I don't get it. Such a big deal has been made out of the Bell, CA officials paying themselves big bucks. This was considered the big local government ethics story of the last few years. The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitizer Prize for uncovering it.

Yes, what happened in Bell was appalling. But what happened in Luzerne County, PA was far, far worse. And yet, for example, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics has two blog posts about Bell, and none about Luzerne County.

The reason I raise this issue is that I feel that government ethics puts too much emphasis on money and the misconduct of bad apples. Although money was involved in Luzerne County, in fact a lot more than in Bell, what makes the scandal so horrible is that (1) it led to hundreds of young people being imprisoned in juvenile detention centers who had done nothing and who had been given almost no chance to defend themselves (this is why it's known as the Kids for Cash scandal); and (2) a large number of professionals inside and outside of the court system knew something serious was wrong, and yet only a handful of them tried to do anything to bring notice to what was happening and bring it to a stop.

In ethics, there are two basic approaches: (1) an ends-based approach, also referred to as utilitarian or consequentialist; and (2) a means-based approach, also referred to as rules-based or teleological. Government officials, and most people when speaking about government, generally use the former, while government ethics uses the latter. This causes a lot of problems.

Therefore, it is very heartening to see an academic taking a critical look at ends-based approaches to solving a governmental problem. The academic is Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos (U. of Chicago Law School), the problem is redistricting, and the name of his draft paper is "The Consequences of Consequentialist Criteria."

After reading my recent blog post about bridging the gulf between administrative and government ethics, one of the great scholars of public administration, George Frederickson, sent me a copy of a 2009 lecture of his, which appeared in 2010 in the journal Public Integrity. Entitled "Searching for Virtue in the Public Life: Revisiting the Vulgar Ethics Thesis," this lecture introduced me to the term "vulgar ethics," which first appeared in a 1991 essay by Lewis Mainzer. This amazing lecture also presents a great summary of a problem that I have written about a bit, but have not emphasized nearly enough:  the effect on government ethics of growing privatization of government. My next blog post will discuss this problem.

I have done a poor job in this blog covering administrative ethics, that is, the field of study involving the professional conduct of public administrators. Writers on administrative ethics have done a poor job of covering government ethics, that is, the field of study involving conflicts of interest. Although the two fields overlap, they exist in mostly separate worlds.  For example, rarely does an administrative ethics professor show up at a Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) conference, and my work (among others') has been totally ignored by administrative ethics professors.

Government ethics is unusual in having very limited representation in academia. Instead, it is taught by professors who consider it essentially a small corner of their field, which is administrative ethics. And to the extent government ethics courses are taught, they deal primarily with the federal government, even though most public administrators work in state and local governments and the federal ethics program does not provide a good example for other levels.

I find this state of affairs disheartening. That is why I was excited to learn that, in the second edition of his book Ethics Management for Public Administrators: Leading and Building Organizations of Integrity (M.E. Sharpe, 2012), Donald C. Menzel added a new chapter, "Local Government Ethics Management in Action."

But what I found in the book was hostility to conflict of interest programs. My goal in this series of blog posts is to try to understand this hostility, and to propose that the disciplines respect and responsibly critique each other, rather than ignoring and, occasionally, showing hostility to each other. What we need is a dialogue and mutual respect.

Self-Evaluation and Getting One's Bearings
To change oneself (and to support change in one's environment), self-evaluation is required. Before you change, you have to have your bearings. The problem is that, unlike evaluation of others, self-evaluation is rarely rational. It is more commonly emotional, taking "the rosiest possible interpretation of the facts," according to the Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010). Most of us think we're above average at everything, from driving a car to making judgments regarding our conflict situations. Officials see themselves as people of integrity, trying to do their best for our community. This makes it hard to orient themselves with respect to possible ethics reform.