Journal of College and Character

ISSN: 2194-587X (Print) 1940-1639 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujcc20

Ethical Impotence

Robert J. Sternberg

To cite this article: Robert J. Sternberg (2015) Ethical Impotence, Journal of College and
Character, 16:3, 180-185, DOI: 10.1080/2194587X.2015.1057154

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Published online: 19 Aug 2015.

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180 Opinions and Perspectives

Journal of College & Character VOLUME 16, No. 3, August 2015

Ethical Impotence

1
Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University

Abstract

Ethical impotence occurs when one wants to act ethically but feels powerless to do anything about
the perceived unethical behavior. One may feel that one’s actions will have no impact or that those
actions actually will have harmful consequences to oneself and/or others. Ethical impotence can be
understood in terms of an eight-step model of ethical reasoning. It is important that students learn to
act ethically, even when they fear their actions will come to naught or be potentially challenging in
their consequences.

When I was a dean, a faculty member came to complain to me about unethical behavior he had observed in his
department that had upset him deeply. I agreed that the behavior he described appeared to be unethical. There
was just one problem: The faculty member’s department was in another school of the university. When I
suggested to him that he go to see his own dean, he responded that he would not do so because he knew with
certainty that the dean would not respond to the charge. Rather, the dean would get upset with him for
reporting the behavior. I did not know at the time whether indeed his dean would respond as he believed, but I
knew that he was experiencing something many of us experience at one time or another—ethical impotence,
or the belief that if we act ethically, it will have no meaningful effect, other than perhaps to get us into trouble.
The sense of ethical impotence that faculty members sometimes feel may also be experienced by staff
and students, the latter being particularly vulnerable. Students often feel powerless against other students,
professors, or institutions that they may feel have acted unethically because others have far more stature
and authority than the students perceive themselves to have.
What do the less powerful do in the face of ethical conundrums when they feel themselves to be
ethically impotent—unable to act in any meaningful way that would change a situation that is ethically
compromised? How can they respond when they are ethically compelled to act and yet expect only trouble
as a result of their actions?
Sternberg (2010) offered an eight-step model of ethical reasoning that can be very helpful in such
situations. Some people believe that to act ethically is easy and to act unethically requires extra steps in
one’s thought processes as one contemplates violations of ethical rules. This model argues, in contrast, that
ethical behavior often is not easy but rather is hard to execute precisely because it involves so many steps.

1
Robert J. Sternberg (robert.sternberg@cornell.edu) is professor of human development at Cornell University. He is a past-
president of the American Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association, and the Federation of Associations
in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

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 Ethical Impotence 181

The model, as currently formulated, describes those steps as follows: (a) recognizing that a situation
exists to which a response may be needed, (b) defining the situation as having an ethical dimension, (c)
viewing the ethical dimension of the situation as serious enough to be worthy of one’s attention, (d)
deciding that one has a personal ethical responsibility in the matter, (e) deciding what ethical principle or
principles apply, (f) deciding how to apply that principle or those principles in the current situation, (g)
preparing for possible negative consequences if one acts, and (h) acting.
Step 5 can be a particular challenge because people interpret ethical challenges so differently. They
may even have different ideas as to what constitutes an ethical principle. For example, “Do not kill” may be
accepted, but the question arises as to “do not kill” whom? However, it is the seventh step in Sternberg’s
(2010) model when one may experience ethical impotence—a sense that nothing good is likely to come of
one’s acting in an ethical way but that plenty of bad consequences await one. Ethical impotence can have
many sources in a university environment: reporting on an impropriety in athletics in a university that will
hear no evil with respect to its athletic program; blowing the whistle on a professor who one knows is
closely connected to, and perhaps even married to, a superior who would be involved in adjudicating the
problematic situation; reporting an impropriety on the part of one’s academic advisor when there is no one
else in one’s department who would be willing or able to serve as one’s advisor; peer pressure mitigating
against reporting an act of academic misconduct by fellow students; or simply sensing that the culture of
the university is to cover up rather than bring to the light of day ethical transgressions.
The question then becomes: What does one do after having observed an ethical transgression in the
face of no clear action or set of actions that one judges is at least reasonably likely to lead to a correction of
an unethical situation? How should we, as faculty and administrators, teach students to respond to such
fraught situations? At some time or another, almost all of us will face such a situation in our careers. What
do we do about it? What would we tell our students to do about it?
There are four major options—say nothing, and do nothing; say something, and do nothing; say
nothing, and do something; and say something, and do something. Consider each of these in turn.

Say Nothing; Do Nothing

The advantage of saying and doing nothing is that nothing the individual does makes a bad situation worse.
One acknowledges one’s ethical impotence and moves on to other things in one’s life. The problem with the
“say nothing; do nothing” approach is that ethical problems left alone often become worse. And do we want to
teach the next generation to “hear no evil; see no evil” in response to compromised ethical situations?
In my experience as an administrator, I became aware very late of a sexual harasser who, for many
years, got away with being a harasser. The students who were harassed were afraid to act because of the
harasser’s power both in his field and in his university. They felt impotent in the face of his harassment.
Eventually, however, one of his victims fought back, leading to appropriate sanctions against the professor
and, for better or worse, negative attention in the media for the professor and the university. Obviously, I
would have hoped to be able to say now that all’s well that ends well, but the student who filed the charges
dropped out of her graduate program, despite encouragement to find another advisor.
This sequence of events highlights an aspect of the model of ethical reasoning in the eight-step
model: Whistle-blowing sometimes, perhaps often, has adverse consequences for the whistle-blower. In this
case, it was not that the student was forced out. She just had had enough. Her doing the right thing brought
her no real personal gain—on the contrary, she left school.

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182 Journal of College & Character VOLUME 16, No. 3, August 2015

The lives of whistle blowers are not always affected in such a manner. In another instance, members
of the laboratory of a well-known scientist reported that the scientist was fabricating data (Bhattacharjee,
2013). The scientist originally tried to make the students feel impotent by retaliating against the students,
but in the end, it was the scientist whose career was cooked, and the lab members did just fine and, indeed,
became heroes for having the courage to act against such a powerful individual.
On a larger scale, genocides such as in Rwanda and Nazi Germany illustrate the problem of the say
nothing; do nothing approach. As long as no one talked about what was happening, despite many people
knowing about it, the genocides continued. Had Nazi Germany not invaded other countries in Europe, for
example, it is not altogether clear whether other countries would have acted to stop the atrocities of Hitler
and his ministers.

Say Something; Do Nothing

The advantage of this approach is that, at the very least, one expresses one’s moral outrage. If one cannot
do anything to stop what is happening, at least one makes a statement against it. The problem with this
approach is that, although a picture may be worth a thousand words, in the case of ethical misconduct, an
action may be worth far more than a thousand words. There is no time that words ring more hollow than
when they are belied by inaction.
As an administrator, I became involved with the issue of whether cases of student plagiarism should
necessarily be reported to the administration of the school for which I was an administrator. Formerly,
professors had the option either of reporting or not reporting such cases to the school administration. The
problem that arose was that administrators were enforcing university policies on plagiarism in an uneven
way. In their view, probably, they were using their good judgment. But in some cases, it became clear that
the faculty members just did not want to become involved in what could be a time-consuming and
distressing judicial proceeding against a student, which, in the end, might lead to no action being taken
against the student but to their being sued. In this case, the student, whose parents might be able to hire a
powerful (and high-priced) lawyer, might have more power than they. As a result, some students were
simply verbally admonished not to plagiarize again, and predictably, many of them did indeed go on to do
it again. Because there were no college records of the cases, other professors typically had no idea that the
students had a past record of plagiarizing. So the students got away with it again and again.
My experience was that faculty members needed to act against, not just speak with the students to
change the students’ behavior—and that the faculty members, in the long run, were doing the students a
favor by taking such action. But their actions often did leave them with the extra work and personal
confrontations they dreaded.
On a larger scale, the limits of verbal outrage are shown by the current situation in Syria. There has
been a great deal of talk on the part of various world leaders, including our own, about stopping the
slaughter, but little action taken. The result has been that the slaughter continues and world leaders continue
to talk about it. It is not clear what action would have led to a positive outcome, but words accompanied by
inaction have been notably lacking in success in saving lives.

Say Nothing; Do Something

The advantage of this approach is that it enables one to act against unethical behavior in what one believes
is an appropriate way without necessarily identifying that it is indeed oneself who is the counter-actor.

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 Ethical Impotence 183

Anonymous whistle-blowers and also governments that act against perceived saboteurs without publicly
announcing their intentions or actions take this approach. State-sponsored intelligence agencies often act in
this way, retaliating against enemies (and perceived enemies) without admitting that they are involved in
the situation in any way.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it creates a great deal of ethical ambiguity. For example, it
sometimes results in an agent retaliating against someone who was perceived to be guilty of an offense but
actually was not guilty. Because there was no public judicial proceeding of any kind against the individual,
there never was any confirmation that the individual was responsible for the perceived ethical outrage.
Moreover, when the results of the retaliation become public, it is not clear who did the retaliation, and
sometimes agents of dubious ethical provenance themselves claim the credit, when in fact they were
uninvolved.
During my time in administration, a private university one day announced that its president was
gone (McGuinness, 2012). The board announced that soon there would be an interim president in
place, but meanwhile, the provost was taking over on an interim basis. It was pretty obviously a firing
because the now ex-president spoke out that he should have been allowed to keep his job. But what
had he done? Publicly, there was no clue. The rumor was that he had privately done something
seriously unethical that had disgraced him and the university. But was it true? And if so, what
was “it”?
I heard several different rumors about what “it” was but never heard any confirmation of any
of them. The problem with the board’s course of action was that the opportunity for a lesson to
others was lost. Others could not learn to avoid such unethical action because they never learned
what the unethical action was, if indeed there was one. In repressive dictatorships, governments
actually use unexplained disappearances to inspire fear: If a person transgresses, one never knows
when he or she will disappear or exactly for what cause. Of course, this scenario was not the intention
of the board of trustees. But their handling of what presumably was a major ethical lapse left others
unclear as to what they could learn from the situation. If there was a teaching opportunity, the board
did not take it.

Say Something; Do Something

In an ideal world, “say something; do something” would be the response of choice in ethically challenging
situations. The problem is that in situations of ethical impotence, it often is not at all clear what one can or
should do. In many situations, universities or parts of them try to act even when they are ethically impotent.
The problem is that in the face of large ethical problems, they are not always effective. However they may
perceive themselves, academics are no better at dealing with their own ethical impotence than is anyone
else. Their IQs do not seem to give them any special insights into how to act in the face of ethical
impotence, and there is no reason they should. For example, selective boycotts imposed by academics
sometimes have an air of capriciousness about them, leaving those uninvolved wondering why the
particular targets were chosen, how the boycotts would be in any way effective, and whether the boycotts
actually teach students the lessons professors should want to teach them.
There are several reasons, though, that wisely chosen action may be the preferred option over doing
nothing. Consider these reasons as illustrated by the case of a student considering whether to go to a
department chair or dean to accuse a senior faculty member of academic misconduct. All students need to

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know the reasons for a wisely chosen action as they confront ethically challenging situations in which they
feel ethically impotent in some degree.
1. Doing nothing makes a statement about one’s ethical stance. If the individual does nothing, it makes
a statement about the individual’s ethical stance as well as the individual’s character in much the same
way that allowing unethical behavior in business or in national politics makes a statement about the
current state of each of those enterprises. To do nothing is to say that one does not care about ethical
misconduct, or that one lacks the courage to do anything about such misconduct, or even that one
views the conduct as acceptable. The lesson the individual may be learning is that it is all right to
allow ethical misconduct if one feels powerless to confront it.

2. Even if action is unsuccessful, it at least makes a symbolic statement. Sometimes, when one acts
against ethical misconduct, the result is less or even much less than one ideally would have hoped for.
But one nevertheless has made a symbolic statement. And a series of those symbolic statements, as
made by courageous people around the world, have brought down unethical individuals and
governments alike.

3. One at least can live at peace with oneself. When one permits ethical misconduct to go unchallenged,
the experience stays with one for one’s entire life. One knows that when he or she could have and
indeed should have acted, he or she instead chose to remain silent.

4. One may prevent others from harm. Not only does one need to live with one’s lack of action, but
unfortunately, other individuals may have to live with it as well when they later become subject to the
misconduct of the same malefactor. Serial transgressors often continue to commit unethical acts
because no one made any attempt to stop them.

5. Sometimes one is not as impotent as one thinks. The perception of ethical impotence can become an
excuse to do nothing. One ascribes powerlessness to oneself as a cop out, perhaps without even
testing the limits of one’s power. If nonviolent “flower power” movements could bring down whole
governments in Eastern Europe, and if people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King could
change whole societies through nonviolence, why is one so confident that he or she is utterly lacking
in power to effect change?

6. Change has to start somewhere. If one does not act, and no else does either, nothing is likely to
change. We all have the power at least to start a process of change, even if the process proves to be a
long and perhaps seemingly endless one.
Students and professionals alike need to learn to deal with feelings of ethical impotence—to speak
and act despite one’s feelings of powerlessness. At some time in our lives, we all have such feelings. The
question is not whether we will have them but whether we will think, speak, and act to do what we believe
is right. To speak and act wisely, even in the face of feelings of ethical impotence, is a decision any of us
can make. And it is a decision-making process we need to convey to our students if indeed our students are
ever to create a better world for future generations. There are many situations in which people feel ethically
impotent. But if students do not learn to act ethically despite their feelings of impotence, what hope is there
for the next generation?

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 Ethical Impotence 185

References
Bhattacharjee, Y. (2013, April 26). The mind of a con man. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/
04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all
McGuinness, W. (2012, Sept. 13). Geoffrey Orsak, University of Tulsa President, fired after only 74 days in office.
Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/geoffrey-orsak-university_n_1881196.
html
Sternberg, R. J. (2010). Teaching for ethical reasoning in liberal education. Liberal Education, 96(3), 32–37.

JCC © NASPA 2015 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1057154