St. Thomas More

The Conscience Clause

There is a moment in every career in public service – and in many private careers besides – when the institution asks you to do something that your conscience says is wrong. Not merely unwise or suboptimal, but wrong in a way that participating in it would make you complicit.

This is the conscience clause. Not a legal provision (though those exist, and they are inadequate). A human reality. The moment when obedience and integrity diverge, and you must choose.

Corruption and the Appearance of Corruption

A distinguished public official is discovered to have financial interests in a company that recently won a government contract. The official insists there is no connection between the two facts. An investigation is conducted. The investigation finds no direct evidence of a quid pro quo. The official is cleared.

And yet.

Something has been damaged that the clearance does not repair. The public’s confidence in the integrity of the process has been diminished, and that diminishment has real consequences that outlast the investigation, the news cycle, and the official’s tenure.

The Conscience of Office

You took the job because you believed you could do good. Perhaps it was government service. Perhaps corporate leadership. Perhaps nonprofit work. The sector matters less than the premise: you thought you could exercise power responsibly.

Now you are being asked to do something that violates your conscience.

Not a catastrophic moral failure. Something smaller. A compromise. A necessary evil, they tell you. The cost of getting things done.

You are trying to decide whether to comply or resign.

The Whistleblower Problem

Let me describe a situation that occurs with depressing regularity. A person working within an institution discovers that the institution is doing something wrong. Not a matter of opinion – something demonstrably illegal, or dangerous, or both. The person reports it through internal channels. The internal channels do not function. The person escalates. The escalation is blocked. The person, having exhausted every avenue the institution provides, goes public.

And the institution destroys them.

On the Useful Fiction of Utopia

People have been arguing about whether I meant Utopia literally since the day I published it. The answer – which I offered at the time, and which has been consistently ignored – is: that is not the right question.

The right question is not whether I believed a perfect society was achievable. I did not. The right question is whether the act of imagining one serves a purpose. It does, and the purpose is indispensable to political life.

Satire as Civic Duty

I wrote a book about an imaginary island where everything works perfectly, and I named it “Nowhere.” Five centuries later, people are still arguing about whether I was serious. I consider this a success.

Satire operates in the space between what is said and what is meant, and that space is the most politically productive territory in all of literature. Because satire says the thing that cannot be said directly. It wraps the indictment in a joke, and the joke provides just enough cover to get the truth past the defenses of the powerful and into the consciousness of the public.

The Oath and the Office

I would like to begin with a document that every officeholder in a democracy has signed and very few have read carefully: the oath of office.

The oath – in its various national formulations – commits the officeholder to serve the public interest, uphold the law, and discharge their duties with integrity. It does not mention party loyalty. It does not mention donor obligations. It does not mention reelection strategy. It does not mention the expedient thing, the popular thing, or the thing most likely to generate a favorable news cycle.