In a long and very important article in today’s New York Times about the conflicts of interest of so-called television and radio network military analysts, one analyst says that the network he works for asked few questions about analysts’ outside business interests, the nature of their work, or the potential of that work to create conflicts of interest. “The worst conflict of interest was no interest,” he said. Hiring military analysts who work for military contractors and whose writing is vet

In an upcoming book, The Rule of Law and Development, Michael Trebilcock and Ron Daniels divide developing countries into three groups (according to an article in last week’s Economist): 1. Those where politicians, lawyers, and the public all support legal reform (e.g., Central Europe after the end of communism); 2. Those where politicians support legal reform, but lawyers and the police do not (e.g., Chile); and 3.

Dan Ariely, an economist at M.I.T., made up a test that is easy to cheat on, in order to see how social situations might affect students’ choices whether to actually cheat or not. As described in his new book, Predictably Irrational, he found that students who had been asked to recall the Ten Commandments did not cheat at all.

“Ethics” is an unfortunate name for what appears in government ethics codes. When people think about ethics, they think about right and wrong, about moral obligations, about being honest and upright, about the Golden Rule. This isn’t what government ethics deals with. Government ethics deals with a limited area of conduct: conflicts of interest. And most people don’t realize this, or understand conflicts of interest. Click here to read the rest of this blog entry. When something is unethical, it is wrong.

An Alaskan state representative needs a new kidney. The new state ethics law does not allow gifts over $250. It has a compassionate gift exemption, but it only allows compassionate gifts with a fair market value less than $250. This is one of many unforeseen consequences that comes from ethics codes (or any legislation, for that matter). So the state legislature is rushing through a bill to change the exemption to a reporting requirement.

According to an article in the Muncie (IN) Star Press, the Muncie City Council voted 5-4 not to adopt the American Society for Public Administration’s ethics code, something that hundreds of citizens at the meeting favored. Apparently, the one non-Council member who spoke out against voting for the code was the City Attorney, who “worried the proposed code of ethics was geared more toward administrators than a legislative body, and that it would create separation-of-power issues.”

In this article published in the Orlando Sentinel, the "Consultant" referred to was Carla Miller, of CityEthics, in a workshop presented in the spring of 2007.

From: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/views/orl-ethics1707dec17,0…

Jacksonville's Ethics Commission recently went through a two year revision process of their City's Ethics Code. The resulting updates were finally ratified by the City Council last Tuesday night. See the Times Union article below... Note that I will get the code revisions up in a separate blog entry later.

From: http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/113007/opl_221526913.shtml.

The Florida Times-Union

November 30, 2007

Is there an ethical requirement to discuss matters that are not being discussed? Dan Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, refers to something he calls the Four Attentional Rules. 'In any group, from the family, to organizations, to entire societies, there are these unstated rules that we learn tacitly about the questions that can't be asked.' Click here to read the rest of this blog entry. The Four Attentional Rules are as follows: 1. Here's what we notice 2. Here's what we call it 3. Here's what can't be noticed 4.

From Wikipedia. The story of the blind men and an elephant appears to have originated in India, but its original source is debated. It has been attributed to the Jainists, Buddhists, and sometimes to the Sufis or Hindus, and has been used by all those groups. The best-known version attributed to an individual in the modern day is the 19th Century poem by John Godfrey Saxe.