Resources & Learning

This is the third in a series of blog posts inspired by reading Susan Neiman's book Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton, 2008). One of her topics is how an individual’s organizational environment can greatly affect his or her conduct. Her goal is not to excuse misconduct, but to explain it and to look at ways of avoiding it. She focuses on two well-known experiments.

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).

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).

It is a truism of government ethics that a sense of entitlement is an important cause of unethical conduct. People who feel entitled to the power they wield feel they have the right to deviate from ethical norms in ways others do not (see my blog post on this topic). Now there is research that supports this view.

This page will contain an overview of the resources available on the City Ethics site. This is a work in progress, but check out the sub-menus under the "Resources" Menu button.

Online Training List Updated May 24, 2013

More and more government ethics information and training materials are available online, so that they can be easily accessed at any time. Everything from FAQs to information sheets to plain-English guides to quizzes to videos.

Reading Garry Wills' A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (1999) made me think about how anti- and pro-government feelings jive with views on government ethics.

A chapter in Jonah Lehrer's new book, How We Decide, sheds some interesting light on ethical decision-making. The book shares the latest discoveries neuroscientists have made using hightech views of the brain at work, especially when it is making various sorts of decisions.

I recently read a fascinating classic study by Albert O. Hirschman (Institute of Advanced Study) called Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (1982). This book focuses on the various tensions between private consumption and public action. It only touches on government ethics issues, but what Hirschman says is worth sharing. For example:

Due to President Obama, the word "empathy" is getting tossed around a lot lately. What interests me is that his definition of the word "empathy" is central to what ethicists call "moral imagination." And moral imagination is central to government ethics.

Here's Pres. Obama's definition of "empathy" from his book The Audacity of Hope: