It is common for councils to engage in backsliding shortly after creating or improving a government ethics program. When there has been a scandal, councils often go further than they would like to go in establishing ethics rules and procedures. When attention to ethics matters has lessened, it often seems to be a good time to make the program more what council members would like, and this almost always means two things:  (1) making it easier for them to accept gifts and (2) making it harder for citizens to file ethics complaints or for complaints to lead to findings of an ethics violation.

Government ethics is naturally focused on the selfish aspects of people's conduct, the aspects that make them provide special benefits to themselves, those who help them, and those to whom they feel special obligations. But as Jonathan Haidt argues in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), people are not just selfish. They're also groupish. And our groupishness causes a lot of problems, as well.

Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), set out a Moral Foundations Theory that posits the existence of moral modules or foundations. In my last post I dealt with the fairness/proportionality foundation.

You may not have realized it, but if you are reading this, you are most likely WEIRD, that is, a member of a culture that is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The features of WEIRDness can be summed up in the following sentence from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012):  "The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships."

According to an article in yesterday's Washington Post, new allegations have been made of a "shadow campaign" by which the District of Columbia's largest contractor (in contract dollars) supported the current mayor's 2010 campaign to the tune of about 650,000 unreported dollars.