Resources & Learning

One section of Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012) is entitled "We Are All Intuitive Politicians." The section begins with a recognition of the centrality of accountability not just in government, but in all our relations with peopl…

The Ethics of Gut Reactions According to Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), our morality is driven by our gut reactions, particularly about disgust. Disgust, based in senses (bad smells, yucky tastes, gross textures), ext…

In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt identifies one of the biggest obstacles to government ethics in the U.S.:  the fact that we have an individualistic society, placing individuals at the center, rather than the more …

This is the first of a series of posts that will pull out valuable pieces from my new book Local Government Ethics Programs. One reason that government ethics is described in terms of obligations is that government officials have a fiduciary duty or obligation toward the community for which they wo…

Local Government Ethics Programs 2.0: A Resource for Ethics Commission Members, Local Officials, Attorneys, Journalists, and Students, And a Manual for Ethics Reform by Robert Wechsler, Director of Research-Retired at City Ethics The second edition of this comprehensive book about localgovernment e…

Well worth reading, as a encapsulated version of what is essential to a local government ethics program, is the statement of Mark Davies, executive director of the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board, gave to the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force, which will soon be making recommendations for …

Corrupt Cities: A Practical Guide to Cure and Prevention, a book by Robert Klitgaard, Ronald Maclean-Abaroa, and H. Lindsey Parris (Institute for Contemporary Studies, 2000), is an excellent study and analysis of municipal anti-corruption efforts primarily outside of the United States. Much of what…

To commemorate the death of Václav Havel, here are some quotations from his work that are relevant to government ethics: "The prerequisite for everything political is moral. Politics really should be ethics put into practice." “Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible p…

Henry Adams' 1880 novel Democracy is a must-read for those interested in government ethics. It's also a first-rate novel, full of wit, excellent writing, and a good portrayal of post-Civil War Washington. It's available free from Project Gutenberg, in six e-book formats. The climax of the novel is …

This fourth blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect is a miscellany of various ideas in the book that have relevance to local government ethics. An Ethics Commission With Lips Zimbardo raises an interesting thought experiment. What if there were a reverse Milgram authority experiment…