Ethics Newsline®

Interviewed by Dan Rather on the CBS program “60 Minutes” this past Sunday, former president Bill Clinton, author of the sprawling new autobiography My Life, shifted into mea culpa mode in discussing his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Describing it as “unconscionable” and “a terrible moral error,” he noted that he did it “because I could” — which, as he said, is “the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing anything.”

On that point, he’s right. And while it may seem odd to derive instruction in moral analysis from someone whose acknowledged moral numbness nearly blew apart a presidency, there’s a valuable lesson here. It lies in the three words he uses to explain his behavior: “because I could.”

To adhere to no higher standard of behavior than “because I could” is to abandon any distinction between what I can do and what I ought to do. But ethics is all about ought — about what’s mandated not by law, or history, or self-interest, but by duty. Such wholesale abandonment of the can/ought distinction is, as he says, “morally indefensible.” More accurately, it’s patently amoral, leaving no room for the central discrimination between willful indulgence and ethical constraint — between selfishness and integrity — that defines the moral life.

The lesson, however, is much larger than Clinton. His three-word explanation sheds some useful light on the current news. In the last week:

• Archer Daniels Midland Co. settled a $400 million class-action suit involving alleged price-fixing in the corn sweetener market. Why would corporate executives get involved in price-fixing? Because they could.
• Congressional hearings are examining the $2.25 billion E-rate program, which collects fees from U.S. phone users to provide Internet connections for poor schools. The hearings are examining allegations of egregious waste and fraud among contractors accused of pocketing millions as they sold Hummer-scale systems to districts that had only Chevy-size applications. Why would corporate sales people get so greedy? Because they could.
• More than a dozen nonprofit hospitals have been targeted by plaintiffs’ lawyers for charging patients without insurance many times the costs billed for similar procedures for insured patients. Why would hospital managers do such things? Because they could.
• After Darleen Druyun pleaded guilty in April to negotiating a job with Boeing while overseeing billions of dollars of Boeing contracts from her position at the Pentagon, she is cooperating with prosecutors in a probe of corruption that already has cost former Boeing CEO Philip Condit his job. Why would Ms. Druyan and Boeing officials agree to such a cozy arrangement? Because they could.

Read the daily papers with your corruption filter in place, in other words, and you’ll daily find tales of those who, having no standard in place stronger than “because I could,” fell into breaches of integrity. Then notice what these stories have in common with Clinton’s escapades: Each concerns people occupying positions of power and authority.

In itself, that’s not surprising. Lord Acton’s nineteenth-century observation in a letter to a friend — that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — is famous largely because it summarizes such a commonplace phenomenon. When the personality becomes so large as to dwarf the force of law and morality, where will the restraint reside? Only in the inner constraints of the individual. Less well known is the uncomfortable but logical conclusion Lord Acton penned in his following sentence: “Great men are almost always bad men.”

It doesn’t have to be that way. Clinton was smart and well-read. He would have known Lord Acton’s dictum. Had he paused to absorb it, he could have applied its caveat to himself. That’s probably also true about the executives involved in these instances of corporate corruption. But like Clinton, so many of today’s leaders came of age (as I did) in a consciously self-absorbed baby-boomer age. The mantras in our heads were not penetrating adages like those of Lord Acton. They were glib and alluring mottos like “whatever turns you on” or “just do it.”

The question, then, is what we do with a popular culture that seems deliberately bent on approving the short-termism of a “because I could” mentality? Clearly, we need to reintroduce an appreciation of the long-term benefits of self-restraint, teaching the next generation how to find the balance between what I can do and what I ought to do. Had Clinton devoted his book to that theme, he might have left a legacy far beyond his presidency. Give him credit, at least, for putting the issue on the table.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics