A Code of Ethics as a Means of Controlling Administrative Conduct

Abstract

its parallels in the work of students and practitioners of administration. During an earlier period the academic students of government were often skeptical of the usefulness of any deliberate effort to set out standards of administrative ethics. Among nonacademic observers there has always been a great deal of skepticism that any other standard than the crudest conception of self-interest was active in the world of politics and government. A distinguished Jefferson City correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch once assured the writer, then working on a thesis on personnel standards in state government, that no one ever got a job in state government unless somebody got something out of it. But of late there has been a growing interest among the academic specialists in the values that determine administrative actions-an interest obviously related to a study of the ethical purposes that administrative activity serves. ' The British writers on the civil service have always paid explicit attention to the high ethical standards of their own civil servants and Fritz Morstein Marx in a study of the German civil service before Hitler stressed the ethical standards of the service and the means of enforcing them. 2 A similar in-