The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society: Morgan, Peter, Reynolds, Glenn: 9780743242660: Amazon.com: Books

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Peter W. Morgan

The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society Paperback – April 5, 2002

by Peter Morgan (Author), Glenn Reynolds (Author)

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For two decades, Americans have engaged in a vast campaign to clean up our ethical act in politics, in the workplace, and in local communities. We have crafted a mountain of regulations, created vast networks of committees and consultants, and become accustomed to speaking of such taboos as "conflicts of interest" and "the appearance of impropriety." Perhaps one statistic says it best: Corporations currently spend over $1 billion per year on ethics consultants. Yet at the same time, our confidence that politicians and businesspeople will "do the right thing" has dropped to an all-time low. Our ethics efforts have failed. As Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds entertainingly and devastatingly describe, we have made legitimate ethical concerns into absurd standards, and wielded our moral whims like dangerous weapons. The Appearance of Impropriety offers a bracing antidote for executives, group leaders, and anyone in public life: A reminder of some basic rules of good conduct that must be taken back from the pundits and bureaucrats that surround us.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Free Press
Publication date

April 5, 2002
Dimensions

6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0743242661
ISBN-13

978-0743242660
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

For two decades, Americans have engaged in a vast campaign to clean up our ethical act in politics, in the workplace, and in local communities. We have crafted a mountain of regulations, created vast networks of committees and consultants, and become accustomed to speaking of such taboos as "conflicts of interest" and "the appearance of impropriety". Perhaps one statistic says it best: Corporations currently spend over $1 billion per year on ethics consultants. Yet at the same time, our confidence that politicians and businesspeople will "do the right thing" has dropped to an all-time low. Our ethics efforts have failed. As Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds entertainingly and devastatingly describe, we have made legitimate ethical concerns into absurd standards, and wielded our moral whims like dangerous weapons. The Appearance of Impropriety offers a bracing antidote for executives, group leaders, and anyone in public life: A reminder of some basic rules of good conduct that must be taken back from the pundits and bureaucrats that surround us.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press (April 5, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743242661
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743242660
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,139,006 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,977 in Public Affairs & Administration (Books)
- #3,218 in Business Ethics (Books)
- #44,714 in Law (Books)

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Amazon Customer

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2009

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The authors contend that what passes for ethics analysis today is nothing of the sort: it is an obsession with whether something "looks" bad: "...mak[ing] little distinction between incorrectly filled-out forms and truly wrongful behavior" (p 189). Determining whether something actually IS bad takes knowledge, one reason reporters are such common offenders. In the authors' words, their profession is "increasingly dominated by journalism graduates who never studied anything substantive before entering their profession" (pp 42-43). The authors are critical of the ethics consultants who can talk about the writings of Kant and Mill but know little or nothing of the field in which they are working and the tendency to denigrate the idea that ethics is "one set of rules of morality." (Lobbyists, politicians, and many others also come under attack.) The authors point out that ethics is about holding people accountable for their actions (an unfashionable idea today). As a result of these trends, all the talk of ethics has not improved behavior: quite the contrary: "...across the board the results [of focusing on appearance] have uniformly been poor. Appearance standards are readily manipulated by the unscrupulous...or by the self-important.... And although adopted in the name of increased sensitivity to ethics, they tend to draw attention away from sins worse than they condemn" (p 156). Case studies from several fields illustrate their points.

One person found this helpful

Even more needed today than when it was written 15 years ago.

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is 15 years old, but still does a great job of explaining many of our current political troubles, including (in my opinion) why the rollout of the Affordable Care Act was so rocky last month.

I was surprised to discover as I read this book that it's message is almost the opposite of what I'd expected from its title. And as the authors suggest, once I understood the issue they are describing, I saw signs of it everywhere.

If you lack time to read anything else, be sure to read the second-to-last chapter, in which the authors suggest solutions. Fortunately, they are ones anyone can help with, rather than the usual prescriptive wishing for magic to happen and public servants to behave differently for no obvious reason for them to do so.

Highly recommended.

2 people found this helpful

If you thought you understood Watergate, READ THIS BOOK!

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2004

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And if you ever wondered why there seems to be no accountability, READ THIS BOOK!
As Milton Friedman has pointed out, when government attempts to solve a problem, the solution is often worse than the problem itself. As "The Appearance of Impropriety" shows, when government was tasked with restoring integrity in government, the solution turned out to be an elaborate code of rules which, in effect, destroy integrity in order to save it!
As an attorney and a self-educated Watergate buff, I read all the whodunit books, explored countless "Deep Throat" theories, and read most of the standard Watergate tomes. Typically the period is portrayed as one in which America learned "hard lessons" in morality, then entered a "new era." During my college years I watched the morality play on television.
Eventually I realized the whole thing had been a triumph of hypocrisy masquerading as a triumph of morality, and I finally concluded that Watergate was a triumph of investigative journalism run amok. I was more cynical than most people even before I read this book, because I sensed that the "new", "more ethical" era was worse in a moral sense than the old era of corrupt backroom deals and cynical political skullduggery.
Authors Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds not only provided me with proof of my suspicions, but they demonstrate how the system the reformers created has come to rival the corruption of the past.
As they show, today's corruption is governed by an elaborate, appearance-based regulatory system in which compliance with the rules, by eliminating any real need for personal integrity, places honesty and integrity about on the level of compliance with such things as IRS codes or affirmative action quotas. Thus, the truly corrupt are enabled, and those with genuine integrity are burdened with humiliating and stultifying regulations which would keep many people away from public service. (As the authors note, Dwight Eisenhower was such a notorious rule breaker that it is doubtful that he could survive today's appearance-based scrutiny.)
Actual example of an ethics rule cited by the authors: "...[A] federal worker can legally accept pay for a "comic monologue" -- unless, that is, the government decides that the talk was actually an "amusing speech," in which case the federal worker could be fined $10,000 and drummed out of the service."
All of this and more can be traced to the post-Watergate explosion in ethics reform (a period the authors call "the Big Bang"). This has ended up deepening the entire country's cynicism, not by restoring integrity, but by creating a monstrous system of appearance-based regulations which encourage moralistic posing while actually undermining genuine integrity. Oddly enough, by exposing the appearance racket for what it is, this book offers hope to people (like me) who long since gave up. Integrity can still be made to matter, despite the cult of appearances enshrined since the Watergate Big Bang.
I am not out to rehabilitate Nixon, but were the fine insights of these authors juxtaposed alongside certain long-suppressed details of Watergate, additional light might be shed on why those who were out to get Nixon at all costs created a system of appearance-based "reforms" which ended up perpetuating the very thing they claimed to be ending. Those who "got" Nixon in my view ultimately had even more to hide than he did. They created a code for their times -- a code of appearances.
In the old days, an impropriety was an impropriety. Appearances were used to conceal improprieties, but with no real guarantee that anyone would be fooled. What was once a disguise has now become official certification that no impropriety exists.
When morality is defined as compliance with rules, true morality ceases.
Why didn't the government ever think of that?

48 people found this helpful

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Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2021

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