To commemorate the death of Václav Havel, here are some quotations from his work that are relevant to government ethics:

"The prerequisite for everything political is moral. Politics really should be ethics put into practice."

“Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.”

Living in the Truth:  "A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system [with] no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his or her own personal survival, is a demoralized person.  The system depends on this demoralization. ... Living in the truth ... is ... an attempt to regain control over one's own sense of responsibility.  In other words, it is clearly a moral act, not only because one must pay so dearly for it, but principally because it is not self-serving ... the representatives of power invariably come to terms with those who live in the truth by persistently ascribing utilitarian motivations to them – a lust for power or fame or wealth – and thus they try, at least, to implicate them in their own world, the world of general demoralization."

Henry Adams' 1880 novel Democracy is a must-read for those interested in government ethics. It's also a first-rate novel, full of wit, excellent writing, and a good portrayal of post-Civil War Washington. It's available free from Project Gutenberg, in six e-book formats.

The climax of the novel is an exchange between the Secretary of the Treasury (Ratcliffe, formerly a senator) and the novel's protagonist (Madeleine), a wealthy widow fascinated with politics. The exchange is all about government ethics. Here are a few wonderful quotations from the novel, including from the climax:

This fourth blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect is a miscellany of various ideas in the book that have relevance to local government ethics.

An Ethics Commission With Lips
Zimbardo raises an interesting thought experiment. What if there were a reverse Milgram authority experiment? In the Milgram experiment, individuals shocked people more and more despite not wanting to, just because an authority figure told them to and said he would take full responsibility. What if authority were used to get people to do more and more good, even if they didn't really want to? What if justifications and role models were used to further compassionate and altruistic behavior?

One of the unfortunate aspects of government ethics programs is that, while ethics commissions are usually given the authority to penalize those who violate the ethics code, they are not given the authority to reward those who withstand the situational forces in order to report ethical misconduct or not indulge in it themselves. Perhaps ethics commissions should be given not only "teeth," but also "lips" to give a metaphorical smooch to those with the courage to stand up to intimidation, resist temptation, and recognize that their loyalty is to the public. A metaphorical smooch would also be in order for those who quickly admit to their misconduct and help the ethics commission, and therefore the public, understand the origins of such misconduct in the unwritten rules of the local government's ethics environment.

This third blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect looks at some ways to deal with situational forces.

Recognizing Our Limitations
One of the college students who played a guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment said later, "I was actually beginning to feel like a guard and had really thought I was incapable of this kind of behavior. ... [W]hile I was doing it I didn't feel any regret. I didn't feel any guilt. It was only afterwards, when I began to reflect on what I had done, that this behavior began to dawn on me and I realized that this was a part of me I had not noticed before."

It is a part of most of us. But if we refuse to recognize this, as most of us do, we can do nothing to control it. This is the first-level act individuals are responsible for when they take a position of authority:  recognizing that they are capable of acting unethically in that position. This can be very difficult. People need help recognizing this, and they usually don't get it.

This second blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect applies the situational approach to government ethics programs, and looks at the situational forces at play with respect to ethical misconduct.

The Situational Approach
It is in the interests of those who are responsible for the preservation of a poor ethics environment to keep an ethics program focused on individuals. This isolates problems and deflects attention away from those responsible for situational pressures and the lack of oversight.

But there is an alternative approach, which takes a situational orientation. Zimbardo refers to the alternative approach to individual misconduct as a public health approach. The medical approach is individualistic, treating the patient. The public health approach identifies diseases and tries to prevent them from spreading. In the context of local government ethics, the disease is institutional corruption and a poor ethics environment. If patients keep catching this disease from their environment, treating their ethical misconduct alone is a short-sighted and short-term solution.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post about a 2007 book by Philip Zimbardo, entitled The Lucifer Effect. I had read about Zimbardo's book in another book, Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity.

I finally got around to reading The Lucifer Effect, and I highly recommend it, despite its length and the small size of its type (for the middle-aged and older, this is a book that's better read as an e-book, where you can make the type as large as you want; I, alas, bought the paperback edition). In this and following blog posts, I will go beyond what I wrote in 2010.

Zimbardo's book starts with an experiment he did back in 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment, where normal college students were assigned roles as guards and prisoners, and quickly became either abusive, silent as to others' abuse, or accepting of abuse to them even as they rebelled in some ways against it. The experiment shows how quickly we can all be shaped by aspects of the situations we are in and the roles we are asked to play, and thereby accepting of new, unethical norms.

Zimbardo also looks at others' experiments, as well as real-life situations, such as the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons.

Local governments are hardly prisons, but they are situations that, especially where there are poor ethics environments, can place strong pressures on individuals to go along with unethical norms. The pressures involve us in loyalty, secrecy, becoming and remaining one of the gang, and playing the games necessary to raise funds in order to get re-elected and to appease those with power, whether in the government, in the party, or in the community (that is, large taxpayers, employers, developers, contractors, organizations, and their lobbyists).