Everybody loves Art Caplan, but it’s hard not to get the impression that he’s just phoning it in much of the time. A WaPo reporter breaks down in panicky confusion over what to buy at the grocery store:

I can’t decide what to eat. I don’t mean which recipe to make, or what restaurant to go to. I mean when I go grocery shopping, I’m paralyzed with indecision. Everything, it seems, is either ethically, nutritionally or environmentally incorrect. Guilt is ruining my appetite. . . .

Should I buy the omega-3 eggs that are supposedly good for my heart? But wait, they’re not organic. Maybe I should spring for the $3.50 organic eggs from Horizon, even though I read that the company has gotten so huge, it’s driving out the smaller organic farmers. Perhaps I should get the cage-free eggs from a small farm in Pennsylvania? Or the brown eggs from vegetarian-fed, free-roaming hens? . . .

[C]hoosing what to eat and drink has become hard work. It’s not simply a case of taste or price. Now we have to ask ourselves: Is this good for my health? Have animals suffered? Is it local? Organic? Bad for the planet? Harvested by child workers?

What’s worse, the answers are often contradictory. Should I buy the locally grown lettuce at the farmers market, even if the farmer uses some pesticides? It’s good to support local farmers, but what about pesticides’ link to cancer?

Either she’s never encountered a complicated moral problem before, or she’s just surprised to find that food choices could be one of them. Either way, she’s arriving pretty late to this game. And Caplan, to his credit, points this out:

I asked [Caplan] if he found moral predicaments at the grocery store.

“Oh, absolutely. And it doesn’t even end with the food,” he says. “One of my great moral quandaries comes when the cashier asks, ‘Paper or plastic?’ ” (For the record, he chooses paper.)

Then he goes off the rails.

Caplan believes there’s no need to have “a moral aneurysm” every time we go to the supermarket. Every person, he says, needs to establish a scale of ethical priorities. Is taste most important to you? Cost? The environment? Your health? Animal suffering? Pick one thing that matters most and let that drive your decisions.

For Caplan, No. 1 on his list is whether suffering was involved. “So I want happy chickens, no veal, no foie gras. After that comes environmental impact, and then labor. I have an ethical guide in my head that helps me through the store.”

This is disappointing. It’s controversial, though perhaps defensible, to suggest that people should set their own “ethical priorities”, but much worse that he seems to suggest it doesn’t matter what those priorities should be. “Is taste most important to you?” Huh? I would have thought that taste was the quintessential matter of taste - one of those things that are purely up to personal preference, as distinguished from matters of ethics about which you are understood to have no choice. By setting matters of taste (literally or figuratively) on an ethical plane with, say, suffering, health, or environmental damage, he makes the latter categories - issues on which we normally say people have strong ethical obligations - equally open to preference.

Somehow I suspect Caplan doesn’t really endorse the idea that you are free to set any ordering you like between personal preferences and moral obligations. (In contrast to the right’s confused cries of “ethical relativism” whenever they encounter a moral proposition they don’t agree with, Caplan’s statement above is a rare example of true ethical relativism, one I presume was merely the result of an ill-considered remark.) In fact, as I hinted above, you can make an argument that there is little or no freedom of choice in that matter - that there just is some objective ordering of moral priorities (which would undoubtedly put preferences of taste well toward the bottom of the list) which you are obligated to respect in making your choices, or at least there is some quasi-rigid scheme of moral priorities (a la’ Rawls, for instance) that clearly sets some matters above others no matter how you personally feel about it.

I suspect that some reasonably objective ordering scheme is correct in principle - even if we can’t agree on what it is, or if, in practice, the necessary information to work it out in each case is unobtainable. Even if we recognize certain ethical issues as of equal importance, in the way we think that donating to one charity versus another is a matter of personal preference, we still can’t act as if every issue was of equal importance; “paper or plastic” may be a matter for reasonable moral discretion, but “taste or suffering” surely cannot be.

The division between taste and morality is one we need to retain. Blurring the distinction between freedom of conscience and moral obligation, or, much the same thing, eliminating the classical-liberal public/private distinction, is a deliberate tactic of the right wing, in its drive to make every aspect of private life a moral issue to which they can dictate the only answer. Similarly blurring those distinctions to make every issue a matter of personal preference is hardly a more reassuring strategy. And encouraging the public to take the everyday moral choices they encounter - paper or plastic; free-range or low-cost - less seriously is hardly the role for a very public ethicist.