GOOD: A SPOTTER'S GUIDE

By Barbara Ehrenreich

WHILE THE VIRTUEmeisters of the right enjoin us to post the Ten Commandments in our kitchen and shun the unchaste among our neighbors, the Clintons have been quietly scrambling to come up with a more congenial source of moral guidance. First there was Hillary's philosophical flirtation with Tikkun editor Michael Lerner, inventor of the indefinable "politics of meaning." Then there was Bill's midnight phone seminar with Ben Wattenberg, whose most recent book makes the unstartling claim that Values Matter Most. And popping up now and again among the Clintons' candidates for official moralist of the center-left has been Yale law professor and Camp David guest Stephen L. Carter, best known for advocating, in The Culture of Disbelief, a more vigorous role for religion in our political life.

Integrity, for all its good intentions, is not likely to end the White House scramble. In this latest work (Basic Books; 277 pages; $24) Carter bemoans the fact that "too many of us nowadays neither mean what we say nor say what we mean" and would like everyone to behave in such an "integral" fashion that even one's foes have to begrudge a little respect. Who could be so craven as to disagree? Imagine, for example, our political candidates hailing one another as fine and honorable men, never mind those nitwit ideas.

Carter offers an admirably robust definition of integrity, broken down into three easily mastered steps: "(1) discerning what is right and what is wrong; (2) acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; and (3) saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong." Thus the abortion provider, risking a bullet to serve his or her patients, can be a person of integrity--if she has truly reflected on what she is doing and admits to being "morally troubled by it"--as can the antiabortion activist who is blocking her path to the clinic. Maybe in his next book, due out in a year or so and to be titled Civility, Carter will recommend that they shake hands.

But the very inclusiveness of Carter's integrity makes it alarmingly content-free. Even a Nazi concentration-camp operative, to draw on one of Carter's illustrative cases, could, on the face of it, exhibit "integrity" by zipping through the three-step program before turning on the gas. In which case "integrity" wouldn't be much more than an accessory, like a walking stick or a pipe, designed to impart some of that ineffable quality we all seem to crave--gravitas.

Carter tries to extricate himself from the swamps of moral relativism by postulating that some ideas are, after all, just plain evil, and as examples of such genuine, integrity-destroying evil, he offers racism and genocide. Thus the Nazi operative couldn't be a man of integrity, no matter how much "discerning" he engages in, because genocide is just, well, over the top. But evil, in Integrity, seems a pretty makeshift deus ex machina. If, for example, racism is such a self-evident no-no, then why not sexism--including any attempt to restrict women's reproductive choices? Or, a pro-lifer could argue, if genocide is evil, then why not abortion? This is where the handshakes end and the howitzers come out.

So are we stuck, then, for our morality gurus with Bill Bennett and Leviticus? Not necessarily. Carter could have advanced the cause of a secular morality if he'd bothered to give a little content to Step 1. Moral reflection, if it is to lead to moral results, has to consist of an exhaustive and empathetic assessment of the impact of one's actions on others, including even the despised and the outcast. If we define moral reflection this way, some good people might indeed be pro-choice and some might be pro-life, but none could be pro-genocide.

The idea that morality grows out of the effort to imagine the feelings of people other than ourselves is not some fancy new formula from the front lines of morality research. This is what used to be known as the Golden Rule, subscribed to by believers and nonbelievers alike and once considered a perfectly adequate foundation for liberalism. Instead of trying to reinvent it, maybe our morality mavens should be asking what happened to it and how we got into such a sorry condition that we need 277 pages of closely reasoned text to remind us of what something as elementary as integrity looks like.

Carter makes no attempt to explain the integrity shortage, and one is tempted to attribute this omission to the limits of his own experiential database. Most of his anecdotal examples are drawn from a life lived almost entirely at the Yale School of Law, first as a student and then as a teacher, where the most vexing challenge to integrity seems to be grade inflation. When Carter does peek out briefly into the larger world of buying and selling, wheeling and dealing, he sniffs and retreats in disgust from that cesspool of hopeless mendacity. Advertising, he notes, is not always 100% truthful!

But if there is something about our winner-take-all commercial existence that systematically rewards nonintegrity, then that is something we ought to know about. And something that a President, if he is in the market for ways to seize the moral high ground, might want to do more than preach about.