Code of ethics from a public or non-profit organization

Big Questions/Big Issues 395

Terry L. Cooper University of Southern California

Big Questions in Administrative Ethics: A Need for Focused, Collaborative Effort

Introduction1 I have argued elsewhere that administrative ethics as a

significant field of study is only about 30 years old, dating from the mid-1970s, largely instigated by the work of the New Public Administration, and reflecting developments in thought about public administration dating back into the 1930s.2 During these few decades, scholarly work on ad- ministrative ethics and its application to practice have ex- panded with enormous speed and rich diversity, both in the United States and around the world. The number of journal articles, books, courses, conferences, and training exercises have proliferated beyond anyone’s wildest ex- pectations. More than a passing fad, administrative ethics has demonstrated its sustainability and its centrality to the field (Cooper 2001, 1–36).

What is lacking with respect to these developments is anything like a focused effort by groups of scholars to study specific sets of significant research questions in a sustained and systematic fashion. There is an enormous amount of interesting but highly disparate scholarship on administra- tive ethics reflecting the diverse and often episodic inter- ests that capture our attention. The existence of this rich diversity of work is not bad at all; rather, it indicates lively intellectual engagement and the multifaceted nature of the field. It also may be viewed as a necessary scoping of the field in its early stages, the product of an energetic explo- ration of the range of concerns in the study of administra- tive ethics.

After approximately three decades, however, there is very little that manifests ongoing scholarship by working groups based on specific theoretical perspectives, sets of related problems, or significant issues.3 Without collabo- rative efforts to fix our gaze on the most fundamental and vexing questions that are essential to moving administra- tive ethics forward, there is a risk that the creativity and energy now being directed to the subject will dissipate, and that our field will fail to earn the sustained promi-

nence in journals, curricula, and professional development it deserves. Without this kind of concentrated work, ad- ministrative ethics may remain an interesting but periph- eral concern.

None of us can define the elements and boundaries of such concentrated efforts; that needs to become a matter in which many of us invest ourselves. We need to work at building consensus among those interested in administra- tive ethics about sets of research questions that, in some sense, define the heart of the field. Not intended to pre- clude or exclude other work on other questions, the call here is for the establishment of a center of gravity for the development of administrative ethics around some focused collaborative efforts. Diversity of interests articulated by many from various areas in public administration are needed to keep the field fresh and lively; focused efforts of those mainly committed to studying administrative ethics may be required to provide sustainability, coherence, and sufficient weight to advance it solidly into the core of pub- lic administration.

This essay should be viewed as the first bid in a conver- sation about those “big questions” around which some fo- cused, sustained, and collaborative activity might be orga- nized. It began with an invitation I sent out to the ASPA Section on Ethics Listserv on September 27, 2002. In that message, members of the section were asked to offer their nominations for the “big questions” in administrative eth- ics. Thoughtful responses were received from 10 persons, with excellent proposals for questions of central impor-

Terry L. Cooper is the Maria B. Crutcher Professor in Citizenship and Demo- cratic Values in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the Uni- versity of Southern California. He is the author of two books—The Respon- sible Administrator: An Approach to the Ethics of the Administrative Role, and An Ethic of Citizenship for Public Administration—and editor of two other volumes, Handbook of Administrative Ethics and Exemplary Public Administrators: Character and Leadership in Government. E-mail: tlcooper@ usc.edu.

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tance. These questions reflected a wide range of perspec- tives on the field and helped to provide a sense of the scope and types of questions on the minds of others interested in ethics.4 However, I do not attribute my big questions to any of those respondents, but appreciate the stimulation they provided.

Some Big Questions in Public Administration Ethics

These questions are presented in no particular order of importance, nor are the relationships among them ad- dressed. They are laid out simply as an attempt to identify significant topics that have not been fully explored, but are deemed essential to the development of administrative eth- ics as a field of study. My intention is to stimulate discus- sion about the big questions of the field, not to urge others to simply adopt the ones I have advanced.

What Are the Normative Foundations for Public Administration Ethics?

This question has plagued all who have attempted to en- gage in research, education, and training in administrative ethics. Usually it is framed less formally, often simply posed as, “whose ethics should we adopt in making ethical deci- sions in government?” Typically the questioner assumes all we can turn to are our own personal ethical perspectives rooted in religion, political commitments, secular philoso- phies, or some highly personal ethical orientation that has been improvised through socialization, life experience, and coping with the world of work. The notion that there is another category of ethics—in addition to one’s own per- sonal perspective—called “professional ethics” seems not to have been acknowledged and understood generally among students and practitioners of public administration (Adams 2001). This is probably because there is no clear consensus about what the normative substance of a profes- sional public administrative ethic might be.

Also, the lack of a strong professional identity for pub- lic administration has left most thinking only of their em- ployment role rather than understanding with clarity the difference between the obligations of employment by an organization and those associated with being a member of a profession.5 This lack of professional identity leaves pub- lic administrators vulnerable to dominance by organiza- tional and political imperatives; hence, the question “whose ethics should we adopt?” is an appropriately innocent one that still deserves responses. As we search for answers, it is important to keep in mind that we are looking for nor- mative foundations, not in the sense of ultimately given in the nature of things (ontologically), but in the sense of a social construct that fits a particular context—American, in our case.

As we consider where we might turn for the normative touchstones of a profession or “practice” (MacIntyre 1984) of public administration, the literature of the last three de- cades suggests several perspectives are vying to become answers to this vexing question. I see five major alterna- tives that have been advanced in the literature over the last 30 years: (1) Regime values, constitutional theory, and founding thought seem so closely related they are worthy of being treated together rather than as separate streams; (2) citizenship theory is somewhat related to these, and not inconsistent with them, but sufficiently different to require distinction; (3) social equity, often of a Rawlsian variety, is a third alternative originally associated with the so-called New Public Administration of the late 1960s and early 1970s; (4) virtue, or character-based ethics provides a dif- ferent kind of answer that is also not incompatible with the other perspectives; and finally, (5) the public interest is still a way of grounding normative ethics for public ad- ministration ethics that emerges from time to time. I will comment briefly on each of these perspectives without any attempt at an exhaustive or even representative review of the literature for each.

Regime Values, Constitutional Theory, and Founding Thought. In public administration this general stream of ideas is most clearly associated with the work of John Rohr. Rohr’s path-breaking book, Ethics for Bureaucrats: An Essay on Law and Values (1989), first published in 1978, argued that public administration ethics ought to be ground- ed in the American constitutional tradition and the regime values upon which it rests. Rohr maintained these regime values are to be found in the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretations of it. The three re- gime values he identified are freedom, equality, and prop- erty, although he indicated this is not an exhaustive list. Rohr called for public administrators to steep themselves in this evolving tradition of constitutional values because when one accepts employment in a regime, it is extremely important to be clear about its core values and whether one can uphold them.6 That is the fundamental professional ethical problem to be resolved, and addressing it does not require the full range of knowledge and skills expected of moral philosophers.7 Thus, taking a job in government is an ethical decision, as well as an economic and career de- cision. Others affirmed Rohr’s work and developed this way of grounding administrative ethics beyond the Con- stitution. They examined other founding documents in ad- dition to the Constitution in an attempt to broaden the field of regime values. Among those scholars are Richardson and Nigro (1987a, 1987b), Vetterli and Bryner (1987), Hart (2001; Hart and Smith 1988), Frederickson (Frederickson and Hart 1985), and Chandler (1987).

Citizenship Theory. Also historical in its approach, this body of thought generally views the citizen’s role in the

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American political tradition as providing the normative foundations for public administration. It is the area in which I have focused my efforts to contribute to the ethics litera- ture. The public administrative role is viewed as derived from that of the citizen, thus making administrators repre- sentative citizens, professional citizens, fiduciary citizens, or citizens in lieu of the rest of us. Public administrators hold the role of citizen in trust as they conduct the public business previously done by citizens, but now handed over to professional citizens who have the time, technical train- ing, and resources to carry it out. Their ethical obligations are associated with the good citizen in American society. Thus, there is discussion of the importance of being re- sponsive to citizens, encouraging their participation, be- ing accountable to them, viewing them as the locus of ulti- mate administrative loyalty, respecting the dignity of the individual, fostering reasoned deliberation, and encourag- ing civic virtue and concern for the common good. Ad- ministrators may be employed by the police department, the water department, the health department, or the public schools to undertake certain specialized tasks, but they work in those places on behalf of the citizens they represent. Administrators work in bureaucratic organizations where hierarchical bonds and obligation are important, but they also need to cultivate horizontal bonds and obligations among the citizenry for whom they are surrogates.

H. George Frederickson published the first journal ar- ticle on this subject in 1982, but the citizenship perspec- tive emerged significantly in the administrative ethics lit- erature following a conference on citizenship and public administration organized and led by Frederickson in March of 1983 preceding the national conference of the Ameri- can Society for Public Administration. The papers were published in a special issue of Public Administration Re- view in March of 1984. Among those addressing citizen- ship as a normative foundation for administrative ethics were Frederickson and Chandler, Gawthrop, Hart, Rohr, and Cooper.

Since the 1983 conference and the special issue of PAR in 1984, there has been a steady stream of articles and books examining, critiquing, developing, and applying the citi- zenship foundation for public administration ethics. Among the authors contributing to this literature are Stivers (1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1991, 1994, 1996), Cooper (1991), Timney (1998), King and Stivers (1998), Foley (1998), Box and Sagan (1998), and Kalu (2003). As with the work on re- gime values, constitutional theory, and founding thought, this perspective has not risen to a dominant position, but remains one of the normative orientations that continue to be of interest.

Social Equity. This single ethical principle was the nor- mative perspective around which administrative ethics as a field of study was first focused in the early 1970s. John

Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) argued that justice is the central organizing principle of government and set forth a fully developed argument for specific criteria for estab- lishing social equity. The New Public Administration move- ment, which found its first organized expression at the Minnowbrook Conference in 1968, claimed Rawlsian so- cial equity as its core ethical principle (Marini 1971).8

Rawls’s work was the subject of special issues and sym- posia in scholarly journals in virtually every discipline and field of study. Public administration was among them, with a special issue of Public Administration Review in 1974 that included six articles on administrative ethics. These essays by McGregor, Chitwood, Porter and Porter, White and Gates, Harmon, and Hart addressed a number of ad- ministrative areas such as personnel management, fiscal federalism, the use of statistics in service delivery, and social service productivity. Two pieces amounted to clear and significant contributions to administrative ethics: Harmon’s “Social Equity and Organizational Man: Moti- vation and Organizational Democracy,” and Hart’s “So- cial Equity, Justice, and the Equitable Administrator.” The other essays offered specific concrete applications, but these two addressed the use of the concept more generally.

Although New Public Administration is no longer an identifiable movement, its contributions to administrative ethics were crucial in the development of a field of study. Social equity never achieved acceptance in the field as the single central ethical principle, but clearly it has become one of the major normative touchstones for administrative ethics. This seems to have been exemplified by the offer- ing of a panel session at the 2003 conference of the Na- tional Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Ad- ministration, “Reflections on Teaching Social Equity.”9

Perhaps indicative of the status of social equity as a guid- ing principle for public administration ethics was that, al- though the session attracted 25–30 people, much of the discussion had to do with the importance of social equity as a touchstone for the field at present. No one suggested it is no longer relevant, but some argued it is associated too much with the New Public Administration of the 1970s and projects such as affirmative action to be used gener- ally. Others maintained that social equity clearly rises above those episodic events, but is just another ethical concept in our tool kit, not the central one. I would argue that it clearly antedates New Public Administration and affirmative ac- tion and, as one expression of the principle of justice, should occupy a position of great prominence in any ethic associ- ated with democratic government. However, it is equally clear that it is not the cornerstone of the administrative ethics edifice.

Virtue. The early work on administrative ethics during the 1970s focused mainly on reasoning about ethical deci- sions and the appropriate normative orientations for

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cognitively resolving ethical dilemmas faced by adminis- trators. In 1981, Mark T. Lilla launched a frontal attack on the rational analysis approach to ethical decision making, which he characterized as simply training administrators to rationalize whatever suited them at any given time. He inveighed against focusing on the analysis of ethical quan- daries as lacking any normative foundation, and therefore likely to be manipulated to serve the interests of the ana- lysts. Instead, Lilla argued for the cultivation of a demo- cratic ethos in public organizations that would be condu- cive to the formation of character appropriate for public service.

This challenge was followed shortly by Pincoffs’s more extensive critique of what he called “reductivism” in pro- fessional ethics. After a critique of analyses of ethical quan- daries, he joined Lilla in calling for a focus on virtue un- derstood as character. Pincoffs maintained this could be accomplished by “judging” the lives of others. He did not mean to encourage pronouncing judgment from some pre- sumed position of moral superiority, but rather regularly reflecting on the character of others, as one of their fel- lows, by examining them biographically and assessing their character. Pincoffs argued that being able to weigh the char- acter of others in a given community—even a community of practice—is an essential moral skill. He asserted, “It is our daily business to assess, to appraise, to judge persons.” He went on, “It is a task so important and central in life that it takes on a life of its own; it is the central stuff of drama, film, literature, and history and of several psycho- logical and social sciences and arts” (1986, 166–67).

A number of other authors followed the lead of Lilla and Pincoffs in asserting the importance of virtue under- stood as character. Hart was one of the leading voices in calling attention to virtue, not as the sole focus of adminis- trative ethics, but as an essential element. In “The Virtuous Citizen, the Honorable Bureaucrat, and ‘Public’ Adminis- tration,’” (1984) he outlined the desired character traits of public administrators as superior prudence, moral hero- ism, caring or love for humanity, trust in the citizenry, and a continuing quest for moral improvement. In “The Moral Exemplar in an Organizational Society” (1992), a chapter in Exemplary Public Administrators: Character and Lead- ership in Government, Hart set forth a framework for as- sessing character that focused attention on “moral episodes” and “moral processes.” Within the broad category of moral episodes, Hart identified two subcategories of action, which he termed “moral crises” and “moral confrontation.” Un- der the scope of moral processes, he specified two subcat- egories called “moral projects” and “moral work.”

Hart’s framework for reflecting on character was used by the authors of the character studies in Cooper and Wright’s Exemplary Public Administrators: Character and Leadership in Government (1992). Radey (1990) argued

for the importance of stories in developing professional ethics. Vitz (1990) maintained more specifically that life stories were particularly important because they can be understood as “the laboratory of moral life.” Because as- sessing character seems to imply a biographical focus, with the assistance of Wright, I invited a group of scholars to identify someone, living or dead, whose character they could study biographically in chapters for the edited vol- ume. The book finally included 11 character studies that were developed using Hart’s framework. I concluded the book with “Reflecting on Exemplars of Virtue,” in which I drew some tentative conclusions (Cooper and Wright 1992b). The main one was that in all of the lives studied in that volume, the pursuit of moral processes (moral work and moral projects) in the daily routines of practice pro- vided a foundation for dealing with the more dramatic moral episodes such as moral confrontations and moral crises. Character, understood as the predisposition to be- have consistently with one’s espoused values and prin- ciples, is built slowly and consistently over time, not all at once when confronted with a dramatic challenge.

Virtue, or character, is clearly one of the elements of the normative foundations of public administration ethics. All of the rational analysis of morally charged situations, ethical principles, citizenship obligations, and regime val- ues will come to naught without the courage of our con- victions. Absent the strength of character to “walk our walk” and “practice what we preach,” ethics is ultimately an empty exercise. However, it is still unclear how, and even whether, we ought to see a role for ourselves in culti- vating character, evaluating the character of specific indi- viduals for hiring and appointment decisions, or in creat- ing organizational environments that uphold character.

The Public Interest. This is probably the most widely recognized and most generally espoused normative touch- stone for public administration ethics. There is an enor- mous literature on the public interest (Friedrich 1962; Flathman 1966), but it has received little attention by schol- ars of administrative ethics. Charles T. Goodsell noted in 1990 that he had been unable to find any “serious advo- cacy of the notion in the literature which is avowedly pub- lic administrationist” since 1957 (97). Goodsell attributed the ignoring of the public interest concept to a critique by Glendon Schubert in the same year. Although Schubert’s biting attack on the use of the public interest concept may well have had a significant impact on thought in the mid- twentieth century, the apparent longer-term reason is that the concept is so broad and diversely understood that it has little operational value. The public interest has a num- ber of somewhat specific meanings, but these tend not to be indicated when the term is used—usually in a vague manner, as though it conveys particular meaning when it does not.

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Goodsell’s “Public Administration and the Public In- terest” (1990) and Douglas Morgan’s “The Public Inter- est” (2001) are notable exceptions in recent years to the lack of attention to the concept by scholars of public ad- ministration ethics. Goodsell reviews four different per- spectives on the public interest and attempts to apply them to public administration. Morgan develops the public in- terest concept historically in the American context. After a treatment of its origins around the end of the seventeenth century, he traces the evolution of the public interest through the American founding debate, the rise of Jackso- nian democracy, populist reform, the Progressive move- ment, and more recent formulations.

My own view is that the public interest has a place in the construction of a normative administrative ethic as our moral compass, orienting us to a fundamental obligation. It serves a symbolic purpose by raising an important ques- tion before every administrative and policy decision: “Are you acting on behalf of broad shared interests or limited particular ones?” The public interest concept is most use- ful in reminding us that as public managers, our ethical obligation is to the former rather than the latter. It is often raised retrospectively when it is clear that something has gone seriously wrong in a particular situation and we are trying to redefine what should have been done in the past and what should be done in the future. When confronted with scandal and gross misconduct, the idea of the public interest provides an intuitive navigational beacon that points us in the right direction. It was raised during crises such as Watergate and the Iran-Contra hearings, and many others. Goodsell observes that “the words public inter- est—despite their poor academic reputation—remain in use in the realm of practical government. They are found sprinkled throughout the statutes practitioners adminis- ter, the memoranda they write, the testimony they give, and the verbal speech with which they articulate their points of view” (1990, 97).

So, we have these four approaches to establishing nor- mative foundations for public administration ethics. They do not seem to be incompatible, but they have not been clearly integrated into a coherent and operational adminis- trative ethic. That work remains to be done.

How Do American Administrative Ethical Norms Fit into a Global Context?

After reviewing the options that seem to be under con- sideration for normative ethics in the United States, it is clear that much of this work is being constructed out of the Ameri- can experience and tied to our history and political culture. This is especially true for the regime values and citizenship perspectives. Whether or how these fit with the administra- tive ethics of other political communities and traditions

around the world is an increasingly pointed question. Do administrative ethical norms have to be created specifically for each nation? Is there anything one could call a global administrative ethic? If administrative ethics is socially con- structed and the world is experiencing greater global inter- dependence due to trade, travel, and communication (includ- ing especially the effects of the Internet), might there be an emerging global ethic for public administration?

This is one of the more intriguing and newer questions that administrative ethics faces, to which the answers are few and only suggestive at best. However, in my experi- ence this question is raised with increasing frequency, both in international meetings and in cities such as Los Angeles that are truly global in their population and cultures. Gilman and Lewis published the first attempt to address this ques- tion in the public administration literature in 1999. Subse- quently, I was invited to a small conference on globaliza- tion in Seoul in the summer of 2000 and asked to address the question, “Is there an emerging global ethic for public administration?” Diane Yoder and I attempted an answer by carrying forward the path-breaking work of Gilman and Lewis. We examined a large number of international trea- ties, pacts, agreements, conventions, and programs going back to the 1970s in an attempt to identify the core values that were explicitly advocated or implicitly assumed. We also tried to examine the reasoning connected with such values. Why were they deemed important?

In “Public Management Ethics in a Transnational World,” we identified self-determination, freedom, hon- esty, trust, and stability as the values that are clearly cen- tral to the initiatives we examined (Cooper and Yoder 2002). Recognition of an increasingly interdependent world and a growing worldwide commitment to market economies and democratic governance are the reasons given in these documents and programs to justify support for the five re- curring core values. Whether these values are enacted or just espoused is not known and goes beyond our study. However, we argue that the fact they are espoused inter- national values indicates they are at least viewed as aspi- rations. What we can say is that there may be an emerging consensus that these at least are the values which nations of the world believe they ought to say they support. The profession of them is significant.

The story that seems to run through these documents is that, in an increasingly interdependent world aspiring to democracy and market economies, stable governments are achieved by upholding and maintaining self-determination of the citizens of each nation and honesty in domestic and international affairs because these help to build trust, both internally within nations and among the nations of the world. Market economies do not work without trust, hon- esty, and stability, nor can democratic governance be achieved and maintained without these same values.10

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Next comes the question of how these values mesh with the elements of the normative foundations of administra- tive ethics in the United States discussed previously. The short answer is that there appear to be no inconsistencies or conflicts. The long answer, yet to be explored, is that we do not know how seriously these values are being taken by the various nations of the world, and we cannot be cer- tain of their congruence with U.S. norms without a lot more experience with concrete applications. Values have mean- ing only in specific contexts. Here, as in the case of our own domestic norms, we appear to be engaged in a pro- cess of socially constructing (on a global scale) a set of normative foundations for public administration ethics. Whether that will be successful remains to be seen. At best, we get glimpses from time to time about the reality of this process.

For example, one of the requirements frequently ad- vocated as a basis for trust in government is a subsidiary value, transparency. Currently, it is as close to being a universally advocated public value as one can find. The importance of transparency for trust to exist within a na- tion and among nations was visible in China’s handling of the SARS crisis in early 2003. When the Chinese gov- ernment attempted to conceal the spread of SARS in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and a number of other cities, trade, tourism, and business travel dropped pre- cipitously. Considerable turbulence also occurred inside China. Distrust of the official reports threatened China’s emerging market economy and its internal stability (LA Times 2003). A lack of transparency in this case appears to have had powerful negative effects that were under- stood only after China’s leadership was confronted with the resulting domestic and international problems.

One caveat is that if such a social construction process is occurring internationally, that does not necessarily im- ply the diverse cultures of the world are being homogenized, westernized, or destroyed. There may be different over- lays of culture that involve domestic life within a society and international relations as somewhat distinct entities. People may live and act within a culture at home while also engaging a global culture. Whether it is possible to maintain such a juggling act remains to be seen.

A serious concern worth noting is that commitment to social equity is not frequently found in the documents we examined. Amy Chua (2004) argues persuasively that mar- ket economies coupled with emerging democratic politi- cal systems can be an explosive mix.11 If, as seems to be the case in many developing countries, the market is largely dominated by an ethnic minority, while the mass of the populace is moving toward democratic government, ten- sion is created between political and economic access. Absent some commitment to social equity, these imbal- ances may create enormous instability and unrest.

How Can Organizations Be Designed to Support Ethical Conduct?

Since the 1960s, before the birth of administrative eth- ics as a field of study, we have had evidence that organiza- tional structure and culture are not neutral with respect to ethical conduct. Our typical hierarchical bureaucratic or- ganizations generally not only have failed to encourage ethical action by the people who work within them, but often have created serious impediments to their efforts to do the right thing. Milgram’s experiments at Yale in the 1960s and Zimbardo’s prison simulation at Stanford in the 1970s made painfully clear how simple hierarchical ar- rangements and culturally determined organizational roles can shape behavior toward humanly destructive ends (Milgram 1974; Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo 1973).

Milgram was able to create a basic organizational struc- ture in a laboratory setting that induced obedience among very large numbers of people of different ages, genders, religious orientations, occupations, and educational lev- els—even to the point of being willing to administer pow- erful, painful, and dangerous electrical shocks to other human beings. Some 980 subjects went through various versions of Milgram’s experiments, and the majority did as they were told, even while protesting that they were being ordered to impose agonizing shocks on the other partici- pants in the experiments. Milgram explained how this oc- curred as the “agentic shift,” a series of gradual psycho- logical transitions through which the subjects moved from being relatively autonomous individuals to becoming will- ing instruments of the experimenter, and in the process abandoned all responsibility for their actions.

Zimbardo discovered to his dismay that college students assigned roles in a simulated prison, with only the briefest explanations of the typical behavior associated with those roles, would become harsh prison guards and retaliatory prison inmates within a matter of a few days. The guards’ treatment of the inmates became so inhumane and abusive that the inmates experienced emotional breakdowns, turned on each other, and reacted aggressively against the guards. Guards and prisoners alike were captured by roles associ- ated with certain cultural and organizational norms that shaped their behavior. The experiment had to be termi- nated after six days instead of running the full two weeks planned at the outset.

During the late 1960s through the 1970s, the tendency of large bureaucratic organizations to stifle conscience and punish those who called attention to corruption and misconduct became painfully apparent. The case of Ernest Fitzgerald, a high-level executive in the Department of Defense, was probably the first widely known example of behavior that became characterized as “whistle blow- ing.” Far from being a self-promoting publicity seeker, as has been obvious with some whistle blowers, Fitzgerald

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had been quietly working inside the department to call attention to the enormous cost overruns of a new cargo aircraft, the C5A. Finally, he was subpoenaed by a U.S. congressional committee and forced to reveal what had been going on. For testifying before Congress under oath and telling the truth, Fitzgerald lost his job and suffered retribution for years (Nader, Perkas, and Blackwell 1972). In 1978 Senator Patrick Leahy conducted hearings on 70 cases of legitimate whistle blowers who had experienced severe retaliation from their own employing organizations for reporting forthrightly to higher authorities the involve- ment of these agencies in serious misconduct (Leahy 1978).

Literature on the dominance of large hierarchical orga- nizations also began to appear in the academic literature during these years. As early as 1956, William H. Whyte was writing about the tendency of modern organizations to create servile “organization men” whose loyalty was so fully tied to the wishes of its hierarchy that they simply did its bidding without question. By the 1970s, a flood of writings on this problem followed suit. In Freedom Inside the Orga- nization: Bringing Civil Liberties to the Work Place, David Ewing (1977) lamented employees’ surrender of most of their rights upon entering the workplace each day; he char- acterized large organizations as “minigovernments” and charged that “for all practical purposes, employees are re- quired to be as obedient to their superiors, regardless of ethical and legal considerations, as are workers in totalitar- ian countries.” Ewing proposed a legally enforceable em- ployee bill of rights to deal with this problem of organiza- tional dominance.

The problem of organizational dominance appeared quite early in the public administration ethics literature. William G. Scott and David K. Hart published Organiza- tional America in 1979, raising the specter of a fascist state growing out of the oppressive nature of large bureaucratic organizations. Alberto Guerreiro Ramos argued for “orga- nization delimitation” in The New Science of Organiza- tions: A Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations in 1981 because organizations threatened to dominate their employees’ lives with an emphasis on a narrow market mentality that would turn them into economic maximizers devoid of appreciation for the qualitative side of human existence outside the workplace. The first edition of my book The Responsible Administrator in 1982 called atten- tion to the problem of organizational dominance. Six years later Kathryn G. Denhardt’s book The Ethics of the Public Service (1988) developed the problems of the organiza- tional context further.

More recently, the problem of organizations impeding ethical conduct has been manifested in two space shuttle catastrophes, when Challenger exploded during launch on January 28, 1986 (Cooper 1987), and Columbia on Febru-

ary 1, 2003. The executive summary of the accident report on Columbia includes the following revealing statement:

The organizational causes of this accident are rooted in the Space Shuttle Program’s history and culture, including the original compromises that were re- quired to gain approval for the Shuttle, subsequent years of resource constraints, fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures, mischaracterization of the Shuttle as operational rather than developmental, and lack of an agreed national vision for human space flight. Cultural traits and organizational prac- tices detrimental to safety were allowed to develop, including: reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices (such as testing to understand why systems were not performing in ac- cordance with requirements); organizational barri- ers that prevented effective communication of criti- cal safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated manage- ment across program elements; and the evolution of an informal chain of command and decision- making processes that operated outside the organization’s roles. (Columbia Accident Investi- gation Board 2003, 9)

The identification of organizational factors is much more explicit in the report on this second shuttle tragedy than in the Challenger report. We learned during that earlier investigation that shuttle engineers had been locked in an all-night struggle with NASA and Morton Thiokol man- agement over whether it was safe to launch in the sub- freezing temperatures that had prevailed through the night. The engineers insisted the O-rings that sealed the major sections of the booster rocket tank would not be suffi- ciently pliable in the cold temperatures to prevent the di- sastrous escape of superheated gases. There being no dis- sent channels in NASA for such expert judgments to be heard in time to prevent the launch, the engineers were finally told to take off their engineering hats and put on their management hats. The launch went ahead as sched- uled on January 28, 1986, the external fuel tank exploded, and the crew was killed. In the report of the investigation that followed, it is clear the decision to launch was made by management over the protests of the engineers (Presi- dential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident 1986).

We now have a substantial literature on the problem of organizations’ tendency to deprive the people who work in them of the freedom to exercise their professional con- science, as well as considerable practical experience to confirm it. During my 27 years of conducting ethics train- ing for public administrators in various parts of the United States, and even in Hong Kong during my year as a Fulbright professor there, at all levels of government, and in many different kinds of public and nonprofit organiza-

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tions, my experience has been extremely consistent on this point.

Whenever I do ethics training for working practitioners, I require everyone participating to write a case about some ethical problem from his or her professional experience and submit it to me confidentially. I then select a set of cases around which I build the training session, maintain- ing anonymity for the authors unless they choose to iden- tify themselves, which they do more often than not. There is no doubt that among those several thousand cases in my files, the single most frequent problem presented is one concerning an organizational hierarchy, and often an orga- nizational culture, that impedes ethical conduct and pun- ishes those who attempt to act ethically, and sometimes even those who suggest doing so.

The question that burns in my mind from these experi- ences is whether we can design public organizations in a way that provides for ethical concerns to be heard and supported by the organizations in which public employ- ees work on our behalf. I have seen public administrators on the verge of tears years after they had faced the bleak choice of rectifying a wrong or retaining their jobs, and then had been vilified for attempting to act ethically. They were churning inside over something they and their peers—and even sometimes their bosses—knew was vio- lating someone’s rights, violating the law, draining the organization’s resources into someone’s pocket, demean- ing someone inside or outside the organization, doing things that poisoned the environment and placed human life at risk, grossly abusing power for personal ends, or regularly lying to the public and their elected representa- tives. But, they had either felt impotent to act or had acted and suffered significantly.

As I have struggled with this question myself, I have often thought how ethicists and organizational develop- ment specialists in public administration need to be work- ing together to design organizations that provide for effec- tive dissent channels, include policies to encourage ethical conduct, and protect employees from retribution when they act with moral courage. I am not sure how this might be done, but the institutional design approach worked power- fully for the American Progressive reform movement at the end of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the century. That movement created bureaus of munici- pal research that were independent workshops or think tanks in cities around the United States, the first of which was the New York Bureau of Municipal Research estab- lished in 1906. These bureaus were the front lines of re- form to crack the hold of political machines on local gov- ernments and put in place organizational forms and processes designed to encourage efficiency. Perhaps we need to consider the establishment of places analogous to those bureaus of municipal research that could bring to-

gether engaged scholars of administrative ethics and orga- nizational development with thoughtful practitioners to address the problems of organizational structure and cul- ture in supporting ethical conduct at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

I advocated a design approach to ethics in the fourth edition of The Responsible Administrator, for which I am indebted to Carolyn Whitbeck’s article “Ethics as Design: Doing Justice to Moral Problems” (1996). This way of thinking about ethics does not assume the problem to be simply one of analyzing an ethical concern toward arriv- ing at a defensible ethical decision. Rather, it also requires thinking about what else is necessary to make the deci- sion effective. As I have conducted ethics training for prac- titioners, I have increasingly encouraged them to arrive at a decision when presented with a case, but not to stop there. In the central exercise for these sessions, they are required to identify the characteristics of the organization that would encourage or impede the kind of action they advocate. And not to stop there, but go on to describe the kinds of management interventions that would be appro- priate to make the changes necessary in the organization’s structure and culture to support their desired conduct. This kind of thinking would be much richer and helpful if I were working in these sessions with colleagues with ex- pertise in organizational development. Ethics is as much about organizational design as it is about analytical and decision-making skills.

When Should We Treat People Equally in Order to Treat Them Fairly, and When Should We Treat Them Unequally?

This is a question that has emerged from our assertively diverse society. During the first half of the twentieth cen- tury, we found ourselves under the sway of the Progres- sive reformers’ assumption that in order to treat everyone fairly, it was necessary to treat everyone the same. This was a logical response to the dominance of machine gov- ernments at the state and local levels, which provided un- equal treatment based on support for political bosses. If the problem was that some streets were swept because someone had voted the “right way” in the last election, and others did not because they had voted the “wrong way,” then fairness dictated sweeping everyone’s streets in the same way. Standardized services were to be delivered across a city by agencies that, “without fear or favor,” treated everyone the same. (Ostensibly, that was the for- mula, although it is never the case that everyone really does get the same street sweeping, or any other service.) The Progressives found a nice congruence in their approach to reform between their commitment to a science of admin- istration and rectifying inequity. By delivering services

Big Questions/Big Issues 403

“scientifically,” which meant based on presumed scientific principles that would apply to everyone in every place and every time, they could achieve efficiency and provide fair- ness (Mann 1963; Wiebe 1967; Nelson 1982; Kennedy 1971; Haber 1964; Warner 1971; Ekirch 1974; Caro 1974; Croly 1965).

However, soon after the middle of the twentieth cen- tury, American society became increasingly diverse and increasingly assertive about its differentiated needs and preferences. Social movements and organized reform ad- vocacy groups emerged in the late 1950s and with increas- ing intensity through the decades that followed. They en- gaged in the full panoply of social change strategies and tactics. The civil rights movement, the antipoverty move- ment, the new women’s movement,12 the environmental movement, the student movement, the disabled movement, the gay rights movement, the Chicano (later Latino) move- ment, and an array of other ethnic movements were all manifestations of a burgeoning of assertive diversity in American society.

This plethora of demands for particularized treatment based on special circumstances has forced us to recognize that the all-too-easy formula of the Progressives—treat everyone the same and you will treat everyone fairly— simply does not work so well given the realities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Organizational systems based on rationalization understood as standard- ization have had difficulty responding to a diverse citizenry and its differential needs and preferences. The result is that many, if not most, citizens frequently feel unfairly treated at the hands of large, centralized bureaucracies with stan- dard ways of delivering services.

The key ethical problem that emerges from this conflict between an assertively diverse society and public organi- zations that attempt to treat everyone the same is that some- times we need to treat everyone the same, but at other times we need to treat them differently in order to provide fair- ness. However, the criteria for sorting these two ways of offering fair treatment are not clearly understood and re- sult in considerable conflict among us. The contours of how to justify differential treatment for the sake of fair- ness are better understood and supported in some cases than in others. For example, public policy concerning the disabled appears to be less contentious than when it con- cerns race, ethnicity, or gender. Providing handicapped parking spaces, curb breaks and ramps, wheelchair lifts for buses, and special restroom arrangements seems to be generally accepted and supported. However, affirmative action for members of our society who have experienced the disadvantages of racial discrimination, or for women who have confronted the barriers of a male-dominated workplace, is among the most hotly contested strategies in recent decades. The challenges are equally difficult for

educational, policing, and health care services. And so the question hangs there before us: When

should we treat people differently to be fair and when must we treat them the same? We should have no illu- sions about the efficacy of ethicists in actually resolving these problems through ethical analysis because they are also matters of power, passion, and politics that are not likely to give way to reasoned argument. However, ethi- cists may have a modest role to play in helping make explicit the values and principles that are implicit in policy alternatives.

If the most fundamental formulation of the justice prin- ciple is something like, treat equal cases equally and dif- ferent cases unequally, the problem is always to identify the attributes that should be treated differently or similarly. Gay and lesbian members of our society are aggressively asserting their right to marriage based on fairness argu- ments. They insist their commitments to faithfulness to each other should be treated the same as any other such lifelong commitments between two people. Sexual identity should not be the basis for treating them differently. Those who oppose state recognition of these unions argue that mar- riage is for heterosexual couples only, and, at best, gay and lesbian committed relationships should be called some- thing else. And so the battle rages on over which charac- teristics qualify one for equal treatment and which dis- qualify one for equality. Is it lifelong commitment that matters most or sexual identity?

Six years ago, when we set about reforming our city charter to create an official neighborhood council system to connect the people of Los Angeles to its governance processes, the same-versus-different-treatment question emerged at the center of a sometimes very heated debate. Should we create a set of standard boundaries based on equal population, or should we permit neighborhoods to create their own boundaries that may result in very differ- ent sizes for neighborhood councils? Should we impose a citywide set of standard bylaws and organizational struc- tures for all of the neighborhood councils, or allow them to develop their own? Most of the city’s administrative agencies argued for standardizing everything, and the jus- tifications were ones we in public administration might expect—efficiency and order. The elected officials tended to argue similarly, but for reasons that were never articu- lated out loud—control and efficiency. Allowing citizens to create their own boundaries was held out as a prospect that would produce chaos.

In the end, we wound up—appropriately I think—with a combination of standardization and variety. Neighbor- hoods were allowed to define and justify their own bound- aries, bylaws, and system of financial accountability in order to be fair to the diversity of Los Angeles. The slogan was “No cookie cutter solutions will work in L.A.” How-

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ever, the new charter did establish a certification process to which all of the neighborhoods had to submit. This pro- cess required a demonstration of active and comprehen- sive outreach to all of the stakeholders in their area, a set of bylaws that provided transparency and access to all stake- holders, and a system of financial accountability that was similarly transparent and responsible. So we wound up with some things standardized and some things different, both of which were means of providing fairness to the citizenry. I do not want to leave you with the impression that all is tranquil and fair now in the Los Angeles neighborhood councils, because it is not, but we have made our way through the initial minefields largely because people were willing and able to think of fairness in more textured and flexible ways even if they are somewhat inefficient, more than a little messy, and lacking in predictable order.

These knotty and often emotional public debates over the meaning of equity in a complex assertively diverse so- ciety are among the most difficult we in administrative eth- ics engage in. We certainly have to view ourselves mod- estly as one of the several kinds of players in these struggles, but I think our role is an important one nevertheless.

Conclusion I conclude where I began—with a call for focused col-

laboration on the big questions in public administration ethics. My nominations for these are as follows: 1. What are the normative foundations for public admin-

istrative ethics? 2. How do American administrative ethical norms fit into

a global context? 3. How can organizations be designed to be supportive of

ethical conduct? 4. When should we treat people equally in order to treat

them fairly, and when should we treat them unequally? Are these some of the big questions in administration

ethics? I think so, but they are offered here, not in the na- ture of a pronouncement, but as an invitation to dialogue among us to identify what the big questions are for us as a community of scholarship and practice. This dialogue should in no way be exclusive, but it does need to be fo- cused and sustained. The interplay between this kind of ongoing work and divergent other scholarship could be creative, stimulating, and even exciting.

How might we go about engaging this kind of delib- eration? One way would be to create working groups that would meet a couple of times during the year, perhaps prior to ASPA and just before NASPAA, for a day of work each time on sorting out some big questions for collabo- rative research. These then might become the thematic focus for ASPA Section on Ethics conferences or similar events. However we proceed, I hope we will do so. Much

has been accomplished over the last 30 years, but much remains to be done to advance the study of public admin- istration ethics.

Big Questions/Big Issues 405

Notes

11. Advancing a specific list of concerns identified as the big questions in administrative ethics is presumptuous, and maybe even hubristic. The only way that could be done with- out sacrificing the requisite modesty of scholarship would be to characterize it as the first step in a collaborative pro- cess. It would have to be understood as an invitation to col- leagues to participate in achieving focus in our collective work. It is in that spirit that this essay is presented.

12. The study of ethics has been with us since the beginning of civilization, but here the point is that the emergence of ad- ministrative ethics as a specialized field of study with a group of scholars devoted to its development, a significant and continuing stream of scholarly literature, conference pre- sentations, and academic courses is far more recent. Its ori- gins are found in the mid-1970s, as detailed in Cooper (2001, 1–36).

13. The notable exception would be the work being done from the theoretical perspective of cognitive moral development, rooted in the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, by Debra Stewart, Carole Jurkiewicz, Ann-Marie Rizzo, and Richard White.

14. I have not used any of the specific questions submitted in their original form, but they informed and stimulated my thinking in ways that were essential to the development of this essay. I wish to thank Charles Garofalo, John Rohr, Robin Bittick, Pamela Gibson, James Heichelbech, Leo Huberts, Eleanor Glor, Rod Erakovich, Bob Cunningham, and Daniel Williams for their contributions to my thinking, but also note that they bear no responsibility for what I have done with their ideas in this essay.

15. In my experience, this is contrasted with the strong profes- sional ethical identity of students in social work who readily

refer to their professional code and its meanings in particu- lar situations.

16. Rohr dismissed the in-depth study of moral philosophy by public administrators as impractical.

17. Rohr also argued that attempting to train public administra- tors to be moral philosophers would be unrealistic.

18. New Public Administration was a movement to challenge the older understandings of the field rooted in assumptions that administrators carried out their work as technical pro- fessionals without much discretion according to the wishes of their political masters. New Public Administration re- jected notions of administration as ethically neutral instru- mental thinkers apart from the citizenry. Their work ad- vanced the first significant treatments of the ethical obligations of public administrators and the importance of citizen participation in administrative decisions. Their first published work appeared in Marini (1971).

19. NASPAA is the national association of the more than 200 college and university professional education programs in public administration and the accrediting organization for the master of public administration degree.

10. This is not to imply that democratic governance is always stable. Indeed, it is often turbulent. What is intended here is a kind of dynamic equilibrium that may undergo frequent turbulence but adapt to the changes without destroying it- self.

11. I am indebted to Patricia M. Nickel for this reference and insight.

12. I use the term “new women’s movement” to distinguish it from that which began with organized effort in the 1840s and continued through the battle for the suffrage for women.

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