ABSTRACT
Self-flagellation is an art of the possible, one that academics are better at than politics. Like the writer Borges, who informs his critics that he could easily supply them with harsher things to say about him than any they were likely to discover for themselves. Where there is no community of purpose, no acknowledgment of the probability of history—neither future nor past— the result, predictably, will be the one we have: a thin and restless present where the pursuit of knowledge becomes only another competitive sport. The difference made by the loss of this sense of privilege may be seen in several examples drawn from the past, each about a distinguished American academic figure. The history of ethics, as philosophers and moral teachers have conceived it, simply assumes the moral point of view and provides little understanding of its alternative and not much more of its failures.
