A Lack of Empathy

Anonymous

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 00:37

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 href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/761" target="”_blank”">a 2009 blog
post of mine</a> 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 <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/732" target="”_blank”">my blog post</a> 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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Empathy-Natures-Lessons-Society/dp/0307407772…; target="”_blank”">The
Age
of Empathy</a> wrote <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frans-de-waal/sotomayers-empathy-not-fo_b…; target="”_blank”">in
Huffington
Post</a>, "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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/0547247990/" target="”_blank”">How
We
Decide</a>, <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/05/empathy.php" target="”_blank”">wrote in his
Frontal Cortex blog</a>, "the absence of empathy isn't great
jurisprudence: it's psychopathy." 
 
Psychopathy (pronounced sigh-caw'-pa-thee) is a disease that has <a href="http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/psychopath.html">numerous
characteristics</a>. 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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