The Appearance of Impropriety

by Peter Morgan and Peter W. Morgan

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684827646
• ISBN13: 9780684827643
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Wise words

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.

If you thought you understood Watergate, READ THIS BOOK!

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,

A succinct explanation of our current political climate

When one reads this book, which presents a plethora of alternatively humorous, irritating and discouraging (sometimes, all at once) examples of what's defective with "appearance politics" in law, science, government and society, one comes away with a much better idea of why American political life is as inane and depressing as it has become in the '90s: it's just the logical development of a long line of struggles in which the vacuum of appearance has triumphed over the meatier and graver substance of reality. This book demands to be read by a wide audience, as it provides an entirely new perspective on some of the more troubling incidents in our recent political and societal history and how we have gotten there. There's probably a post-Clinton Administration sequel awaiting this for Messrs. Morgan and Reynolds to report, or at least, a updated second printing.

A superb analysis of what ails our political system

I really enjoyed this book. It covers a lot of ground: from Augustan age England to scientific scandals involving Nobel laureates. But it remains focused throughout on a common human frailty -- the tendency to deal in appearances rather than reality -- and how catering to that frailty has produced an amazingly screwed-up set of political ethics laws. Since I read the book, I view each scandal headline differently. I recommend it to anyone interested in understanding the convoluted and self-serving mess that goes under the name of "ethics" these days.

The best guide to understanding today's scandal culture.

An excellent and far-reaching guide to the way politicians and interest groups manipulate appearances in the interest of political power and money. The best single guide to understanding today's scandal culture.