Government ethics and public service ethics

Facade of the Legislative Palace of Uruguay with the national flag at sunset (Illustrative image Infobae)First of all, it is grounded in adherence to the basic principles, those of continuous execution and non-expiry: democracy, human rights, the fight against poverty, for equality, for better conditions for workers, against discrimination, for prosperous economic systems and prosperity for all. To the question of whether we have changed since then: yes, we have changed, how could we not? If President Mujica was not the same as in the sixties, they cannot ask us to look at today's world and, in particular, the future with the same outlook. Politicians who resort to sixties-style rhetoric to say something stirring are pitiful. It was an unrepeatable moment and a historic event to have a president of the people, who was not in government to save himself, who was not seeking re-election, who sought a different conception of the exercise of power, who had renounced (and is admired for it, certainly, at the international level) not only material comforts but all political convention and stereotype. First of all, it is necessary to establish a distinction between ethics and morality, which is not always made, thus incurring the consequent confusion of terms. By morality we understand a specific form of human behavior, individual or collective, that actually occurs, or that is postulated as ought to occur. And by ethics we understand the reflective, theoretical attention to morality on one plane or another (the factual or the ideal), which are not mutually exclusive for it. That is to say: ethics is interested in morality, whether to understand, interpret or explain the historically or socially existing morality, or to postulate and justify a morality that, not actually occurring, is considered as ought to occur. To achieve good results in politics and public management, it is necessary to have rulers and officials who have internalized values and possess an integral conduct, for it is these public servants who set the guidelines and operate the institutions. An exhaustive deliberation regarding both the way to curb unethical attitudes in the public sphere and the recovery of citizens' trust leads to the idea that it is not through controls external to the individuals who perform the public function that they are prevented from committing illicit acts, but rather it is through sensitization, the development of conscience as well as the establishment of internal principles in people that the commission of acts contrary to ethics can be avoided. To pretend to subdue men by the force of power, through external controls, cannot be the only path. "The law can be imposed from outside, but not morality." And also: "The set of norms and controls does not guarantee that the public employee acts in an ethically correct manner. Only the strength of the employee's ethical convictions can cover the void generated by the context." Since institutions are of a public character, it is important to have personnel trained in ethics, understood as the powerful tool that forms the conscience of men and fully develops their capacity for judgment. Ethical training is vital for individuals, for they have an eminently active character in the running and development of organizations. Precisely, one of the causes of distrust in public institutions is the absence of ethical principles and values, which gives way to the increase of vices or unethical attitudes, such as corruption, abuse of authority, influence peddling, etc. Situations that prevent the achievement of institutional goals and objectives. Ethics for public servants refers to situations of application. The common good, far from being an abstraction, materializes in each act carried out in the multiple instances of the Public Administration. It is the sum of thousands of daily decisions of the servants who work in public organizations. Each official daily encounters ethical dilemmas that, at times, they resolve routinely and at other times, as a result of deep reflection. That is why it is important for public servants to have a framework that serves as a guide for their decisions. Changes in the attitudes of rulers and public servants toward an improvement in the quality of services and institutions cannot be forced from outside; they must arise from themselves, from each one and from the collective conscience. When public men respond to an ethical philosophy, they exercise self-control by being responsible for their conduct, and for each of their acts. In this way, ethics is the best instrument, for it entails self-control through the correct use of reason, based on the idea of collective service, an important element for public servants. "The interest of the State cannot depend on the passions of the prince, not even on his desire to be bad or good, but rather it demands a profound self-control."The image that is constructed of the public administration, whether positive or negative, is the result of the attitude and conduct of each person who works in an organization. A good image helps to believe in and trust public institutions. A bad image generates distrust, doubt, rejection. To achieve a feeling of satisfaction when performing a task, the person-to-person relationship is important. When speaking of public ethics, it is not that it is a special ethics for the affairs of government and public administration; it simply refers to ethics applied and put into practice in the public sphere. Ethics applied to public servants implies an essential change in the attitudes of each individual, which translates into concrete acts oriented toward the public interest. It is what Weber called "the ethics of responsibility"; that the public servant apply the sense of duty for the benefit of the State. That the people who hold public office do so with diligence and honesty as a result of reason, conscience, maturity of judgment, responsibility and the sense of duty. A true adoption of ethics demands a profound change of conception, of mental attitude and of mindset, that prevents corrupt thoughts. For Hans Küng, the end of ethics in politics is "to rescue human dignity." On this he wrote: "Man must be more than what he is: he must be more humane. Ethics is action, putting values into practice." The notion of the common good assumes the reality of the personal good and the reality of the social project insofar as the two realities form a unit of convergence: the community. The common good is the good of the community. Given that we have long been immersed in a culture based on principles of independence, individuality and property, it becomes increasingly difficult to respect and practice collective principles and values such as solidarity, cooperation, or generosity. On the contrary, "the law of the jungle" resurfaces, where the strongest prevails, and "man becomes a wolf to man," as Hobbes said. Confusions are rekindled as to whether a situation is correct or not; there is even a certain rejection of ethical norms, since these are less attractive or stimulating than individual principles. The individual enjoyment of money and material goods, without a doubt, attracts much more than the collective enjoyment of them. Thinking of oneself and not of others is the characteristic of the modern individual. A society without ethical resources generates a transformation of the conduct of its members based on anti-values. The gravity of downplaying ethical values lies in the fact that people who, during their childhood and youth, live outside these principles will hardly accept them once maturity is reached. In this context, it is easy to understand the state of devaluation in which politics finds itself. It is important to dignify politics and rescue its true or original meaning. Public life imposes demands of ethical behavior because it implies knowing and understanding the human soul. There exists in public service personnel an immense potential, which is the knowledge that one is serving a cause of collective meaning. Said potential, emphasized through an adequate personnel policy accompanied by the strengthening of ethical values, is indispensable for recovering trust in the institutions. It is important to know, if one wishes to recover that institutional trust, what are the causes of its loss. There is distrust because credibility is lost. When one lies, when one promises and does not deliver, when there are needs that are never satisfied, the citizen stops trusting. When communication is not done correctly. Faced with situations of uncertainty, rules and myopic prescriptions are not enough; techniques alone are insufficient; a public ethics is necessary that has sufficient appeal to motivate action according to a principle of justice and universal solidarity. "Trust between institutions and people is not achieved by multiplying controls, but by reinforcing habits and convictions. This task is what belongs to an ethics of public administration: that of generating convictions, forging habits, from the values and goals that justify its existence."Ethics applied to the public function implies service to the citizenry; it is, moreover, an important mechanism of control over arbitrariness in the use of public power, a key element for the creation and maintenance of trust in the administration and its institutions by raising the quality of public administration through the honest, efficient, objective and integral conduct of officials in the management of public affairs. As long as a true and profound change in thinking is not achieved, trust in the public service cannot be recovered. The ethical values instilled in the people who operate in the public sphere and properly cultivated contribute to making the public function more efficient. Likewise, they help to redeem the image of the official, the ruler, the politician and, in general, of those who work in the sphere of public service. No government will have true success in the achievement of its objectives if it does not first integrate ethics into the training of its personnel. In truth, these systems that Latin Americans have stubbornly applied have not managed to offer the material and social goods for living, not even the "good life" enjoyed by the privileged minority, but at least within the framework of dignified human conditions indispensable with respect to food, housing, health, security or social protection. And the point is that the non-democratic alternatives have been devastatingly worse. The other systems must be criticized for the profound inequality in access to social wealth and the injustices that derive from it; for the denial or limitation of individual and collective liberties, or their reduction to a rhetorical or formal plane; for their treatment of men as mere means or instruments. All of which entails the asphyxiation or limitation of the corresponding moral values: democracy, equality, justice, freedom and human dignity. Whereby we are affirming the presence of morality in the project of a new society which, free from the alienation of dignities, must ensure effective individual and collective liberties for its members on the basis of their juridical equality and fundamental guarantees. Morality is an essential component of its project of social and human emancipation. For Marxism, morality is an object of reflection of its ethics in an explanatory sense, that is: as a theory of this specific behavior (individual and collective) that occurs historically and socially. Marxist ethics, or ethics of Marxist inspiration, is distinguished from individualist, formal or speculative ethics that pretend to explain morality apart from history and society, or from the interests of groups or social classes. But morality not only enters Marxism as an object to be explained, but also in a normative sense as the morality of a new society, justifying its necessity, desirability and possibility, after the critique of the dominant morality under capitalism. There is, then, room in Marxism both for an ethics that tries to explain the actually existing morality, and for a normative ethics that postulates a new morality, necessary, desirable and possible when the necessary economic and social bases are given to build the new society in which that morality is to prevail. The problem is that Marxism was incapable of building either a system of justice or of human dignity; its application generated systemic dysfunctions and it could not even remotely structure a project of sustainable development. Therefore, its ethical conceptualization was left hanging, which expressed its own failure. Political referents are forged today by establishing molds, without understanding the nefarious experiences of the past, without struggles against sclerotic convictions and with a deep fear of assuming the necessary changes or of recognizing errors and blunders, without the capacity to backtrack. With the sustained application of formulas that have failed and continue to fail. The left, in particular the "classical" left in each system, has become even more corporatist. Corporatist in dimension and corporatist internationally. We cannot identify ourselves precisely with that approach. Our regional identity is democracy and human rights. We place this before the moral defeat, the sad bureaucratic defeat of a left blurred and routine in its repeated declarations of principles that it applies badly, out of time and outside the necessary social cohesion, that "we must reform," "we must modernize," "we must change." Instead, it occurs to no one to reinvent and propose (and listen to) new forms, to renew and make room for efficient institutions, for a society that brings innovation and bases with commitment to a better social project. The obsolescence of the discourse of the aging ideas of the left falls, sooner rather than later, of its own weight. The future that awaits us, after so much effort, if we do not make the necessary changes of course, is one of unparalleled cynicism. We must recover our course. Not to give away our imperishable longing for justice, democracy and human rights in exchange for the low price of submission and international discipline. It is clear that, if we cede this space of power in the service of the people, we will end up being the scapegoats of our own incapacity to manage what we ourselves generate. We will pass into history like other generations that left as a legacy institutional weakness, economic exile, income poverty and intellectual poverty. We must separate what corresponds to a serious political, economic and social system, modern in the best sense, from a movement, the doctrine, the foundations and the essential bases upon which we move, from "...what corresponds to the rigid dogmatism of a sect or the intellectual complexity of a theory for the lecture hall," as Emilio Frugoni said. So then, let us be "independent": let us propose, contribute, think. Our long struggle for human rights is for change, and that ideal is the only sustainable project for the consolidation of development.