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MAY 2005

The Ethics Guy: Doing Well
By Doing Good

By Jacob M. Appel, J.D.

Conventional wisdom argues that ethical decision-making is exceedingly difficult—but according to Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D, better known as “The Ethics Guy,” it is actually quite easy. “Most of the time we know what the right thing to do is,” he argues. “We know not to cheat, to lie, to take what doesn’t belong to us. We know we should return the ten dollar bill the clerk gives us by mistake. We can already tell the high road from the low road—it’s just a matter of which path we follow.” Weinstein has made a career out of urging people to choose the high road.

“It turns out that when we take the high road, we benefit ourselves professionally and personally as well,” explains the Georgetown-trained bioethicist. “Not always in the short run, of course, but in the long run. All you have to do is look at the business people who chose the low road—Kenneth Kay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow, the executives from Adelphia, WorldCom, Martha Stewart. When people act unethically on the basis of short-term self-interest, they lose. When they behave ethically, they come out ahead in the end.”

This positive, self-enhancing message is the wisdom that Weinstein brings to businesses, schools, and non-profit organizations across the nation. It is also the subject of his forthcoming book, Life Principles: Feeling Good by Doing Good, which describes the five ethical precepts that Weinstein believes are common to all cultures and religious traditions. Yet most people know Dr. Weinstein primarily as the voice of moral insight on CNN’s “Ask the Ethics Guy” and in the Knight Ridder/Tribune newspapers. Here, he answers questions from the public and offers his insight into the issues of the day.

Weinstein’s stated mission is to bring ethics to ordinary people. He distinguishes his role from that of the nation’s other ethics personality, Randy Cohen at the New York Times. “Randy Cohen is the ethicist. He speaks to a limited, high-brow audience. I wanted to be ‘The Ethics Guy’ because I wanted to speak to the rest of the world.” He compares his methods to those of Oprah Winfrey: He wants to present important, complex ideas in a way that enables mass audiences to understand and appreciate them.
Our society’s most pressing moral shortcoming, Weinstein argues, is a pervasive unwillingness to confront the wrongdoing of others. “Think about the ethical scandals of the last few years,” says Weinstein. “For every Andrew Fastow or Jeffrey Skilling, there were a lot of other people who knew something was amiss and did nothing.” This indifference, he argues, is ethically unacceptable. “Edmund Burke warned us that ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’” Weinstein believes that too many good men and women are still doing nothing. “You don’t have to live your life like Mother Teresa,” he adds. “But you do have an obligation to respond to wrongful conduct. How you respond, of course, is a more difficult question.”

Yet Weinstein believes he has human nature on his side. When he speaks throughout the country, he makes a point of asking business professionals why they behave ethically, and he says the overwhelming majority provide self-referential answers: “Otherwise I couldn’t look myself in the mirror in the morning,” “Because if I didn’t, I couldn’t live with myself,” etc. In other words, people want to do right. What “The Ethics Guy” does is remind them that by doing right, they will also maximize their own personal welfare.

How did Dr. Weinstein become “The Ethics Guy”? Through ten years of hard work, he admits. I was teaching college, he says, and at some point it struck me: “Why not make the world my classroom?” Over the following decade, he built up a substantial national following. He has written for and/or been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor and Journal of the American Medical Association. In addition to his CNN duties, he has appeared as an ethics analyst on such shows as ABC TV’s “Good Morning America,” and the Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor.” Dr. Weinstein is currently a W.K. Kellogg National Fellow and lives in New York. 
“The Ethics Guy” is as down-to-earth as his title sounds. Despite his thriving business, Weinstein urges people interested in having him speak to contact him directly. “Give them my personal phone number,” he says. So here it is: 212-706-3832.#
Jacob Appel, a graduate of Harvard Law School, teaches ethics at Brown.

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