TRUTH

profileThe Ethics GuyBRUCE WEINSTEIN ’82 IS IN THE BUSINESS OF DOING THE RIGHT THING.Weinstein’s most recent book is Life Principles: Feeling Goodby Doing Good, which sets forth five basic principles to guideone’s ethical decision-making: do no harm, make things better,respect others, be fair, be loving. He is currently working on anethics book for tweens.Your roommate turns in a term paper she downloaded from theInternet as her own work. Do you tell the professor? A dentalhygienist sees substandard work done by her own employer. Doesshe tell the patient, discuss it with the dentist, or say nothing at all?An employee enhances his resume to get a job. He gets the job. Ayear later, should the employee tell the boss what he did? These arejust a few scenarios that Bruce Weinstein ’82,considers as an ethicist.When Weinstein, known popularly as The Ethics Guy (theethicsguy.com),entered Swarthmore, he thought he was headed for medicalschool. But a course in ethics taught by the late Gilmore Stottintrigued him and pointed him in a slightly different direction. Afterreceiving a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University in1989, he taught bioethics for 6 years at the West Virginia UniversitySchool of Medicine.While there, he decided that many of the questions bioethicistswere facing were also applicable to the general public. “I decided tomake the world my classroom,” he said. In 1995, Weinstein leftWVU and set up his own company, Ethics at Work Inc.GEORGE POULOSNow living in New York City, he regularly speaks to audienceswith more than 5,000 professionals in fields ranging from medicineto real estate. He has a syndicated weekly newspaper columnand appears frequently as an ethical analyst on TV news shows,including Good Morning America and The Today Show.Weinstein said the reason to be ethical is because “it is the rightthing to do.” But when he asks his audiences the “why be ethical”question, the answer is often quite different.“People will say ‘so I can sleep at night,’ ‘so I can get intoheaven,’ or ‘so I can look at myself in the mirror.’ People have aself-referential response. People want to know ‘What’s in it forme?’” Weinstein said.“As a leader, I needed to answer that question. The good news isthat all roads lead to nirvana. If you do the right thing, you’re satisfyingyour ethical obligation to other people and benefiting yourself.The flip side is if you take the low road, such as if you’re a corruptCEO, it will come back and hurt you. You’ll risk legal liability, yourreputation may be ruined, and you may be fodder for negative discussionin the media.”Weinstein has edited or written five books, and his syndicatedcolumn “Ask the Ethics Guy” appears on BusinessWeek.com, wherea recent comment drew fire in a way Weinstein hadn’t anticipated.He had given his response to whether an employee should tellthe boss that he padded his resume when he applied for the job.Weinstein said he should tell.“Owning up to one’s mistake shows the moral virtue of courage,”Weinstein said. “I believe the employer would keep the employeebecause he did something that wasn’t easy to do.”But BusinessWeek.com readers disagreed.“I know it was a skewed sample because people tend to write lettersmostly when they’re angry, but, having said that, there are somany people willing to defend the behavior of lying with ‘everybodydoes it,’ and ‘the CEO did it.’ Covering it up is really disturbing. It’swhy we see corporate scandals, and it will continue until businessestake ethics seriously,” he said.Weinstein said he chose to become a populist ethicist because“many of our society’s issues are discussed from political, military,and legal perspectives. But we also need to talk about the ethicalperspective. Ethics often requires more of us than the law does.”Weinstein doesn’t think our world is any worse off than in earliertimes. “As far back as Aristophenes and Plato, there were complaintsabout youth,” Weinstein said. “Human nature hasn’t changedmuch. But it’s not clear to me that from an ethical perspective oursociety is any worse off than 20 years ago. The fact that I’m seeing,in my professional life, a more widespread recognition of theimportance of ethics is evidence to me that we’re not getting worseas a society.”—Audree Pennermarch 2007: 69