I was inspired to take a different point of view of municipal ethics while reading Charles Taylor's review of Jonathan Lear's new book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Please bear with me as I describe the book before I say why it is relevant to municipal ethics.

The book looks at cultures that have been devastated by having their way of life destroyed. The result is that people's actions no...

This is an excellent article by Tom Freidman which really highlights something that I consider to be very important in the development of any sort of effective ethics program - namely SIMPLICITY. Often it is the really simple things combined with a bright idea that bring the greatest change for the better... Tell me what you think - read it here:

When an official makes an Ad Hominem attack, everyone realizes there is an attack. And when an official makes an Ad Populum defense, everyone realizes that there is a defense. But when an official sets up a Straw Man, the situation isn't so clear. It's not an attack or a defense, but a response to an argument. Straw Men dress in the camouflage of discussion, but they are deeply disrespectful of...

There is so much valuable material in Terry L. Cooper's book The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role (1998) that it's difficult to sum up in a review. So instead I will look at some of its most important points in a few separate blog entries.

Responsibility is the key to municipal ethics as well as administration. It is central to democratic accountability, to recognizing and dealing with sometimes conflicting obligations, to being a...

"Every lie is an exception we carve out for ourselves."

--Bill Curry, columnist for the Hartford Courant, former councillor to President Clinton and gubernatorial candidate in Connecticut. From his March 11 column on the Libby trial and lying among politicians.

According to an article in the Tennessean, the Tennessee House passed a bill that would allow lawmakers ten days to correct 'errors' in their campaign finance disclosure forms once the Registry of Election Finance warned them of problems.

For example, if they intentionally left out donations and got caught, they could add them in and nothing would happen. The argument is that...