Q: After I put a deposit on an apartment, I learned that housing groups labeled the owner “New York’s Most Abusive Landlord” for using rough tactics like cutting off water and heat to get rid of rent-controlled tenants. I find these tactics immoral, but I wouldn’t face them: I’d be paying much more for a renovated apartment. Is it ethical to take the place? — Sebastian
A: Your apartment’s history may be ugly, but you are not obliged to reject it on that account.
I admire the reluctance to profit from a landlord’s apparent thuggery. But to forswear this apartment after the previous tenants have been ousted cannot help them or deliver a reproach to the landlord.
It would be different if you signed a lease during a tenants’ action or a broader organized boycott of this landlord. You should not undermine people’s struggle for decent treatment. But once the battle is over, your solitary rebuff would achieve nothing.
There are other approaches. You might, for example, be a vegetarian on moral grounds even if doing so would not affect anyone else’s conduct or save a single animal. But to apply this standard to ordinary commercial transactions demands that we become too pure to live in the world.
And yet there are emotional concerns: Will you enjoy an apartment permeated with the misfortune of its former inhabitants?
Update: Sebastian took the apartment, and the tenants’ association greeted him warmly.
Q: I work at a newspaper. At a screening of a filmed version of a Metropolitan Opera performance, I saw a colleague there to review it. My colleague left at intermission but reviewed it anyway. Should I alert my bosses? — Name Withheld
A: I see where this is going. Your colleague’s review omits what he or she did not linger long enough to see: The lead tenor took a swing at the orchestra conductor, and in the ensuing melee the opera house burned to the ground. Exciting. Operatic.
Your colleague would, of course, be wildly out of line to deceive readers by writing about parts of a performance he did not experience, but is that the case? He might have commented only on the first act, declaring that, disheartened, he left at intermission. Or he might have received a DVD in the press kit and watched the conclusion at home. You must confirm your facts. But if he did review work he didn’t see, talk to your boss.
In civilian life it’s often different, but as a voluntary member of a professional community, you must defend the standards without which a profession cannot function.
Send questions and comments for Randy Cohen to Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111, or ethicist@ .
