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A Lack of Empathy
Friday, December 3rd, 2010
Robert Wechsler
Many people take a character approach to government ethics. That is,
they see government ethics as a matter of integrity, and ethics training as a
matter of improving an individual's character.
But the aspect of character most important to ethics is not goodness, honesty, or integrity. It is empathy, as defined by President Obama and discussed in a 2009 blog post of mine entitled "Moral Imagination."
In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, "It is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule — not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes."
It's interesting that in the criticism of Obama's use of the word "empathy" with respect to Supreme Court justices (see my blog post on this), many people did discuss what the opposite of "empathy" is, but the idea did not seem to get through to the general public. One reason is that Obama backed off from his earlier definition and said that empathy is a matter of understanding how laws affect the reality of people's lives.
For example, Frans de Waal, author of the book The Age of Empathy wrote in Huffington Post, "That a candidate for the Supreme Court needs empathy, as Obama emphasized, is almost too obvious to pay attention to. Because apart from psychopaths, all humans are endowed with empathy, which is the capacity to be affected by the emotional states of others, and to become part of their situation."
Jonah Lehrer, author of the book How We Decide, wrote in his Frontal Cortex blog, "the absence of empathy isn't great jurisprudence: it's psychopathy."
Psychopathy (pronounced sigh-caw'-pa-thee) is a disease that has numerous characteristics. But the principal characteristics are a lack of empathy and of guilt, the manipulation of others, pathological lying, and a failure to take responsibility for one's actions. Do these characteristics sound familiar?
Remember that, like any mental illness, psychopathy is a continuum, with serial killers at the far end, and at the closer end many otherwise ordinary people with some symptoms or lighter symptoms.
If one responsibly deals with conflicts of interest by using one's moral imagination and if moral imagination depends on empathy, then many people who do not responsibly deal with their conflicts of interest are likely to be people at least partially lacking in empathy. That is, those suffering from psychopathy.
I do not mean to let ethics code offenders off the hook. But it is important to understand why certain individuals so baldly ignore ethics laws, feel no guilt for having broken them, and deny and lie about what they did. It helps no one to simply say these individuals are lacking in character or integrity. Integrity is wholeness, and these individuals are not whole. They are missing important emotions. Their minds do not work as others' do. They cannot appreciate how people feel about what they do.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
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But the aspect of character most important to ethics is not goodness, honesty, or integrity. It is empathy, as defined by President Obama and discussed in a 2009 blog post of mine entitled "Moral Imagination."
In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, "It is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule — not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes."
It's interesting that in the criticism of Obama's use of the word "empathy" with respect to Supreme Court justices (see my blog post on this), many people did discuss what the opposite of "empathy" is, but the idea did not seem to get through to the general public. One reason is that Obama backed off from his earlier definition and said that empathy is a matter of understanding how laws affect the reality of people's lives.
For example, Frans de Waal, author of the book The Age of Empathy wrote in Huffington Post, "That a candidate for the Supreme Court needs empathy, as Obama emphasized, is almost too obvious to pay attention to. Because apart from psychopaths, all humans are endowed with empathy, which is the capacity to be affected by the emotional states of others, and to become part of their situation."
Jonah Lehrer, author of the book How We Decide, wrote in his Frontal Cortex blog, "the absence of empathy isn't great jurisprudence: it's psychopathy."
Psychopathy (pronounced sigh-caw'-pa-thee) is a disease that has numerous characteristics. But the principal characteristics are a lack of empathy and of guilt, the manipulation of others, pathological lying, and a failure to take responsibility for one's actions. Do these characteristics sound familiar?
Remember that, like any mental illness, psychopathy is a continuum, with serial killers at the far end, and at the closer end many otherwise ordinary people with some symptoms or lighter symptoms.
If one responsibly deals with conflicts of interest by using one's moral imagination and if moral imagination depends on empathy, then many people who do not responsibly deal with their conflicts of interest are likely to be people at least partially lacking in empathy. That is, those suffering from psychopathy.
I do not mean to let ethics code offenders off the hook. But it is important to understand why certain individuals so baldly ignore ethics laws, feel no guilt for having broken them, and deny and lie about what they did. It helps no one to simply say these individuals are lacking in character or integrity. Integrity is wholeness, and these individuals are not whole. They are missing important emotions. Their minds do not work as others' do. They cannot appreciate how people feel about what they do.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
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Comments
donmc says:
Fri, 2010-12-03 12:09
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It is lack of empathy that I see in the activities of those "less ethical" characters in government ethics that leads me to believe that there is some truth to the adage that the most wealthy of us have gotten to where they are through a less worthy route than they might have...
There are some examples that prove me wrong - where a significant discovery or technological creation is the basis for huge wealth and success - the success of Google comes to mind, and they continue to genuinely "do good" despite their net corporate weight ("500 lb Gorilla") being so huge at this point.
But for those who build a business and run it ruthlessly with the sole intent to amass wealth at all costs, there will be an overall deficit when it comes to empathy. While I hate generalities, and I have already admitted the flaw in paragraph #2 above, I think it is worth observing that the really vast companies, with public ownership through shares, and therefore strong encouragement from investors to ONLY consider the financial outcomes as important in general demonstrate a childish level of selfishness, along with a complete lack of compunction or empathy for the human detritus left in its wake.
The best analysis I have seen on this line of thought is the documentary based on the book by Joel Bakan: "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation it is an excellent overview of the problems that have arisen that can be directly attributed to the changes in the law regarding corporations - assigning them the rights of a citizen. And it demonstrates my point regarding empathy very well.
All is not well in the world, and it will only get worse as these mega corporations continue to make decisions based solely on corporate profit.