What should be done to promote a clean & ethical government? To those who are right at the center of power, the needs for them to strictly adhere to the ethical standards never cease to exist. Bureaucratic corruption is in fact a by-product of an unethical government. Promoting ethical governing among politicians and civil servants may well minimize possible corrupt acts in all levels of government. Before mentioning what actual actions can be taken to promote ethics, we must first reach a consensus that people who work for the governments may often be caught in situations in which they may be forced to act immorally. Thus, setting crystal-clear moral standards for them is an essential step when it comes to promoting ethics in government as vague standards would likely end up being either ignored or used as tools by those with calculating minds to further abuse their power. Although ethics is a vague concept, we can try to narrow down its meaning into one word: responsibility. Some may argue that the ethics of public service is based on five basic virtues (responsibility, efficiency, transparency, fairness and no conflict of interest) but to me, responsibility is the most crucial one for the latter four seemingly being derived from responsibility. Despite having mentioned that responsibility ought to be the key factor when promoting ethics in government, I’ve yet to clarify who or what exactly the people in government should be responsible for. Well, the simplified answer’d be they shall be responsible for the public. After all, without the public, a government would not even exist. Officials should be frequently reminded that they serve for the public but not themselves. When one feels responsible for the public, he or she will try to offer the public the best–human rights, care for the public’s needs, you name it. Surely, how to raise that sense of responsibility is the real tricky part since most unethical officials have long become indifferent to it. Still, (re)cultivating that sense of responsibility can done in many ways, one of which would be the government further empowering the fourth estate – the media by allowing a larger extent of freedom of press so to let the fourth estate play its role as the monitor of the government to its full potential. Especially now with the rise of the social media and the ease of people getting access to the internet, the fourth estate’s become more powerful than ever before and can actually be a strong ally to the government when it comes to monitoring immoral deeds made by officials and addressing the importance of being responsible for the public. Another possible way to make the civil servants more self-disciplined and passively feel obliged to the public would be the government heavily underscoring that sense of responsibility for the public inside its system and actually rewarding those who’ve been acting morally for a certain period of time (e.g. 10years).There’re other methods to force the civil servants to become aware of both of their responsibility and deeds at work in a short period of time. The most effective one would be setting up several strong institutions which shall be independent of normal civil service and accountable only to the top official in the government. This type of institutions would monitor some specific immoral deeds like corruption of the civil servants and act as legal channels for the public to make official complaints concerning these immoral deeds of officials. Take Hong Kong’s ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption) as an example, ever since it was established in the 70’s, the number of corrupt officials has dropped significantly and now Hong Kong’s one of most corruption-free places in the world. Whilst busy promoting ethics in the system, the government shall always review their ethical standards from time to time and see if their standards are no longer suitable or even have become unethical. Back in the mid 60’s, extorting and killing the ethnic Chinese locals were deemed fine or even, in a way, encouraged by the then Indonesian government. Even till this day, some of the “killers” don’t regret their notorious killings. This shows that while promoting ethics in government is vital to the society, the moral standards set by the government shall always be monitored or changed if necessary as what seems ethical may not be ethical at all. Hence, the government should gather opinions regarding moral standards from other countries so to mold an objective, up-dated set of moral standards for the civil servants and the public. One shall also be aware that absolute cleanness of a government isn’t always ethical under some circumstances. Still, promoting a clean and ethical government is generally good for the public. All in all, means to promote ethics and hard-hit corruption in government are always evolving but the above methods hopefully will be effective for quite a while. (9080)
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:26:32 +0000
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