City Related

Below is an op-ed piece I wrote this week for the North Haven Post about the unethical conduct involved in my town's budget process. Nothing was done illegally or in violation of the town's mediocre ethics code. My question here is, What can be done about this sort of deviousness, which most town residents do not understand, which the town's political leaders almost unanimously deny, and which the newspapers present only (at best) with 'both sides of the story,' taking no editorial...

I was inspired to take a different point of view of municipal ethics while reading Charles Taylor's review of Jonathan Lear's new book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Please bear with me as I describe the book before I say why it is relevant to municipal ethics.

The book looks at cultures that have been devastated by having their way of life destroyed. The result is that people's actions no...

When an official makes an Ad Hominem attack, everyone realizes there is an attack. And when an official makes an Ad Populum defense, everyone realizes that there is a defense. But when an official sets up a Straw Man, the situation isn't so clear. It's not an attack or a defense, but a response to an argument. Straw Men dress in the camouflage of discussion, but they are deeply disrespectful of...

There is so much valuable material in Terry L. Cooper's book The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role (1998) that it's difficult to sum up in a review. So instead I will look at some of its most important points in a few separate blog entries.

Responsibility is the key to municipal ethics as well as administration. It is central to democratic accountability, to recognizing and dealing with sometimes conflicting obligations, to being a...

In an earlier blog entry, I took the side of the Louisiana Board of Ethics in its dispute with the state legislature over whether it has jurisdiction over legislators who participate in debate when they have a conflict of interest. In another case, which the Board of Ethics lost on appeal, I feel the Board of Ethics was wrong, and I feel it is instructive to say why.

The matter involved two parish council members who voted for...

It is not enough to reform a city's ethics program. One must also let the world know about it. Most municipalities reform their ethics in a vacuum. They might look at a nearby town or city, or two, but the people in charge rarely know what is happening elsewhere, what are the norms and what are the latest reforms. This is one of the reasons we have put this website together.

Until recently, Chinese orphanages, run by municipalities, gave their orphans two kinds of surnames, either a...