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do-nothing, powerless job, condemned to sit in an office with desk bare of responsibilities. But despite all the rhetoric about upholding the law and following the regulations, public service also requires reflection and judgment.We must discern the spirit, not just the letter, of the law. An ethical climate in an organization encourages people to think for themselves, consult with others, and support their efforts even when they fail. This sort of recommendation is, of course, unrealistic. It ignores established political-bureaucratic dynamics, which say contract and other administrative decisions are made in favor of major contributors and constituencies and not according to the neutral protocols of bureaucracy.Visible evidence of the pervasiveness of this dynamic is found in a recent Bush administration executive order putting political appointees in charge of reviewing regulations in each federal agency. The order is defended by the Office of Management and Budget as “a classic good-government measure that will make federal agencies more open and accountable.” One must ask, To whom and for what?16 In response to the charge that an ethical agency climate is unrealistic, my answer is that if this is indeed the case, then why are we wasting time teaching ethics in public administration degree programs? Perhaps our practitioner-students (the vast majority) are patiently spitting back what we teach them, all the while invisibly smirking, perhaps ruefully, at the idea that they could actually be ethical on the job. One academic I know well, who refuses to teach ethics, sums up the plight of the bureaucrat as follows, “I want to be ethical but they won’t let me.”17 He is referring to the difficulty of standing up to a command structure that aims for total obedience but saddles the individual with total responsibility. Should we not, in other words, attune ourselves to the reality in public organizations: a complex film of laws, regulations, and protocols, floating haplessly on the surface of a powerful current of politics as usual? If this is the reality, what does meaningful public service consist of? The answer is not better or more laws, regulations, protocols, and ethical codes. Nor is it training, the typical recourse when organizational leaders discover that their people are not conforming to set standards of whatever kind. In fact there is no answer in the usual sense— no way out, no remedy that will fix the bureaucrat’s ethical dilemma. 150 phlosophy for practce There might be an approach, however, one that is authentic. It starts with what is given and pretty much unremediable and wrestles with how to live within, and despite, the conditions one has been given. In this respect, working in an agency is no different from life itself. We are all thrown into it, into circumstances we do not choose, and faced with the reality that life, no matter how we live it, is finite. One can try to evade the circumstances, to ignore the inevitable outcome, or one can open oneself to the possibility of building a meaningful life with what is at hand. You take responsibility even though, ultimately, you are not in control. From this perspective laws, rules, and codes are givens with which the individual self is obligated to engage without being determined by them.18 And the best ethical climate is one that encourages this form of individual responsibility without threatening reprisal. Men and Women n Dark Tmes In days made dark by violence, by the doubletalk and camouflage of government leaders, by speech that sweeps important issues under the rug rather than disclosing them in the light of public space, what we have to draw upon is the illumination given us by “men and women, in their lives and in their works.”19 Nowhere is this truer than in public service today, where public servants wrestle with their responsibilities under clouds of antigovernment sentiment, and where obvious darkness, in the form of war, prison camps, torture, the abandonment of citizens to the fury of the storm, and the threat of terrorism, looms over us all. Arendt offered us stories, believing that there was nothing more powerful with which to counter dark times: Rosa Luxemburg and her passionate engagement in public life, “in the destinies of the world”; Pope John XXIII, with his “strength of daring simplicity,” who “never for a moment relinquished his judgment”; Hermann Broch, who wrote that the ultimate ethical principle for human...

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