What “Public Ethics” Actually Means
Originally written for the Leadership Santa Clara program in 2020, and reproduced here as the foundational statement of what public ethics means and why it matters to a city. If you want to expand your understanding of thinking and acting ethically, this is a good place to start.
Ethics is a set of well-grounded standards for how human beings ought to act.
Personal ethics are the standards that prescribe how we ought to treat other human beings, animals, and the natural world we encounter every day of our lives.
The overall goals of ethics are the highest quality relationships we can have with each other, with other living things, and with our natural environment.
Public Ethics is an organizational or citywide commitment, made by the organization’s senior leadership, committing the organization and all the people who comprise it to act only in ways that will earn the public’s trust that this organization operates at all times, in public and in private, only in the best interests of the public it serves.
Public ethics is the way public officials act when they are at their best earning the public’s trust. Its central questions are these: How should we treat others, and how ought we ourselves be treated? Why is this the right thing to do? How will this build public trust?
The method
Ethics asks us to use a principles-based decision-making process — and it asks human beings, especially those in public service, to be at their best when they make choices, take action, and judge the impact of their actions afterward.
Choosing, acting, judging. Three moments. Each one a place where ethics is either practiced or set aside.
The traditions
Public ethics is grounded in five philosophical traditions. Each one names something the others can miss.
- Virtue ethics. Practice the core values that help you and everyone else to flourish.
Consequences. Do more good than harm. If anything you could do will cause harm, go out of your way to reduce the harm as much as possible.
Individual rights. Treat everyone with dignity and respect.
Especially protect the fundamental moral right: to be treated as a free, equal, capable human being, able to make his/her own decisions and direct his/her own life.
Fairness. Treat equals equally.
The common good. Act only for the good of the community (the community’s “best interests,” and uphold those common conditions the community needs to flourish.
A wise decision generally honors all five. A decision that satisfies one tradition while violating another is a decision worth examining again.
The context
Personal ethics (i.e., the well-grounded core values and ethical standards to which I am committed to living every day in my personal life and by which I evaluate it and become better) and public ethics (i.e., the well-grounded core values and ethical standards to which the City organization is committed, which it promises the people every public official will practice, and to which the organization and its officials will be evaluated by and held accountable to) are incredibly practical.
In our work with the City, We face personal and public ethics issues from the time we get up until the time we go to bed. That’s because we are in relationships throughout the day and night. Ethics challenges us to develop the strongest relationships we can with all of the people we meet throughout the day, from the people we love the most to the people we don’t even realize we’ve met driving to work, but whose life we have made better or worse).
Personal and public ethics live in our everyday lives — shaped by history, by our own lived experience, by our professions, our faith traditions, and the expectations, strengths, and weaknesses of the society and the people around us.
We are called up to practice personal and public ethics (to “do ethics”) today, now even, at a time when interpersonal and professional relationships are increasingly broken and fragile, when corporations are being held accountable for egregious illegal and unethical behavior, when cities are being called to account for decisions that advance private, personal, or professional relationships rather than the common good, and when trust — both individual and public — is at an all-time low.
Despite all that, what was fundamental for Dr. Albert Schweitzer, should be fundamental for us: Ethics begins with solidarity with other human beings. My decisions impact them and they matter, individually, in groups, in cities, and in society. It is also the reason the work matters.
The challenge
The challenge of ethics is ongoing and life-long.
To look honestly at ourselves — at our integrity and the content of our characters.
To value those who have been role models in our lives.
To celebrate our own moral successes.
To identify the stumbling blocks every one of us falls over.
To work patiently to develop skills to overcome them — so that we can practice three rules that get harder as they go:
The Golden Rule. Treat others as you would want to be treated.
The Diamond Rule. Treat others as they would want to be treated.
The Titanium Rule. Treat others the way you treat those you love when you are at your best.
Practiced every day, any one of these rules will change our lives and the lives of everyone we touch. But imagine the world we would create, if we made the Titanium rule our daily practice.
This is the foundation Public Trust Now is built on. Every article, every analysis, every public comment we encourage, every Community Standard we ask members to keep — all of it begins here.
Public officials who do not understand the heart of the matter, who wouldn’t recognize an ethics principle when they fall over it, or those who do understand the heart of the matter and still choose to ignore personal and public ethics, to use them as political weapons, to see them as add-ons or “optional extras,” or as constraints on their majority power–those people have no business running for elected office, or once elected and refusing to learn or improve their ethics understanding, they have no business remaining in office.