P E O P L E F O R T H E - - - - (The following is a request from Friend of McSweeney's (F.O.M.) and irrepressible bon vivant Randy Cohen. Please do what you can. Every little bit helps. -- Ed.) Dear McSweeney's Reader, I'm writing an ethics column for the NY Times magazine, responding to readers' letters of which there have been few. I'd like to invite you to send me a brief scenario of baffling ethical complexity, richly nuanced, and tangled with mixed motives and mitigating circumstances; it should be a true, non-fiction, real life ethical adventure. Rest assured there's no pay involved, so you needn't worry about being corrupted. And letters that run in the magazine are signed only with initials and a city, so your ordinary life will not be disrupted by fame. Sound good? I hope so. -- Randy Cohen Three illustrative examples: "When my pal ordered a Coors at lunch the other day, I read him the riot act: you can't drink that; they're treacherous right wing fanatics. He countered that an evil of McCarthyism was denying someone a livelihood because of his beliefs. If it was wrong for Jack Warner to fire a movie actor for being a red, isn't equally wrong to shun Coors for its non-brewery politics?" 'I was on the subway when I saw a frustrated mother slap her child for crying. She didn't hit him hard enough to endanger his life, but the scene suggested something equally scary: an eternity of whacks, verbal abuse and humiliation. I was afraid to say something lest I make the mother even angrier - at the child. Should I have?' "When the handyman in my building lost his job recently, I felt bad -- not that he was especially handy, but he was friendly and reliable, and it seemed that he was forced out over a personality clash. So when I got a call from a landlord who was considering hiring "Freddy" as a super, I gave him a bigger thumbs up than he perhaps deserved. Was I right?"
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