Book Reviews

In his book The Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael N. Nagler talks about two models for looking at violence that are also relevant to government ethics, the medical model and the educational model.

The Medical Model
The first is the medical model, which sees violence as disease, and peace as health...

In his book The Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael N. Nagler wrote, "Anyone who plucks up the courage to offer an opponent a way out of their conflict can find herself or himself wielding an unexpected power." You may need to read this sentence over a few times before it completely sinks in.

The Courage of Ethics...

Another way in which violence and unethical conduct are similar is the way they are handled by the news media. Just as violence is generally discussed in terms of separate battles and wars, day by day, unethical conduct is discussed in terms of separate scandals and individuals, day by day. And unethical conduct is responded to in the worst possible atmosphere.

What this does is prevent an awareness of the problem of unethical conduct in general and what constitutes a poor ethics...

Despite the title of his essay "What Chance of Ethics in the Globalized World of Consumers?" Zygmunt Bauman has some valuable things to say that are relevant to government ethics (the essay appears in his 2009 book, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Harvard University Press)).

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I've written before about some of the problems relating to the Hatch Act's prohibition of local government employees running for office if their agency gets any funding from the federal government (1 2). Jason C. Miller has written an article for the Southern...

Sometimes concepts derived from one area of study, for one purpose, can be valuable in another area of study, for another purpose. This is true of the concepts of "injunctive norm" and "descriptive norm" derived by social psychology professor Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University for use in the area of persuading people not to do certain things, such as litter.