Book Reviews

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...

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).

A controversial aspect of government ethics involves intentions or motivations. Must an official be shown to have intended to act unethically in order to be...

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...

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...

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.