WORK
The Ethicist Column
Appiah's long-running New York Times Magazine column — the weekly engagement with strangers' moral dilemmas that became the empirical benchmark against which GPT-4's ethical reasoning was tested.
Since 2015, Kwame Anthony Appiah has written 'The Ethicist' column for the New York Times Magazine, addressing the moral dilemmas that readers submit — the friend who lied, the colleague who cheated, the inheritance that split a family, the medical decision that divided a couple, the professional choice that implicated conscience. The column exemplifies in practice what Appiah has argued in theory across four decades: that ethical guidance is rooted in specific lives lived in specific circumstances, that moral reasoning cannot be separated from the biographical particularity of both advisor and advice-seeker, and that the work of ethical counsel is a form of cosmopolitan conversation — sustained engagement with the particular claims of particular lives, conducted from a position earned across decades of thought and experience. The column became the empirical benchmark for the Wharton and UNC studies that tested AI's ethical reasoning against Appiah's own — the experiments that made the distinction between output and position urgent in the AI discourse.
