Mamet Is Wrong About Cheating and Children

It turns out that the FBI carried out an investigation of corruption and outright cheating in elite colleges admissions processes.  To me, I'll admit, it was a surprise that anyone with genuine power actually cared enough to order an operation, but it's entirely unsurprising to discover precisely how some of the rich, powerful, and famous gamed the system.

It was surprising to me to read playwright David Mamet's open letter defending his friend, actor Felicity Huffmann - who was arrested in the sting - not just because he advocates a rather colorful course of action:

If ever there were a use for the Texas Verdict, this is it. For the uninitiated, the Texas Verdict is: “Not Guilty, but Don’t do it Again.”

It's surprising to see him make such a sweepingly universal - and quite bad - justification for her behavior.

That a parent’s zeal for her children’s future may have overcome her better judgment for a moment is not only unfortunate, it is, I know we parents would agree, a universal phenomenon.

A writer, particularly well-known for his revelation of character and action through dialogue in his plays, claims that ALL parents have their better judgement overcome or compromised at some time by zeal for their children's future. It's a bit implausible as a line.

Putting aside his downplaying "for a moment" phrase - that's clearly not the case for any of the parties accused of cheating and bribery - is it really true that every single parent exhibits care, let alone, "zeal" for their children's future?  Mamet knows it's not - he has an entire career of writing characters who pretend to have other's interests at heart, but are really out for themselves, or driven by their own trauma and insecurity.  

But let's talk about the parents who do care, and make bad decisions on that basis.  

Already back in antiquity, Aristotle had a name for the sort of thing that Mamet disingenuously portrays as a mere momentary lapse.  His name for that phenomenon - knowing that something is wrong, but doing it anyway, or knowing something is right, but choosing something else instead.  He called it AKRASIA, and discussed it in Nicomachean Ethics book 7 (among other places).

You can find old fashioned translations of this term as "incontinence" or "weakness of will".  I like to translate it as "lack" or "loss of self-control", or as "failure to follow through on commitments", which capture different features of what Aristotle has in mind decently enough.

It is a moral failure, not as bad as actually being vicious, or depraved, but still bad.  It has an opposite, exercising self-control (enkratia in Greek), which is good, but not as good as being virtuous.  Huffman and all the other people who cheated to get their children into places in elite schools they didn't deserve, did something wrong, something bad.  And there's something wrong and bad in them as well.

Interestingly, while Aristotle considers the paradigmatic mode of akrasia to arise from desires for physical pleasures, he also mentions "children" specifically as one of the objects of akrasia (along with wealth, desire to win, anger, and other things).  So it's not like this is something new.  Mamet would be right to say that parents often fail morally by favoring their own kids.  

He's wrong - and I expect, fully knows that to be the case - in claiming that every parent is similarly akratic with respect to their children.  One might with some degree of plausibility make a much weaker claim that every parent that cares about their children fudges something, at least in some small matter.  

But not every parent cheats the system and others in it, undermines processes, breaks laws - considers and then commits some significant injustice - that's not something we can all relate to, and thus write off as morally insignificant.  We're not all akratic, even with respect to our children.  It costs good parents a lot sometimes to resist the urge to do wrong to "do right" by their kids.  And many of them do it, time and time again.  In Aristotle's terms, those are the people who possess and exercise self-control

In fact, I'll go further.  Huffmann, her 40+ fellow cheaters, and the quite likely thousands who haven't ben investigated and caught, are at best akratic.  At best, because they could be - and some probably are - genuinely morally vicious from any serious ethical perspective.  For his part, Mamet comes across as an either akratic or vicious enabler, doing his best to attempt justifying the akratic or vicious actions of his friend by suggesting we lower the moral bar, and pretend like everyone acts this way.