At the Institutional Corruption conference sponsored by Harvard's Safra Ethics Center last Saturday, Ann Tenbrunsel, co-author of Blind Spots (see my blog posts on this book), noted that people act not only against what is written in ethics codes, but also against their own values. And they don't realize they're doing it. She portrayed the process by which we act as broken into three phases:  prediction, action, and recollection. In the first and third phases, we tend to think in terms of values. But when we act, we do what we want to do or what fits the context (e.g., a business or political decision rather than an ethical decision). Another way to put this is that we make forecasting errors regarding our actions, and then we engage in revisionary ethics, that is, we see good in what we did. Neither planning nor reflection reflect our actual decision.

At the Institutional Corruption Conference sponsored by Harvard's Safra Center last Saturday, Bruce Cain, a professor at UC Berkeley, pointed out that the permeable boundary between government and business (and, I would add, business law) brings into government many individuals who have a different concept of ethics. That is, in the business world, loyalty to one's supervisors (or clients) and to the company is the most important thing. In government, loyalty should be to the public. Of course, this is not loyalty as we know it, so loyalty should be suppressed as much as possible. But political appointees brought in from the outside are unlikely to put their loyalty aside, and those who hire them are unlikely to want this to happen.

Lawrence Lessig, who heads the Safra Center and hosted the event, started by defining institutional corruption as:

A situation where influences within an economy of influence tend to weaken the effectiveness of an institution, especially by weakening public trust of the institution.

This is an academic definition. What's important to take from it is (1) the fact that institutional corruption is a situation rather than an act (and it is hard to deal with IC situations in the usual criminal-like enforcement mechanisms of a government ethics program); (2) that in institutions such as governments there is an "economy of influence," that is, running for office requires funding (campaign, party, and PAC contributions), and those who provide the funds generally get influence disproportionate from others by doing so; and (3) that even when the influence is legal, it weakens public trust, and this makes government, and its democratic processes, less effective.

On Saturday, I attended a one-day conference on Institutional Corruption sponsored by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (videos of it will eventually appear here). Although local government was scarcely mentioned (there was one image of a painting that portrayed the 1930s machine in Kansas City, MO), many ideas that were discussed are applicable to local government ethics.

I will start with the ideas of Mark Warren, a professor at the University of British Columbia, not because he was the first or best speaker, but because, on the train to Boston, I read the online draft of his 2005 paper "Democracy Against Corruption" and found it fascinating. His talk at the conference presented some of the same ideas.

At the annual Council on Governmental Ethics conference in Washington D.C.

From left:

• Kurt Nemes, World Bank Ethics Office
• Carla Miller, City Ethics
• Matt Cross, Office of Governmental Ethics

Each presented as a part of an ethics training seminar in Washington DC, Dec. 2010

City Ethics' Carla Miller attended an international conference on public administration to present a paper on public corruption entitled "Ethics, Elephants and Enigmas" Shown here with panelists that Ms. Miller moderated on day 1 - October 23. The panel was themed: "Management Issues" with panel members from Bucharest, Romania, Bejing (2) and Shenyang, China.