Appearances are very important in government ethics. A situation that has arisen with respect to a proposed state audit of the Palm Beach County ethics commission has created serious appearance problems.

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.

Officials and lawyers tend to act as if they were Platonists. That is, they talk about conflicts of interest as if they existed in a ideal form, divorced from reality.

Many government ethicists, including me, see conflicts of interest as things that exist in the real world, a world where the public is concerned that officials seek to use their office to help themselves and those with whom they have special relationships, such as family members and business associates. What is odd about the real world of government ethics is that it exists in the form not of something rock solid, but in the form of appearances. Enforcing these appearances unfortunately has to be done through the creation of ideal descriptions of conflicts in the form of laws. But preventing these appearances can go beyond these ideal forms.

Here is an example of a conflict situation that has a very concrete existence in the real world of appearances, but is hard to grab hold of in the ideal world of laws.

“These are, as far as I’m concerned, the everyday things and courtesies that are done in life.”

—Andrew P. O'Rourke, then Westchester County (NY) Executive, after admitting that he had sought a job for his son-in-law (and an admission interview for his daughter) at a medical college that had a contract with the county; had recommended his domestic partner for a job with the county's medical insurer; and had "looked the other way" when his daughter was hired by the county's malpractice law firm. Since Westchester County had no government ethics program, his ethical misconduct was the subject of criminal enforcement, and he was cleared of all charges. From Mr. O'Rourke's obituary in today's New York Times.

In February, I wrote seven blog posts applying some of the concepts and practices of nonviolence to the field of government ethics. This is effectively an eighth post. This time the inspiration is not a book, but the latest issue of the journal New Routes, entitled "Peace Without Borders: Regional Peacebuilding in Focus."

This issue takes recognition of the fact that war does not occur in isolation in only one country. Political and ethnic leaders of neighboring countries are often involved, either militarily or through providing money and arms. If wars are regional, then peace solutions must also be regional. Europe is the best example of success in regional cooperation not only to bring about peace, but to institutionalize it so that war is almost impossible.

The same is often true of government ethics.

Annapolis is an unusual little city in many ways. It may only have 40,000 residents, but it's the state capital, the county seat, the home of the U.S. Naval Academy, and equidistant, and not far, from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. With respect to government ethics, the county for which it is the county seat, Anne Arundel County, has a relatively good ethics program, complete with an executive director, which is very unusual even for a county of half a million people.

Therefore, it's not surprising that Annapolis's ethics commission and mayor are trying to improve the unusual little city's government ethics program. The most important improvements in the proposed ordinance are (1) giving the EC more teeth (although they're very blunt teeth) and the right to initiate investigations, (2) giving the ethics program more transparency, (3) requiring more financial disclosure, and (4) placing stricter limits on gifts.