Danger! Beware of justifying an action in the name of a greater good or higher authority instead of taking action for the sake of that purpose

Rules of Thumb for Ethical Behaviour
Adapted from “Lewis, Carol W.; Gilman, Stuart C. (2012). The Ethics Challenge in Public
Service. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.”
1. Danger! Beware of justifying an action in the name of a greater good or higher authority
instead of taking action for the sake of that purpose.
2. Disobedience is preferred to illegality; refuse an illegal directive.
3. Public position may not be used for dissent as a citizen.
4. Ethical public servants do not permit themselves the antidemocratic assumption of their
own moral superiority.
5. Ethical public service rejects naiveté and cynicism and opts for hard-headed optimism.
6. Beware of those who wrap themselves in the common good or confidently assert future
interests.
7. Respect for future generations is a test for the public interest.
8. Empathy is another test of commitment to the public interest.
9. Use of office for personal gain for oneself or others is unethical.
10. Individual responsibility is by no means identical to sole responsibility.
11. A public manager’s first task is fixing the problem and only secondarily fixing the blame.
12. We cannot hide behind our boss or our desk to escape responsibility.
13. We cannot hide behind our subordinates.
14. We cannot hide behind our ignorance.
15. Ethical neutrality strips the humanity from managers and service recipients; dehumanizing
the victims denies the ethical element.
16. The obligation for informed ethical reasoning falls on the individual public manager.
17. Ethical judgment is best when it is self-applied.
18. Ethical public service demands that public servants touch base on all ethical perspectives.
19. In public service, the search is for compatibility and balance, reconciliation and
accommodation; reject moral relativism as a valid theory of ethics.
20. Impartial open-mindedness is the first-order test of genuine empathy in public service.
21. The impartial public manager is ethically driven, not ethically empty.
22. Danger! Beware of militant claims to moral superiority.
23. Anticipate that people see different worlds and respond to, relationships, and instructions
differently and predictably.
24. A typical starting point for ethical decision making is accepting the minimum prescription:
avoid doing harm.
25. Public service’s posture of avoiding doing harm leads to the duty to correct the direct or
indirect problems that we create.
26. Anticipate follow-through by asking, “Can I live with this?”
27. Apply the acid test of prospective publicity and ask what kind of person would do this and
whether you want to be and to be known as this kind of person.
28. Future generations are the most dependent stakeholders of all, and public officials are their
only institutional trustee.
29. The willingness to listen is a component of ethical decision making.
30. Where to draw the line? The more unethical one judges a behavior, the less likely one will
practice it or tolerate others’ doing it.
31. Ethics is not a toggle switch. Ethical managers exercise reasonable selectivity among
responsibilities.
32. They choose their battles in a principled way.
33. Danger! Beware of the slippery slope and losing the capacity to make moral judgments or
act on them.
34. Ethical managers and employees are the internal, direct clients of agency intervention.
35. Many employees look to ethics rules as a basic moral compass, but everyone should
understand that rules are only the beginning of ethical responsibility.
36. Talking about your code with your colleagues and staff can affect your day-to-day work.
37. Regular training or education on ethics is important; ethics training is perishable.
38. Government contractors need to be held to the same ethics standards as government
employees.
39. A good ethics code needs an effective system to support it.
40. Regularly evaluate the ethics environment in an agency.
41. Civil society organizations can help you understand how people outside your organization
see its ethics.
42. True professionalism elevates ethics to the highest standard among all values.
43. The average citizen’s view of government is shaped by his or her beliefs about its
competence and ethics.
44. A public manager’s primary ethical concern is behavior toward other people.
45. In a diversifying workforce, some behaviors need rethinking; others need full-scale
remodeling.
46. In a collaborative setting, put ethical issues and standards on the table, right up front.
47. Ethics dos, like ethics don’ts, should be as few as necessary and as simple as possible to do
the job.
48. Tailor operations to specific administrative realities.
49. A responsible manager seeks to minimize opportunities and temptation and encourage
individual and institutional integrity.