An essay by lawyers Joel Cohen and Katherine A. Helm begins with this story:

“Noted ethics philosopher and Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell once was questioned by the Harvard Board of Governors about having an extramarital affair with a student. When faced with the hypocrisy of being an ethics professor engaged in immoral conduct, Russell argued his private affairs had nothing to do with his professional duties. “But you are a Professor of Ethics!” maintained one of the board members. “I was [also] a Professor of Geometry at Cambridge,” Russell rejoined, but “they never asked me why I was not a triangle.”‘

The authors use the anecdote to explore the issue of whether proven ethics miscreants like Eliot Spitzer, Rod Blagojevich and disbarred class action lawyer William Lerach ought to be lecturing, speaking, or otherwise being listened to in regard to their opinions and advice on ethics. After all, acting teachers are often indifferent actors, and the best baseball managers weren’t much as players. Why should ethics be any different? 

Like so many other topics on this site, the question comes down to what we mean by ethics. If we only mean teaching a set of  rules and how to identify, understand  and follow them, then Russell was right: one doesn’t have to be ethical to do this, or even to do it well. If, however, the objective is to create a more ethical culture by building a community that values ethical conduct, the unethical ethics teacher is of dubious value. Just as I would not care to be given flying lessons by a pilot who crashes frequently, just as I wouldn’t want to hear marital advice from Tiger Woods, John Edwards or Jesse James, the ethical wisdom of an ethicist who has no use for his or her own teachings in real life has neither credibility nor sincerity, and the force of the ethics message is diminished by the realization that the messenger doesn’t respect it.

Cohen and Helm write: “The willingness of an institution of higher learning to extend an invitation to speakers who have demonstrated rogue pasts gives too much “credibility” to their way of thinking.” Their way of thinking is almost always: “Don’t get caught.” That is the ethics lesson they learned the hard way in their own careers, and that is what they will teach: “Learn these ethics principles, and break them at your peril, because you can see what happened to me.” Their ethics alarms didn’t work before, and they aren’t working now. Their wisdom, therefore, has its greatest value for people just like them—and there are plenty—in business, law and government. They all epitomize Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “bad man,” the immoral, unethical citizen who nonetheless obeys  laws because he doesn’t want to be punished. The unethical ethics teachers preach compliance, not ethics, because that is all they really understand and endorse. Compliance is better than nothing, but we know from bitter experience—Enron, waterboarding, the  Wall Street financial meltdown, the health care reform bill— that when all the emphasis is on complying with rules rather than being ethical, unethical people will find ways to be unethical without technically breaking the rules, or at least to try.

So Rod, Eliot, Bill,  Tiger and John may have some limited use teaching what they call ethics to those who already have defective ethics alarms. For anyone to listen to them  who aspires to more than mere compliance, however, is a waste of time, or worse: a compliance mindset and an ethical one are not compatible. While making unethical students more compliant, these unethical teachers may make ethical students less so.

In the end, unethical teachers can only be trusted teach unethical people that it is safer to obey the rules than to break them.