2 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT March-April 2007 Gregory E. Kaebnick Editor Joyce A. Griffin Managing Editor Nora Porter Art Director Josephine Johnston Karen J. Maschke Thomas H. Murray Erik Parens Editorial Committee The Hastings Center Report (ISSN 0093-0334 print; ISSN 1552-146X online) is published bimonthly by The Hastings Center, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that addresses fundamental ethical issues in the areas of health, medicine, and the environment as they affect individuals, communities, and societies. For more information on the Center’s interdisciplinary research and education programs, visit its Web site at www.thehastingscenter.org. The Hastings Center Report is sent to Members of The Hastings Center and to library and organizational subscribers. For more information on membership or subscriptions, contact the Circulation Department, The Hastings Center, 21 Malcolm Gordon Road, Garrison, NY 10524; (845) 424-4040. Periodicals postage paid at Garrison, NY 10524 and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Hastings Center, 21 Malcolm Gordon Road, Garrison, NY 10524 Contents copyright © 2007 by The Hastings Center. All rights reserved. LC: 75-64303 Publication no.: 108810 Canada Post Corporation International Publications Mail Number 1175831 THE HASTINGS CENTER VOLUME 37, NO. 2 � MARCH-APRIL 2007 REPORTFROM THE EDITOR The Problem with Trust and Sympathy Christopher Meyers, a philosopher and clinical ethicist at several hospitals, arguesin this issue that ethicists’ goals are “structurally in conflict” with their incentives. The most obvious and important incentive is that the person draws a salary from the hospital. A more subtle “and insidiously influential” incentive is the intangible benefit of “being accepted into the club”—of acquiring the prestige and authority of a physician. These incentives make it extremely difficult for the ethicist to preserve the independence that is vital to the role. Ethicists, asserts Meyers, are no one person’s agent; their task is rather to act “on behalf of doing the right thing.” I wondered, studying Meyers’s paper, if even something more could be said here: is part of what makes the notion of moral independence so elusive that affiliation is so integral to the very structure and point of morality? Meyers compares ethicists to scientists, who serve truth rather than any particular client. This notion of independence is especially compelling for scientists because, in some sense, the very point of science is to get at independent truths—to figure out what “really is” and peel away any confusing social overlay. In contrast, moral values are, at least arguably, nothing but social phenomena, and moral reasoning nothing but a kind of social skill. From any perspective, figuring out what is good or right depends on enculturation in a way that science does not: it requires that one read complex social scenarios, see how they might play out, gauge motives, apply and parse shared understandings, and intervene in human relationships. It is fundamentally a social process, and that makes the urge to depend on the views of trusted people around one very great. If one works in a setting long enough, one is likely to come to trust some of the people one works with and to count them as moral experts of a sort. Also, maybe the scientific method strives for independence in a way that moral deliberation does not. Part of the point of morality is to foster trust and social cohesiveness. Perhaps one could go so far as to say that where good science is competitive, moral deliberation encourages affiliation. Thus, when one becomes part of a community, more than just the crass business of acquiring power in it can encourage one to side with its members. Becoming part of a community almost inevitably leads one to identify with its members and to share their interests. So maybe the notion of acting on behalf of what is right, though useful to a degree, actually obscures some of the issues. It begins to look like trust and sympathy themselves are partly at odds with ethicists’ goals. The...