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.

End runs around ethics and campaign finance laws are one of my favorite topics to write about. A sizeable percentage of the creative energies of government officials and their attorneys seems to go into coming up with ways of getting around these laws. And then arguing that such laws are of little value since you can't plug loopholes as fast as they can invent them.

The Center for Governmental Studies in California has just published a report on this very topic (although focused on the campaign finance side), aptly titled Loopholes, Tricks and End Runs: Evasions of Campaign Finance Laws, and a Model Law to Block Them (by Molly Milligan).

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:

Adolf Eichmann is the iconic extreme of the government bureaucrat. Not that any of us will hopefully ever be given orders like the ones he was given, but his simply following orders makes anyone question his or her own simply following orders.

There’s a lot more about government ethics that can be learned from Adolf Eichmann, I found from reading Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). When one sees acts that are often done without any thought, that seem so normal, done in a different, frightening context, these acts look grotesque, and we can start to question what we take as normal and natural.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.