Andrew Sullivan at his blog [http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/04/license-behave-badly.html] recalls Haltom's 3rd Law: "No one who professes ethics has any."
Here is what Dr. Sullivan published on 4 April 2012:
Eric Schwitzgebel ponders studies suggesting that professional ethicists behave about as morally as people who aren't paid to think about morality:
[W]e might consider some countervailing forces. One possibility is that there's some kind of "moral licensing" effect. Suppose, for example, that a consequentialist donates a wad to charity. Maybe then she feels free to behave worse in other ways than she otherwise would have. Suppose a Kantian remains rigorously honest at some substantial cost to his welfare. Maybe then he feels freer to be a jerk to his students. One depressing thought is that all this cancels out: Our efforts to live by our ethical principles exert sufficient psychic costs that we compensate by acting worse in other ways, only moving around the lump under the rug.
This entry seems to me to track my third law [Rump Parliament, 20 January 2008] and a discussion from this blog dated 24 December 2009 ["Up Is Down"].
