Ethics and Insights with Dr. Paul Root Wolpe and Ryan Millsap

Ryan Millsap, Chairman & CEO of Atlanta-based Blackhall Studios, is one of today’s top entertainment executives! With a vision for Blackhall that’s ambitious, energizing and boundless, Millsap is blazing a trail through the heart of the South – and setting his sights on the future of entertainment. Listen and learn as Ryan Millsap journeys through the myriad industries, people and landscapes that traverse the complex and dynamic world of film production.

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Ryan: I'm Ryan Millsap, chairman and CEO of Blackhall Studios, and this is the Blackhall Studios Podcast. Nestled in East Atlanta, Blackhall began its journey in 2014, and since then, we’ve welcomed top entertainment production clients such as Disney, Sony, Warner Brothers, Universal, Lionsgate, HBO, Paramount, and others. And I'm excited and grateful to work with these fantastic professionals.

Moving into 2020, I was thinking about my project to expand the studio overseas into the UK, and about how I might utilize this podcast to express my personal values as a businessman and entrepreneur. With the onset of COVID-19, like you, my world changed — and changed, and changed again. Shutting down the studio for three months was not part of my plan in 2020. And now, reopening the studio is exciting, but has huge challenges. Here, my friends, is where being an entrepreneur is the most impactful. I like new ideas. I want to solve problems. I want to create the best environment for my staff and our clients. And I'm doing just that.

You're going to hear a lot about this incredible year we're having on this podcast — from a cultural revolution, to an international healthcare crisis, to an unwieldy political scene, the world has never been more frightening or more exciting. I can't wait to see the movies that come our way because of it. Thank you for joining me; for listening. I'm a fan of yours, and I'm grateful that you're a fan of mine. There's a lot more to come with the Blackhall Studios Podcast.

On this podcast, I get to talk to one of the finest leaders in ethics in the country today. Dr. Paul Root Wolpe is the director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, and is known in academic circles as the Raymond F. Schinazi Distinguished Research Chair in Jewish Bioethics. Coming from UPenn, where he worked under the famous bioethicist Dr. Zeke Emanuel, Wolpe arrived in Atlanta at Emory University in 2008, where he took the Center for Ethics and grew it into an essential and integral hub of programs, curriculum, and leadership. Spending 15 years as a senior bioethicist for NASA, Wolpe sits on the editorial boards of over 15 international bioethics journals, and is well known as a futurist in assessing and analyzing social dynamics.

He's a busy man, and we’ve just scratched the surface of some fascinating elements of the unpredictable, ever-changing and evolving year that is 2020. Listen up to my arresting conversation with Dr. Paul Root Wolpe of Emory University.

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Ryan: Welcome to the Blackhall Podcast. Today we are fortunate to have Dr. Paul Root Wolpe from Emory University joining us. He's an ethicist — and what a time to be exploring the notion of human ethics. Dr. Root Wolpe, welcome.

Paul: Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here.

Ryan: So, it’s a fascinating time to be exploring the right and wrong of human life. I know you have expertise in race relations, as well as in space exploration. Where do you want to start? Do you want to start with race relations or space exploration?

Paul: Wow. Those are the two, huh? I mean, what I've been spending most of my time on recently is COVID. Then that switched to race relations as things exploded in the country. But I'm happy to start there.

Ryan: Well, let's start with COVID and how that all relates. Actually, just tell us: what has been your 90-day journey in the world of ethics?

Paul: So, when COVID first started, those of us in the bioethics world — which is one of the hats I wear — began to have a discussion around the predictions that there was a possible shortage of medical care, in a number of different dimensions. So many of us spent quite a bit of time writing policies for our institutions. I helped write the one for Emory on what would happen if we ran short of ICU beds; how we would triage; how we would allocate ventilators, if we came to a shortage. Luckily, that hasn't happened in this country, but it still could in the second wave, and in what's happening now.

We had to think very carefully through what kinds of criteria we should use to decide — if we're out of ventilators, and there are people who need them, or we have one left and someone needs it, how do we decide who gets it? That grew into a conversation around who is being impacted by COVID, and the recognition that black and brown people and people in disenfranchised communities were being disproportionately affected by COVID; that the elderly were being disproportionately affected. How could we as ethicists — or me, as a rare social scientist in ethics — think about how we deliver healthcare in our country such that these vulnerable populations seem to be so profoundly hurt by a pandemic like this?

Ryan: Well, walk us through some of the ethical arguments. Give us one idea as to how an ethicist starts to parse this out and explain how doctors should act in these kinds of situations.

Paul: Well, we first started with this question, as I said, of allocation of resources — because that's what our institutions were asking of us. I should mention that I'm currently president of the National Association of Bioethics Program Directors. So I helped lead a conversation nationally as we all were grappling with this in multiple institutions. And, in fact, we ended up publishing a paper that compared institutions. What we found was that different people thought about this differently.

Clearly, one of the first criteria is: can you benefit from a ventilator, do you have a good chance of recovering, and how great is your need? So, there are these very solid criteria of medical necessity. But when you looked a little deeper, even those became problematic. And I'll give you an example. One of the measures that is used very often in medicine is something called SOFA. It stands for the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment. And it's a general measure of how good you're doing. It looks at all kinds of measures: metabolic measures, immune measures, how your kidneys are functioning, your liver and all that. And it's all put into one score.

So, the first thing they said was, someone who has a better SOFA score should be privileged over someone who has a less good SOFA score, under the assumption that that person would benefit more from a ventilator, or be more likely to recover, and go on. But then the disability community came in and said, “Wait a second. We start with lower SOFA scores, because we have chronic conditions that might affect some of these functions. So, isn't using even an objective measure like SOFA scores discriminatory against people with disabilities?

So, even starting with what many people thought was square one was problematic. Then you got into more sophisticated questions. Now let's imagine we have two people with the same medical need and the same possibility of benefit. What other criteria should we use? Well, some places said, “Let's use age.” But even that's difficult. What do we mean by that? Do we privilege someone who's 44 over someone who's 45? Or are we talking about life stages? Someone who is a young adult should get it over someone who's elderly, simply because they have more life stages in front of them? Some places specifically forbid using age as a criteria, while others mandate it.

Then there is the question of healthcare workers. Everything else being equal — we have one ventilator, and two people who need it, who are of equal medical status. But one is a healthcare worker. Should we privilege a healthcare worker? After all, they're out there on the frontlines, working; they’re putting themselves at risk. And, in addition, they're someone who we want to get back to work, so that they can help other people. But then, other people start saying, “Wait — it isn't just healthcare workers who are putting themselves at risk. The people stocking our grocery shelves, and other frontline workers — perhaps they are equally worthy of an exception.”

There are others. Those are just some examples. But these are the kinds of questions that we grappled with; that we argued over; that we worked with our institutions to try to decide. And different institutions — by the way, different states, because there are a number of states that have statewide policies — came up with different solutions to those problems.

Ryan: So walk us through one of the states. You don't even have to name the state, necessarily; if you want to, you could. Walk us through an actual solution to that kind of a triage dilemma, and what people actually decided would be the criteria to decide who got a ventilator. I mean, thank God we haven't reached that place, I don't believe, in the United States. But I know that's been a big concern. So, there are now protocols in place, correct?

Paul: Exactly right. Almost every institution has one now. And, as I say, they're different. But a typical one would say something like, “First, you start with an objective score.” By the way, almost all of these — not all of them, but almost all of them — say the people who make this decision are a separate committee that looks at these objectively. They exclude anybody who's actually treating patients, because you don't want that conflict of interest. You don't want me promoting my patient. And there are opportunities to take nuances and complicating issues into account.

So, one policy might say, “First, look at the SOFA score.” And if there's enough of a significant difference — it can't just be a marginal difference between them — you choose the person with the greater likelihood to benefit. And then, if that isn't sufficient enough, or if people are too close together, you move to other criteria. One might take age as an important criteria; life stages. A young adult might get it over someone who's middle aged, or who's elderly. Another criteria that some places use is healthcare. Healthcare workers now, at this point, can come in. And if you are a frontline healthcare worker — and not just, by the way, someone who works with patients directly. But if you're the person that cleans COVID patients’ rooms, you're putting yourself at risk. So you also have privilege there.

Then, explicitly, no other criteria is considered to be acceptable. At that point, if everyone is still equal, it's random. People use a lottery system to see who gets the ventilators. People have tried to come up with criteria. It's very difficult to compensate for structural injustices, so it's very difficult to say, “And then, at this point, if you are of a disenfranchised community, you get it over someone from the majority community,” because defining that, and determining who that is, is almost impossible. So, nobody uses that kind of criteria — though everybody recognizes that those are people particularly at risk and particularly vulnerable. You often also have a disconnect between what we recognize as structural inequities, and the ability to actually compensate for them in specific cases like COVID triage.

Ryan: Do you feel like lottery, at the end of the day, is intellectually satisfying for an ethicist?

Paul: You know, a lot of people say it should be a lottery from the beginning; that all of these other things are in some way biased — as I mentioned, even the SOFA score. So they say the only really unbiased way is lottery. It used to be ‘first come, first served,’ but then everyone recognized that the first people to get there are often the most privileged. Adjust in terms of their transportation abilities; never mind anything else. There are some ethicists who argue that nothing but a lottery is ethical. So I don't think that a lottery is ethically unsatisfying. I think it's emotionally unsatisfying to a lot of people. But there are ethicists who believe that it is actually the fairest way to allocate any scarce resource.

Ryan: Do you think that there is going to be a growth in private healthcare situations, or means by which people can avoid a lottery?

Paul: Well, I don't think so — only because a lottery never happened. I think if we had had a massive lottery in this country, that might have been something that developed. But, as you mentioned, we haven't gotten to the point where we've had to use almost any of these triage measures. The solution to all of this, by the way, is not to come up with better and better triage measures, but to come up with adequate resources for healthcare. If we had enough ventilators, we wouldn't have to use any of this. If you had enough ICU beds, we wouldn't have to use any of this.

Some of that is unavoidable. You can't always have enough ICU beds for a massive pandemic. That would be maintaining thousands and thousands of beds, empty, for years and years and years. But you certainly can have enough ventilators warehoused. You certainly can have enough masks and PPE — another thing we ran short of. And, most importantly, you can plan the pandemic better — like most other countries did in the Western world — through early testing and early preventative measures. And then you don't have to worry about these kinds of things. We handled it all very poorly here, from pre-planning all the way through the actual pandemic itself. And we had plans in place. The CDC had developed a great plan. There were other plans that we had. And when push came to shove, they weren't followed — not only on a national level, but on the state level as well, in many states.

Ryan: Do you attribute that to a cultural problem or a leadership problem, or is it both?

Paul: I think it's both. I think it's definitely both. But I think leadership can overcome the cultural problem, if it's coordinated enough and strong enough. This cultural problem existed in other countries, too. But strong leadership brought people through it. There is and was ample evidence, from all over the world, that early strong preventative measures, along with testing, can not just flatten the curve, but actually reverse it.

The United States and South Korea both had their first COVID patient identified on January 20th. And the difference in the trajectories is remarkable. By the end of March, South Korea had tested 400,000 citizens. The United States, which has three times the population, had tested 40,000 citizens. Because of their immediate strong testing, South Korea identified the specific regions and areas where it was flaring up, and they could put in preventative measures just in those areas — so they never closed down their entire economy. They never closed down all of their institutions. They targeted those places with outbreaks. They stopped the pandemic there. And now life has been — for a couple of months, almost — back to normal in South Korea.

We did just the opposite. We didn't test; we didn't put in preventative measures. And now we have one third of the cases in the world. So that's just a perfect example of what strong leadership and quick action could have done with this pandemic.

Ryan: What have you observed about American culture in this pandemic?

Paul: You know, it reflects something interesting. If you think back to other times when this country was divided — think back to the 60s and early 70s, for example — the country was divided, but not polarized. Those are two different things. The conversations we were having back in the 70s were strong, and people had very strong opinions about them. But there was real conversation across the aisle. There was real discussion between factions. There was compromise. We were divided, but not polarized.

We now live in a time when we are divided and polarized. And what that polarization means is that it's almost impossible to have reasonable conversations across differences. And because of that, every action becomes symbolic. If it's an action on your side, it's symbolic on the other side of everything they oppose — even if the action makes all the sense in the world. Polarization leads to the kinds of reactions that make controlling a pandemic extremely difficult, because this country has to be unified on action. That's why, if we had strong leadership that could bridge the divide, we would have been in a lot better of a situation than we were — though I do recognize it is very difficult to bridge that divide right now, and I don't know where the leadership is right now that can do that.

Ryan: The thing that I've been exploring, observationally, is what role American culture has played in our inability, or just not natural inclination, to conform to the necessities of a pandemic — and how much we blame on leadership. I'm not convinced that any leader could control the American spirit, which just seems to be contrary to the conformity required to fight a pandemic.

Paul: I agree with you. That's why I said I'm not sure I see any leader that can do that right now. But I don't think it is the basic American spirit. I think 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when that spirit was still here, we could have done it. I think it is this historical moment. But I also think a really far-sighted and clever leader could have controlled this pandemic without having to fight that spirit. Because if we put into place — the way South Korea did — testing of areas of outbreak, and then controlled those areas, we would not necessarily have had to put this kind of blanket shutting down of institutions into effect all across the country. We could have done it regionally, and in very targeted ways, and then we could have directed federal aid at those targets instead of having to spread it throughout the country. And we might have been able to control this in the way many other countries did, without having to fight the battle of the polarized American spirit right now.

But we didn't. And now we do have to fight that battle. I think what's going to happen is that this virus is going to slowly continue to spread. It's going to begin to infect those places that, up until now, have been pretty free of the virus. And I think some of these pockets of opposition that have been able to operate so strongly — in part because they've been relatively unaffected by the virus; and we're seeing this already — are slowly going to find the virus infiltrating their communities. And then it will be interesting to see what their response is.

Ryan: I agree with that. Do you believe that there was enough testing available early on that we could have implemented that program in a more systematic way? Or was there a fundamental failure of infrastructure relative to testing? I don't know that answer. Do you know that answer?

Paul: It was both. We certainly didn't have the testing ready, but we could have ramped up and gotten it ready very quickly. We also could have used the same sources that some of our sister countries did. But testing was considered to be unnecessary by the federal government, despite the fact that all of their advisors from the CDC — especially Fauci, but many others also — were trying desperately to get them to institute mass testing. But they refused.

Ryan: They refused. Do you know, philosophically, what that was about? Was that a philosophical decision, or was that a resources decision? What drove that ethically?

Paul: I wish I knew. I wish I knew what drives a lot of the current political decisions that are getting made at the top level of our government. Many of them defy ethical logic, and seem to be driven entirely by politics. And politics has its own logic. Ethics really isn't what drives those kinds of decisions.

Ryan: Let's take one step back, because one of the things I think is always interesting is to explore what makes people interested in the things they do. My question for you is, can you trace some of your own psychology that led you into a world of ethics and a career in ethics?

Paul: That's a really interesting question. When people ask me why I became an ethicist, I tell them stories — and very often, I tell two people two different stories. Not because they're not both true, but because I think it's many factors in a life that lead to this. And all of them are, to some degree, true.

So let me start by telling you what I think ethics is, which is different than the way it's defined by most of my peers — probably in part because they're philosophers, and people in religious studies, and, those kinds of disciplines, and I'm a social scientist. I define ethics simply as, “how we define, express, and assess our values in the world.” Ethics is about values, and it's about how we negotiate through a world in which every decision we make, even relatively trivial ones, have some value set that promotes them or inspires them — even if we don't realize what the values are. Even if they're implicit rather than explicit.

So, if you're brought up in a way that you talk about those kinds of things — where ethics and values are an important part of the conversation you have in life; where you think about your behavior and how it impacts you and others; and then you are driven by some sense of positive impact on the world — then I think that ethics becomes part of the way in which you see the world, whether you go into it professionally or not. My father was a clergyman, so I think that had something to do with it. He was strongly cultural and ethical in the way in which he talked about the world and sermonized. So that was inspired in me very young. I had a religious upbringing, so I studied these questions, even as a child.

That's one story of how I got to where I am. I could tell others, but I do think that that early training was impactful. And I'll tell you another interesting story about that; an example. And that is a book written by a colleague of mine, David Blumenthal, at Emory — where he looked at why it was that non-Jews hid Jews in the Second World War, in the Holocaust, at great risk to themselves. Why did they do that? The interesting thing was, they couldn't explain it. Their answers were always things like, “Well, that's what you do. I mean, how could you let someone else be persecuted? How could you let them go to their death?” Or, “That's the way I was brought up. You reach out and help people.”

Those aren't really explanations. Those are deep-set values that you express because they're part of who you are, and the way you define the world. So I think that might be the best explanation that I have. Why I decided to go into it professionally might be a little bit different, but I think that's why it always interested me.

Ryan: What kind of a pastor was your father?

Paul: He was a rabbi. Two of my brothers are rabbis, and my daughter's a rabbi. So it's kind of like the family business.

Ryan: What's it like, being a rabbi? How do you think it's different than being a Protestant pastor? Or do you think it's very similar?

Paul: Well, that's interesting. I think in some ways it's similar, and in some ways it's different. When I was in graduate school, I went through graduate school with two other fellow students, one of whose fathers was a methodist minister, and one of whose fathers was actually the head of Billy Graham's South American Crusade. We talked a lot about this question as PKs — preacher's kids — as they called us.

We had some things in common much more than we had with people of our own religious backgrounds who didn't have clergy as parents, especially congregational clergy. You grow up as the child of thousands of people who see you as their clergyman's child; as their child, too, in some sense. So that's a common experience. But I also think these traditions have their own unique contributions and unique background.

If you look, for example, at my tradition — at the Jewish tradition — the Talmud, which encodes Judaism's laws and ways of thinking, is an ancient document, and the first document in human history that records all dissenting views. Most other ancient documents just say what the winners said; what you're supposed to do. But the Talmud is an argument, and it's an argument between people with different views of what the right answer is. All of those views are recorded — and all of them, interestingly, are seen as equally important and valid things to talk about and discuss. Sometimes what had been a minority position in a different time and place is elevated to a majority position.

Because of that — if you take something like bioethics — the Talmud has been talking about bioethical issues for almost a couple thousand years; 1500-1600 years. And so these questions have been percolating and incubating in Jewish thought for many, many, many years. And that's part of the reason why I think there's a lot of Jewish contribution to these questions when we talk about them. Each tradition has its own unique contribution to make to these, and they're all a little different from each other.

Ryan: Why do you think that the Jewish community, in recent times has leaned towards the Democratic Party and more what are considered right now liberal notions socially? I've always thought that to be a fascinating combination.

Paul: Yeah. I think it is, because I think it’s for a few reasons. Speaking first, sort of with a religious hat on, there is a profound preoccupation in Judaism with the idea of justice. I can give you textual reasons for that, and historical reasons for that. The idea of treating people equally across all walks of life is a fundamental idea in Judaism. And fairness is an idea that underlies the liberal sensibility.

I also think it's because of our historical experience. If you look at the Holocaust, and you look at persecution in Europe, it was done by people who shared a set of values. And I don't mean this in a pejorative way at all. But, in terms of their outlook, it was closer to what we consider to be a conservative outlook than a liberal outlook. And Jews were the victims of that. It is why we have traditionally allied with African-Americans in this country, and why someone like Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish leader, marched hand in hand with Martin Luther King, who called him ‘my rabbi.’ It's because we have common experiences of oppression and persecution that align with each other.

On the other hand, there is this great fealty to Israel as a country. And I think part of the shift of a minority of Jews — but still a significant number — to a more conservative perspective has been around the sense that Jews have of protectiveness around Israel. So there is that tension in the Jewish community; that very strong tension around those two issues. And that is a constant conversation in my community.

Ryan: Why do you think there isn't a dialogue — and maybe there is, inside the Jewish community, that doesn't exist inside the American intellectual community in a robust way. Why do you think there isn't a discussion about some sort of blended political agenda that would allow for a deep sense of justice and protection of the minority, and economic conservatism — the way that you might find being propagated from the Jewish finance establishment on Wall Street — combined with some sort of protection of Israel, if that's what people desire? I mean, help me understand how the Talmudic tradition of conversation is helping to find an integrative solution on the political side — because maybe the Jewish community is who could lead us out of this terrible bipolarization of politics.

Paul: So, that's a very complicated question. First, I want us to be careful — your use, I think, without any intention, of the ‘Jewish financial community’ perpetuates a stereotype about Jews as being in control of Wall Street and finances. And Jews are a small minority of Wall Street. But that being said, your question is a really interesting one, because Jews believe that they are part of that conversation. And Jews have that conversation internally all the time.

The polarization, or the division, exists in the Jewish community, too. We have that conversation in the broader community. There are a lot of people who identify themselves, for example, as economic conservatives and social liberals, or fiscal conservatives and social liberals. George Bush, Jr. characterized himself that way. And I also think that there's a there's a large swath of America that, for a very long time — I mean, over the last, I don't know, ten years or so, it has become more and more polarized — but it used to be that most Americans were in the moderate middle. I still think more are there than the media gives credit for.

If you think about it, how do you swing from Barack Obama to Donald Trump? I mean, that's an extraordinary swing of the American public, and that's more complicated than ‘liberal and conservative.’ That has to do with a deeper set of cultural strains in this country around all kinds of issues of change, and fairness, and questions of where we should put our energies, and involvement in foreign affairs, and foreign wars. I mean, there's there is a lot packed into that. I'm not sure there has been nearly enough political analysis of that swing — because hidden in that swing is real truth about our culture that I'm not sure we've really unpacked yet and that we really understand.

When you pull people out of their sort of political rhetoric; when you get talking to them individually; when you have someone with a more liberal perspective talking to someone with a more conservative perspective over a symbolic beer, so to speak, you see those barriers break down. But what our political system has done, especially by being a two-party system — after all, we're really the only major two-party system in the democratic world. Most others are parliamentary, which means you can have nuances and interim parties that encapsulate that. But it's difficult to do that in a two-party system, where they have to kind of crystallize around some platform. That platform has to differentiate them from the other party, and also mobilize their most active members who are going to raise the money and do the work, which tend to be extreme members. So we've set up a system that, at its worst, really encourages that kind of difficult polarization. And when you get leadership like we have now, that feeds that, then it gets even worse.

Ryan: So, where do we go? Let’s say I was elected as an important official. Let's use an example. I get elected as the governor of Georgia. And I say to you, “Professor, help me realign our society with more unity and ethical goodness.”

Paul: I think the first thing you do is, you go out of your way to avoid language — sort of key buzzwords; symbolic phrases and ways of thinking — that talk to one side over the other. And you have to really convince both sides that your desire is to do what's in the best interest of the country. Lincoln appointed people from opposing parties to his cabinet. What would it look like to actually have a leader in our country that drew from both sides of the aisle in a way that really looked at compromise? Could they break the back of the polarization of the country, or could they do it in Georgia?

I don't know. Georgia, they might. Georgia is turning much purpler than it used to be. And I think most people want a reasonable, sort of evenhanded approach to government. So I think it's possible. It takes a really skilled political leader. I don't think we've had that kind of leader recently in this country. And I'm not sure where that person is going to come from. But I believe that conversation is possible, because I've had it myself with people who started out with very different opinions than I have.

Ryan: Yeah. I sit in a really fascinating place in Georgia, in that I've considered myself a Republican, but I'm a Republican from California, and a California Republican in Georgia has a lot in common with a Democrat in Georgia — and with Republicans. So I feel very at home on both sides of the aisle in Georgia. And I feel free to have conversations that maybe I wouldn't feel as free to have if I had grown up in Georgia and had a fundamental Southern upbringing that might lead me to ask less questions, or be more uncomfortable by talking about particular things — but I don't.

I'm from an origin that brings a West Coast conservatism — and yet a West Coast social, maybe, openness — that is that is different. And I've found that my friends, both conservative and liberal, are very open to having complicated, nuanced conversations. I think they're searching for that, really, right now. And there's just not a public forum for it. So my hope is that we'll get that kind of leadership.

Paul: I agree.

Ryan: A question I love to pose to philosophers, particularly ethicists, is... I've spent a lot of time in my life exploring this notion; this kind of virtue-ethical notion that, somehow, goodness might lead to wisdom. That somehow, goodness might make my mind function at a higher level. Do you think there's any credence to a correspondence between human virtue and human intellectual ability?

Paul: Yes. I think it goes partially in the other direction, in that those who spend time contemplating the good often are those who think in an intellectual way. That doesn't mean they necessarily behave that way. Some people behave in ways that we think of as good because it's just part of who they are, and how they've convinced themselves to be as human beings, and aren't that interested in really intellectually analyzing it.

And, by the way, I know ethicists and other people who intellectually analyze the good, who, when it comes right down to it, are not good people, particularly. So I'm not sure what that correlation really is — because the key, to me is not analyzing virtue and the good in an intellectual way. I mean, I do that as an academic, and I have friends that do it, but that's not enough. You can write a wonderful book on the virtue and the good, while still behaving badly. The question is: how do you look at virtue, and being a virtuous person, in an introspective way? And that can be an intellectual way, but it can also be other kinds of ways. It can be through religious introspection. It can be through meditation, and on the more mystical side. There are a lot of ways to do that. And intellectual ways is only one way. But it has to be turned inward. It has to be a self-examination. It has to be a really honest willingness to open oneself up to that.

We're seeing that right now, I think, in the arguments over race — because whites in this country are being challenged to do that around their assumptions around race, which are often taken for granted. “Because I'm a good person, I must not be racist” is not enough anymore — because the kinds of unexamined assumptions, and because of the social structures that we live in without recognizing them. After all, I am a sociologist — and the thing that sociology teaches you from the beginning is that we live embedded in social structures that we don't question or really understand. When you begin to examine them and unpack them, you see embedded in them advantages to the majority race and disadvantages to minority races that we don't recognize, clearly, without a deep and profound self-examination.

That's what whites are being challenged to do right now, and that's what each of us has to do individually around our own lives. And you can do it intellectually, or you can do it other ways. But you have to do it to be a virtuous person and to live a life of integrity.

Ryan: What do you think? I mean, I think I've been doing a lot of soul searching around these questions. What things are just, quote, ‘just cultural,’ and what things are actually racially biased? And what obligations — like, human obligations — someone who grows up in a particular culture has to alter that culture to meet the needs of the minority in that culture. What are some of the things you've been thinking about around those questions? Because I think there's a lot of challenge in the world right now.

Paul: There is. Social structure always embeds power. It's one of the things it does. It's one of the things it's always done. If you look at the early tribal cultures, there were all kinds of power relations built into the way in which those societies were structured. And we’re really good at finding those because they're so different from ours. We're much less able to see the power structures embedded in our own society. But they're there, and we take them for granted. We don't think of them as power structures, because we live in them, and we wear them like a comfortable suit.

When we're actually challenged to do them, very often we get angry — by we, I mean white people right now — because we are benefiting from them. A challenge to them might mean that we lose our benefit. Second of all, we don't see them. The fact that I can walk down the street and not worry about being harassed by the police is not something I think about. The fact that my black friends have been harassed in their lifetime many, many times, and I never have, is not something I think about because it's never happened to me, so it isn't in my consciousness. I don't worry about it when I walk out of my house.

So, when you have unconscious biases like that, it takes an act of will to recognize them, and then to deal with them. But it is everybody's responsibility, I believe. I mean, this is one of the things that our black friends are telling us. We help perpetuate that set of injustices through our unwillingness to confront them in an honest and real way.

Ryan: You know, I had an interesting life experience years ago in Long Beach, California. It was a Saturday morning, and I got dressed to go play basketball. I drove to a pretty rough part of town, because there was better basketball in this rough part of town. I played basketball. And after the game, I got in my car, and I was leaving. I was driving by myself, and I got pulled over — because, unbeknownst to me, my tags on my car had expired.

The police officers — one was a black woman, and one was a white male police officer. They proceeded to get on their bullhorn and tell me to step out of the car, put my hands above my head, move over to the curb, and sit on my knees with my hands behind my head. I had no idea why I'd been pulled over. They then stood over me — one of them with their hand on their gun; they didn't pull the gun, but with their hand on the gun in a very technical fashion — while the other one called in all this stuff. Again, they didn't tell me what was going on. And this went on for about ten minutes

Finally, they came over and told me what was going on. They asked me about the car. They were trying to see if it was stolen; yadda yadda. Eventually, they gave me a ticket for having expired tags and sent me on my way. But it was an experience that I had never had before — where the police felt threatening, and where I felt very vulnerable to police protocol that I believe was police protocol in that particular part of town. That was a more crime-ridden part of town. I can't imagine the police pulling me over in the part of town I was living in for expired tags and having that same experience.

I've been reflecting on that, trying to ascertain how much police protocol is different in, quote, ‘more dangerous,’ more crime-infested parts of town — where the police have had maybe more scares and more life-threatening experiences themselves — and how much that plays into these protocols. I clearly was just some white guy dressed to play basketball, driving a white BMW.

Paul: Great. Again, that's a complicated situation that would take a long time to really unpack. And you're absolutely right. You would not have been treated the same way if you had been pulled over on Wilshire and Beverly Glen. But the question to me is not just that. Yes; there are neighborhoods where police themselves are more frightened to go. So the protocols are different, in part because of some perceived need for self-protection. But part of the question to ask is, why have we set up our policing such that they feel that way in those neighborhoods?

I mean, if you look at the at the most instructive example: I'm from Philadelphia. Right across the river from Philadelphia is Camden. And I spent a lot of time in Camden. Camden was an extremely crime-ridden, difficult city; a very dangerous city. And so they did what a lot of people are calling for today. They completely eliminated the police department, and then they rebuilt the police department from scratch. Instead of designing it the way it was designed, they hired a lot more police, and they located them in the neighborhoods. Their job was to walk through the neighborhoods and introduce themselves to people — to talk to people, and become part of the neighborhoods.

Camden, which had the highest homicide rate — or one of the 2 or 3 highest homicide rates in New Jersey, which is a state with a very high homicide rate — dropped its homicide rate to a third. Robberies went down by 60%. I mean, these statistics are staggering of what happened when a different kind of policing was instituted there. It is model of any city in the United States for altering crime through a different kind of policing.

So, part of the question isn't, “Oh, the police have to protect themselves in dangerous neighborhoods.” Part of the question is, “How do we design policing in ways that exacerbate and magnify the problem rather than solving the problem?” One thing that we've learned is that force-based crime prevention by police who come into neighborhoods to try to stop it doesn't work, has never worked, and won't work. And we need a different kind of strategy. Neighborhoods will respond in part to the kind of policing they get. And so, the police themselves are part of the problem in these quote-unquote ‘crime-ridden neighborhoods,’ by the way, in which they police. The story that we tell is that these neighborhoods are somehow innately crime-ridden, so that the police have to behave that way. But Camden shows that’s just not true.

Ryan: I think that's fascinating, and an incredible psychological exploration to a social problem. I hope that we get more of that. I certainly know that my friends, both white and black, and who are affiliated with law enforcement, are longing for deeper social, psychologically satisfying solutions for everyone. So I hope that that's where this all ends up.

We're running out of time. But you have given us wonderful insight, and, I think, opened up some really deep questions. There must be people who are searching for advice, ethically, right now. If they wanted to find you, what are the best ways to find you on the web, or find you personally?

Paul: Well, it's very easy. I mean, if you go to the Emory Center for Ethics, you can find me. My email address is my first initial and last name: pwolpe@emory.edu. Or if you just Google Paul Root Wolpe, I'll come up. So I'm pretty easy to find.

Ryan: And Wolpe is spelled W-O-L-P-E, correct?

Paul: That's right.

Ryan: Well, Doctor, thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. It's been wonderful to have you on the Blackhall Podcast.

Paul: Well, thanks so much for inviting me. The conversation did not go where I thought it would go, but this has just been so much fun.

Ryan: I agree. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks again, and have a great day. I'm Ryan Millsap, and this is the Blackhall Studios Podcast.

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Ryan: I'll leave you guys with thoughts that I write on Instagram. “I perceive shadows to be real things. And then, in knowing real things, I learn to pay no attention to shadows.”

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