The existence of a public service ethic – a core set of principles which prescribe the minimum standards and guide the behaviour of all those involved in public life – is a widely held and much cherished belief in western democracies. The notion of such ethics is a fundamental feature of public administration, providing for continuity and consensus of values across a wide range of otherwise disparate professions and organisations. Achieving a comprehensive and transferable definition of ethics which has meaning in both contemporary structures of public administration, and potentially evolving patterns of public service, is a complex and somewhat impossible task. In traditional structures of public administration the potential contexts in which ethical dilemmas could occur were restricted to a limited number of organizations, most of which were bound by a similar and narrow set of legal and constitutional arrangements.