City Ethics
Breaking the oxymoron: "City Ethics"

The Basis of Human (and Government) Success

Robert Wechsler
Conflicts
It's always nice to know that your discipline is at the heart of what it means to be human. In Tuesday's New York Times Science Section, Nicholas Wade wrote:

    Biologists have little hesitation in linking humans’ success to their sociality. The ability to cooperate, to make individuals subordinate their strong sense of self-interest to the needs of the group, lies at the root of human achievement.

    “Humans are not special because of their big brains,” says Kim Hill, a social anthropologist at Arizona State University. “That’s not the reason we can build rocket ships — no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing the information.”

    The two principal traits that underlie the human evolutionary success, in Dr. Hill’s view, are the unusual ability of nonrelatives to cooperate — in almost all other species, only closely related individuals will help each other — and social learning, the ability to copy and learn from what others are doing. [emphasis mine]

Right there we have two principal aspects of government ethics:  subordinating self-interest to the public interest, and going beyond nepotism to work with any qualified individual.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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