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The "Ethics Guy" tells
why our
choices define the quality of our lives
By Liz Seymore
US Airways Magazine
Youre an insurance broker. An insurance
company offers you a free trip to a very nice resort. There
are no strings attached, but obviously you both know that
the company hopes that the trip will lead to more business
for them. Its tempting, and many of your colleagues have taken
similar trips with no qualms, but youre not so sure. Is it
OK to accept the offer?
No, says Bruce Weinstein, its not.
"Your clients trust you to make recommendations based
on their best interests, not on your loyalty to companies
that have treated you to pricey vacations," he wrote
in answer to that real-life question, which was submitted
to his syndicated weekly newspaper column. "In the long
run, your business will profit if you take the high road and
just say no to these attempts to unduly influence your judgment."
Stay home.
Doctor of philosophy, writer, lecturer,
part-time documentary filmmaker, and full-time Ethics Guy,
Weinstein knows that its not always easy to do the right thing
— or even to know what the right thing is to do. But
that doesnt mean hes ready to let any of us off the hook.
On a day in early February, Weinstein — just back from
the Sundance Film Festival and dressed in a black sweater,
black pants, and comfortable-looking black-suede shoes —
sat in the small living room of his Upper East Side New York
apartment and talked about the fine art of doing right. His
cat Stanley (named for Stanley Kubrick) lay stretched out
on a towel on the windowsill; his other cat, Marty ("after
Martin Scorsese, of course"), settled himself on the
carpet-covered platform of a cat tower in the corner.
"What it all comes down to is
choice," Weinstein said. "Every day we face choices,
we face temptations, we face possibilities, and its up to
us to make the right choice. Often we take the low road because
its easier, or because of self-defeating patterns, but that
doesnt justify it. Im a great believer in everyones capacity
to change."
These may not be the best times for
ethics but they are great times for an Ethics Guy. Weinstein
appears regularly on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and other
networks to give his ethical take on news stories. Knight
Ridder/ Tribune Information Services distributes his weekly
syndicated column "Ask the 'Ethics Guy" to newspapers
around the world. He travels regularly to speak to classes,
businesses, and non-profits. His message is a simple one:
Ethics is not just a matter of doing what is right because
its the right thing to do. In the end, the ethical life is
richer and more rewarding than a life without ethics.
Weinstein traces his interest in ethics
back to a high-school assignment to read Platos Republic.
"Id heard about Plato, but I had no idea it was written
so theatrically," he says. "It reads like a screenplay.
The neat thing about the Republic is it can be read as philosophy,
it can be read as literature, it can be read as politics,
but I was really interested in the moral arguments in there."
He majored in philosophy at Swarthmore College and followed
that with a Ph.D. in medical ethics at Georgetown University.
For six years he taught biomedical ethics to medical, dental,
nursing, and pharmacy students at West Virginia University
Medical School.
In 1999, Weinstein moved to New York
and began to mount a campaign to become the go-to guy on ethics
(he points out that the other high-profile ethics guy — Randy
Cohen, who appears in the New
York Times Magazine and on NPR as The Ethicist — does
not have a professional background in ethics). It wasnt an
easy sell at first. "Television has no shortage of legal
analysts, military analysts, and political analysts, but people
get concerned when they hear "ethics," because theyre
afraid theyre going to hear a point of view grounded in a
particular religion or culture." Not so, says Weinstein.
The lasting and most basic ethical principles are shared by
all major religious and philosophical traditions. Despite
the concerns, Weinstein began getting more and more calls
from television networks. A couple of years ago he pitched
the idea of an ethical advice column to the Knight-Ridder
newspaper chain. Through the weekly column he stays connected
to the daily real-life dilemmas of his readers around the
world, picking up emails on his Blackberry wherever he is.
"Often my best work times come on a plane or a bus, or
20 minutes waiting in an airport," he says.
Weinsteins gentle and humane approach
to ethics has clearly struck a chord. "You can teach
ethics by making people afraid of doing the wrong thing, or
you can teach it by explaining what benefits will follow if
you take ethics seriously," he says. None of us behave
completely ethically all the time. "Everybody tests the
principles of ethics occasionally, and they should,"
says Weinstein. "Its only by testing them that you learn
there may be something to them after all."
When hes not helping readers and viewers
make ethical choices, Weinstein is pursuing his other career
as a documentary filmmaker. "When I was seven I saw the
James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. I fell in love with
the opening title sequence, the blend of beautiful music and
dazzling images that created this amazing world that didnt
exist anyplace else. Even at age seven I thought 'Ive got
to get into this. " While he was teaching in West Virginia,
Weinstein was named a National Fellow by the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation; he used the fellowship to study film at NYU. His
first project after leaving academia was to follow a Chicago
childrens choir as they toured South Africa right after the
end of apartheid. The Ethics Guy and the documentary film
guy often overlap: His current project follows the story of
an ex-Mafia member who is using his past experience in organized
crime to discourage young people from getting into a life
of wrongdoing.
Earlier this year, Weinstein published
a book titled Life Principles:
Feeling Good by Doing Good. He ethically acknowledges
that the principles upon which his book is based draw heavily
on Principles of Biomedical
Ethics, a textbook co-authored by one of his Georgetown
professors. "Principles
of Biomedical Ethics was written by two scholars pretty
much for a scholarly audience, crystallizing centuries of
secular humanist and religious thought," he says. "I
thought that the principles were too important to be relegated
to academia. What I try to do is break it down, make the explication
of the principles fun and applicable to everyday life, and
try to reach as wide an audience as possible."
The ethical life apparently comes
a little harder to some people than to others. "I used
to bring a stack of my books with me to my seminars, but I
discovered that inevitably some of them would walk away,"
he says. "Id say if you need to steal an ethics book
its probably not going to do you any good. On the other hand,
if everyone did the right thing I would definitely have to
find another line of work and I dont know what that would
be."
Below are Weinsteins five fundamental
principles on how to live ethically:
- Do no harm. "What
kind of a world would it be if we couldnt count on other
people to avoid harming us?" Weinstein asks. He adapted
the first principle from the doctors Hippocratic Oath, but
applies it much more widely. "Not only in our deeds,
but in our words we would do well to consider how what we
say and do affects other people, particularly the people
we care most about," he says. " 'Do no harm doesnt
mean only dont hit someone if you feel like hitting them
— it means dont say something nasty if you feel like
saying something nasty. It doesnt help you and it doesnt
help anyone else. 'Do no harm is the basic condition for
having any kind of civilized society or culture or community."
- Make things better. Doing
no harm is important, but its not enough.
"If at the end of your life the most you can say is
'I didnt hurt anyone you havent lived a full ethical life,"
says Weinstein. "As you weigh ethical choices, its
also important to ask 'Does this help anyone? 'Does this
make a positive difference in the world? " Principle
No. 2 comes with a pay-off: "Theres something personally
enriching about helping other people," says Weinstein,
"and of course, when you enrich the lives of others
you enrich your own."
- Respect others. Weinsteins
third life principle is made up of three individual components.
The first is to keep confidences. The second is to tell
the truth. Finally, you should keep your promises. "For
many years I would ask people at the end of my seminars
why a person should be ethical, and the overwhelming response
was some variation of 'So I can look myself in the mirror.
Rarely would I hear someone say, 'Because its the right
thing to do. I began to think that if this is what people
are telling me in Anchorage, Alaska, and Jacksonville, Florida,
and Austin, Texas — if wherever I went Id hear the
same thing, I should be paying attention."
Respect for others helps to keep us connected to other people
and be straight with ourselves. "By honoring our responsibility
to tell the truth, keep our promises, maintain confidentiality,
and remain trustworthy," writes Weinstein in Life Principles,
"we give a gift to all of those with whom we have a
relationship. By enriching others we enrich ourselves."
- Be fair. "Of
all the principles, the principle of justice and fairness
is the most complex and the hardest to get at," says
Weinstein. Theres no one-size-fits-all-situations measure
of fairness. Deciding who gets how much of a scarce commodity
is one kind of justice; deciding whether and how someone
should be punished is another; and deciding how to right
a wrong is yet another kind of justice. "However the
principle is applied, the idea that we ought to be just
or fair to people is something that is common to all cultures
and all traditions," Weinstein explains. "But
what that actually means can vary widely from culture to
culture and even within a culture. Is the death penalty
fair? Is it fair to punish someone for adultery? Who gets
an organ transplant? The important thing is to understand
your own criteria of fairness in any given situation and
apply them evenly."
- Be loving. Weinstein
added this last principle to the four laid out in Principles
of Biomedical Ethics, the main inspiration for his
own book. "Without compassion, the moral life really
wouldnt be complete," he argues. The first four principles
could stand alone, but if we do the right thing only out
of a sense of duty and obligation, something is missing.
"Compassion," he says, "is the bedrock."
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