Blogs

Good, open government does more than give people reason to trust those who spend their tax dollars. It even gives people a better environment.

According to an article in last week’s Economist, the annual Environmental Sustainability Index, which grades the environmental health of 150...

The Ethics Resource Center’s first National Government Ethics Survey has just come out, and is available free at the ERC’s website, although it requires registration. It is the result of a random 2007 telephone poll of government employees, and is part of a series of polls looking at ethics in different sorts of workplaces. City Ethics' Founder, Carla Miller, was on the Advisory Group for this survey.

Here are some of the Survey’s...

Articles have been written putting into question the study on which the following blog entry was based. The Tulane Law Review and Law School have apologized, but the authors, although admitting to their errors, stand by their conclusions and plan to publish a revised version of their law review article, according to an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. For more on this,...

The most important division in ethics is between ends-based approaches (consequentialist or teleological, best known as "the ends justify the means") and rules-based approaches (deontological).

The most important problem for individuals in government is that we are taught rules-based approaches while we’re growing up (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), but in government most talk is in terms of ends (Will it raise taxes?).

Today’s New York Times has...

Transparency is often seen as a technical, often annoying part of municipal ethics. All those notices and agendas that have to be filed at the right time in the right place, all those document requests from the news media and opposition parties. Is all this really necessary for good government? Does it lower taxes, provide better services? Or is it just a pain in the neck?

Sometimes you need a big disaster – Enron, for example – for people to understand the cost of not acting...

The Ethics Resource Center in Washington DC has released an interesting document for anyone active in the Ethics & Compliance Officer field - see the quotes below which give a taste of the subject of the document: