This is the second in a series of blog posts inspired by reading Susan Neiman’s book Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton, 2008). A controversial aspect of government ethics involves intentions or motivations. Must an official be shown to have intended to act unethically in orde…

I recently read Susan Neiman’s book Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton, 2008) and found a lot there of value to government ethics, even though government ethics doesn’t generally involve the big questions of moral philosophy (see my blog post on this). I am going to write a fe…