Sexual Ethics

From "The Ethicist" column in today's New York Times Magazine:

I am a lawyer. During a first date with another lawyer, we had sex, and I wore a condom. Days later, when I came down with a bad fever and couldn’t determine the cause, she revealed that she had genital herpes. A judgeship will soon open up in her county, and she’s a near lock for it. But if I report her lapse of sexual ethics, I doubt that the selection committee will pick her. Should I? — NAME WITHHELD

The sophisticated Randy Cohen, the Times ethics guru, responds that (of course) this "lapse" ought not to be disclosed since "being unscrupulous in bed does not presage being inept on the bench."

If only there were some agreed upon set of qualifications for judicial office, so that one might know that a particular candidate was likely to be "inept" or not. One might have thought that since judges, well, "judge," a function which sometimes involves the exercise of, er, uhmm, "judgment," it might follow that someone with the morals of a feral cat did not have precisely the optimal skill set.

But that's just us.

Of course, only the militantly atheist New York Times could have a regular feature on "ethics" entirely divorced from religion. We're pretty sure that, in that reality-free environment, the touchstone is whether something or someone is nice and, if so, then it's ethical. After all -- in the final analysis, as Mammy Yokum taught us, good is better than evil because it's nicer.