Kwame Anthony Appiah, the public philosopher and writer, purports to offer his readers what the New York Times presents as “advice on life’s trickiest situations and moral dilemmas.” The questions Appiah fields in his twice-weekly Times column, The Ethicist, are sometimes on topics that that stir deep disagreement. In one column, for instance, an adult woman who had undergone two abortions asked whether she had a moral obligation to inform her pro-life mother about the abortions; Appiah advised that, given the “highly polarizing” nature of the abortion debate, she should evaluate whether the disclosure would bring her closer to her mother or drive her away. “You may decide simply to let this go — and to love what you love about each other,” he concluded. With this sidestep, Appiah declined to offer a straightforward ethical assessment or otherwise provide the reader with a clear answer.
Appiah’s reticence here was perhaps understandable. After all, the moral dilemma presented did not call for an objective assessment of a particular action (such as undergoing an abortion); rather, it hinged on the circumstances of the woman’s strained relationship with her mother and whether, taking into account their differing beliefs, she ought to disclose her decisions. In such a dilemma, the person best positioned to make a prudential judgment about the wisdom and importance of disclosing the abortions to her mother (and perhaps thereby inflaming tensions over a subject on which they profoundly disagree) is probably the woman herself.
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