About three weeks ago Randy Cohen, the Sunday New York Times columnist who guides the morally perplexed in a feature called “The Ethicist”, told a supplicant that there was nothing unethical about downloading a pirated e-book version of a Stephen King novel so that he would not have to lug the heavy hardcover around on a journey.

Cohen’s grounds for blessing the customer’s patronage of the pirate site were that the legitimate e-book version was not yet available, and besides, the customer had paid for the hardcover and was therefore entitled to help himself to whatever e-book was at hand, which in this case happened to be a stolen one.

Though we think of ourselves as judicious we reacted to Cohen’s advice with unwonted intemperance. We were almost unanimously supported by a host of indignant people, many of them authors who had no need of an ethics counselor to distinguish between right and wrong. However, one author, John Scalzi, took exception and defended The Ethicist. Scalzi’s rationale goes like this: “You bought the book once and I got paid once; after that if you get the book in some other format for your own personal use, and I don’t get paid a second time, eh, that’s life.”

We’ve had three weeks to review all the comments and reflect on the position put forth by the Cohenim and Scalzistas in the hope of finding some redeeming values that we overlooked in our initial hotheaded reaction. We’re sorry to report that we have found nothing to alter our sense that their views are pernicious and stupid. (Oops! There we go being intemperate again.  There must be something about apologists for piracy that brings out the mean spirit in us.)

Our feelings about all this were reinforced by an eloquent comment submitted by Tony Burton, a writer and publisher of Wolfmont Press. As we’re not content to let this issue disappear from our front page we’re printing it in full below with Mr. Burton’s permission.

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My first thought is, if this is an ethicist speaking, then the blind truly are leading the blind.

Situational ethics. It’s OK to do something wrong in certain situations. So, it’s OK to speed way over the posted limit if… what? If you are late for an appointment? If you are fleeing from a raving lunatic? If you have to catch a plane? Breaking the law, breaking the established rules, just because it makes life more convenient for you is unethical. As someone else noted, just because I have purchased a ticket to see a movie does not make it legal or ethical for me to secretly videotape the movie while I am in the theater.

As to the comment that “you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability,” what malarkey. Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps the level of acceptability of “the Ethicist” is so low that just about anything meets it, as long as apparent and immediate harm are not seen. It’s not unethical, then, to throw a single candy wrapper out the window. And if everyone who eats a Snickers bar thinks that way, the landscape will be plastered with wrappers. It is an insidious way of thinking, that “it does no apparent harm, or so little harm, so if it is convenient for me it must be OK even if it is illegal.”

It’s OK to steal a little bit. It’s OK to tell just one racist or homophobic joke, every once in a while. It’s OK to view child pornography in the privacy of your own home because, hey, you didn’t pay for it… just managed to find it on a file-sharing network and after all, it’s not YOU who coerced that child into doing those things, and even if you hadn’t downloaded it, the child would already have been molested anyway, right?

Yes, I’m being extreme. I’m being extreme because it’s too easy to accept unethical behavior when you candy-coat it. Call it what it is: dishonest, immoral, illegal, and UNETHICAL. That anyone intelligent is able to rationalize it into something else is somewhat frightening, because it is so easy to move from this sort of “harmless” theft to something worse, and every time you succeed in convincing yourself that you are OK, that you are in the right, it just makes it that much easier to do something more heinous. And that someone in such a position, writing for the NYT where so many thousands of people can use his words to justify their own unethical behaviors… it is reprehensible.