Moral philosophers promote the idea of developing a person’s character, the concept that you can teach people to be virtuous.

That’s bunk, according to Randy Cohen, author of the nationally syndicated column “The Ethicist” who appears in Tacoma this weekend.

“It’s not the few bad apples that cause the problem,” Cohen said in an interview with The News Tribune. “It’s the barrel.

“If we want to get people to do the right thing, we should focus on building better neighborhoods. … You can create conditions where people tend to do the right thing and conditions where people do the wrong thing.”

One example: Circumstances and conditions, including lack of oversight, resulted in a small group of U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners at the military’s former Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq.

“Most prisons are not Abu Ghraib,” Cohen said. “We know a lot about how prisons are able to treat people well.”

Cohen will appear at Theatre on the Square on Sunday night in Tacoma to discuss how to create the kind of neighborhoods, schools and businesses where people are likely to behave admirably. He’ll talk about his column that appears in The New York Times Magazine and The News Tribune on Sundays. He’ll answer questions from the audience, including the type of moral dilemmas he examines in his column.

Cohen, 61, has earned five Emmys, three of them for his work writing for seven years at “Late Night with David Letterman.” In his blog, “Moral of the Story: The Ethicist’s Take on the News,” last month, he wrote that after talking with his former “Late Night” colleagues, he determined that Letterman’s sexual relations with staff members were “deeply wounding to his wife and others close to him, but that he did not victimize his paramours: He was Bill Clinton, not Roman Polanski.”

So what makes him qualified to pronounce what’s ethical?

Cohen says that unlike plumbing or medicine, there’s no license required to write about ethics.

SEEKING HELP

When questions turn on technical knowledge, he consults experts, such as medical ethicists or freedom-of-speech lawyers, for their expertise.

What are the effects of one’s actions on other people? Would someone be harmed by the action under contemplation? “If you’re sitting alone at home, you can sin, covet your neighbor’s ox,” Cohen explained. “If you want to be unethical, you have to leave the house and steal the ox.”

It’s a tough call when the dilemma involves a clash between two good intentions – say, whether to give money to a charity or to use it for one’s family.

“I never argue from authority. I have to construct a reasoned case from each thing I assert, and hope to persuade the reader from the argument I construct,” he said. “In the end, it’s not my credentials that should draw people to my column but whether they find it engaging and informative and useful and entertaining.”

Often, readers posing the questions have already made their decision by the time Cohen’s response appears in the column a couple of months later. The week a column will be published, Cohen contacts those readers to make sure he understood their information; if they’ve already made a choice, he includes that in the column.

When he started writing the column 10 years ago, the prospect of people following his advice stirred anxiety. Since then, he’s realized that from the way people ask questions, they already know what’s right. They simply want him to present a reasoned argument as to why it’s right.

“I’ve come to be less anxious about it,” he said. “People seem to completely ignore it. Utopia has not arrived. I’ve embraced my triviality.”

Debby Abe: 253-597-8694

debby.abe@thenewstribune.com

What: An Evening with Randy Cohen

Where: Theatre on the Square, 915 Broadway, Tacoma

When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $29, $39, $49. Available online at www.broadwaycenter.org until two hours before the show. Tickets also available at the theater or box office at 253-591-5894.

More information: Read Cohen’s column in The News Tribune’s SoundLife section on Sundays. His blog, Moral of the Story, is at ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com.