Photo by Joshua Sukoff on UnsplashStory originally appeared at Medium.
It was obvious before the COVID-19 outbreak that ethics was lacking in the United States Government. One of the first things the Trump Administration did was to work with the House of Representatives to gut and subjugate the House Ethics Committee, to disastrous effect. The disdain of this government for ethical rules and oversight was one of its hallmarks during its first years in office, and unfortunately, things have not improved since then.
What is the purpose of ethics, and why do we need it in government?
As an ethicist myself, I am perhaps uniquely situated to answer this question. Ethics is the study of rules which emerge from human behavior — i.e., people who behave in X way during situation Y achieved something, and people who behaved differently achieved something else. The purpose of ethics in public policy is to inform the public about possible ethics violations so as to increase the credibility of the government.
The reasoning runs thus: In a difficult situation, the government was able to navigate the conundrum and ensure the best outcome, so they have maintained their trustworthiness. It’s a simple and rudimentary equation, but it shows the core reasoning behind the government’s decision to institute an ethics committee to oversee itself in the first place: build credibility with the public.
Back in 2017, when the new administration essentially got rid of its ethics committee, what it was saying was essentially that it didn’t care whether the public believed it was a credible authority or not. After breaking essentially every ethics rule in the book, Trump was sick and tired of the criticism he was receiving and obviously not willing to step down from his post, so he just made the people criticizing him go away. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. Fast forward to 2020. The government is in the midst — suddenly — of a debacle, 3 years after Trump’s inauguration. The utter lack of accountability to ethical or other standards for these leaders has eroded the entire regime. Only yes-men remain to head up public offices, and the few remotely competent leaders who remain must constantly fear for their jobs if they speak out.
The medical establishment began an effort to begin responding to the impending pandemic immediately, but with poor protection and poor visibility ensured by Trump’s efforts to avoid being seen as a conspicuous ethics violator, none of these voices were heeded and Trump was able to essentially dodge the question until the virus was already entrenched on US soil.
The value of ethics is that it can provide an objective standard for action and reaction. Let me explain that a bit more: under proper normative ethical rules in government, a whistleblower will be protected from termination or prosecution because the government recognizes its tremendous capacity to act out of line and whistleblowers are a key source of information for leaders to respond to malfeasance within their organizations.
While a whistleblower would not have helped the United States Government respond to a rapidly impending existential threat such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the general character of the US Government itself would have. The US Government, at least before Trump, consisted of a very expensive and practically exhaustive set of heuristics developed to safeguard against all manner of threats.
The plans to try to ensure ethical leadership were just one part of the structure which Trump immediately began to destroy when he entered the Oval Office. The plan to ensure rapid and effective pandemic response was another casualty.
The study of ethics, in the end, is the study of human behavior. The decision to adhere to ethical norms is a guarantee of responsibility in and out of crisis situations. The US Government is failing to save American lives right now because we, the people, have allowed it to walk back all of the controls and insights we used to have into its operation, and we are now unable to ensure its function as a direct consequence of our failure to ensure that our channels of oversight remained intact.
As Kant himself might say, the function of ethics is to ensure an intelligible world. Without adding this layer of structure to our social systems, we are unable to ensure that they are prepared to do their job, and protect us during times of crisis. Make no mistake: the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the United States particularly hard because we have allowed ourselves to slip on, of all things, ethics.
