ETHICS, NOT MORALS, PLEASE:

Are our efforts controlling corruption or creating an ethics industry? (Sharon Hayes, 27/2/2004, Online Opinion)

[T]he more one reads the corruption research in Australia, the more it seems to indicate that, far from reducing corruption, current programs are more concerned with encouraging the rapid development of an ethics industry that is fast becoming both self-determining and self-perpetuating. Considerations of efficacy are part of the rhetoric of public-sector ethics but there is little evidence of it in either the academic or government literature.

Such charges have already been laid against other governments in recent times. For example, United States legal academics Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds in their research into the implementation of ethics in United States government over the past three decades, conclude that such a self-perpetuating “ethics establishment” has already taken hold in the United States, giving rise to a culture of “appearance ethics” that focuses on the simple manipulation of appearances rather than on substantive ethical analyses of current practices. They conclude even further that appearance ethics is pernicious because it “gives the illusion of control and precision” based on ever more constricting rules and regulations that offer simplicity at the expense of substance.

Carmen Electra of the Executive Branch (Glenn Harlan Reynolds, 3/01/04, Tech Central Station)

[L]ike some Carmen Electra of the Executive Branch, the [President's Council on Bioethics] seems to be getting more stacked all the time. Here's how the Washington Post summarizes the latest events:
 
President Bush yesterday dismissed two members of his handpicked Council on Bioethics -- a scientist and a moral philosopher who had been among the more outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cells.

In their places he appointed three new members, including a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out precisely against the research that the dismissed members supported, and another who has written about the immorality of abortion and the "threats of biotechnology."

Bush Ejects Two From Bioethics Council: Changes Renew Criticism That the President Puts Politics Ahead of Science
(Rick Weiss, February 28, 2004, Washington Post)

One of the dismissed members, Elizabeth Blackburn, is a renowned biologist at the University of California at San Francisco. She said she received a call yesterday morning from someone in the White House personnel office. [...]

The other dismissed member, William May, an emeritus professor of ethics at Southern Methodist University, is a highly respected scholar whose views on embryo research and other topics had also run counter to those of conservative council members. Efforts to reach him last night were unsuccessful. [...]

The three new appointees are Benjamin Carson, the high-profile director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University; Diana Schaub, chairman of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland; and Peter Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia. All are respected members of their fields. And their writings suggest their tenures will be less contentious than their predecessors'.

Funny how upset they get when you try to introduce morality into discussions of ethics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 1, 2004 7:36 PM