The essence of caring is empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand, be sensitive to, and care about the feelings of others. Caring and empathy support each other and enable a person to put herself in the position of another. This is essential to ethical decision making.
Let’s assume that on the morning of an important group meeting, your child comes down with a temperature of 103 degrees. You call the group leader and say that you can’t make it to the meeting. Instead, you suggest that the meeting be taped and you will listen to the discussions later that day and telephone the leader with any questions. The leader reacts angrily, stating that you are not living up to your responsibilities. Assuming that your behavior is not part of a pattern and you have been honest with the leader up to now, you would have a right to be upset with the leader, who seems uncaring. In the real world, emergencies do occur, and placing your child’s health and welfare above all else should make sense in this situation to a person of rational thought. You also acted diligently by offering to listen to the discussions and, if necessary, follow up with the leader.
Putting yourself in the place of another is sometimes difficult to do because the cir- cumstances are unique to the situation. For example, what would you do if a member of your team walked into a meeting all bleary-eyed? You might ignore it, or you might ask that person if everything is all right. If you do and are informed that the person was up all night with a crying baby, then you might say something like, “If there’s anything I can do to lighten the load for you today, just say the word.”
A person who can empathize seems to know just what to say to make the other person feel better about circumstances. On the other hand, if you have never been married and have not had children, you might not be able to understand the feelings of a mother who has just spent the night trying to comfort a screaming child.
Citizenship Josephson points out that “citizenship includes civic virtues and duties that prescribe how we ought to behave as part of a community.” 43 An important part of good citizenship is to obey the laws, be informed about the issues, volunteer in your community, and vote in elections. President Barack Obama has called for citizens to engage in some kind of public service to benefit society as a whole.
Reputation
It might be said that judgments made about one’s character contribute toward how another party views that person’s reputation. In other words, what is the estimation in which a person is commonly held, whether favorable or not? The reputation of a CPA is critical to
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Chapter 1 Ethical Reasoning: Implications for Accounting 17
a client’s trusting that CPA to perform services competently and maintain the confidential- ity of client information (except for whistleblowing instances). One builds “reputational capital” through favorable actions informed by ethical behavior.
All too often in politics and government, a well-respected leader becomes involved in behavior that, once disclosed, tears down a reputation earned over many years of service. The example of former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards shows how quickly one’s reputation can be destroyed—in this case because of the disclosure of an extramarital affair that Edwards had with a 42-year-old campaign employee, Rielle Hunter, that Edwards covered up.
In 2006, Edwards’s political action committee (PAC) paid Hunter’s video production firm $100,000 for work. Then the committee paid another $14,086 on April 1, 2007. The Edwards camp said the latter payment from the PAC was in exchange for 100 hours of unused videotape Hunter shot. The same day, the Edwards presidential campaign had injected $14,034.61 into the PAC for a “furniture purchase,” according to federal election records.
Edwards, a U.S. senator representing North Carolina from 1998 until his vice presiden- tial bid in 2004, acknowledged in May 2009 that federal investigators were looking into how he used campaign funds. Edwards was accused of soliciting nearly $1 million from wealthy backers to finance a cover-up of his illicit affair during his 2008 bid for the White House.
Edwards admitted to ABC News 44 in an interview with Bob Woodruff in August 2009 that he repeatedly lied about having an affair with Hunter. Edwards strenuously denied being involved in paying the woman hush money or fathering her newborn child, admit- ted the affair was a mistake in the interview, and said: “Two years ago, I made a very serious mistake, a mistake that I am responsible for and no one else. In 2006, I told Elizabeth [his wife] about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for His forgiveness. And we have kept this within our family since that time.” Edwards said he told his entire family about the affair after it ended in 2006, and that his wife Elizabeth was “furious” but that their marriage would survive. On January 21, 2010, he also finally admitted to fathering Hunter’s child, Quinn (and since the girl was born in 2008, that indicates pretty clearly that Edwards’s statement that the affair ended in 2006 was less than truthful).
On May 31, 2012, a jury found him not guilty on one of six counts in the campaign- finance trial and deadlocked on the remaining charges; the Department of Justice decided not to retry him on those charges. On the courthouse steps, Edwards acknowledged his moral shortcomings.
Edwards violated virtually every tenet of ethical behavior and destroyed his reputa- tion. He lied about the affair and attempted to cover it up, including allegations that he fathered Hunter’s baby. He violated the trust of the public and lied after telling his family about the affair in 2006. He even had the audacity to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. One has to wonder what it says about Edwards’s ethics that he was willing to run for president of the United States while hiding the knowledge of his affair, without considering what might happen if he had won the Democratic nomination in 2008, and then the affair became public knowledge during the general election campaign. His behavior is the ultimate example of ethical blindness and the pursuit of one’s ow