Randy Cohen’s weekly column for The New York Times, “The Ethicist”, provides a glimpse into the intrinsic beliefs of individuals; beliefs that convey a society’s general perceptions on ethics, values and behaviour. The questions people ask and how they are framed can already say a lot about what they believe to be right or wrong. More importantly, they say a lot about the possibilities of altering behaviour.

After eight years of answering questions about right and wrong, Cohen has developed his own concise definition of ethics- “Ethics is ‘right conduct’,” he says. “It’s about behaving in the proper way. Ethics is not only an individual decision made in a moment of crisis; it is not about what one does in isolation. Ethics is an expression of community values.” So how do people make decisions about ethics?

One of the most common models people use to guide their behaviour and assist them in making decisions is to examine the legalities of the situation. Questions about what people are obliged to do by law are frequent in Cohen’s column, and, he says that there is a tendency to think that what is ethical and what is legal are the same thing. “It’s not entirely foolish to use the law to guide behaviour,” he says. “The law is a society’s way of expressing its values. But beyond an expression of values the law is an expression of power.”

Legal issues, however, do not cover all areas of life. So, what other tools exist to help people make decisions about ethical issues? In his column, Cohen makes reference to a number of philosophical rules of thumb that can help determine the right choice in a given situation; For example, using the ‘golden rule’ of ‘do unto others’, the concept of ‘making a good faith effort’, or the ‘what if everyone were to do it’ test.

Another of his favourite tests for evaluating morality is the ‘cake test’. “One technique for evaluating behaviour is to consider how you would feel if you were the other party in the transaction,” Cohen explains. “This is a style of moral reasoning demonstrated by our mothers when they divide the last piece of cake by having one child cut and the other pick.”

Sadly, the cake test is not widely taught in, for example, business schools. Moreover, Cohen has learned that when it comes to very serious moral transgressions, people do not usually reflect on the tools philosophers have provided to guide decision making. “People don’t make the decision to act ethically or unethically. It involves casually acquiescing to standards, or ‘ordinary behaviour’ in a community. They don’t see it as a decision. Once people can clarify the situation they are in as requiring a moral choice, we’ve won – they have a very good chance of knowing the right answer.”

That said, how can one teach ethics and integrity? According to Cohen, education is perhaps not the most important factor: “If you want to changing human behaviour, which is the point of all this, you do not change people’s character. What shapes people’s behaviour is the shape of the community in which they live, whether that is their family, their school, their corporate culture or their country.”

The more difficult task, therefore, is to create the kind of community where people are inclined to behave well. “People behave the way their neighbours behave,” he says. “If we were hanging out with Attila the Hun, we would probably think looting and pillaging was more part of our normal, everyday activities than we do now. I almost never pillage, have never had the chance to loot.”

One can extrapolate about more typical corruption topics based on questions asked of the Ethicist about everyday life. For example, “A friend’s son was seriously injured in a car accident. Fund-raisers were held, and a significant amount of money was donated to help his family care for him. The family filed a lawsuit in connection with the accident and collected more than $10 million after attorneys’ fees. Sadly, their child died. Some donors have wondered if the family should refund some of the donations? Are they right?”

Cohen answered: “They are. While gifts generally come without strings, here it is the recipient, not the donors, who implicitly defined a condition for these gifts: donations would be used for the care of a child. Now that this is, alas, no longer possible, donors should have their money back if they desire (even if they express no legal claim to it).”

One could ask the same question of donor countries or multilateral development banks who have donated a significant sum of money to a certain country for development purposes. Time passes, they see no significant results, and the country cannot account for the money. Are the donors right to ask for their money back?

Another example comes from a query about the ethicality of doing something illegal when enforcement was spotty: “Since my firm reopened in New Orleans, I’ve been parking illegally in a loading zone. Enforcement is sporadic, so I average only about one $20 ticket a week, cheaper than putting the car in a lot. Friends say it’s unethical to exploit a broken municipal system. I say I harm nobody: there are no businesses open on this block, so nobody to use the loading zone. What do you say?”

Cohen’s answer: “In this particular case, I’m with you. With no businesses on the block, the purpose of the loading zone is obviated, and you do no harm in parking there. But as a general matter, your friends are correct. You should obey the law even when enforcement is spotty and getting caught a bargain. A fine is not a fee for the right to break the law; it is a device for discouraging misconduct.”

This question could equally be applied to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Convention against the Bribery of Foreign Officials. If firms believe the fines they are forced to pay if found guilty of bribery are less than the money they have earned on the contract, then like the parking ticket violator, there is no motivation to adhere to the rules of the convention.

Cohen says that motivation to act ethically is less about negative incentives than about procedures. The establishment of rules and procedures in and of itself is a symbol of management’s values. “The incidence of sexual harassment cases has really dropped in the last 20 years in America,” he says. “This is because nearly every corporation now has very serious procedures in place for what should happen when there are allegations of sexual harassment. You don’t have to rely on the goodwill of your supervisor, companies have specific procedures. It is amazing how successful it has been to simply have this clarity. In the past, this sort of thing was seen as a sort of moral failing- and the person should get sort of a moral education; you have to treat your colleagues with respect, well, that didn’t work very well. But establishing certain procedures makes it very clear that this is conduct that the corporate culture takes very seriously.”

Cohen’s point on procedures typifies his greatest lesson learned from eight years on the job. “I have come to see that my job is not so much to tell people what to do, as to tell people why to do it, he says. “You can tell from the way they construct the questions that they know what the right decision is – they know they shouldn’t kick the dog, but they don’t know why. And I think what they want from me is a logical reasoned argument.”

About The Ethicist

Randy Cohen has been writing “The Ethicist” column for eight years. His background is in writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines ( The New Yorker, Harpers, the Atlantic, Young Love Comics) and for the television programme the Late Night Show with David Letterman. Randy auditioned for the part of the Ethicist by responding to a test question: “You’re at work, and you stop by a colleague’s desk to drop off some papers. You glance at the screen and your name jumps out at you- your colleague is writing an email to your boss blaming the failure of a group project on you. What should you do?”

According to Cohen the ethical answer was relatively simply. Of course, you should not have read the email on your colleague’s screen, but looking when your name is in something, it naturally jumps out at you. The question was so cunning, because it was set up in a way where you yourself were already involved in wrongdoing. “If you saw that email and didn’t read it, it wouldn’t be a sign of strong ethics, but a lack of vitality,” he wrote, “you can’t not read it, but at the same time, you can’t admit that you did”. The correct way of reacting would be to write a pre-emptive email to your boss, he says, never mention that you read the email, but go over the project in detail and that you would never blame anyone. Instead, you suggest positive solutions, and lessons learned. And then walking by your colleague’s desk, you would accidentally spill a cup of coffee on their keyboard.