Ethics Codes: Bah! Humbug!

The holiday slowdown is a marvelous time to kick back and catch up on trivial reading. And it’s hard to find anything of late much more trivial than the recently passed Ethics Code for Kalamazoo City Commissioners.

Don’t get me wrong. I love this City Commission, and I marvel at its dedication to public service. If commissioners want to take the time to write an ethics code, pass it and make future commissioners sign it, no harm done. And to their credit, they have no intention enforcing it. It is, in their words, “aspirational,” not “punitive.” Besides, the City Attorney said “there’s no need to supplement state law.”

Not violating state law, of course, is the essence of the city’s ethics code, unless someone really was curious about whether commissioners should get in free to New Year’s Fest (the $100 gift threshold probably settled that).

You can bet your boots that Bernard Madoff, architect of the now-famous $50 billion fraud, signed the Ethics Code of the Securities and Exchange Commission. That agency, by the way, expends more than a third of its $900 million budget on enforcement. And Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was arrested on ethics charges last week, personally signed into law last year the eight most recent revisions to the 75-section ethics act of the Illinois state government. I'm sure the other 40 Illinois governors who have been indicted signed whatever ethics codes were put in front of them.

Ethics codes don’t work for a pretty simple reason: people who cheat also lie.

But hey, in sacred places like the Kalamazoo City Hall, how could an ethics code hurt? Other than giving people a false sense of security, probably doesn’t.

Most people have a hard time voting against ethics codes. In my professional association -- if indeed, ‘public relations professional’ is not an oxymoron (with apologies to my colleagues) -- I cast the lone “no” vote against our ethics code on the grounds that it was hypocritical. We came out against plagiarism when we’re begging journalists to steal our stuff. Nothing delights a PR professional more than to have his or her work used word-for-word.

And, nothing against lawyers, but would law be a better profession without an ethics code? Do legal scholars, or ethical scholars, ever wonder about the moral implications of a defendant being “fully candid with his or her lawyer without suffering any consequences.”? A better way to look at the code of ethics for lawyers might be this: it’s a “code” that lay people are not allowed to crack. Try asking to make a case in a court of law.

Believe it or not, computer hackers have a code of ethics that speaks to the duty of “solving problems”. It stops short, as you might imagine, of saying “first, do no harm.”

In truth, it’s wonderful living in a community where public servants are passing ethics codes and glad-handing at New Year’s Fest, regardless of whether they pay to get in. May they keep it up.