Consider the following events: A President of the United States is impeached and almost removed from office in part because he lied to keep secret a sexual dalliance. The Dean of Harvard's School of Divinity, a prominent theologian and respected academic administrator, is removed from office after the discovery that he had logged hundreds of hours on the Internet looking at pornography. The New York Times reports that "hundreds of thousands" of patients are being 1. recruited by their personal physicians into a booming venture: the business of testing experimental drugs on people." The patients, uninformed about their physician's financial interest, "were being pushed to participate in the studies because of the financial interests of their doctors." (May 16, 1999)

What ties these events together is that an activity or interest that some, especially the accused, might consider dubious but purely private seems to others to conflict directly with the accused's professional responsibilities. These events suggest many questions relevant to professional ethics. We might, for example, wonder whether the conduct in question was wrong simply because it sets a bad example or because it tends to undermine the public's trust in professionals generally.

But the question I want to consider here is whether such personal failings inevitably interfere with the proper performance of professional responsibilities. The prevailing assumption seems to be that one cannot compartmentalize one's life into distinct domains of public and private activities without loss of professional integrity, that private vices eventually corrupt professional character, and that therefore the conduct of professionals in private life should be above reproach. Indeed, licensing laws for most professions make that assumption explicit by requiring that licensees be of "good moral character' as well as technically competent.

Dangers of Integrity?
This principle Of consistency suggests that we should expect absolute coherence between personal and professional standards of ethics. How can we trust the President, or anyone else in authority, who in their personal lives violate standards of trust, fidelity, and honesty? Not only does lack of consistency between public and private character seem to undermine pretensions to integrity-, it also seems likely to lead to an unhealthy fragmentation of one's identity.

Yet there is considerable disagreement about this matter; many people are unsure how much consistency we should demand between public and privatecharacter. Itooamunsure. Is it fair or reasonable to question the integrity of those who in their private lives engage in activities morally in conflict with their professional roles? Is a surgeon who cheats on a spouse, has heart trouble because he walks too little, eats too much, and can't give up smoking, and otherwise exhibits a morally flawed character necessarily unable to be compassionate to and honest with patients? Is he necessarily unable to give wise counsel? Is he even likely to fall below ordinary standards of good practice?

In short, is it reasonable to demand that professionals lead exemplary private lives when they are no less subject to the character faults, assorted vices, and weakness of will to which other people are subject? The answer is not so obvious.

By acknowledging a distinction between "public" and "private", we implicitly recognize a domain that should be beyond public scrutiny. What justifies this domain of privacy? Privacy is what enables us to work out a way of being that is uniquely fitted to our own talents, skills, and ambitions. Often the process of working things out leads us to experiment in ways that would be impossible--and harmful to personal growth--if we knew we would have to make public the entire spectrum of our undertakings, including mistakes resulting from bad judgment. Assuredly, privacy has limits and should not shield us from sanction if our private behavior is criminal or morally egregious. But short of this, mistakes and other minor infidelities in private may in fact be the prelude to avoiding such errors in one's professional life; they may also be the impetus that deepens a commitment to uphold ethical standards more rigorously.

Privacy insulates us from public condemnation and enhances self- by cloak -ing personal failings and errors behind a veil of secrecy so that we can learn from our mistakes and develop skills essential to living a better life. To think that the only morally good professionals are those who are equally good in their personal lives is to pre-empt the possibility of moral development, both personal and professional.

Moreover, to suppose that there must be absolute consistency between private and public actions does violence to the very point of drawing the distinction in the first place. Privacy is an essential ingredient underlying human dignity. People who take on professional roles are as entitled to protect their privacy as is anyone else. Protecting their privacy means that they may not, in their private lives, always live up to the standards they profess as a professional. That is as it should be. That is what privacy is for.

Perplexities of the Good Life
To believe that there must be consistency between public and private behavior is to assume not only that how we should act morally is always straightforward and clear, without any serious ambiguity or uncertainty, but also that there is no inherent conflict between personal and professional roles. Both assumptions seem naive. Few serious moral situations are completely transparent or unambiguous, in the sense that we know, at least most of the time, what is good or ethically best. More frequently, there are complexities and uncertainties that leave us bewildered about what to do. We often end up choosing to do the least harm rather than do what is the morally best. What is good, and what a good life is morally, are notoriously contentious topics. The diversity of opinion among philosophers on those topics, both today and over the whole history of moral philosophy, testifies to how much there is to contend with.

If we are often in doubt about what is good in life, especially in our personal life, then it seems presumptuous to believe that there will be a ready moral coherence between our personal and professional roles. Each professional will have to work diligently to find the right balance, one that avoids the inherent conflicts and tensions that make it nearly impossible to do both roles well. For some, it is a drama that leads them to abandon career in order to save their personal life from ruin. Achieving integrity seems straightforward enough, but only if we oversimplify our understanding of what in reality is a much more complex and perplexing undertaking.

The Ideal Self
Behind all this, there stands the belief that underlying the roles we play there exists an objective, rational, and deliberative self that controls all that we do; to harmonize our roles we need only employ logic--rationally, self- principles--to all our choices, in our various roles. By this method, we will automatically achieve integrity. Unfortunately, that belief involves a radically idealized conception of self, stripped from its social and historical context and the hard reality of unequal resources, skills, and capabilities: the ideal self feeds on an illusion that self- avoids the ambivalent, existential, and tragic dimensions of life.

Then add to these doubts about the ideal self doubts about how much of our character we are responsible for.

To what degree do the vagaries of moral luck change the dynamic, making any assessment of moral integrity problematic at best and intractable at worst? Although the President is surely responsible for his actions, can we assert with the same degree of confidence that he is also responsible for the flaws in his character that may have led him astray? Can we say with conviction that every married man should be able to resist the advances of a sexually alluring woman? The President might have avoided the scandal were it not for his bad luck in being pursued by an implacable prosecutor bent on bringing him down. Is Harvard's Dean of Divinity responsible for his addiction to pornography? And to what degree can we resist the blandishments of our cultural obsession with wealth and the accumulation of material goods? Isn't the promise of increased wealth just the sort of inducement that can get almost anyone-including, it seems, many physicians--to do almost anything for more money? Are our desires, proclivities, and vices really something we choose? Or do we discover their power as they drive us in directions that we may find hard to resist, regardless of our idealized understanding of ourselves and who we wish ourselves to be?

We should, I think, pause in our rush to judge. Ideally, professional ethics and personal character should cohere as the necessary ground for integrity, but in practice the relation between the two is, apparently, much more complicated; and the costs of too much simplifying could be quite high.