Dr. Bruce Weinstein is a corporate consultant and public speaker known as “The Ethics Guy.”  In a recent article for Business Week, he reminded me why it is that so many people dismiss ethics as either intrinsically obvious or disconnected from reality, when, of course, it is neither. 

The article, entitled “The Ethics of Picking A Vice-President,” purported to make the revolutionary argument that Senators McCain and Obama had an ethical obligation to try to choose as running mates the individual most likely to be good presidents should a tragedy occur, and not merely the politicians will would attract the votes to get their tickets elected. After all, when so many vice-presidents have ended up in the White House, it only makes sense to make job qualifications the number one priority.  

This sounds persuasive and wise, except that it ignores the indelible lessons of history: there is no way to determine who will be an effective President of the United States. There is no experience that prepares one for the job, no special skill set that assures success. One could make a strong case, for example, that most of our smartest presidents---Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Garfield, Taft, Wilson, Carter---have been among the worst, while many of our most successful, such as Washington, Jackson, Polk, FDR, Truman and Reagan, were far from intellectual giants. Experience? Abraham Lincoln, widely regarded as our greatest president, had no executive experience at all. Harry Truman, one of our most admired presidents, had no substantive qualifications for a job of such magnitude. The presidents who came to the office with what seemed to be the strongest backgrounds for the job, James Buchanan, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, all were failures. Meanwhile, vice-presidents chosen for purely strategic purposes have dazzled: if anyone in their parties had even suspected that Teddy Roosevelt, who was regarded as a trouble-making maverick, or Lyndon Johnson, whom the Kennedys held in contempt, would actually become president, they would never have been nominated at all.  

So the Ethics Guy’s argument boils down to “don’t choose someone who is obviously unqualified to be president.” Well, duh. No felons, no congenital idiots, no high school dropouts, no rock singers, no Rosy O’Donnell or Kevin Federline….okay, good idea, got it. But none of those candidates would be much of an asset in the election, either. Beyond the obviously unqualified, however, nobody really knows what a promising should look like. The most dubiously-qualified vice-presidential candidates of recent decades would probably be William Miller (Goldwater), Geraldine Ferraro (Mondale), and of course, Dan Quayle. But were any of these less promising than Truman? They might have surprised us. 

Weinstein’s real message is buried at the end of his article, and it is aimed at business executives picking their successors. But running a company is nothing like running a country; there are very good ways to predict who will be a successful CEO. His analogy with vice-presidential choices is wrong-headed and naïve, and it devalues ethical analysis to argue for options that are theoretical rather than real. For Obama and McCain, picking vice-presidential running mates who will improve their chances of being elected, while keeping their fingers crossed that they will be up to the job, isn’t just an ethical course---it’s the only course.