What We Stop Caring About

If you’ve ever attended one of my ethics sessions, you’ve probably heard me say: we are all good people. Now, to be clear, I can’t possibly know that. But on most days, I think it’s true. And that’s exactly what makes ethics so uncomfortable. Because if most people believe they’re good, then the question isn’t why “bad people” do bad things. It’s how good people end up doing things we later struggle to explain.

We’re very comfortable judging behaviour. We call actions good or bad—usually based on outcomes. The courts try to refine that by adding intent. Even then, we’re cautious about labeling a person as good or bad; we’re supposed to focus on what they did, not who they are. And yet, most of us still carry around a quiet assumption that truly harmful behaviour must come from fundamentally bad people. It’s a comforting idea. It just doesn’t hold up very well.

People often point to sociopaths or psychopaths as the exception—individuals who lack empathy and are therefore easier to classify. But even that breaks down on closer inspection. In Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare describe how many of these individuals operate quite successfully within organizations. They follow the rules. They achieve results. They are often admired. Not because they are good, necessarily, but because they are effective. Which complicates the idea that behaviour alone tells us what we want to know about a person.

And then there is the harder truth. Some of the most troubling actions in history were taken by people who believed—completely—that they were doing the right thing. They weren’t conflicted or uncertain. They believed they were correcting a wrong or advancing a cause that mattered. That doesn’t excuse the outcome, but it does challenge the idea that ethical failure is simply a matter of choosing wrong over right.

It suggests something more uncomfortable. That ethical tension is often about competing values, and that in the moment of decision, one of those values takes priority over the others. We like to think we balance things carefully—that we weigh fairness, loyalty, honesty, responsibility—but in practice, that’s not usually how decisions unfold. Under pressure, one concern tends to dominate. The others don’t disappear, but they recede enough to stop influencing the outcome.

In that sense, ethical failure isn’t always a collapse of character. It can be a narrowing of focus. From an evolutionary perspective, that makes sense. If a threat appears, we don’t pause to carefully weigh competing priorities—we act. But in a professional context, that same tendency can lead us somewhere else entirely. We focus on meeting a deadline and stop thinking about accuracy. We prioritize loyalty and stop asking hard questions. We protect confidentiality and use it, sometimes without realizing it, as a reason not to speak up.

That dynamic is easier to see in others than in ourselves. A colleague once shared a story that has stayed with me.

Asked to describe Lynn, I would say she is honest, straightforward, and trustworthy. She runs a successful tax practice and spends her days helping clients navigate the complexities—and realities—of the income tax system.

Early in her career, during a period when her family was under significant financial strain, she filed her personal tax return, seriously understating her income. The result was a materially lower tax liability at a time when that mattered most.

The specifics don’t matter. The decision does.

What struck me was not the act itself, but how simply she described it. This wasn’t greed. It wasn’t an attempt to get ahead or take advantage of the system. In that moment, her focus narrowed to one thing: protecting her family. That priority took precedence over everything else she values and now upholds professionally.

She didn’t stop being a person of integrity. But in that moment, something else mattered more.

In those moments, we are still the same people — good by any reasonable definition. We are simply caring more about one thing than everything else, and that shift—subtle as it is—can change the outcome in ways we don’t fully see at the time.

When people care deeply about an issue, a belief, or a cause, that narrowing can become even more pronounced. It doesn’t require bad intent. It doesn’t require a lack of values. It only requires that one value becomes so important that others fade into the background. You don’t have to look very far to see how that plays out, whether in organizations, in professional judgment, or in broader social debates. The pattern is the same: focus intensifies, and peripheral concerns lose their weight.

Caring, in other words, is not neutral. It comes at a cost. Every time we elevate one priority, something else becomes less important, at least for that moment. Sometimes we are willing to pay that cost. Sometimes we’re not. And often, we don’t consciously recognize the trade-off we’re making until after the fact, when the outcome forces us to look back and ask how we got there.

So yes, I still believe most people are good. But that’s not reassuring. If anything, it should serve as a caution. Because the risk isn’t that bad people will do bad things. The risk is that good people—focused, committed, and entirely convinced they are doing the right thing—will fail to notice what they’ve stopped caring about.