"Part of me thinks that I will always be somewhat disappointed if what ends up becoming one of the most important relationships in my life is with another white person."

Says some unnamed man writing in to the NYT ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah. Headline: "As a White Man, Can I Date Women of Color to Advance My Antiracism?"

I haven't read to the end yet, but I've seen many hostile references to this column. Are they hostile to the letter-writer or to the ethicist? I don't know, but I became hostile to the letter writer when I got to the sentence quoted above. 

First, he's a man in bits and pieces: "Part of me... somewhat disappointed ... one of the most important..." I was so disgusted I had to restore myself by listening to "All or Nothing at All" by Frank Sinatra.

"As a lesbian, I cringe when I hear straight women refer to their platonic friends as 'girlfriends.'"

"This usage feels as if it diminishes the significance of the term within the lesbian community. Lesbians use 'friend' to mean a platonic friend and 'girlfriend' to mean a romantic partner. It feels like an erasure of lesbians (and other queer identities) when straight women use 'our' term. I’m not saying that they are intending to be homophobic or harmful, but the impact is anti-L.G.B.T.Q.+.... Given the evolving landscape of language and identity, I wonder: Would it be ethically sound for me to ask people to use the term 'friend' instead?"

That's a letter to the NYT "Ethicist" advice columnist (Kwame Anthony Appiah).  I haven't read the answer yet.

My responses, in the order they occurred to me:

1. This was once one of the arguments for same-sex marriage — a desire to use the honored terms "husband" and "wife" to refer to the most-treasured relationship. That always had this other side, even when marriage was restricted to male-female couples: You should get married if you want the rest of the world to stand in awe of the vast profundity of your commitment to your lover.

2. It's not really a matter of ethics. It's a matter of language usage. And you ought to hesitate to use your feelings about your self-expression to impose on how other people speak, especially when they are using the language that they've lived with and there's no connection to any ill will toward you or anyone who deserves special consideration. Why would you want to push people around like that?

3. It's better as a discussion topic than a request. Don't say: I'd like to ask you to refrain from using the word "girlfriend" to refer to women you're not having sex with. Start a conversation, like: You know, every time you call one of your friends your "girlfriend," I picture the 2 of you having sex, and then I have to remember that's probably not what you meant, but you keep doing it, so I thought I should confess, that's how it sounds to me — and my girlfriend.

"I have never met a nonbinary person who thinks that they/them pronouns are somehow exclusive to nonbinary or trans people."

"They are a way to opt out of the gender binary in third-person reference, and people may choose to do that for many reasons—gender-based, political, philosophical, even religious. One uses the pronouns someone requests because it is the courteous thing to do. It does not stop being the courteous thing to do because one disagrees with the person's reason for requesting them (at least so long as the request is made in good faith rather than as political trolling)."

Says a commenter to the NYT Ethicist column, "My Relative Isn’t Trans or Nonbinary But Wants to Use ‘They/Them’ Pronouns. The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on allyship and forms of solidarity" (NYT).

The Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, took a different position: "Using pronouns properly is a matter of not misgendering people. It isn’t part of a general policy of calling people whatever they want to be called.... [Y]our relative evidently identifies as cisgender and is motivated simply by allyship.... As the N.A.A.C.P. activist Rachel Dolezal notoriously failed to grasp, solidarity with a group does not grant you membership within it. Many will find the notion that you support people by appropriating their markers of identity to be passing strange."

Breadcrumbing.

I'm learning a new buzzword in "My Girlfriend Said She Loved Me. Should I Say It Back Even if I’m Not Sure?/The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether it’s OK to profess love if you’re uncertain you feel it" (NYT).

[I]f she has a vision of a shared future that doesn’t resonate with you... exaggerating your feelings in order to preserve the status quo would amount to “breadcrumbing”: leading her on, and preventing her from moving along with her life. The prototype breadcrumber is the manipulative cad who just wants to keep all options open on a Friday night. More typical breadcrumbers, I suspect, are driven not by cynicism but by uncertainty, and by a desire to avoid conflict....

Breadcrumbs. I tend to think of Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs to mark a path that leads back out of the forest. But breadcrumbs fail as path markers because the birds eat them. But there's also the idea of feeding a person mere crumbs. Isn't that usually seen from the point of view of the person offered the crumbs? You're just giving me crumbs! I don't think I've seen it from the perspective of the person hoping to get what they want by only giving crumbs. So I don't think this is a good buzzword — not unless it's used by the person who's rejecting the offer of crumbs.

Googling, I see that it is, in fact, a well-established term for manipulating someone. Why are people letting themselves be manipulated by metaphorical crumbs? I'm blaming the victim here.

"My brother, who is 12 years my senior, witnessed my mother repeatedly slapping infant me, not stopping til my father restrained her."

"He told me some 30 years later, with visible guilt. I was appreciative. I had always felt fearful and alienated by my mother from an early age, but without knowing about that incident, thought it was due to some defect in my own character. Truth is a disinfectant, even if it hurts, initially."

That's the highest-rated comment on a NYT advice column, "My Sibling Was Abused as a Baby. Should I Share What I Saw? The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on the disclosure of a horrific event in a family’s past."

The columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, concludes "To insist on disclosure when the knowledge would only cause long-term distress would be acting on that old maxim fiat justitia, ruat caelum — let there be justice, though the heavens fall. That, I fear, would be a kind of moral fanaticism."

There's a Wikipedia article on fiat justitia, ruat caelum. I'll just quote some of the famous examples of the use of the Latin phrase, which The Ethicist used to warn against doing something for the sake of justice. Is that the way it always goes, or is it often — more often? — used to mean put justice first and let the chips fall where they may?

"'If equal affection cannot be,' W.H. Auden wrote, 'let the more loving one be me.'"

"In the romantic quest to find a person with whom to share a life, though, we really do seek someone who will fully reciprocate our feelings. We’re warned, accordingly, not to press ourselves on someone who, in the old formula, is 'just not that into you.' Friendships are different; they come in a variety of intensities. Romantic love, if you’ll indulge the caricature, has a toggle switch; friendships come with a dimmer switch. Some friendships have the 'one soul in two bodies' intensity that Montaigne wrote about. Other friendships involve vague good will and an actual conversation every other year. You seldom see each other, but you have a blast when you do. Is there any real friendship between you two?"

So begins an answer from the NYT "ethicist," Kwame Anthony Appiah, answering a question from a person who "pretend[s] to like" someone who considers him a friend. He sees this person as unpleasant and depressed but continues to get together with him, seemingly out of pity for him. 

Here's the Montaigne essay, "Of Friendship." 

"I struggle... with what I think of as duplicitousness: She actively restricts who she tells about her pro-life views..."

"... because she fears it will hurt her advancement prospects and could end friendships. She hopes people will see her as a good person and not judge her first on her anti-abortion views. I cannot decide if this is lying. And while I disagree with her views, it is the potential lying that is most questionable to me. Maybe it’s like being queer and choosing to stay in the closet, but there’s the issue of what is a choice and what is inherent. Is it right for her to withhold the truth, or even lie, to protect herself, for the sake of her reputation and friendships?"

From a question to the NYT Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, in "Is It OK That My Co-Worker Keeps Her Anti-Abortion Views on the Down Low? The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on withholding the truth when it may hurt you professionally."

Appiah runs with the sexuality analogy, "the closeted employee in a homophobic workplace":

Concealing your sexuality is consistent with self-respect if it’s motivated not by shame but by prudence. Nor are our deepest convictions exactly volitional: Could you choose to see abortion as wrong?

Here's another analogy: religion. What if you know your colleague believes nonbelievers in her religion are going to Hell? Is she unethical not to let her coworkers know that's what she thinks of them? To state the obvious: This subject matter is not appropriate for the workplace! It's certainly not wrong to keep quiet about it. The difficult question would be what if she believed ethics required her to disclose.

"In the past, I would simply have shut down inappropriate discussions, but I’m no longer legally allowed to do so....

"My question, then, is whether it’s ethical to continue to teach material I know will expose students to bigoted, racist speech from their classmates, with whom they will then be expected to maintain a collegial working relationship. In a nutshell, if teaching the poet and activist Audre Lorde means forcing Black, queer and female students to endure racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments from their classmates, is it still ethical to teach Audre Lorde?"

A question to the NYT "Ethicist," Kwame Anthony Appiah, in "How Can I Teach When I’m Not Allowed to Shut Down Trolls?/The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on how to navigate new state laws restricting classroom discussions."

The NYT ethicist — Kwame Anthony Appiah — comes out in favor of cultural appropriation.

The column begins with a letter from an art therapist who had hospital patients go on "a guided mindfulness journey to find their spirit animals." This involved teaching them about Native American cultures and having them draw "their animals" on a totem pole. One patient questioned the activity and used the criticism "cultural appropriation."

I think it's an awful exercise, for many reasons. I don't know what has to happen to you to make you a patient on the receiving end of such "therapy," but if I'd been in that situation, if I had anything like the mind I have now, I'd have refused to participate. It's an imposition of ersatz religion. It's fake and sappy, and it appropriates the sincere religion of others and turns it into a childish art project. 

The ethicist began by questioning whether it is cultural appropriation when there's only a "hazy" connection to a culture. Speaking of religion, he makes a food analogy:

"I am a white woman living in an overwhelmingly white, low-crime neighborhood. My homeowners’ association pays off-duty members of the local Police Department to patrol the neighborhood..."

"... even though there is broad agreement among Black community leaders that the department has a race problem. I have become increasingly uncomfortable paying for this patrol. I want everyone in my neighborhood, regardless of what they look like or whether they live here or are just passing through, to be safe. If I don’t want to give money (beyond my tax dollars) to this Police Department, can I decline to pay that portion of my homeowners’ dues?"

So writes a lady in Missouri to the NYT "Ethicist" columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah.

I think we all know the answer to the question, and Appiah has many sentences, but 3 of them give the answer that must be given: 

You chose to buy a house in a neighborhood with a homeowners’ association, which is, in effect, a hyperlocal government. You have a voice in it — a voice that can be amplified by suasion — but so do your neighbors. You can’t simply withdraw from it or renegotiate its terms by yourself.

Another answer, prominent in the comments over there, is: MOVE! 

But what's the point in that? The woman doesn't like what's being done, but it's not being done to her. If she leaves, she'll have no voice at all, and it's even less likely that the change in behavior she wants will occur. 

And yet she does continue to enjoy the extra crime control her neighborhood has bought for itself. Does she need to move to give up that benefit — move somewhere more out of control, put her personal safety on the line? Or is it enough that she has put her distaste for her own privilege into words and gotten those words published in The New York Times?