A quote from a lawyer in an article in today's New York Times brought me back to what I recently promised to discuss at the end of a blog entry about Elizabeth Wolgast's book, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and Organizations.

Daniel K. Webb, the head of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's legal team, said of the City Council's request that the mayor resign: "I have told the mayor, as his lawyer, that he should not consider that under any circumstances."

The Code of Professional Responsibility states that the duty of a lawyer to his client and his duty to the legal system are the same: to represent his client zealously within the bounds of the law. But lawyers often go beyond zealous representation on legal issues. They often provide non-legal advice, just as Mr. Webb did to the mayor.  What could the law possibly have to say about a public official's decision to resign in the face of a scandal harmful to Detroit?

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Elizabeth Wolgast’s 1992 book, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and Organizations, raises some very important government ethics questions. I will deal with just one of them here.

The term “artificial persons” includes lawyers and government officials who are considered to act in the name of others. Wolgast’s book looks at the problems such artificial persons cause with respect to our ordinary views of such ethical issues as responsibility and accountability.

Too often, Wolgast says, lawyers and government officials hide behind their roles. I’m just representing my client as best I can, lawyers say. I’m just implementing policy, representing and helping my constituents, following legal advice.

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In an upcoming book, The Rule of Law and Development, Michael Trebilcock and Ron Daniels divide developing countries into three groups (according to an article in last week’s Economist):

1. Those where politicians, lawyers, and the public all support legal reform (e.g., Central Europe after the end of communism);
2. Those where politicians support legal reform, but lawyers and the police do not (e.g., Chile); and
3. Those where lawyers support legal reform, but politicians do not (e.g., Pakistan)

Legal reform succeeds only in the first of these three groups.

With respect to ethics reform, the same is true in the United States. It is not enough for politicians or lawyers alone to support ethics reform.

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Adolf Eichmann is the iconic extreme of the government bureaucrat. Not that any of us will hopefully ever be given orders like the ones he was given, but his simply following orders makes anyone question his or her own simply following orders.

There’s a lot more about government ethics that can be learned from Adolf Eichmann, I found from reading Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). When one sees acts that are often done without any thought, that seem so normal, done in a different, frightening context, these acts look grotesque, and we can start to question what we take as normal and natural.

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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: