Appearance Isn't Everything

...Why are we so concerned about often trivial improprieties in business and financial relationships amid a general climate of moral relativism and nonjudgmentalism about almost everything else...

...Underinclusive because it substitutes attention to technicalities for substantive, responsible judgments, permitting public officials to engage in dicey conduct that conforms to the letter of appearance rules while violating their spirit...

...It's not that the results aren't often damaging, it's just that the authors have strayed beyond legal and political analysis into a larger cultural critique that lacks focus and a coherent framework...

...They quote Gary Edwards, former director of the Ethics Resource Center, as saying, "We have had entering the workforce for several years a generation of people whose moral development has been arrested...

...In their analysis, the authors round up the usual suspects—politicians waging war on their foes, journalists looking for the next big story, an institutionalized ethics bureaucracy in every government agency and corporation...

...Much more urgent is the question of appearance ethics as a symptom of moral and social collapse...

...In The Appearance of Impropriety in America, Peter W. Morgan, a Washington lawyer, and Glenn H. Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, argue that public cynicism in the face of apparently obsessive attention to proper conduct is the product of the reigning ethical standard: the appearance of impropriety...

...They embellish these pretensions with a lot of quotations from Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones to draw parallels between contemporary American society and Augustan England...

...ple are indifferent to Whitewater and Paula Jones: Everybody knows that Bill Clinton is an amoral, philandering heel, but the economy is humming and the stock market soaring...

...The system doesn't really care whether an official is generally honorable and decent, so long as he has correctly filled out his financial-disclosure form and avoided lunch with members of regulated industries...

...Then they resume their struggle to convince the reader that things are worse in this regard today than ever before (except possibly in Augustan England...

...At times, they seem to realize this and acknowledge, as an aside, that concern about appearances is universal...

...But it can't keep up with its book-length ambitions...

...Thirty years ago, a family concerned with appearances might have concealed a daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy or insisted on a shotgun wedding...

...The authors write, "When a high school band considers whether to appear in a campaign rally featuring the President of the United States, the debate is framed in terms of the potential for an 'appearance of impropriety.' When NYNEX adopts a company-wide policy on accepting holiday gifts, management invokes the 'appearance of impropriety' principle...

...Overinclusive because innocent people are often caught in a net of flimsy accusations, hobbling the institutions in which they work, as well...

...Equally disturbing, politicians react to every new wave of scandal by criminalizing more and more ethical lapses, real and imagined...

...They are on to something, no doubt, but it's not concern with appearances over substance per se...

...As a legal rule, such a standard is impossibly vague and therefore ripe for abuse...

...They even advocate a renewed effort by parents, schools, and churches to reward and inculcate traditional values in children...

...Morgan and Reynolds at least are aware of the relationship between what they describe as "appearance ethics" and the broad moral decay of society...

...It's hardly news that human beings care about keeping up appearances...

...This is the mindset exemplified by Al Gore and his claim that, even if he did make fund-raising phone calls from the White House, "no controlling legal authority" said he couldn't...

...At the very same time, our moral sensibilities in other areas are so fragile that Richard Allen had to resign as President Reagan's national security adviser because he accepted a watch from a foreign government...

...That obsession, they say, defines contemporary society and underlies many disparate cultural and political phenomena, from witch hunts for scientific fraud to the proposed constitutional amendment banning flag-burning...

...As the authors observe in an appendix on Whitewater, it has been difficult for the public to work out the rightness or wrongness of those investigating and judging the Clintons, let alone the Clintons themselves...

...and Al D'Ama-to, who was chairman of the Senate committee looking into Whitewater...

...They even go so far as to suggest once or twice that the obsessive concern with appearance ethics is a symptom of a larger failure to cultivate virtue in citizens...

...But they would have written a much more important, more effective book if they had developed these ideas more fully...

...Phone lines, however, were deemed okay...

...Relying on appearances is easier and safer than doing the hard work of behaving morally or making moral judgments about the conduct of others...

...The interesting question is what kinds of "appearances" are considered particularly important today and why...

...The authors claim that the appearance standard is merely one expression of a pervasive national obsession with appearances generally...

...To avoid even the appearance of impropriety," one board member said, "the school system should not provide hardware to board members...

...For example, Morgan and Reynolds appear to be shocked, shocked to discover that lawmakers wanting to appear tough on crime have enacted a lot of symbolic legislation and that prosecutors trying to make a name for themselves often overreach...

...his predecessor, Robert Fiske...

...Thus we are told that no one cares about Fred Thompson's hearings on the Clinton fund-raising abuses because everybody does it, and, besides, it's already been reported in the newspapers...

...Similarly, peoMelinda Ledden Sidak is a writer living near Washington, D.C...

...But now, women proudly choose to have babies without husbands...

...Although the authors discuss example after example of what they call "appearance ethics," they in fact are no longer talking about the appearance standard at all...

...Morgan and Reynolds contend that the appearance standard is both underinclusive and overinclusive...

...Not only has independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr been accused repeatedly by Clinton defenders of violating the appearance standard, so have the judges who selected him...

...And the more we identified similar appearance problems in different places, the more we thought it would be a good thing if more people saw the same things that we did...

...The conventional explanation is that the Washington scandal machine has so fatigued and disillusioned the public that no one pays attention anymore, simply assuming that all politicians are on the take...

...Small wonder, then, that the authors conclude, "Hardly anyone seems able to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of conduct these days without gravely considering how it appears...

...Appearance Isn't Everything Right and Wrong in an Age of Screwy Ethics By Melinda Ledden Sidak It is a paradox of our times that, with a few notorious exceptions, politicians today are more honest and trustworthy than they have been in the past, yet public distrust of politicians is sky-high...

...For this reason, the authors point out, the American Bar Association explicitly refused to apply the appearance principle to lawyers (though not to judges) when the organization adopted its new Model Rules of Professional Conduct...

...This book started out as an article in the Stanford Law Review, and as a history and critique of the appearance test as a workable legal rule, it is useful and interesting...

...The drafters noted that the appearance test has no discernible limits and presents "severe problems for both the public officeholder and the private practitioner...

...Although the appearance test made its formal debut in the ABA's 1924 Canons of Judicial Ethics, it wasn't until Watergate that the test began to be invoked frequently and applied indiscriminately...

...However apt the historical analogy, concern with how things look to other people is a pretty common human trait, persisting from time immemorial...

...In a Louisiana parish, plans to connect school-board members to the school system's computer network were suspended for fear of ethical problems...

...Rather, they are describing the wholly predictable and usual way human beings—especially politicians—posture hypocritically and strike high-minded attitudes in pursuit of selfish goals and hidden agendas...

...The costs of this effort to hold officeholders to a Caesar's-wife standard have far exceeded any benefits...

...As they explain in the preface, "Having ourselves become sensitized to the uses and abuses of appearances in contemporary society, we found it impossible to look at the world in the same way as before...

...These effects are felt not only at the national political level, but right down to the local school board and throughout the private sector...