Book Reviews

Laura Hartman and Crina Archer's essay "False Beliefs, Partial Truths: Personal Myths and Ethical Blind Spots" (January 2012) provides a valuable new view on how our blind spots hamper our handling of ethical matters.

Double Blindness

Self-justification is an important element in ethical misconduct, cover-ups, and officials' public denials and explanations of conduct. It aids and abets our blind spots. It is a sign of weakness, anxiety, and fear more than of poor character

Self-justification is something each of us engages in. Sometimes we fight it, sometimes we effectively compromise with it, and sometimes we give in to it. The one thing most of us rarely do is think or talk openly about it.

"The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became — though even to use words like 'corrupt' or 'sinister' made serious people uncomfortable, so Katsuyama avoided them. Maybe his biggest concern, when he spoke to city residents, was that he be seen as just another nut with a conspiracy theory."

The draft of Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout's new essay, "The Forgotten Law of Lobbying," which will appear in Election Law Journal, looks at the history of how American courts have viewed lobbying. This history provides a valuable perspective on lobbying, making it more clear what it is about lobbyists that attracts bad feelings.

I've been writing a lot about government ethics and behavioral psychology over the last few years. I consider some of the findings of behavioral psychology, especially about blind spots, essential to understanding what leads to ethical misconduct and, therefore, essential to ethics training, ethics advice, and ethics enforcement. But behavioral psychology has not yet been embraced by American government ethics programs, at least as far as I have seen.

I'm reading an excellent novel right now:  Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi, translated from the Italian by Michael F. Moore (Ecco, 2004, 2011).

I recently read the latest, third edition of The Ethics Challenge in Public Service: A Problem-Solving Guide by Carol W. Lewis and Stuart C. Gilman (Jossey-Bass, 2012). This is the second most popular text used in Public Sector Ethics courses, mostly in Public Administration programs. Most of the book deals with issues other than conflicts of interest, but it has some valuable things to say about the topic.

This is the third of three posts on how Richard W. Painter's recommendations for federal ethics reform in his book, Getting the Government America Deserves: How Ethics Reform Can Make a Difference (Oxford U.P., 2009), may be applied to local government ethics programs.

Lobbying

Two weeks ago, the Better Government Association-Alper Services Integrity Index was published, the first since 2008. It grades each state's conflicts of interest, freedom of information, open meetings, and whistleblower-protection laws.