Between the lines of right and wrong

Randy Cohen ponders 'The Good, the Bad and the Difference'

Randy Cohen, "The Ethicist" from The New York Times Magazine.

(CNN) -- What does it take to be an ethicist? Years of study of the Torah, the Gospels, the Quran, and the Bhagavad-Gita? A firm grasp of the U.S. penal code? An ability to trace your ancestry to Solomon, Rousseau and Oliver Wendell Holmes?

If you're Randy Cohen, it helps to have spent years as a writer for "Late Night with David Letterman" and "TV Nation."

Cohen is the man who writes the weekly "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. A number of his columns, as well as some additional questions, answers and second opinions, have been gathered in the new book "The Good, the Bad and the Difference" (Doubleday).

He's as surprised as anybody that he got the job.

"I conjecture that there were four to six others who were invited to audition," he says of the process.

At the time, Cohen was fresh off a stint as head writer for "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" and writing the weekly news quiz for Slate.com.

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"The Times wouldn't say who the others were, but I got the impression that they were academics with [perhaps] a background in philosophy," he says.

Each candidate was given the same three letters to respond to. Cohen surmises that his writing ability gave him the edge.

"Maybe [the other candidates] weren't able to write for a general audience," he says. "I do have an analytical turn of mind, but I can also write a funny sentence."

From monkey-cam to morals

That Cohen, 53, should have even established a career as a comedy writer -- or an ethics columnist -- must have seemed unlikely many years ago.

He studied music in graduate school -- "I wrote some of the ugliest music you've ever heard," he says -- before "disentangling" himself from the life of a composer by becoming a humorist and newspaper writer in New York.

The Letterman gig came about, more or less, in the same accidental way as the ethics column did 15 years later. He was asked to join the staff in 1984, "like some rookie lucky enough to be drafted [by a championship squad]," he says.

Cohen spent seven years with David Letterman's late-night show when it was on NBC in the 1980s.

Writers were given lots of leeway. "It was run like an apprenticeship," Cohen recalls. Writers would learn the basics from the other writers, but very quickly you were on your own.

The pointed lack of direction created a hothouse atmosphere that produced some of the best comedy of the 1980s, with writers free to pursue the wackiest of ideas: elevator races, an audience-participation show in which the opening credits were samples from a 1966 Sears catalog, Letterman in an Alka-Seltzer suit.

Cohen's own contributions included the "monkey-cam," a camera mounted on top of a monkey, and the "360-degree rotation show," in which the picture made a complete turn from the beginning of the hour to the end. He won three Emmy Awards during his seven-year run with the program.

The Letterman show also served as worthwhile training for an ethics column, Cohen writes in "The Good, the Bad and the Difference."

The show was based on the thesis that "your childhood has been bought and sold for profit, and as a consequence you grew up in a world of witless pop-culture junk," he writes.

"The show was built around a sense of right and wrong, and its mission was to articulate the difference between the two (sometimes through the use of glamorous actresses and trained circus animals)."

Creating 'a framework to be good'

Writing the ethics column is about a half-time job, says Cohen. He receives about 300 letters and e-mail messages a week.

He makes no apologies for his left-wing slant, which is at odds with several other writers on ethics, notably author and CNN contributor William Bennett.

"Our lives are intimately bound up with everybody else's," he says.

For example, he says, if one encounters a homeless person on the street, an ethical decision is what to do about the issue -- and for Cohen that means taking steps to improve society so the streets are not full of homeless people, not putting the homeless out of mind or dismissing them as useless members of society.

Michael Broyde, a rabbi and law school professor at Atlanta's Emory University who occasionally teaches courses on ethics, enjoys Cohen's column but takes issue with his consistency.

Broyde divides ethics into intuitive ethics -- a response on a gut level that can vary from question to question -- and systemic ethics, an attempt to build a structure so there are rules that govern conduct.

"In my view, systemic ethics is more valuable," he says, "because it allows a person to look at your rules and figure out the right answer."

Cohen's column, he maintains, isn't necessarily about ethics. "It's [about] handing you my moral dilemmas and handing back my opinion."

But Cohen says there is a larger idea at work: The idea of trying to be good (and do good) in a world where the gray areas can be overwhelming.

"Those who write tend to be genuinely interested in how to be good," he says. "And when you give people a framework to be good, they will try."

That, he says, is a "cause for enormous hope," even if he realizes his mail is coming from people who aren't exactly a cross-section of America.

And what of Randy Cohen? Is there anything he's done that wasn't exactly ethical?

He pleads the Fifth Amendment.

"An account of my bad behavior I leave to my enemies," he says. "Part of being an adult is being filled with remorse."