Summer Reading: Eula Biss's "On Immunity"

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 08/27/2015 - 12:50

Eula Biss's excellent book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Immunity-Inoculation-Eula-Biss-ebook/dp/B00KUY4D7…; target="_blank">On
Immunity</a> (Graywolf Press, 2014) is not about legislative
immunity, but about immunity to diseases. And yet there is a great
deal of food for thought in it about municipal ethics. 
 
The first parallel can be seen in the "mun" in both "immunity" and "municipal." It comes
from the same Latin word "munus," which means service or duty. Who
knew that duties were inherent not just in ethics, but in being
municipal? Perhaps the goal of a "munificent" government ethics
program should be termed "munity." How could a municipality reject
munificent munity? 
 
I have already pointed out the second parallel in my book <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/files/lgep1-0%20-%20Robert%20Wechsler.htm" target="_blank">Local
Government Ethics Programs</a>, in my discussion of a public
health approach to government ethics. Here's what I say there:
 <blockquote>
The medical approach is individualistic, treating the patient for a
disease he catches from his environment. In the context of
government ethics, this means enforcing rules against individuals
who are caught violating them. 
 
The public health approach identifies the origin of diseases and
tries to prevent them from spreading. In the context of local
government ethics, diseases originate in institutional corruption
and an "unhealthy" ethics environment. If officials keep catching
diseases from an unhealthy ethics environment, treating their
ethical misconduct individually is a short-sighted and short-term
solution. It means one scandal after another, year after year,
undermining the public trust more and more as time goes on. This is
clearly not a sufficient way to handle ethical misconduct. 
 
Only by recognizing the power of situational forces to corrupt us
can we avoid, prevent, challenge, and change them, so that the
scandals stop. Just as we need to recognize that we are all
vulnerable to diseases, ethics programs need to recognize everyone's
vulnerability to situational forces and the need to deal not only
with individual conduct, but also with the situational forces
themselves. This is similar to what happens during a flu epidemic,
where public health professionals try to stop the spread of the flu
at the same time that individuals are treated individually. 
 </blockquote>
This blog post will continue to apply the public health metaphor to
government ethics. 
 
Herd Immunity 
The reason it is important to be vaccinated against diseases is not
just so that the individual who is vaccinated will not get the
disease. It is so that enough people will be vaccinated against the
disease that the process of vaccination will protect everyone, even
those who are not vaccinated. This concept is known as "herd
immunity." And, in fact, the more people who are vaccinated, the
more each individual is protected, because individual vaccination is
not foolproof. Even the vaccinated are protected by herd immunity. 
 
Herd immunity works even with vaccines that are not all that
effective for each individual (as government ethics laws are said to
be by their critics). Biss wrote, "[W]hen enough people are
vaccinated with even a relatively ineffective vaccine, viruses have
trouble moving from host to host and cease to spread, sparing both
the unvaccinated and those in whom vaccination has not produced
immunity. This is why the chances of contracting measles can he
higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated
community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a
largely vaccinated community." 
 
This is certainly true of government ethics. For example, the more
people who receive ethics training, the more people will understand
the concepts and the less people will feel they can get away with
conduct that their colleagues will not understand as unethical. The
more people who seek ethics advice, the more everyone will feel
obliged to seek ethics advice. The more advice that is given, the
clearer the guidance will be and the more protected each individual
will be from being accused of ethical misconduct. Everyone wins.
Finally, the more people who report ethical misconduct by their
colleagues, the less misconduct there will be to report. With
training, advice, and reporting, even the worst ethics environment
can be changed, even if not everyone supports it and even if the
ethics code is mediocre. Herd immunity. 
 
It is worth noting that those in local governments who most
vociferously oppose government ethics programs, their independence,
and their enforcement powers are usually the highest-level
officials, who often exclude themselves from these programs when
they do establish them. This is also true of those who choose not to
immunize themselves through vaccination. These individuals tend to
be highly educated. Northern California, the home of Silicon Valley,
has the highest rates of refusal to vaccinate children. In
government, this self-exclusion from immunity is more serious,
because it is these high-level officials who determine the ethics
environment and act as role models, one way or the other. They are
the only ones who can undermine herd immunity. 
 
Contamination and Unnaturalness 
There are many people who are opposed to vaccinating their children.
There are also many people who are opposed to government ethics
programs, most of them in government and academia. According to
Nadja Durbach, as quoted by Biss, anti-vaccinators see bodies not as
potentially contagious and therefore dangerous to society, but
rather as vulnerable to contamination and violation. Similarly,
those opposed to government ethics programs do not see government
officials as contagious in a way that would create a poor ethics
environment (not to mention susceptible to blind spots), but rather
as ethical individuals who can make their own ethical decisions
without government interference, which violates their personal
freedom and professional skills. These anti-vaccinators see
government ethics programs as just as unnatural as vaccines. 
 
But government ethics programs, like vaccines, are not violations of
government officials, at least if they are run responsibly. Nor are
they unnatural. As vaccines "invite the immune system to produce its
own protection," government ethics programs invite government
officials to deal responsibly with their conflict of interest
situations, and they guide and facilitate this process. Such
programs provide training and advice, and require disclosure, to
help officials do the right thing and ensure that their colleagues
do the right thing, as well. They not only offer enforcement of
rules, but also, when officials seek advice, protection from
enforcement. 
 
"Infectious disease is one of the primary mechanisms of natural
immunity," Biss wrote. "Whether sick or healthy, disease is always
passing through our bodies." So is temptation to engage in ethical
misconduct, not to mention our colleagues' misconduct, which often
implicates us, even if only by inaction or a lack of curiosity, a
failure to take a risk to protect the government organization or the
community. We are constantly being infected, and constantly fighting
off infections, sometimes without success. An effective government
ethics program, especially one accepted by government leaders,
greatly increases the odds of fighting off an infection, and cuts
both the amount of infection and the risk of reporting misconduct. 
 
Ethics Training 
What a vaccine does is to train the immune system so that it is
capable of "remembering" pathogens it has not yet seen. This is a
perfect description of ethics training, at least with young
employees and new elected and appointed officials. Training
experienced officials should, in this sense, be different, because
they've seen it all and have learned to deal with it in their own
way, which may or may not be optimal for them, but is less likely to be optimal for
the government organization and the community. 
 
Ethics Advice 
Biss quotes the bioethicist Arthur Caplan's warning about the
state of medical practice today, "If you keep telling people that
it's just a marketplace and that they're just clients and that the
autonomy of the patient is what must be served to make them happy
customers, then you have a collapse of professionalism in the face
of consumer demand." 
 
This is also a problem with the practice of government ethics
advice. The autonomy of the government official is too often given
priority over the good of the government organization and the
community it serves. This means that ethics advice is provided only
on the occasions and at the times officials ask for it, and only
with respect to the questions that concern them. It also means that
officials expect confidentiality and privacy, as if their conflicts
of interest were private rather than public matters. This makes it
difficult for most government ethics advisers to provide anything
more than legal advice, often after the fact, and difficult to make
this advice available to all officials, so that the rules are
clarified with respect to particular situations. 
 
Immune Systems 
We all know from the horror of autoimmune diseases how important
immune systems are to us. But immune systems are not all benevolent.
Fevers and inflammation are two of the ways immune systems protect
our bodies. These means of operation are known as "regulation." 
 
Similarly, government ethics programs are not all peaches and cream.
In the short run, they can undermine trust in a government via
enforcement actions and the bad press that accompanies them. But in
the longer run, enforcement, as well as training, advice, and
disclosure, can increase trust by preventing further misconduct and
enforcement actions, and by showing the public that government
officials as a group have chosen to deal responsibly with their conflict
situations. 
 
The alternative, a lack of regulation, means scandals, coverups, and
criminal actions that undermine the public's trust far more than a
government ethics program. As in the human body, regulation is
useful in a local government organization. 
 
The dangers of immune systems also apply to what is generally
referred to as "integrity," but which is better referred to as
"belief in one's integrity," because integrity is never a fact, does
not operate the same in all situations, and can never be known by
the public. We believe that personal integrity is as purely good a
thing as a strong immune system. But, as in the 1918 Spanish flu
pandemic, strong immune systems can kill healthy young adults
by causing an overwhelming immune response. 
 
As with young adults in 1918, those with
a strong belief in their integrity are sometimes the most
susceptible to blind spots regarding their own actions. Therefore, a person with a strong belief
in his integrity can, for example, act under the belief that it is
good for the community to help his wife get a government contract
because she is the best person for the job, not realizing that his
involvement is totally inappropriate, no matter how good she may be. 
 
Historical Increase in Ethics Oversight 
Biss notes that, as a child, her father was vaccinated against
five diseases, she was vaccinated against seven diseases, and her
son was vaccinated against fourteen. But she also notes that one
dose of the smallpox vaccine her father was given challenged his
immune system more than all 26 doses of vaccine her son was given. 
 
There is a similar parallel in government ethics. In the old days,
when corruption was more prevalent in most local governments,
a government official's immunity to situational forces was tested
far more than an official is today by taking ethics training,
seeking advice, and filing disclosure statements. Which is more
dangerous to each official, not to mention to the government
organization and the community? Why do some critics think that
things are harder on officials now? Do we really prefer to have
young officials experience lesser corruption and learn how to deal
with it that way, rather than trying to prevent corruption from
occurring? 
 
The Other Immunity 
As noted at the beginning of this post, the word "immunity" is
actually part of government ethics, although it isn't clear whether
it refers to a government ethics rule or a way of getting around accountability for
ethical misconduct. I am referring to legislative immunity, which
prohibits enforcement of at least criminal laws against sitting
legislators (and others) who are engaging in legislative activities.
I consider legislative immunity a government ethics rule (a minority view), because it
protects officials from acting out of fear of prosecution (that is,
in their self-interest) rather than for the good of the community. 
 
However, when legislative immunity is used to get around ethics
enforcement itself, then it is just the opposite of a government
ethics rule: giving oneself a special exemption, just the way
someone exempts themselves from having to vaccinate their children,
at the expense of the community. This kind of legislative immunity
provides legislators with a loophole to engage in ethical
misconduct, legalizing for them what is illegal for others. Even if
legislative immunity is constitutional, it can be overriden by
legislators, either as a group passing a law or individually by
signing away their immunity from ethics laws. 
 
In fact, in terms of its roots, "immunity" means, in Biss's words,
"an exemption from service or duty to the state," or to the
community. Why, in the context of government ethics, should
government officials ever be exempted from service or duty to the
community they represent or work for? Why should any official want
to remain exempt from ethics laws and, therefore, vulnerable to an
unhealthy ethics environment and the possibility of scandal? 
 
It would be helpful if local officials used the metaphor of "body
politic," which goes back to the ancient Greeks and went out of fashion in the twentieth century. This metaphor has each of us, including
officials, as bodies within a larger body. Now, the word "body" is
just another term for board or legislature. But the body politic
imagines the city as a living organism, which depends on the lives
of all those within it, just as a society that seeks to protect
itself from a disease depends on everyone to vaccinate themselves
and on leaders to support and facilitate vaccination. 
 
As Biss says, "our bodies may belong to us, but we ourselves belong
to a greater body composed of many bodies. We are, bodily, both
independent and dependent." No group can be excepted, and especially
not community leaders. "We resist vaccination in part because we
want to rule ourselves," says Biss. But as officials, our political
leaders cannot rule themselves. They can only rule themselves as
citizens. 
 
Sting Operations 
I'm not crazy about sting operations, but in a world without
effective government ethics programs, they can appear necessary.
Biss's book discusses something very similar to sting
operations: variolation (better known as inoculation), the
practice of infecting people with a mild case of smallpox in order
to prevent more serious illness, a practice that is hundreds of
years old in China and India, and was brought to America from
Africa. A sting operation infects government officials with
temptations in order to protect the public from those who give in to
temptation. Only the weak fall prey to such temptation. 
 
The problem with both practices is that they focus on the individual
— the medical approach rather than the public health approach.
Stings are said to benefit the public, but actually they undermine
trust and make it look like lots of politicians (or all of them) are
rotten rather than the environment they work in. A public health
approach to corruption will have an effect that is broader and
longer lasting. 
 
War and Government Ethics 
Biss quotes Susan Sontag on the subject of war, "one of the few
activities," Biss says, "in which we are not expected to consider
practicality and expense." This also applies to programs that use
military metaphors, such as the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty.
I would add to this the protection and creation of jobs. 
 
But when it comes to government ethics, there are no military
metaphors (and any War on Corruption would inevitably be criminal in
form). Government ethics programs are usually considered too
expensive and impractical. The most common metaphor for such
programs is "window dressing." Manikins filling desks. The fact that
the goal of public trust in government is priceless, and makes
everything else in government easier to accomplish, does not seem to
matter. 
 
In addition, while preemptive strikes were given a bad name in the
Iraq War, preemptive strikes in both health care and government
ethics are very useful. They make further health care unnecessary,
and they prevent ethical misconduct. Government ethics programs are
primarily preventive not, as many people think, all about
enforcement. 
 
The AIDS Epidemic 
One of the things people learned from the AIDS epidemic is that
if you lead a cautious life and limit your contact with others, then
you'll be spared the disease, unless you're very unlucky, like
Arthur Ashe. The same sort of lesson has been learned in response to
corruption in government, against which there is seen to be no
vaccination. The only way to ensure that one will not catch the
disease — will not be contaminated — is to stay away from
government. 
 
While having multiple sex partners is not a necessary element of a
good community, widespread participation in local government is. And
not enough people are participating. 
 
Therefore, local governments need to act in ways that will increase
participation by letting citizens know that they don't have to worry
about becoming contaminated. An effective and inexpensive way is to
have a good, independent government ethics program. 
 
Another thing people learned from the AIDS epidemic is that it is
important to preserve a strong immune system to protect oneself. The
problem is that people with strong immune systems can carry a
disease without symptoms and pass it on to others. 
 
Similarly, it is not enough for a government official to be a man or
woman of integrity. Even if integrity might protect the individual
official, it is not enough to protect the organization. Those who
say they do not need a government ethics program in order to act
ethically do not recognize that the organization needs it, as does
the public. 
 
A Shared Space 
At the very end of the book, Biss quotes her young son on the
subject of moles, the animal kind: "They aren't blind, they
just can't see." As Biss adds, the same can be said of humans:
that we don't see that we are, for example, as Martin Luther King,
Jr. said (and Biss quotes here), "caught in an inescapable network
of mutuality." This is true of disease, of community, and of
government organizations. Government ethics, like immunity, is "a
shared space — a garden we tend together." These are the last words
in Biss's brilliant book. 
 
Robert Wechsler 
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

Summer Reading: Eula Biss's "On Immunity"

Tags