Haltom's Third Law: No one who professes ethics has any

How much should we generalize about trained incapacities?

As far as I know, my third law originated with me: "No one who professes ethics has any." In graduate school I noticed that faculty trained in philosophical disputation tended to deploy ethical precepts and moral casuistry in academic forensics to an extent far greater than they practiced scruples in their lives. I speculated that facility and experience with ethical argumentation led these instructors to discover that they could justify almost any conduct, which in turn meant that they could rationalize sleeping with their students, cheating on their spouses as well as their taxes, and other behaviors that might strike the untutored as less than moral.

I have so far resisted temptations to generalize Haltom's Third Law to the scope of Berkowitz's Law: "Academics' specialties reflect academics' deficiencies." The late Steve Berkowitz was a sociologist at the University of Vermont. He exemplified his own law to at least the extent that he was maladroit at relating to fellow humans individually or in groups. However, more than personal projections were involved. Steve saw how many political scientists were impolitic and/or inept at organizing people or administering programs. He noted how many geographers are often lost. He reminded me both how many undergraduates I had known who seemed to have selected psychology as a major to deal with their own manifest problems and how many psychologists I was meeting who seemed utterly maladjusted. [I should add that clinical psychologists have struck me as much more likely to exhibit imbalances than, say, cognitive scientists.]

Now, many academics do exhibit "trained incapacities" [Veblen]. That is, in acquiring specialized expertise, many academics lose practical, everyday know-how. We have all run into:

• teachers of writing who cannot write a personal statement
• post-modern theorists who no longer think or talk coherently
• economists who cannot manage a household budget or make a decision
• rhetoricians who could not interest high-schoolers in sex
• professors of education who could not teach a cat to sit up
• literary analysts who cannot tell that "Dr. Strangelove" was satire
• humanists possessed of precious little humanity
• historians who cannot remember on what date the Fourth of July or Cinco de Mayo falls
• political scientists who preach but never practice accountability or due process
• "internationalists" who can barely speak English, let alone a language used in areas that they purport to study
• musicians who cannot live with or in harmony

But we have also met many academics who were equally inept at each of the mundane tasks above but had not been trained into such ineptitude. Thus, I suspect that Berkowitz's Law is the product of selective attention to ironies. Many academics cannot write well, as any veteran of the Faculty Advancement Committee can attest. The author of this blog never took an English course after high school, so it is less noteworthy that he never learn [sic] how to write. Nor is it cause for comment when one who publishes in academic outlets becomes less and less able to write succinctly or understandably. [Perhaps that is why so many colleagues avoid publishing.]

Thus, I have resisted generalizing Haltom's Third Law along the lines of Berkowitz's Law.

However, it may be that my third law suffers from the same etiology as Berkowitz's Law. That is, maybe academics tend to become less scrupulous and more cunning over their careers. Certainly tenure makes less circumspect some academics who are utterly ignorant of ethics. Accession to petty administrative posts [department or program chair, for example] has released some inner demons or made obsessive-compulisive disorders evident in ways that called for dazzling casuistry by those not trained in such macabre arts. So maybe my attention has been drawn to the irony of propounding ethics while behaving badly.

Still, I insist that all or almost all purveyors of ethics in academia have turned out to be themselves seriously unscrupulous. I have known more than one expert on ethics who adjudged every stimulus or situation by how it might benefit himself or herself, so I can cite that example without singling out anyone. Kant would have excluded the exemplar's reasoning from the realm of moral philosophy altogether, but the exemplar plays on her or his professional specialty in ethics to camouflage her or his selfishness.

Maybe Haltom's Third Law could be improved by noting that all intellectuals are trained to rationalize, to chisel, and to befuddle. One must defend one's dissertation after all! Maybe all or almost all academics have proclivities for hypocrisy, larceny, and mendacity. Nonetheless, "ethicists" stand out for their sheer chutzpah.

I am so happy that I did not bring up Bill Bennett in this entry before now. I bring up his name now to remind readers of Rump Parliament of this bon mot from Jacques Ellul: the accomplished propagandist accuses targets of the very misbehavior that the propagandist has committed in the recent past and/or anticipates executing in the near future. I need not retrace the ethical gambols of Dr. Bennett. I need only remind readers that self-professed ethicists, like other propagandists, tend to excoriate sinners over sins with which the propagandists are only too familiar.


Coming Soon: Haltom's Fourth Law! "If It Does Not Fit, Use a Larger Hammer."