The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.

AuthorHansell, Jordan B.

The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wards Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society. By Peter W. Morgan and Glenn H. Reynolds. New York: The Free Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 272. $25.

Rameshwar Sharma needed cash to continue his research on two proteins, [alpha.sub.2A] and [alpha.sub.2GC], so he turned to the federal government.(1) At the time he submitted his grant application, Sharma had completed a good deal of work on [alpha.sub.2A] but very little on [alpha.sub.2GC]. At some point while typing his forty-six page grant application, Sharma realized that repeatedly typing [alpha.sub.2A] and [alpha.sub.2GC] was annoying. To ease his pain, he created macro keys that he could hit whenever he wished to type either protein. Big mistake. On page twenty-one he hit the wrong key, inserting [alpha.sub.2GC] where [alpha.sub.2A] should have been.

No one on the National Institute of Health (NIH) review panel was fooled -- they all knew that if Sharma really had done the work on [alpha.sub.2GC] that his typo seemed to indicate, he would have trumpeted his progress. In addition, the surrounding discussion concerned [alpha.sub.2A].

Quite apart from the typo, the NIH panel denied Sharma's grant application. Had this been all that had happened to Sharma, he would have considered himself lucky. Instead, an anonymous accuser forwarded his application to the Office of Science Integrity (later the Office of Research Integrity (ORI)). After investigation, the ORI determined that his typo constituted scientific misconduct. The gist of the ORI's position was that Sharma was attempting to fatten his chances by fabricating his work product.

Three years later an appeals panel vindicated Sharma, concluding that his typo "was the result of a careless error" (p. 130). In the interim, the federal investigation closed his lab, forcing him to take an unsalaried position at an optometry college in. Pennsylvania. He lived in a dorm. He made so little money that he had to pull his two children out of college and he was unable to attend his father's funeral in India. As Sharma himself put it, the entire ordeal had a "devastating effect" on his reputation and his career (p. 129).

Some Orwellian nightmare? Orwellian maybe, nightmare no. In the Appearance of Impropriety, Peter W. Morgan(2) and Glenn H. Reynolds(3) present Rameshwar Sharma's splintered reputation and career as what remain after one passes through the enormous buzz saw created by the conjunction of the Ethics Establishment -- the bureaucracies that police behavior in several of the largest segments of American society(4) -- and the appearance of impropriety standard -- the ethical standard those bureaucracies apply to individual behavior. Morgan and Reynolds argue that each component alone has its problems, but that together they are devastating. The potent combination has affected areas other than science, including government, business, and academia. Although the authors are not the first to decry the appearance of impropriety standard,(5) they are the first to analyze it in relation to the institutional context in which it operates, noting how that context magnifies its imperfections.

Despite the book's ambitious sweep, perhaps it is not ambitious enough. For example, Morgan and Reynolds fail to provide any foundation for their discussion by defining what they mean by ethical behavior.(6) More specifically, Morgan and Reynolds fail to supply any one ethical yardstick against which society shoed measure its members' behavior. The authors flirt with several ethical constructs -- the Golden Rule (pp. 37, 109), what amounts to an agency-cost definition (pp. 46, 74), and finally a motivational model or a model that examines the actor's motives (p. 36) -- but they stop short of choosing one.(7) To be fair, the authors did not set out to answer the age-old conundrum of what constitutes ethical behavior. But because they fail to ground their discussion in some explicit definition of ethical behavior, their analysis at times feels superficial.(8)

In the end, the book's analysis inheres largely in its application of the adage "You get what you pay for" to present-day ethical discourse, in effect restating it to read "Ask for appearances, and appearances are what you will receive." It adorns that analysis with anecdotes ranging from the humorous to the outright scary.(9) The book's general argument can be somewhat facile at times(10) and might occasionally leave those desirous of more searching inquiry dissatisfied. Nevertheless, what the book lacks in academic rigor, it makes up for in readability and intrinsic interest, and it leaves the reader with a graphic understanding of the dangers of the combination of the Ethics Establishment and the appearance of impropriety standard.

Part I of this Notice discusses Morgan and Reynolds's views on the appearance of impropriety standard. Part II engages in a similar examination with respect to the Ethics Establishment. Part III outlines the problems the authors identify as springing from the combination of the two. Finally, Part IV discusses some of the solutions that Morgan and Reynolds propose.

  1. THE APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY STANDARD

    1. Subverting the Standard

      The appearance of impropriety standard is just what it sounds like -- an ethical standard that focuses on whether behavior appears improper, not on whether it is. At the heart of Morgan and Reynolds's arguments rests the plausible proposition that "a preoccupation with mere appearances inevitably leads to the concealment of substantive abuses" (p. 15). The problem springs not from an appearance standard per se but from the misuse that it invites (p. 8). In particular, the authors argue that an appearance standard is vulnerable to two perversions -- Petty Blifil (pronounced Bliff-full) and Grand Blifil(11) -- both of which distract us from the underlying substantive behavior.

      Morgan and Reynolds use Petty Blifil to "describe the ease with which unscrupulous individuals use our ethical standards to attack relatively innocent individuals with accusations of `impropriety'" (p. 21). According to the authors, one of the most noteworthy examples of Petty Blifil occurred during the Savings and Loan (S&L) scandal. Federal Home Loan Bank Board Chairman Edwin J. Gray opposed bank deregulation in direct contravention to the wishes of several S&L operators, including Charles Keating. In an attempt to drive Gray out, Keating systematically funneled information on Gray's expense practices to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Despite the fact that Gray was following past Bank Board practices, the press accused Gray of "being too close to the savings and loans he was supposed to be regulating" (p. 22). Sure enough, Gray left office, dragging his tattered reputation behind him. Keating, on the other hand, gave large gifts to Mother Teresa and waged an antipornography war, all of which won him high acclaim. After the S&L edifice collapsed and the dust cleared, however, Keating found himself in jail and the "questions about the appearance of Gray's expenses [were] supplanted by questions about exactly how many hundreds of billions of dollars the American taxpayer lost in what has been called the `worst public scandal in American history.'"(12)

      Because the appearance of impropriety standard opens the door to this type of duplicity, the standard is counterproductive. Rather than encouraging ethical behavior, it can drive those who are truly interested in the public welfare -- the Grays of the world -- from the process only to make room for those "who are so determined to acquire power, or adoration, or whatever, that they will endure just about anything to get it" (p. 24).

      Grand Blifil represents the corruption of the appearance standard on a grand scale. Grand Blifil consists of the manipulation of appearances to create the illusion of institutional propriety (p. 27). It results in two phenomena. First, requiring proper appearances encourages proper appearances rather than proper substance (p. 28). Second, in an effort to supply the proper appearance, even the best-intentioned may succumb to hiding unsightly facts (p. 29).

      As to the first type of Grand Blifil, the authors point to campaign finance reform as one of the better examples (p. 30). In particular, they recount the Illinois state legislature's attempts to control its members' receipt of campaign funding. In response to an episode in which riverboat-gambling lobbyists pulled state representatives off the House floor to give them campaign contributions, the legislature passed a law making it illegal to give contributions on state property. The reason? It looked bad. The result? Lobbyists could continue to contribute as before, just not on state property. The authors argue that this case illustrates Grand Blifil's tendency to "treat[] symptoms instead of causes" (p. 35) and to leave the underlying problems unchanged.

      As an example of the second type, Morgan and Reynolds offer seasoned government bureaucrats' desire to operate government orally rather than in writing (p. 29). Why do they refuse to write things down? It allows them to protect appearances by ensuring that no "less-than-rosy assessments of how things are going" show up later to splinter the illusion (p. 29). The...

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