Empathy & Ethics.

Interesting article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100528/sc_livescience/todayscollegestudentslackempathy

Where has empathy gone? The article implies that the media is part of the problem. I hope they include talk radio in that media because regardless the political slant the shows tend to be mean-spirited and pit people against each other rather than encourage honest debate.

As you know I attended a seminar on ethics this week. I wasn't able to sleep during it because they divided the class into small discussion groups. It is pretty hard to sleep in a group of four without being noticed. After thinking about the seminar I couldn't help but relating the lost of empathy with the lost of ethics. One of the statements the main speaker said was that the financial meltdown of a couple of years ago wasn't really a financial breakdown instead it was a breakdown of ethics. My immediate reaction after reading the empathy article was; did the lack of empathy make the transition to the lack of ethics easy? If the financial speculators would have had empathy for their clients or the country would that have tempered their willingness to ignore ethics?

A couple of situations that the main speaker used during the seminar.

First situation. Hurricane destroys a small town. Electricity is out. No clean water anywhere in sight. Its been a couple of weeks without all of life's necessities. You, your wife, and your three children have no water or food, you are close to death. There is a Walmart across the street. You break into it and take enough water and food to feed your family. Ethical? Moral?

Second situation is the same as the first. However, this time on the way out of Walmart with the food and water you take an HD thirty-two inch TV with you. Ethical? Moral?

Should ethics be based on the golden rule? Every religion has a version of it. From the manual they handed out at the seminar:

Buddhism: "Hurt not others with that which pains yourself."

Christianity: "Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them."

Hinduism: "This is the sum of duty, do naught unto others what you would not have them done unto you."

Islam: "No one of you is a believer until he loves for his neighbor what he loves for himself."

Judaism: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire law, all the rest is commentary."

Are ethics and empathy related? Have we lost both? Should ethics be based on the golden rules? In the two situations mentioned above are both unethical, moral, or ethical?

WHO AM I?

Yesterday's answer was Lucretia Rudolph Garfield.

The date of my birth is unknown although some accounts say I was born in 1839. The date and place of my death are unknown. I was born to a slave owner whose daughter has been featured on a previous Who Am I. After his death the slave owner's mother and daughter freed his slaves. The year of freedom was either 1843 or 1851. The women of the plantation that I worked on were said to have been buying members of theirs slaves' families from other owners when they found out they were going to be sold and then giving them their freedom. I remained with the family as a paid servant after they gave me my freedom. My employer sent me too the Quaker School for Negroes in Philadelphia in the late 1850s. After graduating I returned to Virginia and married a free Black man, on April 16, 1861 -- just days before the Civil War began. The ceremony was highly unusual because the church parishioners were primarily white. We settled down just outside Richmond. I continued to work for my former owners. After the war started my employer asked me to help her in the elaborate spying system she had established in the Confederate capitol. I had considerable intelligence, as well as some acting skills. In order to get access to top-secret information, I became a dim-witted, also slightly crazy, but able servant. My employer had a friend take me along to help at functions held by Varina Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. I proved myself well and was eventually taken on full-time, working in the Confederate White House until just before the end of the war. Of course, they assumed I was a slave. With the racial prejudice of the day, the assumption was that slaves were illiterate and not intelligent, and the way slave servants were trained to seem invisible, I was able to glean considerable information simply by doing my job. While serving meals and cleaning up after I overhead conversations about troop strategy and movement between the president and his advisors and military officers. Being literate, I was able to read letters and documents that were left out in the president's private study. I memorized everything word for word. President Davis came to realize there was a leak in the house, but did not suspect me until late in the war. I passed my information to my former employer or a reputable R baker. With his business, both at the bakery itself and while making deliveries, he was able to receive and pass on secrets without suspicion. In his stops at the Davis household, I would greet him at the wagon and talk briefly. Just before the baker died he told his daughter about my activities. She in turn told her nephew who recorded them in 1952. According to the nephew I was the source of the most crucial information available. He wrote:

"...as she was working right in the Davis home and had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel president's desk, she could repeat word for word. Unlike most colored, she could read and write. She made a point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries at the Davis' home to drop information."

At the end of the war, suspicion finally fell on me. I fled in January 1865, but attempted one last act as a Union spy and sympathizer. I tried to unsuccessfully burn down the Confederate Capitol. After the war, the federal government destroyed the records of Southern spy activities, to protect their lives, including mine. I recorded my spying activities in a diary, but family members inadvertently discarded the diary. My family rarely discussed my work -- even among family members -- fearing retaliation from lingering Confederate sympathizers and due to the political and social climate in the South. There is no record my life after the war or of my death. In 1995, the U.S. government honored me for my efforts by inducting me in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. During the ceremony, my contribution was described:

"She certainly succeeded in a highly dangerous mission to the great benefit of the Union effort. She was one of the highest placed and most productive espionage agents of the Civil War. ... [Her information] greatly enhanced the Union's conduct of the war. ... Jefferson Davis never discovered the leak in his household staff, although he knew the Union somehow kept discovering Confederate plans." Who Am I?