Life & Wisdom Quote by Stanley Fish

Fish is taking a swing at one of academia's favorite parlor tricks: reading a person’s ethics off their theory like tea leaves. The line has the brisk, prosecutorial cadence of someone who’s watched too many colleagues treat “deconstruction,” “liberalism,” or “natural law” as a moral x-ray. “Always incorrect” is deliberately absolutist, a useful provocation from a critic famous for puncturing the fantasy that interpretation can be purified of interests, institutions, and incentives.

The intent is less to defend moral relativism than to block a lazy shortcut: the belief that abstract commitments map cleanly onto lived conviction. A philosopher can argue for utilitarianism and still be tender, cruel, principled, venal, contradictory; a theorist can write about emancipation while exploiting people, or champion order while privately acting anarchic. Fish’s point isn’t that ideas don’t matter, but that theories are often professional performances - rhetorically coherent, socially legible, strategically deployable - while moral life is messy, situational, and frequently untheorized.

The subtext is also disciplinary: he’s warning against the moralizing impulse that turns intellectual disagreement into character indictment. In the late-20th-century “theory wars,” positions were routinely treated as tells - if you were X, you must secretly be Y. Fish denies critics that comfort. He’s asking readers to separate textual stance from ethical soul-searching, and to notice the machinery in between: the classroom, the journal, the audience, the career, the tribe.

It works because it attacks a seduction that feels righteous. If we can deduce virtue from worldview, we can skip the harder work of judging actions, contexts, and consequences. Fish refuses that convenience.