Global Ethics in the 21st Century: An Alternative Approach

At the beginning of the 21st century, there continues to be disagreement over the application of ethics in the public sector. In this chapter, we argue that the current approaches to ethics used in public administration are inadequate, and we are suggesting an alternative that is more useful for public administrators. For example, elsewhere we have discussed how

many current approaches to public-sector ethics lead to an increase in organizational bureaucracy and a subsequent reduction in organizational productivity (Lynch et al., 2002). Our suggested approach to ethics is not new; in fact, it builds on the common spiritual wisdom found in the five current largest religious traditions, and it directly flows out of the work on ethics by Aristotle.