The principal problem with getting one's ethics from one's organization is that, according to Bailey, “Organizations seem to have a poorly developed sense of right and wrong. Expediency all too often comes out ahead of morality. Organizations and institutions are supposed to be the guardians of trust and fair dealing, but often there is no one to guard the guardians and — self interest being a prime mover — they look after their own good rather than the public good. ... The lack of moral sensibility lies in the leaders and owners, who put their advantage ahead of the common good ... behind a screen of respectability, of professed concern for the public good. Everywhere there is a major presentational effort either to deny self-interested behavior or to redefine it as altruism."

What you can see from reading this anthropologist, who studies all sorts of organizations in countries around the world, is that what occurs in local governments in the U.S. is no different. The principal thing that is different is that local government officials owe their fiduciary duties not to owners, or to numerous, dispersed stockholders who change frequently, but to the members of the community they live in.

In The Kingdom of Individuals (Cornell University Press, 1993), F. G. Bailey's principal concern is what he calls svejks (pronounced "shvikes"), that is, individuals in organizations who put their personal, but not usually financial interests ahead of the organization, and yet act as if they are loyal to the organization, using its proclaimed values to defend their actions. This is not the sort of conflict of interest that is ordinarily dealt with in government ethics. But what the author says about the conflicts of interest in organizations, including governments, is valuable, and often fascinating.

So in the next few blog posts, I will riff on ideas raised in this book.

Another cause for my last blog entry, on the three lies of government ethics, is that I had just finished F. G. Bailey's book The Prevalence of Deceit (Cornell, 1991). The book is about the close connection between deceit and power. Bailey pictures politics as a contest for power that employs rhetoric. The goal of rhetoric is to persuade (the politician's most important means of manipulation) and, in this case, to persuade possible supporters that the politician is telling the truth. Not a truth, but the truth.

I recommend an essay by Donald Menzel from the October issue of PM, the magazine of the International City-County Management Association (ICMA), entitled "Strengthening Ethical Governance in Local Governments." Menzel is a former president of the American Society for Public Administration, author of Ethics Management for Public Administrators: Building Organizations of Integrity, and co-editor of Teaching Ethics and Values: Innovations, Strategies, and Issues in Public Administration Programs.
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Gift disclosure and limitations are an important part of government ethics. But rarely do we think of what gifts mean. Usually this goes little further than politicians saying, "I can't be bought."

But gifts aren't about buying. In fact, gifts are the opposite of buying, according to Lewis Hyde in his 1983 book, The Gift. "[A] gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us."

What is most important about gifts for our purposes is what Hyde shows the reader in his descriptions of gift-giving in primitive and modern societies: "the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved."