decision what she wanted to do.
Today, medical ethicists help people decide a lot of Terry Schiavo-type questions about when a patient is hopeless enough to let the patient die, or whether to take a dangerous, unpleasant treatment like cancer chemotherapy when there's a very low chance it will do any good.
(There are corrupt ethicists, too http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/pharma-buys-a-conscience.html.)
The job of an ethicist is to clarify ideas
But Randy Cohen was answering ethical questions usually on the basis of nothing more than his own personal opinion or gut feeling. Up to the point where I stopped reading his column, I never saw a thoughtful consideration of the different viewpoints and options. Cohen just delivered his own opinion, as if he had a direct line to God.
What really annoyed me about Cohen was that he was taking a field with a lot of good, thoughtful logical and even scientific analysis behind it (for example, doctors did studies of how patients felt a year after deciding to let relatives die; for example, doctors recorded conversations between doctors and patients about fatal diseases and found out that the patients didn't usually appreciate the seriousness of their condition) and treating it as if it were just a matter of opinion, and entertainment, and his opinion was better than yours. It's like applying creationism to ethics. He's just a liberal version of those conservative Christians (or extremists of every religion) who think that they have all the answers and everybody should do what they say because they have a direct line to God. It's scientific ignorance applied to ethics.