Search Results

This chapter presents a summary of some of the most important federal ethics rules, observations about how they work in practice, and suggestions for how they could be more effective. Topics discussed include gifts and travel, restrictions on representation, financial disclosure, financial conflicts of interest, covered relationships and the impartiality rule, and the movement of personnel between government and private industry.

This chapter discusses fiduciary principle in private and public law. Topics covered include transparency and accountability as fiduciary responsibilities, finding solutions to fiduciary breach, the threat posed by systemic corruption to the fiduciary principle, and rules' predominance over standards and criminalization in ethics law.

This chapter discusses an example of individual corruption—insider trading in securities markets on the basis of information misappropriated from the government. It also addresses the taxation of capital gains from assets that need to be sold to avoid financial conflicts of interest. In each of these contexts, unique challenges are posed if federal employees are regulated by both federal ethics law and other areas of law. Lack of coordination can cause a government employee, who is affected by both areas of law, to be pulled in two inconsistent directions.

This chapter argues that two prominent approaches to ethics that are often thought to be rivals of a divine command ethic are actually complementary to a divine command ethic. In particular, a divine command ethics presupposes a natural law ethic, or some comparable account of the good. A natural law ethic, such as that developed by Mark Murphy, provides a good foundation for a divine command theory by providing an account of the good, and a divine command theory helps a natural law ethic give a convincing explanation of moral obligations. A divine command theory is also consistent with reasonable forms of virtue ethics. It is not consistent with extreme forms of moral particularism, but these views are not essential to virtue ethics. A virtue ethics can be linked to a divine command theory in that the virtues can be understood to provide the telos or goal of moral obligations.

This chapter discusses ethics reform in the legislative branch. House and Senate rules were amended in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 to restrict members' interaction with lobbyists. Congress thus took the rare step of imposing more stringent ethics requirements on members themselves. Nonetheless, major areas of abuse, such as lobbyists' involvement in campaign finance as well as the revolving door between Congress and K Street, were minimally affected by the new rules.

This chapter discusses the influence of campaign finance over politics. Topics covered include impact of campaign finance on government ethics, the insufficiency and excessiveness of disclosure requirements, overcoming obstacles to effective campaign finance reform, and public funding of election campaigns.

This chapter situates corrective justice within Kant's philosophy of right. It traces the normative presuppositions of corrective justice to Kant's conception of the will, that is, of the freedom and purposiveness of self-determining activity. It also connects corrective justice to the institutions of a functioning legal order. Kant presents legality as an idea of reason, an articulated unity applicable to the external relationships of free beings. Legality thus conceived makes the right prior to the good within the conceptual sequencing of the operations of practical reason. Accordingly, the juridical relationship of one party to another in private law can be understood independently of the ethical duties incumbent upon them.

This chapter outlines John Finnis' singular contribution to the discipline of the law and ethics of medicine in the UK and beyond across almost half a century. It argues that, not least because of the powerful, arguably uniquely powerful, combination of legal and philosophical expertise that he has brought to the discipline, he should be regarded as the ‘father’ of the discipline, or at least as one of its fathers.

In this dialogue, Hal Abelson the acclaimed professor, scientist and distinguished member of MIT CSAIL, and co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology (MITCET), firstly discusses the potential of the digital revolution and Internet. He talks about the reasons that led him to initiate Creative Commons (Abelson was also involved with the start up of MIT OpenCourseWare, Public Knowledge, the Free Software Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology). He then describes in detail the MIT model. On the one hand it is based on not making distinctions between teaching and research, and on the other it focuses on radical meritocracy, which gives rise to a culture of open exchange and openness. He moves on to explain details of the philosophy behind the prestigious MIT Course 6, which uses semiconductors to bring together the physical side of electrical engineering and the logic side of IT, thereby generating a range of innovative interactions. He finally talks about the foundations of leadership which MIT have laid and continue to maintain in education and innovation.