Honesty and transparency are not enough: politics edition

Supreme Court judge Samuel Alito was asked to recuse himself from cases involving the January 6, 2021, riots, following the news that an upside-down U.S. flag, which was associated with that insurrection, was hung at his house on that day.

In a bit of meta-commentary, Paul Campos tells this story of Kathleen Parker, a Washington Post columnist who comes to Alito’s defense, quoting the judge’s statement, “My wife is a private citizen, and she possesses the same First Amendment rights as every other American . . . She was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our residence and our vacation home and has flown a wide variety of flags over the years.” This shifts things to Mrs. Alito, who, Parker assures us, “is funny, feisty, unfiltered and the life of any party.”

I’m not going to express any view on whether Alito is violating any ethics code, as this is something I know nothing about—here’s a Washington Post op-ed arguing that there is an ethics violation, based on “the statutory mandate that a judge ‘shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,'” which sounds kinda vague—lots of moving parts on this one.

The thing I want to focus on here is the apparent contrast between the Mrs. Alito being a funny, feisty, and pleasant person and the Alitos possibly supporting an armed overthrow of the U.S. government.

When a political movement becomes big, it can attract lots of funny, feisty, pleasant, intelligent, and accomplished people. Back when supporting a right-wing takeover of the U.S. government was an extreme position, sure, then it was mostly the very troubled people who would support the idea. But now that a big chunk of Americans hold that view, sure, this chunk will include lots of funny, feisty, etc. people. Indeed, once a position becomes mainstream enough, its very mainstreamness, at least in some social contexts, can make it more attractive to our funny, feisty friends.

Here’s some historical context. Communism used to be popular among intellectuals in the U.S. and elsewhere. Remember Oppenheimer? OK, he wasn’t supposed to be such a nice guy, but “funny, feisty, unfiltered and the life of any party” . . . that sounds about right. And I’m sure that many of his communist friends were funny, feisty, etc., and also very nice people too. Did they support the armed overthrow of the U.S. government? I guess they did! This armed overthrow wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so maybe they felt that by doing small things to push the country in that direction, some good things would come of it . . . but, yeah, they were on the side of revolution. Most Americans weren’t, but if the communists had succeeded in taking over the Democratic party in the way that insurrectionists have succeeded with much of the modern Republican party, then who knows?

The point is, there’s no reason to think that someone being funny, feisty, etc., should get in the way of her or her spouse supporting an insurrection. Just look at history.

And this takes us to the title of this post. In science, we say that honesty and transparency are not enough. As Nick Brown and I recently put it, it is important to be able to criticize published research without impugning the integrity of the researchers; conversely, researchers should not fool themselves into thinking, just because they are morally upright, that they cannot publish work with serious and avoidable errors.

I have no problem with Kathleen Parker using her newspaper column to sharing her positive impressions of Martha-Ann Alito. I just don’t think this is particularly relevant to the important political question of whether Samuel Alito is violating judicial rules, which I guess would be best addressed through some study of the law, along with evidence on previous cases where judges have taken strong political positions outside of their court rulings. Indeed, I wouldn’t even think it particularly relevant if Parker had direct evidence on Mr. Alito’s feistiness, etc. This is not to say that Parker is wrong on the merits—it’s hard to say, as she doesn’t address the legal issues in her column—just that I recognize a form of reasoning that bothers me when it comes up in discussions of science too.