ADVERTISING AND ADMINISTRATION UNDER THE PRESSURE OF ETHICS 979-10-93538-00-6

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Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of Ethics

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ADVERTISING AND ADMINISTRATION UNDER THE PRESSURE OF ETHICS

 

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Sandu Frunză

Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of Ethics

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Sandu Frunză

ADVERTISING AND ADMINISTRATION UNDER THE PRESSURE OF ETHICS

Éditions de la SUERS 2014  

Sandu Frunză

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© Sandu Frunză © Éditions de la SUERS, 2014 125, Chemin de la Font du Broc, 83460 Les Arcs, France ISBN 979-10-93538-00-6 EAN 9791093538006

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CONTENTS

1. Minimal Ethics and the New Configuration of the Public Space ...................................................................... 7 Minima Moralia and Individual Responsibility.......................................7 Minimal Ethics in the Society Built on Communication.......................15 Communication, Advertising and Minimal Ethics ...............................23

2. Administrative Ethics from the Perspective of the Rights and Duties in Relation to Oneself......................... 35 Beyond the Ethics of Neutrality and Organizational Ethics ...............35 Ethical and Juridical ...........................................................................41 Rights and Duties in Relation to the Self............................................46

3. Administrative Ethics from the Perspective of Rights and Duties in Relation to Otherness........................... 51 Spiritual (intellectual) duties towards others: the problem of deception................................................................52 Euthanasia as a Public Debate Topic ................................................55 Abortion as a Topic of Public Debate and Action...............................60

4. Respect as an Exigency in Public Space Action............... 69 Personal Happiness and the Happiness of Others – Between Duty and Respect.............................................................69 Respect as a Permanent Preoccupation of Professionals in Public Administration..................................................................72 Competence and Professionalism – Manifestation of Respect in Relation to the Self and to Otherness ........................................74

5. Ethical Management and Ethics Management in Public Administration.............................................................. 81 Ethical Management...........................................................................82 Ethics Management............................................................................89

 

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6. Deontological Codes and Their Importance in Professional Development and the Shaping of Public Space........................ 95 The Etiquette Code and the Ethical Code..........................................95 Ethical Codes – An Instrument for Optimizing the Profession............98 Ethical Training as Instrument of Professional Development...................106

7. Ethics in the Conduct of Civil Servants................................ 113 Definition of Key Terms in the Professional Conduct of Civil Servants ...........................................................................116 The General Principles of the Professional Conduct of Civil Servants ...........................................................................117 Civil Servants’ Norms of Professional Conduct................................123 Ethical Counseling and Monitoring Norms of Professional Conduct ...............................................................127

8. Advertising – Between the Suspension of Desire and the Ethics of Seduction...................................... 133 An Inferno Named Desire ...................................................................133 Seduction as a Paradisiacal State.....................................................140

9. Ethics in the Code of Advertising Practice........................... 149 The Culture of Ethic Attitudes...........................................................149 Ethical Aspects of Advertising Addressed to Children .....................156

10. Advertising and Social Responsibility................................ 163 Ethical Communication and Responsibility ......................................163 Social Responsibility as Protector of Privacy .......................................172 Towards an Ethics of Responsibility....................................................180

Acknowledgements ................................................................... 189 References ................................................................................ 190 Index ......................................................................................... 207

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1. Minimal Ethics and the New Configuration of the Public Space Minima Moralia and Individual Responsibility Feeling the need to rethink tradition and sometimes the need for deliverance from the pressure of tyranny, contemporary thinkers have not been hesitant in talking about the end of religion, the end of philosophy, the end of public relations, the death of God, or the end of morality. Each of these claims regarding the end is accompanied by a sudden revival on the one side, and a lesser violent dimension than its previous manifestation form, but with sufficient consistency in ordering reality and life, on the other side. That is why the intention here is not to speak about the revival of what previously existed, each end proving in fact to be a new beginning. Beginning here, philosophical, political, and ethical reflections or considerations of a different nature can be developed in order to explain the new social, political, administrative, or simply human context, this simplicity being seen in the complexity of the manifestation of the human condition in the modern or postmodern world. In such a context, Gilles Lipovetsky’s statement that “the twenty-first century will be ethical or it will not be at all”1 has a special meaning. This is all the more so as it becomes a reply to the statement “the twentieth century will be religious or it will not be at all” attributed to Malraux. In spite of the complex distinctions sometimes made between ethics                                                              1

Gilles Lipovetsky, Amurgul datoriei. Etica nedureroasă a noilor timpuri democratice, Trans., Preface,Victor-Dinu Vlădulescu, (Bucureşti: Babel, 1996), 17.  

 

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and morality, with the particularities of what is right or wrong in the conduct of individuals,2 the terms are seen here as equivalent and are used accordingly. For those who see morality as a religious term, the two references to ethics and religion from Lipovetsky and Malraux may seem to say something very similar, all the more because Malraux does not say that the century will be Christian but religious, which relativizes the content of his religious projection. Whether one understands religion in a sense strongly connected to Christian morals or in a more general sense relating to the “sentiment of the sacred”3 or to the “diffuse religious sentiment”4 specific to contemporary religiosities, the affirmation of ethics is possible on the basis of placing religion on a secondary level or on the basis of stating new forms of pantheism in the context of God’s death5, or on the basis of what is today called, in generic terms, “the escape from religion”.6 In spite of the existence of discourse on the rebirth of interest in religion, the decrease of the impact that religion has in contemporary public space is still a significant topic of discussion. Developments in the area of social services are significant in this respect. Today, we are facing a situation in which religious organizations are increasingly dependent on funds that come from secular institutions. These funds are es                                                             2 William Frankena, Ethics, 2nd ed., (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 1-11; Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 1- 31; G. J. Warnock, The Object of Morality, (London: Methuen & Co., 1971), 1- 26.  3 Mircea Eliade, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, preface by Georges Dumezil, trans. by Mariana Noica, (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1992).  4 Francoise Champion, “Spirit religios difuz, eclectism şi sincretisme” in Jean Delumeau (coord.), Religiile lumii, (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1996).  5 Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, (New York: The Bobs-Merrill Company, 1966).  6 Marcel Gauchet, Ieşirea din Religie, trans. by Mona Antohi, (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2006).

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pecially used for restoring the religious edifices or for building new ones. However, behind the scenes there are also various types of social involvement and activities that assume participation in the construction of public space.7 Religious organizations are also diminishing their engagement in social ministries, or creating an alternative space for mutual help of the persons with a high degree of social exclusion.8 One of the ways that religious organizations maintain a presence in the public space is through the health care system. In this respect, there is both an institutional experience and a positive presence related to providing religious counseling. However, we note that experts affirm the need of ethical analysis in order to diagnose the ethical status of the public health care system.9 At the same time, the problem of an ethical reconstruction of the human condition is identified, especially in limit situations such as those that involve the limit between life and death, problems concerning the right to a dignified death, and the desire to prolong life as long as

                                                             Daniela Cojocaru, Ştefan Cojocaru, Antonio Sandu, “The role of religion in the system of social and medical services in post-communism Romania”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, Vol. 10, issue 28 (2011): 65-83.  8 Sorin Cace, Daniel Arpinte, Corina Cace, Ştefan Cojocaru, “The Social Economy. An Integrating Approach”, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, No. 33 E (2011): 49-66.  9 Vasile Astărăstoae, “Is It Necessary an Ethical Analysis of the Romanian Healthcare System?”, Revista Română de Bioetică, Vol. 8, No. 1, (January – March 2010): 114-115; Elena Abrudan, “Ethical Expertise and Bioethics”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, Vol. 10, No. 30 (2011): 397-402; See also Sandu Frunză, “On the Need for a Model of Social Responsibility and Public Action as an Ethical Base for Adequate, Ethical and Efficient Resource Allocation in the Public Health System of Romania”, Revista de cercetare şi intervenţie socială, vol. 33 (2011): 178-196.  7

 

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possible.10 The role that religious organizations once played in the educational system and in cultivating family values has diminished.11 The family, once modeled after the Holy Family, no longer functions as a significantly religions structure: family models and values are becoming more and more secularized.12 This form of a minimal presence of religious organizations is maintained even in the situation where one can note, to a certain extent, an openness toward recognizing the importance of the presence of religion and the religious as a significant resource in debates that take place in the public space.13 The lack of involvement in the public space could lead, eventually, to limit situations, such as were seen                                                              10

Beatrice Ioan, “Decisions Regarding Medical Treatment in End of Life Situations – A Subject of Debate at European Level”, Revista Română de Bioetică, Vol. 9, No. 4, (October – December 2011): 63.  11 Ştefan Cojocaru, Daniela Cojocaru, “Naturalistic Evaluation of Programs. Parents’ Voice in Parent Education Programs”, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, No. 34 E (2011): 49-62.  12 Ioan Bolovan, “Transylvania until World War I Demographic Opportunities and Vulnerabilities”, Transylvanian Review, Vol. 19 Issue 1 (2010): 73-124. For using in comparative case studies is interesting the case presented in Ioan-Aurel Pop, “Medieval Genealogies of Maramureş. The Case of the Gorzo (Gurzau) Family of Ieud”, Transylvanian Review, Vol. XIX, Supplement No. 1 (2010): 127-141, and all the vol. XIX of Transylvanian Review published under the topic “Pursuing Diversity. Demographic Realities and Ethno-Confessional Structures in Transylvania”, ed. by Ioan-Aurel Pop, Sorina Paula Bolovan and Ioan Bolovan.  13 Ioan Alexandru Tofan, “Secularization and Religious Pluralism Towards a Genealogy of Public Space”, European Journal of Science and Theology, Vol. 7, No. 2 (June 2011): 5-15. See also Sandu Frunză, “Does communication construct reality? A New Perspective on the Crisis of Religion and the Dialectic of the Sacred”, Revista de cercetare şi intervenţie socială, vol. 35 (2011): 180-193; Sandu Frunză, “The relational individual in a communication built society. Towards a new philosophy of communication”, Transylvanian Review, vol. XX, No. 3, (Autumn 2011): 140-152. 

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throughout the 20th century. In limit situations one can see that modernity brings indifference as the main argument for the necessity of an ethics of responsibility.14 This is a supplementary reason for affirming the necessity of ethics as a part of the public space. Thus, according to Lipovetsky, even today we are at the stage where “the ethical effect is stronger and stronger, invading mass-media, stimulating philosophical, juridical and deontological reflection, giving birth to institutions, aspirations and ingenuous collective practices. Media charity, bioethics, humanitarian actions, saving the environment, imposing morality in business, politics and mass-media, debates concerning abortion and sexual harassment, erotic phone lines and the codes of ‘correct’ language, the crusades against drugs and tobacco, everywhere the revival of values and the spirit of responsibility are evoked as the number one imperative of the century: the sphere of ethics has become the privileged mirror where the new spirit of the time is deciphered.”15 This society is based on what Lipovetsky calls a minimal ethics. It is meant to enact the person living in the decline of duty. It is characterized by abandoning of the gods and contemplation in the absence of duty. The strong sense of morality falls into the shadow of darkness and makes room for this border ethics where the construction of the ethical is in the hands of the individual freed from the great morally foundational narratives. We witness the instauration of a culture wherein that which is brought to the forefront is just “the cult of efficiency and quiet regulations, of success and moral                                                              Cristina Gavrilu ă, and Romeo Asiminei, “The problem of evil and responsibility in Elie Wiesel’s view. New perspectives on the Holocaust”, European Journal of Science and Theology, Vol. 7, No. 4, (2011): 75-82.  15 Lipovetsky, 17.  14

 

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protection.”16 Minimal ethics is no longer “an ethics of imperatives.”17 Lipovetsky begins by noticing that in contemporary society, we live at the crossroads of two types of discourses: one proclaiming the moral decadence illustrated by the increase of violence and antisocial attitudes, by poverty and financial fraud, and by economic, social, and administrative corruption, and another that speaks about the revival of morality, of the ethical reconstruction of the individual world, and of the redefinition of organizational life and public space in ethical terms. This duality, of decadence and moral rebirth, shows that we actually witness an escape from what Lipovetsky calls “the first cycle of modern morality,” which “has functioned as a religion of secular duty,” in a cycle where the particularities of democratic cultures are defined by being placed beyond the principle of duty. They opt to assume a “weak and minimal ethics” wherein the principle of authority is connected to individual resorts situated in the context of the avoidance of the universal landmarks that have suppressed “all values related to sacrifice, either required by the afterlife or by profane finalities;” “daily culture is no longer fed by the hyperbolic imperatives of duty, but by the wellbeing and dynamics of subjective rights, and we no longer recognize our obligation to grow attached to anything else but ourselves.”18 Such an ethical context implies a review of the classical moral perspective that associated personal preferences and individualism with immorality, identifying the individual’s right to autonomy, desire, happiness, to enjoying the privilege of giving credit only to “non-painful norms of ethi                                                             Lipovetsky, 17.  Gianni Vattimo, Etica interpretării, trans. by Ştefania Mincu, (Constan a: Pontica, 2000), 146.  18 Lipovetsky, 20.  16 17

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cal life.”19 This is the new context of the decline of duty that Lipovetsky describes as one of a minimal ethics that, leaving behind the integrating force of great ideologies, makes room for the type of action particular to minimal ethics. Although he is a nuanced critic of Lipovetsky’s perspective on minimal ethics, Zygmund Bauman notices that what characterizes postmodern ethics is a week conscience that “can neither convince, nor compel.” Consequently, it “does not handle any of the weapons recognized by the modern world as markers of authority. By the standards of the modern world, the conscience is weak.”20 What is important in Bauman’s statements is that there is no alternative source to rely on other than moral conscience, no matter how weak it is. It is the only one that can inspire the postmodern individual with the responsibility to decide on what is to be done, what is right, and to refuse the unacceptable in choosing not to do evil.21 From the perspective of a minimal ethics built on this weak conscience, “moral responsibility represents one of the most personal and unalienable human luxuries and the most valuable human right. It cannot be taken away, divided, given away, sold, or deposited for safe-keeping. Human responsibility is unconditional and infinite and it manifests through constant suffering that it does not manifest enough. It does not search for guarantees for its right to be, or for excuses for its right not to be. It is here before any guarantee or proof and after any excuse or forgiveness.”22 When he sets out to explain the particular topic from Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno defines it as “the at                                                             Lipovetsky, 21.  Zygmunt Bauman, Etica postmodernă, trans. by Doina Lică, (Timişoara: Editura Amarcord, 2000), 270.  21 Bauman, 271.  22 Bauman, 271.  19 20

 

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tempt to expose the elements of a common philosophy starting from subjective experience.”23 In constructing and explaining such ethics, he evokes Hegel with the purpose of placing himself in a position that implies a new valorization of the subject, of the individual in relation to the whole. Although the individual seems feeble before the pressure of the whole, it is individualist society that creates the situation wherein the totality is formed by the interaction of individuals, and the individual receives substance from the very manifestation of society. Thus, in contemporary society, when compared to the model suggested by Hegel, “the individual has won in plenitude, he has differentiated and become stronger to the same extent as, through the socialization of society, the individual has become fragile and empty of substance.”24 Andrei Pleşu has these characteristics in mind in the Romanian context when, assuming the idea of minimal ethics, he states that this is no longer based on major efforts, but on ethical detail, on the list of options that are no longer seen as fundamental, but may seem significant. The type of discourse chosen as a starting point in the construction of minima moralia is the one of autobiography, daily life, and the need for mental consolidation and inner justification. The ethical no longer comes from grave options and painful decisions that imply morality, because the ethical in postmodern society does not establish itself as an element of reference. In the era of ethical minimalism, Pleşu notices, we usually see ethical order through the lens of conventional morality, through what creates a state of normality and a certain famili                                                             23

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflecţii dintr-o viaţă mutilată, Trans., Preface, Andrei Corbea, (Bucureşti: Editura Univers, 1999), 9.  24 Adorno, 8-9. 

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arity with “a certain ethical minimalism, understood as an analytics of moral mediocrity.”25 Such moral mediocrity can be considered a means of remaining in the framework of ethics in what Lipovetsky terms the “post-moral society.” Here it is implied that moral maximalism, the great ethical narratives, the great ideologies, no longer answer immediate needs, and the solution to this comes from a reorientation towards the needs of the individual. Acting from the perspective of a minimal ethics, the individual becomes aware of duties towards self, others, and society. Thus, the decline of duty confronts us with a new moral understanding of the principle of duty: “it is not about returning to the heroic duty but about the reconciliation of heart with celebration, of virtue with interest, of the imperatives of the future with the present quality of life. Far from opposing the post-moral individualist culture, the ethical effect is one of its exemplary manifestations.” 26 Concurrently: “administrative ethics assumes that individuals in organizations can make moral judgments and can be the objects of moral judgments.”27

Minimal Ethics in the Society Built on Communication Along with postmodern culture, a double phenomenon has arisen due to global culture. On the one hand, cultural pluralism has brought a sort of revitalization of values that direct individuals on the path of the need to preserve selfidentity and a type of rethinking of global standards according to personal expectations. The result of this is a concession                                                              25

Andrei Pleşu, Minima moralia. Elemente pentru o etică a intervalului, second edition, (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1994), 145.  26 Andrei Pleşu, 145.  27 Dennis F. Thompson, “The Possibility of Administrative Ethics”, Public Administration Review, Vol. 45, No. 5 (Sep. – Oct., 1985): 555. 

 

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of absolute values to certain principles of the new global context. On the other hand, the global context has generated the option for global ethics, which is manifest as weak ethics, in accordance with the integrating processes brought along by the process of globalization itself. The result of this is pressure on the strong principles of the traditional ethos and the local ethics built on this. This is followed by the creation of an ethical context wherein individual options are rebuilt in a double perspective: of personal and institutional needs on the one hand, and of needs resulting from society’s adaptation to the flux of global development on the other. Only due to the existence of a minimal ethics is it possible to have a reconstruction of the ethical context, of inter-personal relations, inter-institutional relations, and professional media in general. The presence of professional ethics in various cultural contexts is facilitated by the fact that this minimal ethics is a privileged medium of manifestation of the phenomenon of generalized communication that accompanies all the processes of globalization. Hence, “if it is true that our era witnesses the rebirth of the thematic of values, it is even more so that it witnesses the triumph of communication that has managed to integrate the very ethical reference in itself.”28 The fact that ethical maximalism quits the contemporary scene does not mean that it leaves a completely empty landscape in its wake. The emptiness opens toward the manifestation of ethical creativity in the space of minimal ethics. As stated above, the basis of the creativity of a culture founded on minimal ethics is the double attitude that the individual has toward values, preserving some of the ambiva                                                             28

Lipovetsky, 292. See also Sandu Frunză, “Does communication construct reality?”, 180-193; Ana Elena Ranta, “The Communication of Local Public Authorities with Mass-Media. Effects and Best Practices”, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, No. 34E (2011): 201-216. 

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lence that individuals from earlier times had toward the sacred. On the one hand, humans have the tendency to invest meaning in each daily gesture and in each form of existence from the perspective of values. On the other hand, humans manifest a contradictory tendency to escape and liberate oneself from the power of the actions of values, to avoid their dominant action. Minimal ethics places the human being at the crossroads of these two attitudes.29 When it comes to personal and institutional options, beginning with minimal ethics, a very important aspect is the way in which we manage to initiate an encoding process in the form of the deontological codes of various professions. The codes have the purpose of creating an ethical context beyond the continuous dispute between absolutism and relativism. This means that they are an instrument that is only possible due to the fact that ethical maximalism is minimized in postmodern society and, at the same time, becomes the real carrier of minimal ethics by filling the space left empty by the absolutism of values and their relativity, by ethical maximalism and the uncertainties of absolute ethical relativism. It is important not to overlook the fact that even if a minimal ethics becomes possible and if we were to actually support the advent of minimal ethics, once it is assumed by the individual and the organization that they are part of, the deontological codes become manifest as regulations that work in the spirit of dominant values. Lipovetsky shows that the presence of codes of etiquette, of ethical control and ethical commissions, is correlated with institutional communication, the objective primarily being that of improving the image of the organization. Most often, the act of organizational communication takes place along with social and moral re                                                            

Sandu Frunză, Comunicare etică şi responsabilitate socială, (Bucureşti: Tritonic, 2011).  29

 

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sponsibility. The influence of ethics and of communication is mutual. With the rebirth of interest in values, a new type of communication begins to develop, integrating ethics in the spirit of a minimal ethics which permits the development of professional ethics. Communication is what drives ethics, what makes it a strategic vector of organizations, an instrument for overcoming crises, transforming it into an instrument of efficient management, and ethics becomes “a strategic and communicational investment.”30 Somehow the need for regulation at the level of daily activity comes naturally from what Andrei Pleşu called “the need to live by delegation, to transfer the power over your own life to someone else.”31 This type of disempowerment could be a form of advent of relativism in the space of responsibility. This attitude may be correlated with the fact that post-moralist society “turns moral action into a recreational show and into communication at the level of enterprise.”32 And it is exactly here that the beneficial role of a minimal ethics intervenes: “the ethics of responsibility does not impose a norm with authority, but it makes it desirable as being conformable to each individual’s development, it emphasizes team spirit only to the extent that it is the group that permits you to become yourself, simultaneously improving the efficiency of the enterprise.”33 Starting with this transformational force of ethics at the level of the individual and her/his organizational integration, at the level of public administration one must act “for the benefit of an ethics based on dialogue, an ethics of responsibility directed towards searching for a balance between effi                                                             Lipovetsky, 291-294.  Pleşu, 144.  32 Lipovetsky, 21.  33 Lipovetsky, 308.  30 31

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ciency and equity, between profit and the interests of the employees, between respect for the individual and the collective welfare, between the present and the future, between freedom and solidarity.”34 Taking into consideration the importance of ethics in public space and its democratization, one must look toward society today, but especially toward the future, with the belief that “there is the necessity for intelligent politics and strategy, more preparation, responsibility and professional competence, more science and technique. Instead of the imperative of the heart, we must support the imperative of mobilizing human intelligence, enhance our investment in knowledge and the permanent educational dimension.”35 Public values are an important topic in public administration, because public policies are the means for assigning values.36 The discussion on assigning values raises the issue of integrity, which, in its turn, implies the issue of trust. A government based on moral rules and efficiency will gain legitimacy due to the trust it inspires. Public opinion regarding the personal integrity of someone working in public administration is of vital importance.37 Any form of government wants to have a good image in the eyes of the citizens it governs. A widespread means of influencing the public perception of governmental policies and actions is establishing juridical regulations, anti-corruption laws, and ethical codes in order to avoid unethical conduct in the public system and in society as much

                                                             Lipovetsky, 27.  Lipovetsky, 313.  36 Gjalt de Graaf, Zeger van der Wal, “Managing Conflicting Public Values: Governing With Integrity and Effectiveness”, The American Review of Public Administration, 40(6) (2010): 624.  37 Gjalt de Graaf, Zeger van der Wal, 626.  34 35

 

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as possible.38 Trust is a necessary condition here in order to gain legitimacy from the perspective of minimal ethics. It is important to understand that from the perspective of the need to elaborate and influence public policies, ethics “inflects with seduction and efficacy,” since of necessity it is preoccupied with personal, social, economic, political, and administrative issues.39 As Ari Salminen and Rinna Ikola-Norrbacka show, trust involves a number of aspects and has various shapes and dimensions: trust between individuals, trust in the professional capacity and competence of those working in public administration, trust in politicians, trust in the quality of the services offered, trust between various organizations involved, trust inside a community and between communities, and so on. The factors that determine trust are also multiple. They may be connected to personal, family or community experience, personal history and individual or community values, or the ethical exigencies that are at stake. The image that citizens have regarding institutions is important because it influences a greater set of attitudes. For example, one may expect that “a person with a negative attitude towards the state government will most likely complain about taxes, about corruption or the ineffectiveness of administration.” 40 An important distinction is between the trust placed in public institutions in comparison to that placed in private institutions. For public administration theorists, it seems natural to have different measuring units for the two types of institutions. Public institutions are associated with greater expectations regarding the necessity of ethical conduct, the necessity                                                              38

Ari Salminen, Rinna Ikola-Norrbacka, “Trust, good governance and unethical actions in Finnish public administration”, International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 23, No. 7, (2010): 647.  39 Lipovetsky, 313.  40 Lipovetsky, 313. 

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to use higher standards and greater exigency than the private sector. This comes from the assumption that this satisfaction is determined by the fact that: “Strict ethical standards are included in public trust … public sector ethics is different from private sector ethics because the citizens’ trust keeps democracy effective.”41 Moreover, it is considered natural that the degree of satisfaction regarding public services should be greater than that obtained when someone resorts to private services. The degree of trust is associated not only with the ethical dimension, but also with the fact that civil servants are usually associated with the idea of defense, enforcement, and respect for the law. Thus, in public action, the critical and the juridical elements should be mutually sustained: “The legal basis of good governance is built on laws and regulations. The ethics of public organizations are safeguarded by legislation, either with general norms or specific regulation that specify the bases of ethical conduct in practice. Another way is to strengthen ethical values in the organization, in the work place, in such a way that they are commonly accepted and meant to make staff committed to ethics without remunerations or sanctions.”42 Even if it is generally acknowledged that it is required of civil services to be more ethical and efficient, there are also authors who consider that it is more likely to expect a combination of ethics and efficacy accompanied by a maximum degree of satisfaction from a public-private partnership. In this sense, in practical situations in the Romanian context, one may accept that “in relation to central administration, private management has proven to be not only a more efficient administrator of capital, but also a better manager of public needs. Thus, the problems of the community may be                                                              41 42

Salminen, Ikola-Norrbacka, 649.  Salminen, Ikola-Norrbacka, 651. 

 

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partially solved by social partnerships between private businesses and local communities. It is necessary to find ways of cooperation between the public and the private sectors at the local level.”43 However, apart from the public/private distinction, what appears important from an ethical perspective is the awareness of the fact that the public sector needs not only a new understanding of the relationship between ethics and religion,44 but also profound reforms, both at a macro level, through constitutional reforms,45 and at an organizational level, including the managerial function,46 the idea of leadership as factor of change and professionalization,47 and correlation of these with ethical principles of management.48 One of the great acquisitions of today’s society is the secularization of ethics. It offers the possibility of feeling comfortable with promoting a form of moral relativism that                                                              43

Bogdan Diaconu, Etica societăţii instituţionalizate. Trei dimensiuni ale responsabilităţii sociale: legea, statul şi mediul de afaceri, (Bucureşti: Curtea Veche, 2009), 88.  44 Sandu Frunză, Mihaela Frunză, Claudiu Her eliu, “Philosophy, Ideology, Religion. An Attempt to Understand what is Going on with Philosophy in the Romanian Educational System”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, Vol. 8, no. 22, (Spring 2009): 129-149. 45 Emil Boc, “The Revision of the Romanian Constitution: Current Issues”, Revista de cercetare şi intervenţie socială, vol. 35, (2011): 149-170.  46 Călin Emilian Hin ea, “Reform and Management in Romania. Strategy and structural change”, Revista de cercetare şi intervenţie socială, vol. 34, (2011): 177-196.   47 Andrei igănaş, Tudor iclău, Cristina Mora, Laura Bacali, “Use of Public Sector Marketing and Leadership, in Romania’s Local Public Administration”, Revista de cercetare şi intervenţie socială, vol. 34, (2011): 212233.  48 Valentin Mureşan, “Managementul eticii în companii între realitate şi speran ă” in Dumitru Bor un (coord.), Responsabilitatea socială corporativă: de la relaţii publice la dezvoltare durabilă, (Bucureşti: SNSPA – 2010). 

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does not alienate people from the ethical certainty that offered existential comfort through its firm values. Thus moral life, ethical conduct, becomes a common asset to all in the conditions of daily life or in the more complex conditions of professional life.

Communication, Advertising and Minimal Ethics Minimal ethics represents an endless source of value recuperation. That is why: 1. at an individual level, as well as at a level of varied identity structures, it enables the recovery of a wide variety of principles and practices; 2. it generates the possibility of exerting multiple authority poles; 3. it favors autonomy and the respect for diversity, for dialogue and intercultural communication; 4. it allows individuals to redefine their professional identity without interfering with personal values; 5. it offers organizations the opportunity to redefine their communication and their professional ethic by tuning in the general principles with the requirements, the norms, and the specific rules of the organization. All of these and more show that minimal ethics can act as a premise that can overcome the tension between relativism and absolutism. At the same time, it represents the necessary element for rethinking ethics and especially professional ethics, deontology, even communication deontology. This ethics does not act under the authority of any absolute transcendence, but neither does it succumb to the relativization of values. On the contrary, it creates the context for their assumption through norms, rules, behavioral practices, and every-day decisions. One of the reasons why this is possible has to do with the re-signification of the connection between  

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humans and the transmundane, with the world’s resignification with what the trans-humane represents, with the rearrangement of humanity and transcendence in a familiar cosmos where unity and difference coexist. This coexistence is possible not on a traditional religious moral background, but through an ethical reconstruction that can be achieved by referencing the principles of minimal ethics as the basis of any ethical thinking and practice. As can be seen in other texts that I have published, I consider Gilles Lipovetsky’s perspective as one of the most consistent ethical perspectives on postmodernity. This is the reason why I affirm that the premise of my reflections on postmodern ethics is similar to the ethical discourse of Lipovetsky. At the same time, I believe it is obvious that my reflections in the field of religious studies are consistent with the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas. Such an approach is due to the belief that any analysis of religions should supply an ethical discourse, and this discourse must, first of all, propose an ethics of responsibility. But in order to accomplish this, ethics must separate itself from religious discourse, and from religious practice, from theological imagery and from “dogmatic” thinking. In terms of professional experience, religion is important for postmoderns only to the extent that it can bring more understanding of ethics in communication. Religion is not a source of authority and a central resource for the foundation or the assumption of minimal ethics in the professional contexts of a globalized world. Religion tends to manifest itself in real life as a singular religion, which often converts it into an obstacle to communication and dialogue in the context of globalized communication. However, it should be mentioned that minimal ethics is not anti-religious and does not deny religion. It does not imply a re-evaluation of religious morality, but a rethinking of human existence from the

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perspective of the repercussions caused by modernity in the consciousness of the postmodern man. The postmodern world introduces a new understanding of the human condition, which in fact implies a new understanding of transcendence and transcending. Levinas philosophy provides a way of understanding these that is suitable to ethics and deontological decisions. As Pierre Hayat shows, transcendence cannot be reduced in this case to the transcendental. Modern philosophy rethinks the issue of subject and subjectivity, generating a reconstruction of the idea of transcendence. Transcendence is connected with inner existence and with the development of human beings, meaning that “Transcendence becomes the intimate structure as subjectivity. In other words, it is subjectivity that is found at the beginning of the movement of transcendence.”49 This new understanding of transcendence facilitates a new understanding of humanity. Transcending and transcendence are defining concepts for the birth of intersubjectivity, meaning that the manifestation of the human subject is, by definition, relational: it is intersubjective. In other words, man cannot exist but in connection with alterity, and the fundamental mark of this alterity is transcendence. As a key element in defining the modern philosophical subject, transcendence is no longer regarded as a philosophical theme among other philosophical themes. It is always questioned in the light of what Levinas calls “first philosophy,” by which he means ethics. Understanding transcendence, as the understanding of the subject as a relational being, is fundamental for the definition of ethics. The assertion that ethics is not a philosophical discipline                                                              49

Pierre Hayat, “Preface: Philosophy between Totality and Transcendence” in Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, translated by Michael B. Smith, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), x. 

 

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should be seen in this context in which it is considered to be first philosophy.50 Thus, transcending reveals a relational reality. For Levinas, transcendence occurs in the relational structure represented by the presence of the face, of the image of another being. This presence reveals that the word represents the presence of God expressed through the relational significance of the face of the other. We are not dealing here with a theological perspective, as in Dumitru Stăniloae’s theology of the face.51 We are not concerned with the correlation between image and archetype, between human being and divine being. The presence of the face does not necessarily imply the embodiment of transcendence. Here, the relation is not simultaneously displayed vertically and horizontally, holding human and God face to face, because the face of the other is the face of transcendence itself. As a result transcendence, as Levinas presents it, never becomes a being in the true sense of the word. Nor does it become immanence. It is more likely distinguishable in the process of transcending made possible by alterity.52 Thus, we are not dealing here with ontology, or ontotheology, but with ethics. Levinas observes that when we try to discover the origin of the word “God,” the circumstances force us to accept God’s Word in the name of social authority of religion. In order to see that the use of this word varies according to circumstances we need to consider the original source of ethical reflection. The presence and the interference of ethics are absolutely necessary in order to acknowledge His Voice.53                                                              Hayat, xix.  Dumitru Stăniloae, Chipul nemuritor al lui Dumnezeu, (Craiova: Ed. Mitropoliei Olteniei, 1987).  52 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, translated by Michael B. Smith, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 169.  53 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 175.  50 51

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Here Richard A. Cohen’s observation is important for understanding the meaning of Levinas’ transcendence. He reveals that the intersubjective relation is defined by the difference between the action of desire and satisfaction. While epistemology, ontology, and theology rely on an accomplished satisfaction, religion relies on the perpetually unfulfilled desire for what is absolutely desirable.54 When Levinas claims that the intersubjective relation belongs to religion, not theology, he imagines a God who “is neither an absolute power nor the object of mystical or dogmatic belief. God, too, is encountered in the alterity of the other person. God Himself ‘comes to idea’ in the proximity, in the non-indifference of one to another. The wholly other, God, shines in the face of the Other.”55 This is the way in which the statement that God’s existence is sacred history should be understood, a statement perceived by Levinas as the sacredness of interpersonal relations through which divinity can be present.56 At the same time, we can reference Vianu Mureşan’s interpretation crediting Levinas with the “creation of a type of humanism where plurality is necessary, where the concept of infinity has no physical meaning, does not belong to a divine being.”57 It is attained as a presence in the “face-to-face” relation, belonging to an ethic of responsibility and thus always implying the other. Such an ethic develops at the intersection of the sacredness of values and man’s ethical practices. This confluence generates a range of regulations and shapes ethical be                                                             54

Richard A. Cohen, “Translator’s Introduction” in Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, translation by Richard A. Cohen, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 23.  55 Cohen, “Translator’s Introduction”, 23.  56 Cohen, “Translator’s Introduction”, 24.  57 Vianu Mureşan, Heterologie: Introducere în etica lui Levinas, (ClujNapoca: Limes, 2005), 89. 

 

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haviors. We have stepped out of the field of theology and morality, without abandoning the need for sacredness experienced by human beings. The postmodern man invests this sacredness in ways of celebrating in which we can hardly recognize the traditional representations to which we are accustomed as individuals belonging to a Western culture. It is an investiture with sacredness accomplished as an intersubjective relation. This sacralization is achieved in the context of the secularization of ethics and its conversion into a commodity in the hands of those that choose to act on their own, as well as those functioning in organizations and professional associations. A society based on communication will be driven by an ideal of ethical communication. This ideal gradually becomes possible when it faces reality due to the professionalization of ethical relations. The educational system plays an important part in this process by putting pressure on the development of future specialists in the spirit of a professional ethic built on the principles of deontology. However, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the development of ethical proficiency represents a real challenge for the educational system when we are facing the standard tendency of replacing the teaching and evaluation methods that required the communication of knowledge with methods that require the development of skills, competencies, and the ability to use acquired knowledge. Such a tendency also has its threats. One risk of this type of education at the university level could be that students receive the impression that they are engaged in vocational school training rather than university education. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this level of education, but its place is distinct from university education. Beyond this risk, there is the advantage that the educational process has a tangible purpose, it is motivational, and it

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triggers a strong and relevant connection between the labor market and teaching programs. What is currently called in academia “student-centered education” is concerned with, among other things, the development of skills relevant to the needs of the labor market. It is of great importance to rethink the pedagogical methodology utilized in instilling the theoretical basis and cultivating mastery of arts such as communication and advertising. Working in the field of advertising implies aptitude and vocation. This vocation requires the uncovering of a dimension of creativity that otherwise might be hidden or that might be acquired through the subtle mechanisms of initiation. Competence is achieved through a constant effort of learning and reflection on the theoretical literature of the field of interest, including those concerning professional ethics, and on this solid professional and cultural ground one can build a career. Sometimes students' expectations can be diverted from the noble goal of this ideal by emphasizing the practical or applied dimension to the detriment of the theoretical foundation that yields an efficient practice. Thus theoretical aspects are often ignored, sometimes even considered useless. An efficient educational system can only be achieved by combining theory and application, whether in the same teaching subject, or in the integrated system of the curricula. As for professional training in the field of ethics, which is often offered as an alternative for a postgraduate education, this must also combine theory with practice relevant to those theories. Various risks can be avoided by promoting the idea that practice must always be based on a thorough theoretical education. The absence thereof may cause deficiencies in mechanical, contextual, and unidirectional abilities. In advertising, for example, if one is able to intertwine the theoretical and the practical aspects of a situation, one could generate the context for the creative development of expertise and would  

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be able to master the dynamics of the challenges offered by knowledge, creativity, or technological development. One of the characteristics of a communication-based society is the extraordinary dynamics of the marketplace. Because of this it is necessary one’s understand as well as one’s practice to be dynamic. Although when values (including ethical values) are discussed the dynamic is toned-down (in some cases even conservative), the field of ethics reacts to these changes, even in communities accustomed to hearing about “eternal values” or morals that are specific to that community. Howard Whitton defines skills as the ability of the learner to apply his knowledge. Skills imply knowledge, abilities, values, attitudes, and the ability to communicate. In the process of developing ethical abilities among those that work in the public sector (be they public administration employees or those who work in the fields of public relations, advertising, corporate social responsibility, or others) the development of skills implies a program of personal development training. This program should be conceived in such a way that it would convey knowledge and develop abilities capable of correctly identifying ethical issues that one might encounter, and it should teach one to make the right decisions from an ethical point of view, decisions suitable to the value system used in the public sector. Howard Whitton presents us with some of the abilities that should be taught during training programs: 1. The ability to identify ethical issues, which presumes an ability to analyze and to formulate a diagnosis, as well as the capacity to test and apply standards. 2. The ability to solve problems in the most proper circumstances for settling ethical issues, by approaching ethical dilemmas, conflicting situations, or plural concurrent solutions, by appealing to ethical principles and norms, to rele-

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vant ethical standards, guidelines and codes, and to legal provisions (when they exist) capable of controlling the situation. 3. The ability to formulate an argument in order to solve a particular ethical problem, which involves an interference with a series of institutional factors belonging to the legal system, with institutions specialized in communication, or with different types of professional services, compelling you to have argumentation skills, and know how to use proper language and concepts. 4. Taking into consideration that the practice of ethics is a social activity, the ability to create consensus is very important, as well as the ability to generate communication and recognition that incorporates your own principles and those of other individuals, interest groups, or the state’s interest. 5. A proper knowledge of the foundations of ethics and especially the principles of professional ethics is necessary for highlighting the skills necessary for the assumption of the institutional role it must play. The role also implies the assumption of ethical standards that combine principles of integrity with judicial, political, and cultural elements in a conscious and knowledgeable manner. 6. One of the most important abilities is to effectively apply ethical standards in your professional life and in your every-day activities. Taking into consideration that a proper knowledge of ethical standards does not necessarily imply that they will be applied, one should be constantly attentive to the development of compelling reasons for the on-going practice of the abilities concerning the attachment towards ethical standards, the study of these ethical standards based on reflection and personal experience, and their implementation in every personal and institutional situation.58                                                              58

Howard Whitton, “Developing the ‘Ethical Competence’ of Public Officials: A Capacity-Building Approach” in Ethics and Integrity in Public

 

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Advertising, in all its ways of communicating, needs ethical competence and must abide by the ethical requirements that shape public space. Anti-consumerist tendencies constantly draw attention to the negative ethical consequences of advertising persuasion. William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally propose an interesting critique on this subject. It is based on religious grounds, more precisely on the Christian movement called the “Moral Majority,” which perceives advertising as a way of celebrating the ideology of secular humanism, an ideology that they consider extremely dangerous. In this context, advertising is regarded as one of the most offensive causes of moral decay in society: by introducing images of hedonistic pleasure in the private and public space, by associating sexual elements with the products being promoted, or by exacerbating materialism.59 Such a maximal ethics should be moderated by presenting two types of attitudes confronted by Leiss, Kline, and Jhally. On the one hand are those advertising critics who consider advertising useless because it only raises the final price of a product without any benefit to the consumer or the product. But going beyond that, advertising is being questioned because it is believed that it generates false needs, distorting the relation between people and objects, since it promotes false standards, affecting the behavior and the choices of women and children, or because advertisers, by buying media space, could end up controlling the media.60 On the other hand, there is also the more moderate perspective of economists who argue that, at least partially, we                                                                                                                Administration: Concepts and cases, Raymond W. Cox III (ed.), (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2009), 241-242.  59 William Leiss, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising. Persons, Products & Images of Well-being, second edition, (New York: Routledge, 1990), 17.  60 Leiss, Kline, Jhally, 15-17. 

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owe the ongoing increase in the standard of living, as well as the increase in consumer satisfaction, to advertising, which contributes to generating a cultural consistency of consumption.61 In order to highlight the positive aspects of advertising, the authors focus on a central theme: the status of advertising in the complex interaction between people and objects in modern society. We may start by mentioning that advertising enables access to the new culture of consumerist society as part of the complex culture of the modern world. More than facilitating access to products, advertising creates a new type of reality, characteristic of consumerist culture, introducing new standards of consumption and quality of life. Thus, the purpose of the discourse mediated by objects, as well as the discourse of objects, is not only to sell products on shelves, but to connect the consumer’s behavior to cultural patterns that imply networks of social interaction. The market of commodities, as well as the market of ideas, behaves as a symbolic space where special connections between people, products, and wellbeing occur.62 When Celia Lury described the consumer culture as a world of objects that determines new types of reflexivity regarding individual and collective identity, she was thinking about the part played by advertising in the creation of new connections and in generating new meanings of the consumer’s personal relation with products. The consumer culture produces not only consumers but a series of relations created by the consumer and cultivated in a universe of significations. It’s an experience lived under the sign of reflexivity influencing the level of relations concerning inclusion or exclusion, fairness or injustice, along with the whole ethical ex                                                             61 62

Leiss, Kline, Jhally, 15.  Leiss, Kline, Jhally, 5. 

 

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perience and values regained under the sign of identity.63 The reflexive assumption of values and identity is enabled by what Celia Lury presents as carriers of significance in the process of acquisition and trade by the individuals who take part in the social life.64 Instead of proposing an abstract category that would define an abstract group of one-dimensional individuals, without any specific characteristics, we are offered the opportunity to accept that the category “consumer” requires a proper identity in a cultural sense and in terms of an individual and group ethic. The consumer culture is hardly conceivable without the continuous need to redefine it in terms of ethics. The critique of consumer culture often feeds on precisely this need for ethical nuance, essential to the consumerist choice.

                                                             63

Celia Lury, Consumer culture, second edition, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), 31.  64 Lury, 30. 

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2. Administrative Ethics from the Perspective of the Rights and Duties in Relation to Oneself

Beyond the Ethics of Neutrality and Organizational Ethics From the point of view of the applied ethics that guides us in teaching this course, administrative ethics implies the inventory, analysis, appraisal, and application of ethical principles to the organizational structures in public administration and to the civil servants working in these organizations. Beyond these elements which involve the institutionalization of ethics in public administration, we must call on a generic framework meant to make possible a larger debate on the ethical context, the conditions of the institutionalization, the organizational and personal implications of the practice and development of ethics in the public space. Thus we notice that: “The democratic ethos … places administrative morality in a societal framework, where the moral administrator is described in relation to regime, values, citizenship, serving the public interest, and commitment to social equity. The democratic ethos calls for responsive and responsible decision makers who are able to define the ethical dimensions of a problem, and to identify and respond to an ethic of public service. Those who argue for a democratic ethos in administrative ethics suggest that no civil servant is insulated from politics, and that simply following the rules may be an inadequate moral response. Within the philosophy of a democratic ethos lies the recognition that a public administrator may be  

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required to choose between two equally legal possibilities, and must, therefore determine ‘to do the right thing’”.65 To suggest a topic on ethics in public administrative from the perspective of the duties that each individual has as a member of a collective in relation to oneself and to other human beings66, we generically continue here the question: is ethics in administration possible? The answer may be found in a classic text of administrative ethics, Dennis F. Thompson’s The Possibility of Administrative Ethics, where two types of possible objections to the presence of ethics in public administration may be found: from the ethics of neutrality to the ethics of structure.67 In this context we can accept quite a broad integration of administrative ethics in political ethics, understood by Thompson as application of the principles that imply: “(a) the rights and duties that individuals should respect when they act in ways that seriously affect the well-being of other individuals and society; and (b) the conditions that collective practices and policies should satisfy when they similarly affect the well-being of individuals and society.”68 A possible answer regarding the way in which ethics in public administration may be understood is the one that derived from establishing the limits of applying ethics in the field of public administration. A way to establish such limits is to deny (totally or just some aspects of) the possibility for                                                              65

Willa Marie Bruce, “Administrative Morality”, in Jay M. Shafritz (ed.), Defining public administration: selections from the International encyclopedia of public policy and administration, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000), 411.  66 Patrick J. Sheeran, Ethics in public administration: a philosophical approach, (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1993).   67 Dennis F. Thompson, “The Possibility of Administrative Ethics” in Classics of Administrative Ethics, edited by Willa Bruce, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2001), 79.  68 Thompson, 79. 

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ethics in public administration. One type of intercession comes from an ethics of neutrality which implies accepting that ethics can and should exist at the level of the individual action of each civil servant understood in its own individuality. But, each individual’s personal options must not affect or concern the organizations the individual is part of or the attribute of civil servant per se. Thus, we may say that in fact, one’s attribute of civil servant does not imply merging one’s personal moral options with one’s actions. The moral quality of individuals is suppressed and so is the individual and responsible implication of one’s personal ethical values. As individuals they have to practice an ethics of neutrality, because they must act in the name of the values of the organization and in virtue of those duties resulting from their attribute of makers of the administrative action. They must implement the values, principles and policies of the organization they are part of. From the perspective of an ethics of neutrality, we must see: “the ideal administrator as a completely reliable instrument of the goals of the organization, never injecting personal values into the process of furthering these goals. The ethic thus reinforces the great virtue of the organization – its capacity to serve any social end irrespective of the ends that individuals within it favor.”69 It is evident that even in situations in which individuals act in the name of an organization’s values we cannot disregard the personal values of each individual and the way these shape the attitudes and the behavior of the individual. People benefit from a wide range of freedom of choices within an organization that the ethical or unethical character of the organization depends on.70 Consequently, we must                                                              Thompson, 80.  Patrick Maclagan, Management and Morality. A developmental Perspective, (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 106.   69 70

 

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expect, as regards the responsibility as well as the general character of the organization’s ethical behavior, that individuals are an important factor. It is just as important for each civil servant to be conscious of the fact that he/she has the mission to serve public interest, and with that purpose he/she must harmonize or subordinate personal values, beliefs, convictions to those of the organization. A particular form of individual responsibility is the managerial responsibility. The manager is an important factor in promoting the values of an organization. He/she has an important role in imposing values, shaping options, imposing effective means of action in the name of an organization.71 We cannot ignore the fact that “Management not only involves teaching others to do things right, it also involves teaching them to do the right thing.”72 What makes the manager’s responsibility to be seen by specialists as crucial regards each individual’s input in relation to the responsibility and the ethical attitudes imposed by the organization. Another type of topic is the organizational ethics, which, as it is devised by Thompson, begins with the idea that the moral subject is not the civil servant, but the organization. The civil servant is only responsible for the actions he/she must carry out in the workplace according to her/his placement within the organizational structure and according to his/her legal responsibilities. For the majority of actions made while carrying out the activity in the name of the organization, the civil servant is not directly responsible, because the organization is the one carrying the responsibility                                                              71 Călin Hin ea, Cristina Mora, Tudor iclău, “Leadership and management in the health care system: leadership perception in Cluj county children’s hospital”, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, 27E (2009): 93.  72 Sheeran, 96. 

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in which or in whose name the civil servant acts. From the perspective of organization ethics, engaging the individual responsibility is excluded by Thompson based on three types of arguments: 1. No individual can be that important in an organization so that he/she gives the measure of responsibility for the organization in question. 2. There is always a distance between the personal intentions of each civil servant and the results of a collective work. 3. We must bear in mind that within an organization, each civil servant is designated a function; in this context, we notice that sometimes, although the action of each individual has been carried out according to moral exigency, the result of the collective action brings an unethical result according to the organization.73 In spite of the particular role of each participant in the activity of the organization, we must not forget that, beyond particular roles, each individual is a participant in the ethical construction of the organization. Even if we accept the fact that the organization is a moral person in the metaphorical sense of the term,74 the success of the ethical participation of an organization in public space is made with the contribution of the ethical actions of individuals, even if it is not constituted as the sum of those. It is legitimate to ask ourselves if the ethics of organizations is of the same nature as the ethics of the individuals the organization consists of and who act in the name of the organization. If we talk about the ethical actions of organizations, governments, nations,                                                              Thompson, 87-88.  Kenneth E. Goodpaster, Ethics in Management, (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1984), 148; Marian Preda, Comportament organizaţional. Teorii, exerciţii şi studii de caz, (Iaşi: Polirom, 2006), 43.  73 74

 

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states75 we must understand that here is the case of a result of an ethical construction. Of the two types of ethics it is important to remember that the ethics of individuals and that of organizations should always act positively in a way that privileges the action of organizations to serve public interest.76 The question is whether the limits described by the two types of critical approach lead to either rendering the civil servant devoid of responsibility or to a tendency of the civil servant to not pay sufficient attention to the personal ethical aspects engaged in his/her activity. Such situations may be avoided if we correlate the intentions of the civil servant while carrying out an action with the collective result of the action, if we balance the well-intended actions of individuals and the results (either positive or negative) of the individual and collective action. To understand the civil servant’s implication manner from the perspective of administrative ethics, “We are forced to accept neither an ethic of neutrality that would suppress independent moral judgment, nor an ethic of structure that would ignore individual moral agency in organizations. To show that administrative ethics is possible is not of course to show how to make it actual. But understanding why administrative ethics is possible is a necessary step not only toward putting it into practice but also toward giving it meaningful content in practice”.77

                                                             75

R. A. Duff, “Responsibility” in Edward Craig (general editor), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 293.  76 Sandu Frunză, Comunicare etică şi responsabilitate socială.  77 Thompson, 90. 

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Ethical and Juridical One way to look at ethics in public administration is brought along by the distinction suggested by York Willbern between the ethical behavior of civil servants and the ethical content of public policies. In this context we must opt for discussing the two ethics together, because they both contribute to appointing the unitary framework of action in the organizations that provide public services. We must begin with the premise that the ethical problems we invoke when we talk about the equity of laws should appear to us also in the situations when we make judgments about public policies. Willbern considers that the ethical problem is significant for the actions connected to public services at all levels, from each individual’s ethical engagement together with others to the most complex structures that serve public interest. As civil servants, the decision-makers must ensure an ethical frame and to create the premises of an ethical attitude for all options and public actions.78 Here is a certain dynamic of the relation between the ethical and the juridical. We suppose that ethics cannot be in conflict with the law and the place ethical options take with respect for lawfulness. We often feel there is an undefined space between law and personal preferences. This is where our personal ethical options can make room for themselves. They can be brought along in the professional space as long as they do not conflict with the specific deontology of our profession and with the legal frames. This is why we can say it is moral to be legal, because it is difficult to accept that from an ethical point of view, our moral options may lead us                                                              78

York Willbern, “Types and Levels of Public Morality”, 115-127, in Classics of Administrative Ethics, edited by Willa Bruce, 124.  

 

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to breaking the law.79 For this reason, from the point of view of the ethics governing public space, the attitude of the people or groups who claim the law may be eluded if we can show that the law contradicts morality seems unacceptable. One example for this is given by Patrick J. Sheeran: in the United States, pro-life groups that support the cause against abortion consider that the law that permits legal abortion is immoral and may determine actions of civic insubordination, may lead to protests, even violent ones and even determine terrorist acts with hand-made bombs in the clinics where abortion is practiced. The paradox lies in the fact that, adopting a religious grid of rigid interpretation, these groups reach the conclusion that accepting the law that brings abortion under regulation and subordination in relation to this law truly constitutes an act of immorality. Consequently, any action that aims at breaking that law, even resorting to violence in public space so as to show disapproval of the practices deriving from that law is moral.80 Ethics is seen in close connection with human action. Not all human actions are under the incidence of ethics or, more precisely, not all bear the mark of ethics. Thus, we are interested in human action and its ethical connotations, and for that we must see which actions bear this mark: “Morality involves the examination of human action to decide if it is good, bad or indifferent—to figure out if it is right or wrong, good or bad”81. So, if ethics focuses on goals, morality implies the conformity of human actions to the goals, in other words, morality implies a direct relation between action and goals82. From the point of view of ethics in public administra                                                            

Sandu Frunză, Comunicare etică şi responsabilitate socială.  Sheeran, 9.  81 Sheeran, 61.  82 Sheeran, 63.  79 80

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tion it is meaningful that ethics and morality are associated with the idea of shaping which comes from the generic framework of regulations and laws. At the same time, Patrick J. Sheeran considers that, although from a deontological point of view it is legitimate to focus on laws and regulations, these cannot be sufficient elements to form an adequate view on what is ethical or moral from the perspective of those working in public administration. With these elements that establish the general framework. A very important factor is that of the intervention of individual conscience. We cannot conceive the presence of ethics in public administration without the presence of a conscience that applies laws and regulations to the particular conditions of the action. It interferes as a fundamental element in the decision-making mechanism regarding what is or is not ethics in the decisions and public services.83 Dan Crăciun, Vasile Morar and Vasile Macoviciuc suggest a distinction between moral rules and juridical regulations beginning with six distinct elements: 1. The principle of authority that imposes legal regulations is an administrative, juridical or political institution imposed by the coercive forces identified with the state, while moral rules are autonomous and imposed by individual conscience. 2. The subject of juridical regulations is always inscribed in a space of institutional authority that the individual must obey, while the subject of moral rules is a generic one. 3. An essential distinction appears to be between the systems of sanctions and rewards. While sanctions can be seen in the juridical field as well as in the moral one, the rewards are distributed only in the field of morality. From a juridical perspective, obeying the law is an obligation as a citi                                                             83

Sheeran, 82-83. 

 

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zen and derived from the need of security and protection provided by the state, while in the moral field, rewards as well as sanctions pertain to the individual conscience. Moral satisfaction or remorse supervenes as a result of the ethical appraisal from the community or from the individual conscience. 4. A distinction between juridical regulations and moral rules derives from the fact that often the legal interdictions are enhanced by the moral interdictions, while with moral interdictions there isn’t always the same reciprocity. 5. Juridical regulations ensure a minimum of sociability, to avoid side-slips in society, while moral regulations nominate a maximum of sociability, with consequences in personal development, enhancing human condition and social peace. 6. There is an evaluation of laws from a moral point of view; some prove to be less legitimate, as it sometimes happens that juridical regulations may be at one time considered more progressive than the moral norms that regulate the life of certain communities.84 A distinction between ethical and juridical is proposed by Tom Regan from the perspective of a theory of rights: 1. The juridical rights of individuals depend on the legal framework and other juridical elements from the context they live in. In this context individuals may receive certain rights; some rights may be taken away from them, juridical rights undergoing a certain dynamics in different periods of time and in different social and cultural contexts. They are born as a result of human creativity and need an entire mechanism to get them moving, to develop and protect them. At the same time, if we can talk about the existence of moral rights, they manifest as universal rights all individuals have                                                              84

Dan Crăciun, Vasile Morar, Vasile Macoviciuc, Etica afacerilor, (Bucureşti: Paideia, 2005), 67-70. 

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access to, provided the rights are relevant to them. Consequently, the moral rights circumvent some particularity elements that juridical rights are subject to. 2. Another important element in understanding moral rights is that moral rights imply an equal moral access of those that have access to it. This aspect of equality especially reveals the fact that moral rights do not have different degrees of applicability, but that all those that possess them are equal holders of moral rights. 3. Another manner of distinguishing between moral and juridical rights is that of highlighting the fact that the moral right is not the result of the creativity of one individual or of one group in the way that juridical rights are imposed by a despotic figure or are created by an instance with power to legislate.85 The possibility of a clear distinction between the ethical the juridical becomes functional with the separation of ethics from the religious moral, of the lay source of administrative, social and political authority from the theological pressure and divine authority. One of the most convincing analyses in this sense is suggested by Gilles Lipovetsky in his attempt to reveal the way in which a minimal ethics is constituted in the context of a society that is built according to the strict principles of a rational ethics. In such context, the emphasis moves from the moral authority to the growth in importance of the juridical force to regulate the status of humans and of ethics and founding instance in a culture that privileges rights in relation to duties. Thus, “not the duty towards the divine legislator is at the basis of social and political organization, but the inherent rights of individuals. While the individual becomes the major term of the democratic culture,                                                              85

Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 266-268. 

 

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the fundamental moral fact is identified with defending and recognizing subjective rights, the duties do not vanish, they derive from the fundamental rights of the individual, they become correlates of this”.86 What Lipovetsky notices is quite interesting, that “the ethical exigency and respecting rights are just as meaningful”.87 He notices a tendency towards moralizing public action which he perceives from the open perspective of an opposition between politics and moral, based on the value of democratic pluralism and the depreciation of political and social violence. From the perspective of the autonomy of administration related to political power “the less religion of politic and the less moral based on sacrifice, the more request for counter powers and transparency, pluralism and preoccupation with procedures, professionalism and negotiation in the forms of regulation and administrative decision”.88

Rights and Duties in Relation to the Self One way to apply ethics in public administration is that of evoking the idea of the relation between rights and duties. Beyond the general discussion on rights and duties, Sheeran points out the attention to the complexity of duties that we may reveal in three ways: the duties we have in relation to a supreme being, the duties we have to ourselves, the duties we have in relation to others. While the duties towards a transcendental being place us in the field of theology, the duties we have to ourselves and to others place us in the effective field of ethics. This is why it is necessary to understand the way in which what we must ethically value in relation to our                                                             Lipovetsky, 32.  Lipovetsky, 230.  88 Lipovetsky, 230-231.  86 87

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selves as well as the duties we have to other beings and the rights and duties that we have as members of a community in relation to society and the state must be conceived.89 Sheeran begins with the ethical premise that, in relation to ourselves, as well as in relation to others, we have duties towards the soul (intellect) and duties towards the body. Regarding the way duties towards ourselves are imagined, the author believes that, unlike the field of justice where there are no juridical obligations towards ourselves, in the field of ethics, an adequate relation to the self leads to an authentic relation to others and shapes positively and ethically our style of manifestation in institutionalized situations where we are required to act. A good starting point in cultivating an ethical attitude for the public administration civil servants is, according to Sheeran, each person’s attempt to become, for a start, his/her own best friend. This may contribute to a better development of the self image in relation to personal and other’s expectations. And so he arrives at the rhetorical question: “How can you think well of or treat other people fairly and decently if you hate yourself or have a poor selfimage?”90 Philosophically, Sheeran establishes two types of duties in relation with the self: duties towards the soul (intellect) and duties towards the body. The duties towards the soul (intellect) imply: “For public administrators, that means taking the necessary course either through formal training, on-thejob training or both to meet the responsibilities of the job. Furthermore, duty to the intellect includes training the will in decision making so that our decisions are morally good”.91                                                              Sheeran, 91.  Sheeran, 95.  91 Sheeran, 96.  89 90

 

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In relation to our own body we may evoke the duties regarding the preservation of life or those regarding bodily integrity. The preservation of life is considered a duty by Immanuel Kant. He states that: “it is a duty to preserve your life and besides this, everyone has a spontaneous disposition to do this. That is why, the often fearful care that the majority of people has towards their own life, has no internal value and its maxim has no moral content. They preserve their lives according to duty not out of duty. On the contrary, if calamity and hopeless chagrin have completely drown the pleasure to live, if the afflicted, strong at heart, more outraged by his faith than humiliated and cast down, desires death, he still preserves his life without loving it, not out of predilection or fear, but out of duty, then his maxim has a moral content”.92 Concurrently, as regards the duties towards our own body, suicide appears as a non-ethical deed, just as mutilation is unethical. If regarding suicide things are quite clear, regarding the duty of respect for life which implies respect for one’s own life, regarding the intervention on the body that may be assimilated as mutilation, things are much more ambiguous. If in general we deem mutilation unethical because the principle of bodily integrity is ethically valued, we can, for example, ask ourselves whether a series of medical interventions which lead to ways of bodily mutilation are legitimate and ethical, considering that they are the result of an action of saving the life or improving the life of an individual. In this sense, it is considered that: “We have certain inalienable rights, which we cannot give up. The right to life is one of these. We have a corresponding duty to maintain that life                                                              92

Immanuel Kant, Critica raţiunii practice. Întemeierea metafizicii moravurilor, trans., introductory study, notes, foreword, index by Nicolae Bagdasar, (Bucureşti: Editura IRI, 1995), 209. 

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and to maintain the human body to the best of our ability”.93 Bearing in mind that such problems of medical ethics reverberate in public policies and in decisions in the public administration, we must always find a balance of ethical decisions. The principle of integrity and of life preservation cannot be contradicting. Decisions must be made bearing in mind the greater benefit that the individual can obtain, and public policies should be oriented towards the possibility of making the best decisions to serve the interest of the individual as a member of the community and as participant to the construction of public space. This is one of the areas where ethical decision must prevail in relation to any religious explanation. We must not be arrested by religious perspectives that may consider the human is a human being just as a whole and that any loss of body parts or an abatement in psychic capacity affects one’s human condition, or could suggest that any intervention upon the body is a sacrilege, an affront to the creative divinity and ruler of the human body and soul. In such explanatory systems the damages to the individual through the lack of efficient intervention could lead to much more ethically contestable consequences than the religious negative consequence. For that matter, it is right that in the decision pertaining to medical ethics, the rational spirit and the scientific and human explanations and motivations should prevail. Moreover, we should not neglect the theories that tell us that the human has control over one’s own body, meaning that one is the possessor, the owner, the one responsible for what happens to one’s body. This means that one can make a series of decisions that may seem radical, like voluntary sterilization or other procedures that are aimed at the body without being a threat, without jeopardizing life. If we accept that these problems can be                                                              93

Sheeran, 97. 

 

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solved as problems pertaining to personal conscience and individual freedom, then these actions may seem ethical.94 Religious, political, administrative decisions should not intervene where we talk about problems regarding our own conscience, as long as there is no ethical or juridical damage or where there are no direct consequences regarding public cost or public order.

                                                             94

Sheeran, 97. 

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3. Administrative Ethics from the Perspective of Rights and Duties in Relation to Otherness Deontological concerns emphasize more and more the fact that it is insufficient to concentrate on respecting laws and regulations when we talk about ethics in public administration. It is more and more common to think that we must bear in mind the involvement of civil servants with their own professional and ethical conscience in the decisions regarding what is right or wrong, fair or unfair, and in solving ethical dilemmas that intervene in daily activity. Conscience is that which intervenes in ethical judgment and in the mechanisms of rational decision. Therefore, “conscience is something within human beings that determines the morality of human actions. Conscience is a special act of the mind that comes into being when the intellect passes judgment on the goodness or badness of a particular act”.95 In this perspective, the intervention of conscience is perceived as a practical means of action related to the juridical frameworks or to those provided by the rules that govern professional life. Just as regarding one’s own person, the individual has two types of obligations, using the same model. Patrick J. Sheeran considers that in relation to the other individuals participants to the public space, we have two types of duties, some that aim for the intellectual dimension, their quality as spiritual beings and other that aim their quality as beings that unfold their lives in the body.                                                              95

Sheeran, 83. 

 

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Spiritual (intellectual) duties towards others: the problem of deception One of the intellectual (spiritual) duties a person has in relation to others is that of telling the truth, not deceiving. When he speaks about deception, Patrick J. Sheeran has in mind four elements that could reach a definition: “1. There is a statement contradicting thought; 2. There is an act of the will (the decision) to state or communicate something contrary to the thought; 3. There is at least implicit the will to deceive another person; 4. There is actual deception of another person”.96 Consequently we have different degrees and manners of relating to the idea of truth and otherness. As it is clear from this list of elements, we may talk about the relations we have with truth per se and with the conscious relation we choose regarding truth as act of thought, as operation pertaining to the personal intellectual life. But simultaneously we have the way we relate to another person, to another consciousness we communicate with, as a manner of relating the personal intellectual experience with the other’s intellectual experience. Thus, deception appears as an inauthentic act in relation to the self and as a non-ethical act in relation to the other. These defining elements for deception are translated into four forms atthe level of action. Thus we may notice that starting with the four defining elements we can identify four distinct ways by which a person formulates deceptions: “1. by affirming what he or she knows as untrue; 2. by denying what he or she knows is true;                                                              96

Sheeran, 104. 

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3. by asserting as certain what he or she knows to be doubtful; 4. by asserting as doubtful what he or she knows to be certain”.97 As it can be seen in the four ways a person uses deception, we are facing four ways of personal engagement related to the truth. Generally, when we talk about deception, we are revealed that deception manifest itself as a choice of the individual consciousness that voluntarily places itself in an inauthentic relation to the truth. Consequently, deception is an individual engagement that implies either stating a non-truth, or disclaiming it, or stating that which is doubtful as truth, or questioning what the individual conscience confidently perceives as true. Thus, deception engages the individual in a personal way, with one’s own options manifested into consciousness in relation to the idea of truth and implies the ethical responsibility of the individual engaged in an unethical act in relation to the truth and with the receiver of the message that contains deception. The individual experience of deception is relevant for the understanding of deception manifested in institutionalized mediums. A description of the way deception is institutionalized is stated: “Public administrators often find themselves in situations where they engage in deceptive activities or come very close to such deception. In bureaucracies in particular, there is great concern about secrecy and security. The public and other government agencies often request information. Sometimes public administrators do not provide it, and in doing so claim they do not have it when actually they do. Frequently, the information provided is a distortion of the truth. Bureaucracies spend considerable time writing, rewriting and editing materials so that the finished product is too vague to                                                              97

Sheeran, 104. 

 

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convey true meaning. Even when the person or agency requesting the information has the right to know and the information is not classified, in some cases public administrators are not as forthcoming as they should be. There is no question they sometimes distort the truth or lie”.98 In bureaucratic actions we are sometimes in the situation that the truth creates difficulties, as it is, the situations become impossible. In this sense, to ease the overcoming of such difficulties, Alan Montefiore states that: “if we should admit that the truth is an impossible notion, we should admit as well that it is indispensable”.99 A special topic related to this attitude is the topic of confidentiality. It has been theorized by ethicists and convincingly formulated by Sissela Bok in discussions on the problem of secrecy. The topic of confidentiality is a legitimate concern of all those working in public administration. It is important in its ethical aspect and its juridical aspect. This topic is always correlated with the right to know, to be correctly informed. Sometimes this knowledge could serve public interest and then there is the dilemma of the way in which the secret may be unveiled, breaking the confidentiality rule. The solution to this dilemma may be more adequately stated if we start with the evidence that every human being has the right to personal protection, reputation, preserving personal authority, family, relatives and friends, just as it has the right to preserve honor and dignity in relation to society and state, or even keeping a positive image of her/his community or country.100 In the name of such rights, which are evidently                                                              Sheeran, 105.  Alan Montefiore, “Montaigne avea dreptate” in Respectul. De la stimă la diferenţă: o problemă de nuanţă, Catherine Audard (coord.), (Bucureşti: Editura Trei, 2003), 123.  100 Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 35-39; Sheeran, 1993.  98 99

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correlated to the duties each individual has, the problem of keeping secrecy, confidentiality, seems a sensitive problem that may lead to certain ethical dilemmas or actions that may seem unethical. Accordingly, we notice we have situations in which civil servants engage in actions that may be associated with deception due to the delusive aspect of their finality. Even in situations where they could act differently, they prefer eluding or certain categories of public. This attitude can be encouraged by the bureaucrats’ obsession with keeping secrecy and confidentiality, which produces a distortion in relation to the free access to information. Sometimes, even the people that should have access to information, though classified, are in the situation of receiving partial or distorted information, so vague that it can no longer be operationally used.101 This attempt to hide the truth, to elude it or distort it seems to be part of the daily behavior of civil servants. It can lead to affecting the functionality of the institution, the good relations between different institutions and the relation with various categories of public. For this reason it is natural to emphasize the unethical character of such way of relating to the truth and to set in motion the individual accountability and the institutional responsibility that appear in such situations.

Euthanasia as a Public Debate Topic One way to manifest the duties we have as human beings towards other beings is that regarding the protection of life and avoiding murder. It can be theorized as voluntary or accidentally. We can talk about the deliberate or the accidental nature of the crime; the murder can be the result of a direct action or it may be the consequence of an action or series of                                                              101

Sheeran, 1993. 

 

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actions that may be categorized as the causality leading to murder. Each time the event is emotionally and ethically strong.102 In this context, there are two relevant themes from the point of view of individual options, public debates, public policies, administrative decisions: euthanasia and abortion. Starting from the premise that civil servants are the ones maintaining and making up the state, Sheeran notices that they are the ones responsible for fulfilling the most important duties of the state. Among these duties, accomplishing a common good, the wellbeing, peace and prosperity are elements that the state has to provide to its citizen. In this sense, the state must even support individuals and their families when they no longer have the power to support or help themselves. The power of the state must descend through its civil servants in public administration to this level of mutual aid. Regarded from this angle, problems such as euthanasia and abortion must not be solely individual concerns, but problems that must be brought to the attention of those who must create the frameworks of public action and solve public problems.103 Interestingly, to the public, topics such as euthanasia and abortion also become topics of public interest, despite the fact that they regard the personal dimension and describe a personal option. From the point of view of political philosophy, when we accept that something is important personally, it is also important politically bearing in mind the fact that it is important from a public perspective. Whenever there are controversies in the public space, the state has multiple responsibilities, including the social responsibility connected to the politics concerning the multiple ways in which the state regulates the relations among indi                                                             102 103

Sheeran,109.  Sheeran, 137. 

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viduals, groups, communities and institutions following obtaining positive effects for the wellbeing of society, of social security, of the right for a better life.104 In order to provide them, state intervention becomes legitimate, and public debate around the controversial topics attracts the elaboration and implementation of public policies based on the social responsibility of the state. For this reason we consider beneficial the state’s intervention in managing ethically and judicially controversial issues like euthanasia and abortion. If euthanasia confronts us with the issue of individual dignity and the supposed right to die in dignity by ending unavoidable suffering, then, philosophically, in theory, the state could get involved in regulating the way in which this situation could be solved in favor of the person claiming such right. Of course, we must ask ourselves if the person has the right to be aided to die in an extreme situation such as incurable disease or extreme suffering that cannot be assuaged. Just as well we can ask ourselves if the doctor, the family or a civil servant should bear the duty to fulfill the expressed wish, as in to end the life of the individual in question. Another important question arises before stating an answer: is there an essential distinction between active euthanasia (helping a person die) and passive euthanasia (letting a person die)? An important aspect of the answer to this question is the fact that the distinction between the active and the passive attitudes means that “an agent that kills provokes death, while an agent that lets someone die permits nature to follow its course”.105 Here we have the problem of responsi                                                             104

George Poede, Politici sociale. O abordare politologică, (Iaşi: Tipo Moldova, 2002), 5-6.  105 Helga Kushe, “Eutanasia” in Peter Singer (ed.), Tratat de etică, trans. coord. by Vasile Boari and Raluca Mărincean, foreword by Vasile Boari, (Iaşi: Polirom, 2006), 327. 

 

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bility. We must decide how to ethically administrate the relation between reward and punishment. Unlike other ethical debates, when we talk about euthanasia, things seem more complicated because “in regular situations, people value their lives and it is their interest to continue it. The situation changes when euthanasia problems arise. In euthanasia cases, death – and not the continuation of life – is the interest of the person. This means that an agent that kills someone, or lets someone die, does not harm the life of the person, but benefits them”. A possible conclusion is that patient rights must act in the direction that is most favorable to the patient. In extreme cases, like those in the discussions on euthanasia, to act in the direct interest of the patient means to act according to her/his request to have a dignified death. Thus we may reach the conclusion that, from the perspective of responsibility, the one that acts by helping a patient die is more ethical than the one passively letting her/him die, because the former intervenes more in accomplishing the patient’s interest.106 When we try to answer here questions as delicate as this, we must mention that it is not our goal to plead in favor of abortion or euthanasia, but to discuss them as philosophical issues, essentially important as public debates. In debating the topic of euthanasia, for example, we must take into consideration the present situation in different countries, the fact that active euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium after meeting very strict criteria, while assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and in some of the United States, such as Washington, Oregon and Montana. Thus, active euthanasia is not only considered unethical, but in most cases is considered murder, in the majority of countries. There is also the exception of places, in clearly defined                                                              106

Kushe, 327. 

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circumstances, where euthanasia may be done by physicians with the condition that the patient’s decision to die is voluntary and pertains to a well informed patient of which we are well aware that he/she is in a situation where the affliction can no longer be treated, and her/his state can no longer be improved.107 We must bear in mind the complex nature of euthanasia from the perspective of what the patient is going through regarding the small list of options, but the extremely large range of emotions in her/his horizon.108 Furthermore, philosophers have adopted various positions, from accepting euthanasia to considering it murder. The first perspective is based especially on the idea that accelerating the end of a life in affliction is an action that may be justified ethically. The second considers that taking on the act of ending the life of a human being is an action that cannot bear any other name than murder.109 When we find cases of acceptance of euthanasia we finally realize that “compassion for one suffering from an incurable disease and, in the case of voluntary euthanasia, the respect for autonomy have represented the main arguments of those supporting the moral aspect of euthanasia”.110 The respect for the right to live is so powerful in the mentality of the Western individual and in the law articles that not only euthanasia, but even the decision of disconnecting mechanical life-support in situations much less problematical, like the decision taken with the diagnose of cerebral death, remain in the field of strong ethical controversy. Beside the ethical dilemmas, in the western world we are under the pressure of juridical systems meant to protect the individ                                                             Kushe, 324.  Mihaela Frunză, Expertiză etică şi acţiune socială, (Bucureşti: Tritonic, 2011), 75.  109 Sheeran, 110.  110 Kushe, 324.  107 108

 

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ual and the family in situations like this. And this is what creates additional difficulties in accepting a standard of ethical decision in sensitive problems such as euthanasia or diverse forms associated with assisted death or any kind of intervention that assumes the discontinuation of another’s life.111 Together with Gilles Lipovetsky we can accept that “the request for subjective rights regarding personal death to be acknowledged goes in the direction of an ethics that has as supreme finality the respect for the individual”.112 But the debate regarding the difference between active and passive euthanasia is alive and meaningful. The differences here may be considered important in order to elaborate and implement public policies. In this sense it is necessary to “draw some limits, of which universal are those that protect against unjustified death. Even if those limits may seem philosophically arbitrary and unsettling, they are necessary to protect the more vulnerable members of society against abuse”.113

Abortion as a Topic of Public Debate and Action Beside the fact that they are connected to the duties we have towards the soul (intellect) or the body, euthanasia and abortion are living topics in the center of debates also because they are concerned with fundamental elements of the human condition. They awake controversy also because the beginning and the end, birth and death have a special value from a moral perspective. Thus, “if issues such as euthanasia and the right to die or death with dignity are troublesome to ethicists, abortion presents an even greater dilemma. This is an issue                                                              Sheeran, 110.  Lipovetsky, 107.  113 Kushe, 331.  111 112

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that troubles most people, and affects administrators at all levels of government. Just as euthanasia raises the question of at which point death occurs, abortion involves the matter of when life begins”.114 When talking about abortion we mean the discontinuation of the evolution of a pregnancy during the cycle of development from zygote to embryo, to fetus, before the embryo is a fetus and therefore seem as a potential human being. Abortion may be spontaneous or induced. When it is induced, it implies the expulsion, in certain conditions, through direct intervention, of the fetus from the womb of the pregnant woman, before it is viable to live outside the maternal womb. Thus, the main ethical problem is whether this expulsion can be associated with the idea of murder.115 While talking about abortion we must bear in mind that it has become an important problem from a political and moral perspective even if the case is that in many states abortion is legal, within certain legal articles. The complexity of the problem has been emphasized by Cristina Ştefan when she argues that not only the woman is affected by the problem of abortion, but also the implications are much greater, because accepting and practicing abortion target several levels: 1. The individual: abortion implies making a complex decision, with religious, medical, moral and other implications and consequences, with results affecting the whole personality; 2. The couple: the fetus is the result of a common participation, it is the result of heterosexual relations, which implies the fact that the man, as a member of the couple, is even                                                              114 115

Sheeran, 111.  Sheeran, 111. 

 

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further concerned with the act of the termination of the pregnancy; 3. The extended family: they are not indifferent to the addition of a new member to the family; 4. The community: even if the emotional implication here is absent, we cannot neglect the economical and social aspects generated; 5. The nation-state: we must bear in mind the consequences derived from the fact that governments practice different demographical policies, which can be pro-natality or restrictive of it to certain degrees. 6. The global level: we notice there is a differentiated growth of the population of the planet, the growth is greater in poorer regions and lower in wealthier regions, which raises many problems in the field of global ethics.116 The importance of the topic in the shaping of public space is rooted in the context of the growth in intensity of controversies arising between the groups that are firmly prolife or pro-choice. The answers given by both the pro-life and pro-choice groups are extreme, with no shading. Following, we will synthesize the two types as we find them in Sheeran: 1. Pro-life activists: a) They consider abortion murder. Starting from the premise that life begins at the moment of conception, they consider any voluntary termination of pregnancy to be murder. To cross the difficulties of medical explanations, John T. Noonan provides an explanation that uses the criteria of humanity. Thus, all that is conceived of human parents is human, including the aggregation of cells that is defined as a                                                              Cristina Ştefan, “Avort” in Otilia Dragomir, Mihaela Miroiu (eds.), Lexicon feminist, (Iaşi: Polirom, 2002), 42-43; Dan Oprescu, Filosofia avortului şi alte încercări, (Bucureşti: Ed. Trei, 1997), 122-123.  116

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human being in its first days of conception, inasmuch as it has a genetic code, it is human.117 b) There are situations that may remove abortion from the sphere of murder, of immorality. These exceptions are possible when the life of the mother is endangered or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. c) Understanding these exceptions is difficult to accept because they do not show inconsequence, but a relativism in the explanation of murder through the appeal to the sacred right to life depending on the circumstances of the occurrence of the pregnancy or its effects on the mother. Such a strong conviction that speaks not only of unethical attitudes but also of murder cannot be logical and credible when it renders rules relative to circumstances. This proves the relativity of the assertion that human life begins with intra-uterus conception. d) Abortion is considered against nature and against the law and, because the laws that permit abortion are unethical, it means they can be broken. Moreover, they can be fought against by any means, even those of disobedience and violent means, such as terrorist acts. They consider that they must pursue their conscience because, although their actions may be illegal, these are completely justifiable from a moral perspective.118 2. Pro-choice activists: a) Consider that there is no certainty regarding the moment when life appears, the only certainty being associated with the beginning of human life at birth. The status of                                                              117

John T. Noonan Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in History” in James E. White, Contemporary Moral Problems, (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company, 1993), 101.  118 Sheeran, 1993. 

 

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person is given in this perspective once we can talk about personal choices and self-development.119 b) They bring in philosophers’ opinions according to which life begins at birth or at a certain point in the evolution of the embryo, which means that up to that moment, the woman may choose to terminate the pregnancy without being ethically condemnable. c) They consider that abortion should no longer be made after the viability of the fetus is confirmed, the abortion raising ethical problems beginning with the third trimester of the pregnancy. In this sense, the case Roe versus Wade is meaningful, as it establishes two thresholds in the evolution of the pregnancy, one at the end of the first trimester when the doctor can intervene in response to mother’s requirement, and the second after the second trimester has begun when state institutions may intervene and limit or even prohibit abortion.120 d) The fact that they accept that at a certain point there may be ethical issues is an argument used in criticism by prolife supporters against pro-choice supporters. e) Concurrently, it is difficult to understand from a prochoice perspective the acceptance by pro-life groups of exceptions from the unethical situation of abortion, because they do not prove inconsequence but relativism in the explanation of murder by calling on the sacred right to life, depending on the circumstances in which pregnancy occurred or on its effects on the mother. Such a strong conviction that speaks not only of unethical attitudes but also of murder can                                                             119

Carol C. Gould, “Private Rights and Public Virtues: Women, the Family, and Democracy” in Carol C. Gould (ed.), Beyond Domination. New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy, (New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield Pbs., 1984), 13-15.  120 The Supreme Court, “Excerpts from Roe v. Wade (1973)” in James E. White, Contemporary Moral Problems, 93. 

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not be logical and credible when it makes rules relative, based on circumstances. This is what proves the relativity of the assertion that human life begins with intra-uterus conception.121 From a general view of public debate on this topic we can ask ourselves: to what extent does the state have the right or the moral obligation to prohibit deliberate abortion? Does the legal status of abortion derive from its moral status? Can abortions be legal although some claim they are immoral?122 Mary Anne Warren examines three arguments in favor of abortion: 1. Abortion must be permitted to avoid unwanted consequences. Among the unwanted consequences the author lists: keeping in mind that through the ages women have suffered from the lack of contraceptives and legal abortion methods, it would be a mistake for abortion to be prohibited. Unwanted births lead to the growth of poverty, create insecurity, contribute to the drain of family or state resources. Future survival and health depend on the access to abortion, on the one hand regarding women as individuals, and on the other hand social and biological systems; avoiding heterosexual relations and sexual pleasure to avert the base premise of a possible pregnancy can be negatively perceived by both men and women. A rhetorical question in this sense is asked by the author: “if heterosexual relations lead to the death of millions of innocent ‘persons’ (aborted fetuses), then shouldn’t we at least try to abandon this type of relations?”123 2. Women have the moral right to choose abortion in the name of women’s right to freedom, self-determination                                                              Sheeran, 112-113.  Mary Anne Warren, “Avortul” in Peter Singer (ed.), Tratat de etică, 333.  123 Warren, 333-344.   121 122

 

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and physical integrity; an unwanted pregnancy may be perceived negatively, traumatizing by the woman and birth might create problems in personal and professional development; even if we accept the idea of the right to live of the fetus, we cannot disregard the right to freedom, selfdetermination and integrity of the woman, all the more so because no other situation in the judicial system asks for such sacrifices to save a life. 3. The fetus is not a person therefore it does not have a substantial right to live. The fetus does not have features for the status of person: “the capacity to reason, selfconsciousness and social and moral reciprocity” does not confer the fetus a legal and moral status. If we were to extend legal and moral rights onto the fetus, this situation could be a threat to the fundamental rights of the woman.124 One way to explain this is the one suggested by Florentina Bocioc when she singles out the fact that, most often, in this discussions either the human rights are called upon, either specific laws on the health of reproduction. If we are to take administrative decisions, then they can be taken by evoking principles related to laws. In this perspective, the performance of ethical concepts is powered by the reproductive rights and sexual rights that are based on: 1. “The principle of corporal integrity and selfdetermination (including health, well-being and sexual pleasure); 2. The principle of equality, respectively acknowledging women’s ability to make decisions regarding their own health and fertility; 3. The existence of living condition based on social rights, proving the connection between economical, social                                                              124

Warren, 333-344. 

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and cultural rights and global issues of equitable development and environment preservation”.125 The discussion from the perspective of rights, although advantageous, creates a series of problems from the more general perspective of human rights. A very important aspect highlighted by Helen Bequaert Holmes is the delicate issue that in the Bill of Rights we do not have a clear, textual specification of the ownership right regarding a person’s own body. This deficiency is considered important from the perspective of reproduction policies, of woman’s rights to decide when to have or when not to have children. Starting with this context, Helen Bequaert Holmes considers that without the right to prevent, control and set the desired time to have or not to have children, the political, economical and social rights of the woman are limited.126 While the opinions in favor of abortion are based on the rational invocation of rights, the opinions regarding the necessity to prohibit abortion are based on theological and ideological options. They are difficult to argue from a rational and scientific point. The fact that prohibiting abortion is difficult to justify is deduced from the way the interdiction has been imposed in 1966 in Romania. We notice that in justifying the law prohibiting abortion, Nicolae Ceauşescu had asked for a complex study involving: “collectives coordinated by the Ministry of Health and Social Articles, made up of representatives from the State Committee for Planning, the State Committee for Work and Salary Issues, the State Committee for Culture and Arts, the State Committee for Guidance and Control of the National Committee of Women,                                                              125 Florentina Bocioc, “Drepturile reproductive şi drepturile sociale” in Otilia Dragomir, Mihaela Miroiu (eds), Lexicon feminist, 83.  126 Helen Bequaert Holmes, “A Feminist Analysis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in Carol C. Gould (ed.), Beyond Domination. New Perspective son Women and Philosophy, 258. 

 

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the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finances, the Ministry of Justice and General Union of Syndicates”.127 All this expansion of forces was supposed to lead to a scientific justification of the necessity to prohibit abortion as an efficient and ethical solution to the problem of demographical decline. It is interesting that the study had not reached conclusions to support it. This had determined Ceausescu to formulate the necessity of a purely political decision with a strictly ideological justification in line with the idea that “reproduction is a duty individuals have towards society”.128 Thus, to adequately understand this topic, the issues regarding women’s specific experiences, birth, breast feeding, abortion, menstruation or other topics that philosophy has marginalized, but with important information for those involved in drafting public policies and abortion laws, should be explored more profoundly as philosophy topics, interdisciplinary studies and also applied ethics. From the perspective of ethics in the public administration, the topics regarding duties and responsibilities, regarding the self or those regarding others prove their importance in their complexity connecting the elements from political ethics, environment ethics, business ethics, care ethics, bioethics and so on. Even if we may notice that “Sometimes people – including public administrators – are more comfortable having someone else decide what is right and wrong”,129 the tone in which the issues must be solved is one of combining personal responsibilities with government decision and responsibility.                                                              127

Raluca Maria Popa, “Corpuri femeieşti, putere bărbătească. Studiu de caz asupra adoptării reglementărilor legislative de interzicere a avortului în România comunistă (1966)” in Oana Bălu ă (ed.), Gen şi putere. Partea leului în politica românească, (Iaşi: Polirom, 2006), 97.  128 Popa, 103.  129 Sheeran, 149. 

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4. Respect as an Exigency in Public Space Action Personal Happiness and the Happiness of Others – Between Duty and Respect When we act in public space, it is considered that it is our duty to respect others at least to the same extent we respect ourselves, or to the same extent we expect others to respect ourselves. We usually internalize this duty as an obligation we feel concerning our own self and concerning the dependence, but also autonomy in relation to others, the closeness, but also distance in relation to them. In this sense, we can understand the statement: “the grandeur and relish of respect as a feeling derives from its complexity, from its capacity to blend distance and communion”.130 From the perspective of the duties we have towards others, there is a very meaningful paragraph in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy: “to be humanitarian, when you can, is a duty… there are some souls so merciful that for no other reason, vanity or selfishness, find an internal pleasure in spreading joy around them and who revel in pleasing other because it is their doing”.131 What interests us for our topic                                                              130

Pierre-Patrick Kaltenbach, Jeanne-Helene Kaltenbach, “Trebuie să respectăm diferen ele?” in Respectul. De la stimă la diferenţă: o problemă de nuanţă, Catherine Audard (coord.), 168.  131 Immanuel Kant, Critica raţiunii practice. Întemeierea metafizicii moravurilor, trans., introductory study, notes, index by Nicolae Bagdasar, (Bucureşti: Editura IRI, 1995), 209. 

 

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is the disclosure of the selfless attitude as each individual’s duty. It springs from inside us as a rational attitude connected to the reality of the joy a person feels when doing good to others. Directing another’s joy reflects as an internal joy in that who succeeds to create a world of fulfillment around him/her. This way, public space may be described as a space of each one’s duty to experience the achievement of good together with others. At the same time, Kant draws our attention to the duties we have to our own self. “To ensure your own happiness is a duty… for unpleased with your own state, overwhelmed by cares and amidst unsatisfied needs, you may easily become a great temptation for the violation of duties”.132 Even if happiness is a vague concept, it appears as a duty that each of us must fulfill concerning our own being. Personal happiness in this perspective is the warranty of the fulfillment of duties. An unhappy person can at any time disregard or break the duties he/she has under the natural pressure of overwhelming worries. Consequently, attaining personal happiness may be considered not only a duty to ourselves, but also to others. Only from those that have already reached happiness can we expect that in their capacity of participants to the public space to be humanitarian and fulfill their other ethical duties. Moreover, Paul Ricoeur states that for the power of a subject to become real as an oral subject it is necessary that the action be doubled by that of social and political institutions. The connection between self esteem and the moral appraisal of an action needs the mediation of certain institutions.133                                                              Immanuel Kant, Critica raţiunii practice, 210.  Paul Ricoeur, “‘Eul’ demn de stimă şi de respect” in Respectul. De la stimă la diferenţă: o problemă de nuanţă, Catherine Audard (coord.), 96.  132 133

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A way to place together the duties we have concerning ourselves with those we have concerning others may be revealed starting with the Kantian imperative that prompts us to respect the other: “act accordingly so you use humanity in yourself as well as in any other, always with the same purpose but never just as a means”.134 The dimension of respect is an integration one because it brings balance between the respect of the other and the selfrespect. Beyond the Kantian significance, we notice that invoking humanity as a reference element has the precise purpose to put into rational terms the necessity to acknowledge that the objectification of the other in order to reach a personal purpose is in fact reducing the other to a simple object/instrument. Or, in a world of objects we could never foster authentic inter-subjective relations. This is why the finality of an action counts as much as the intention behind it, the means and the purposes being in a continuous relation of adequacy. This adequacy to the other is the one we have in mind when we say that respect is, among others, a way to retrieve each other together. When we bring in the Kantian paragraphs we do so rather to reveal the necessity of respect in public action and more importantly in the relations we have with the other in public space. Respect may point to diverse aspects: from the attitude the office civil servant may have towards each person he/she serves to the attitudes the organizational structures have or even to the respect that state institutions owe each citizen while satisfying various types of needs.

                                                             134

Immanuel Kant, Intemeierea metafizicii moravurilor. Critica raţiunii practice, (Bucureşti: Editura Ştiin ifică, 1972), 52. 

 

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Respect as a Permanent Preoccupation of Professionals in Public Administration Although respect is among the duties we have to ourselves and to others, what interests us in this presentation is not the respect we have to ourselves, but the respect to clients, users and other citizens, to our community. But we cannot ignore the generally accepted fact that the respect to ourselves is seen as the starting point for any type of ethical behavior, for any kind of ethical attitude that may concern other people, other beings, the environment or the entire planet. Asking herself what it means to respect others Patricia J. Parsons reveals the existence of three steps on the ladder that must be climbed to reach respect. Thus, we have three levels for the manifestation of respect as an intrinsic dimension of ethical behavior in the professional environment: 1. The preoccupation in line with the personal development of moral habits and abilities to respect others; 2. Developing an ethical behavior starting with building respect in interpersonal relations and the interdependence of morality and good manners; 3. The growth of professional aptness as proof of the respect to employees, clients, the respective professional category or society.135 The option displayed by Particia J. Parsons to use as a starting point to understand respect, the equivalence of which we may find in the dictionary in related terms like ethics and etiquette. The meaning of etiquette: 1. A series of conventional rules concerning polite behavior in society or in professional situations;                                                              135

Patricia J. Parsons, Ethics in Public Relations. A Guide to Best Practice, second edition, (London and Philadelphia: Kogan Page, 2008), 48. 

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2. Codes of ethical behavior that regulate the manner of relating to others in various professional environments. Beginning with this relation between ethics and etiquette, it is not difficult to accept that ultimately the ethical codes imposed by professional associations are conventions that try to regulate behaviors in situations of ethical dilemmas by applying moral standards, or to establish rules of ethical decision reflecting the consideration each participant in the life of the organization benefits from. Thus we are called to use any means offered by friends, family, professors, the organizations we are part of or even positive personal experience or that related to past errors to achieve good manners. Regardless of the way we achieve good manners in our formation, to be keen to etiquette becomes part of an ethical action that concerns the ethical behavior in public space. The relation between ethics and etiquette invites us to reflect on the manners of behavior that constantly integrates the other as a participant and as a guide in the ethical decisions we make. This may eventually lead us to the idea that in professional activity “Basic respect for everyone – your secretary, the courier, the coop student, the designer, the client, your boss, the janitor – both smoothes working relationships and assists in the more formidable task of making good ethical decisions”.136 To help us better understand the terms of the discussion on good manners, Particia J. Parson suggests us to take the test below. If our answer is NO to any of the questions below it means that we must analyze our manners and correct the direction until our answers become positive. Test: 1. “Do you always say please and thank you even when the person is ‘just doing his or her job’?                                                              136

Parsons, 54. 

 

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2. Are you always careful to especially acknowledge when someone goes out of his or her way for you? If you cannot do it at the time, do you remember to do it later? 3. Do you always seek privacy for unpleasant encounters? 4. Do you always control your temper? 5. Do you refrain from using profane or rude language even when under pressure and even in business e-mail? 6. Do you refrain from making sexist or ethnic remarks or forwarding jokes that contain either? 7. Do you refer to others with the degree of formality that you expect to receive?”137 The necessity to find a positive answer to these questions derives from the preoccupation we must have in professional environments concerning the state of harmony, the cultivation of non-conflicting relations, the faith and respect we owe our coworkers, clients, members of the community where our organization expands its activity, representatives of the media, other participants to the public space.138

Competence and Professionalism – Manifestation of Respect in Relation to the Self and to Otherness From an ethical perspective, a possibility of manifesting respect in relation to the self and to otherness is connected to the assertion of competence and professionalism. The absence of competence and the presence of incompetence in professional activity are associated with an immoral attitude, with an unethical commitment in relation to certain public categories. It is not by chance that various associations mention competence among the most important ethical traits of a                                                              137 138

Parsons, 55.  Parsons, 48. 

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professional. Thus we find ourselves in the situation of suggesting a double package in the continuous formation of public employees. On the one hand, we must expect those working in public administration to want to continuously expand their knowledge, skills, abilities, each one according to his/her specialization. On the other hand, even closely tied to the first kind of exigency, we must ask those working in public administration to acquire ethical competence and even ethical expertise. Their concerns are as follows: 1. Ethical competence that we may use in our behavior, in our relation with ourselves, or in action regarding others, as professional relation in the environment we are part of; 2. Ethical expertise necessary in solving ethical dilemmas that may occurr in professional activities and decisions or the expertise necessary to implement and institutionalize ethics in the organization in question. Among the components that must be the constituent parts of ethical competences applicable to professionals in public administration, Howard Whitton lists: 1. Problem identification skills, 2. Problem-solving skills, 3. Advocacy skills, 4. Self-awareness and consensus-building skills, 5. Subject-matter knowledge, 6. Attitude and commitment to the application of standards.139 In Romania, a special framework is opened by the legal articles concerning the conduct of civil servants. With these, the problem of expertise and ethical counseling pene                                                             139

Howard Whitton, “Developing the “Ethical Competence” of Public Officials: A Capacity-Building Approach” in Ethics and integrity in public administration: concepts and cases, Raymond W. Cox III (ed.), (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2009), 241-242. 

 

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trates all public institutions. Thus appears the issue of qualified personnel in mastering ethical competences and more importantly, of ethical expertise necessary in any complex professional environment. Development through the participation in training programs to obtain ethical competences is necessary because “the fact that ethics becomes part of the community life, the fact that each individual had to a greater or lesser extent ethical competences does not mean that having ethical expertise is a widely encountered phenomenon. The transition from having and exercising ethical competences to the acquiring of reflexive capacity, the capacity to implement and, more importantly, acquiring the ability to transfer competences and expertise in the field of ethics is a significant qualitative leap. It brings along even the compulsoriness of consistent education in moral philosophy and ethics, even when ethical expertise is exercised by professionals from the field of individual, organizational or communitarian practice, from other fields like science or humanities”.140 We must mention that the ethical exigency regarding the conduct and behavior of civil servants in Romania is, on the one hand, the result of a natural practice of institutional practices and, on the other hand, a reflection of the pressures that come from the fact that Romanian is part of the European Union. The necessity to accomplish an administrative cohesion at the European level determines adopting some common reference elements, regardless of the particularities of different states.141 Consequently, we must expect positive consequences regarding the development of professional                                                             

Mihaela Frunză, Expertiză etică şi acţiune socială, 18.  Adelina Dumitrescu, “Ethics Between General Guidelines and National Values. A Comparative Study” in National and European Values of Public Administration in the Balkans, Ani Matei, Crina Rădulescu (Editors), (Bucureşti: Editura Economică, 2011), 237.  140 141

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competence, as well as regarding the development of ethical competence in Romanian public administration. Howard Whitton considers that public trust cannot be obtained without ethical trust. This is how we explain the fact that after the values according to which the domain of public government have been encoded and standardized, with those of moral behavior following, it has become a necessity to integrate these values and those regarding professionalism to the professional competences of those working in public government. Ethical trust cannot be given to those exercising power in the name of the state except in close relation to their professionalism.142 Bearing in mind the importance we give to professional competence as ethical value, it is natural to ask ourselves what exactly this is and how it can be described and regulated. If we analyze deontological codes we notice that the problem of competence is challenged but not defined, it is rather evoked in vague terms instead of being clearly defined. Thus we get to talk about someone’s level of competence in terms of ethical expertise given by professional excellence, about the relation to other people or various categories of people. Or we talk about continuous personal development in terms of professional development, research, education and permanent actions for the increase of trust.143 Approaching the relation between ethics and professionalism, Stuart C. Gilman and Carol W. Lewis notices that: “ethics and genuine professional success go together in public service. It is the job itself—the ambiguous, complex, pressured world of public service—that presents special problems for people who are committed to doing the public’s work and who want to do the right thing. Facing up to the ethical de                                                             142 143

Whitton, 236.  Parsons, 56-58. 

 

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mands on public managers starts with biting the bullet: public service ethics is different from ethics in private life. The reason is that democracy is sustained by public trust—a link forged by stringent ethical standards”.144 This requisition of ethics in public space is explained by two types of motives. Some come from the fact that exercising power, authority and responsibility in the public space depends on the degree of trust possessed by the one exercising them. Others come from the high standards and high expectations the public has in relation to public authority. In the relation there are, on the on hand, trust, the level of acceptance, desirability, legitimacy, and on the other hand, ethics. This relation is reinforced by the fact that in professional codes we usually have included some references to the idea that the activities uncoiled in public administration must be ethical.145 This dimension is reinforced by Stuart C. Gilman and Carol W. Lewis beginning with the idea that in Latin virtu means excellence. Consequently, if we regard professional excellence as a virtue, this places us in the middle of the ethical field. Such action makes ethics become not only a requirement we ask of those working in public administration, but is a constitutive part of their professional identity. Subsequently, they believe that the standard we postulate on the conduct of public administration civil servants must be built on values that reflect a higher degree of ethical exigency than that of individual morality or that which we claim in relation to the private sector.146                                                              144

Carol W. Lewis, Stuart C. Gilman, The ethics challenge in public service: a problem-solving guide, 2nd ed., (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint, 2005), 21.  145 Lewis, Gilman, 22.  146 Lewis, Gilman, 26-27. 

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Among the types of values we find in the public space, we list: ”1. Commitment to the public good 2. Accountability to the public 3. Commitment beyond the law 4. Respect for the worth and dignity of individuals 5. Inclusiveness and social justice 6. Respect for pluralism and diversity 7. Transparency, integrity, and honesty 8. Responsible stewardship of resources 9. Commitment to excellence and to maintaining the public trust”.147 I believe these values may be associated with the four elements of moral behavior that Howard Whitton identifies in the analysis of some theoreticians of public space: moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral character. What seems important to me is his suggestion to add as an essential component the necessity of training in an ethical context to orient and sustain the entire effort of ethical shaping of behaviors and the institutionalization of ethics. Such an ethical context “should inform education and training programs in professional ethics for public officials, as an essential strategy aimed at improving the ethical performance and climate of an organization”.148 Howard Whitton reveals the fact that, as usually happens in any profession, civil servants must be capable of efficiently and responsibly using their knowledge and professional expertise and to harmonize the exercise of their function with the exigency that derives from the formulation of the ethical code adopted by their profession. At the same time, they must be capable of correctly identifying the ethical                                                              147 148

Lewis, Gilman, 37.  Whitton, 237. 

 

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problems that arise and to correctly solve ethical dilemmas they are faced with in their professional environment.149 Developing competence, professionalism is no longer a problem of increasing personal prestige because such an attitude responsibly assumed essentially contributes to the development of the organization’s ethics. The integrity and prestige of an organization are proven, among others, by the fact that they eliminate incompetence and are always concerned that those working in the organization act according to professional norm, including at an ethical level.150 This is why organizations must openly propose to participate in creating the ethical context of professional action.

                                                             Whitton, 238.  Guy B. Adams, Danny L. Balfour, “Ethical Failings, Incompetence, and Administrative Evil: Lessons From Katrina and Iraq” in Ethics and integrity in public administration: concepts and cases, Raymond W. Cox III (ed.), 42.  149 150

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5. Ethical Management and Ethics Management in Public Administration We begin with the distinction Alan Lawton and Michael Macaulay make between ethical management and ethics management to reveal the existence of a polarity. On the one hand we have the preoccupations regarding individual managerial action: “ethical management is about how individual managers behave with integrity, how they may set a personal example, and how they treat others both within and without their own organizations. On the other hand we have the presence of ethics in the form of ethical control and the ethical context of the organization in general: “ethics management will include all the control mechanisms that we are familiar with including the creation of ethics agencies, codes of conduct, and sanctions for breach of a code”.151 The two components of the presence of ethics naturally form a unity which derives from the presence of the two poles. Here there are put together the most various motivations, from the individual ones, to organizational imperatives, to the social values and exigencies and so on.152 James S. Bowman considers that as soon as we notice that ethics has become the soul of public administration, we understand that, starting with the traditional image of the professionals in the field, we must cover a long distance that im                                                             151

Alan Lawton, Michael Macaulay, “Ethics Management and Ethical Management” in Ethics and integrity in public administration: concepts and cases, Raymond W. Cox III (ed.), 107.   152 Lawton, Macaulay, 113. 

 

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plies effective actions to impose high moral standards, effective instruments to implement ethics and a functional ethical context in institutions. Thus, everything we have gained at the end of a personal effort of knowledge, implication and transformation must be set as the basis for an institutional construction which implies, among others, an assumption of the articles of the deontological codes.153

Ethical Management Bearing in mind that ethics is present in all the fields of public activity we expect that those holding public functions to have an ethical conduct above the standards of minimal ethics, either because they had been chosen, either because they have come to fill in the job as a result of a contest. Donald C. Menzel notices the fact that the main ethical attitude the public expects is that of fulfilling ones professional duties when it comes to protecting human rights, protection against criminality, assuring the confidentiality of information, protecting the environment, assuring work and leisure time activities, drafting just laws, assuring public order, obtaining social peace and many other duties. In fulfilling all of these duties, we expect civil servants, especially the ones in managerial positions to prove an ethical conduct associated with the respect for each citizen, to promote democratic values, to prove clear attachment for honoring the existing laws and so on, Consequently, “managers understand that ethics and in                                                             153

James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, “Removing employee protections: a ‘see no evil’ approach to civil service reform” in Ethics and integrity of governance: perspectives across frontiers, edited by Leo W.J.C. Huberts, Jeroen Maesschalck, Carole L. Jurkiewicz, with a foreword by John Rohr, (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2008), 339. 

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tegrity are essential qualities that managers must embrace in order to be successful”.154 Donald C. Menzel speaks of four obstacles that must be overcome to reach standards above minimal ethics: 1. leadership myopia, which regards the incapacity to understand the importance of ethics in the act of governing; 2. lack of top management awareness of misconduct, starting with the cruel realty that shows that a lot of the people in management positions are not properly informed regarding what actually happens in the organizations they lead; 3. the combined punch of history and culture, bearing in mind the influence that some cultural traditions may have on organizational ethics or an ethical government; 4. ethical illiteracy concerning the fact that there are leaders incapable of understanding the complexity if the ethical issues accompanying the public function or the act of government.155 Naturally, this question emerges: what type of knowledge, what type of expertise and abilities are necessary for someone to have in order to be considered as having ethical competence? The answer provided by Donald C. Menzel reflects an open attitude towards knowing the ethical codes of the profession, knowing the laws and their ethical implications, gaining abilities in knowing and recognizing ethical problems and solving them. Thus, a manager with ethical competence is: 1. “committed to high standards of personal and professional behavior, 2. has knowledge of relevant ethics codes and laws,                                                              154

Donald C. Menzel, Ethics moments in government: cases and controversies, (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis Group, 2010), 4.  155 Donald C. Menzel, Ethics moments in government, 4. 

 

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3. has the ability to engage in ethical reasoning when confronted with challenging situations, 4. is able to identify and act on public service ethics and values, and 5. promotes ethical practices and behavior in public agencies and organizations”.156 Donald C. Menzel considers that an ethical manner for the civil servant, the manager to serve public interest is of respecting the law. The legitimacy given by the implementation of laws is accompanied by the responsibility to honor the laws. When we have in sight the necessity for the civil servant to continuously develop her/his ethical competence, as part of her/his professional becoming, we must bear in mind that in professions such as medicine for example, continuous professional training caries on for many years after graduation. Bearing in mind the complexity of the profession and the difficulty to fulfill public wellbeing, we can expect civil servants to continuously participate in educational programs, specialization programs and professional training, including in ethics. Well done ethical training may be an excellent premise for an efficient transposition into practice of skills that are specifically related to the profession. Professional expertise has a lot to gain over the appropriation of solid ethical principles and the gaining of competences in the field of ethical decision. Thus, “ethics becomes an inseparable part of being a professional”.157 This explains the fact that “today, public administrators possess expertise in many specialized fields, such as budgeting and finance, personnel and human resources, information technology, computer engineering, management systems, public works, police, and fire services. Each specialty has a professional education requirement and                                                              156 157

Donald C. Menzel, Ethics moments in government, 18.  Donald C. Menzel, Ethics moments in government, 35. 

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an association that provides its members with ethical guidance”.158 The relation between ethics and the action of those working in public administration is seen by Rodney Erakovich and Sherman Wyman from the perspective of organizational culture. The dimensions of organizational culture are determined to a lesser extent by the idea of economic efficiency and profit and to a greater extent by ethical and efficient communication, implementing values such as transparency, institutional cohesion, justice, including social justice and so on. Consequently, it is natural to notice that among the essential preoccupations of those with managerial functions, arises a desire to create an ethical context, to objectify ethical norms and to trace the directive lines of ethical action. Having as objective providing public services, drafting public policies and other actions that aim for the public welfare, organizations in public administration stimulate the creativity of individuals in the processes of implication and socialization which leads to the strengthening of the ethical climate and to an ethical conduct based on individual and organizational values.159 Ethical problems in public administration bring along a series of difficulties regarding purposes (just as legitimate) promoted by various organizational structures. Even if we have a general frame, that of public welfare, various organizational structures of public administration may have distinct interests and to even be in the position of promoting competitive interests.                                                             

Donald C. Menzel, Ethics moments in government, 36.  Rodney Erakovich, and Sherman Wyman, “Implications of Organizational Influence on Ethical Behavior. An Analysis of the Perceptions of Public Managers” in Ethics and integrity in public administration: concepts and cases, Raymond W. Cox III (ed.), 79-89.  158 159

 

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For example, Alan Lawton and Michael Macauley give us the following picture of purposes that may be intended by local authority: 1. “to turn political choices into practical services; 2. to implement central government policy at the local level; 3. to be a vehicle for community engagement; 4. to be a body that represents local interests; 5. to deliver public services efficiently and effectively; and 6. to promote the public interest”.160 It is possible that, at least partially, the interests of central authority do not completely overlap with those of local authority. And it is here that the resolution of ethical problems may intervene at the level of relations between various authorities. To solve this type of situations we need an ethical management that involves setting in motion the mechanisms that also “focuses on stopping corruption and fraud and putting in place codes of conduct, registers of interest, perhaps a regulatory agency or an ethics officer”.161 Stuart C. Gilman and Carol W. Lewis consider that ethical responsibility in an organization pertains mainly to the manager. This is the reason because managers in public positions want to generally eliminate the relativity of applying ethical principles, the ambiguity regarding what ethical conduct means, the relation between individual ethics and organizational ethics. Thus, it is natural to support the tracing of clear directions, to circumscribe the ethical context, to clearly establish rules based on duties and law.162                                                              Lawton, Macaulay, 111.  Lawton, Macaulay, 112.  162 Lewis, Gilman, 114.  160 161

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Starting with the professional rules formulated by George Graham, authors such as Stuart C. Gilman and Carol W. Lewis synthesize the three standard categories of standards and obligations of professionals in administration thus formulated by the author above: 1. Participation. The activity of an organization must me described by keeping the employees well informed regarding the role each one has, organizational policies, the decision-making process, the elimination of conflicts of interests, the implication of personal values in relation to organizational values, the means of implication and personal participation to the life of the organization. 2. Compromise. The participation to the life of an organization always implies reaching a compromise between personal beliefs and the way things go in an organization along with routine. In the art of compromise, a component is the idea of challenging decisions outside organizations only in the situations when they are completely incompatible with the policy of the organization and the licenses justify such an attitude. An important aspect brought into the topic is “that administrators are forbidden to order a subordinate to take illegal action; suppress significant information, distort facts, or deceive; take responsibility for an opposed decision for which the superior can take responsibility; or sign unapproved documents.” 3. Implementation. When we have a final decision of the organization, it must be applied regardless of the fact that as individuals we approve or disapprove of it. When major conflicts arise between personal conflicts and the decisions inside our organization, the only solution to solve the conflict is to transfer somewhere else or to quit.163                                                              163

Lewis, Gilman, 115. 

 

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To reach the ideal of the realization of ethical management, public administration in Romania conforms more and more to the model of European administration where social responsibility and sustainable development are very important.164 Consequently, the managerial profile we expect to find in public administration is one marked by the managerial responsibility associated with these principles. Just as in economical organizations the idea of economic efficiency is accompanied by principles related to social equity, managers of public institutions must be concerned with the problems of sustainability and to responsibly act concerning the communities they are part of. These must act in the spirit of cultivating and developing the systems of values of the society. The managerial function must be associated with the knowledge of the complexity of value systems. And between the values managers promote there must also be their function as social entrepreneurs that have the responsibility to solve social problems, among others.165 From an ethical point of view, it is important to understand the necessity of an ethical attitude when discussing the problems of strategic thinking in public administration. Strategic decisions must be accompanied by assuming the social responsibility, because decisions are based on values, and depending on the values we embrace we opt for the purposes and projects we wish to accomplish. Strategic decisions should be ethical decisions, which does not necessarily mean they should be morally correct, but that they are closely connected to ethical issues to the same extent as financial prob                                                             164

Ana-Maria Bercu, Mihaela Onofrei, “Social Responsibility – Value For European Administrative Space” in National and European Values of Public Administration in the Balkans, Ani Matei, Crina Rădulescu (Editors), 145.  165 Dalton E. McFarland, Management and Society. An Institutional Framework, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1982), 183. 

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lems are connected to financial decision.166 Hence, when we talk about the social responsibility of organizations, identifying responsible attitudes and conducts does not only imply explaining and applying a set of rules, but also identifying the major elements that managers acting responsible must take as decisions with general implications.167

Ethics Management Valentin Mureşan draws attention to the fact that ethics management does not represent the classification of ethical problems an organization is confronted with in the process of moral actions. It is a branch in organization management. Thus, ethics management has a strategic function. It implies the development of instruments and methods that contributes to building an ethical conscience of the organization as a starting point to make decision processes more efficient, to improve the ethical context proposed by the organization. Ethics management implies the institutionalization of ethics through the development of instruments such as: “ethical codes, ethical committees, ethical audit, ethical education of the personnel, techniques to create a moral institutional culture, searching for toolboxes of ethical decision”.168 At the same time, ethics management in public administration implies strategic options for the ethical development of organizations. Tracing the steps of the model suggested by Donald                                                              166

Edward R. Freeman, Daniel R. Gilbert, jr., Corporate Strategy and the Search for Ethics, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 3.  167 J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, Administrative Ethics in the Twenty-first Century, (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 152.  168 Valentin Mureşan, “Managementul eticii în companii între realitate şi speran ă”, in Dumitru Bor un (coord.), Responsabilitatea socială corporativă: de la relaţii publice la dezvoltare durabilă, (Bucureşti: SNSPA – 2010), 86. 

 

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Menzel, Valentin Mureşan’s analyses focus upon four types of strategic approaches: “the first is the strategy based on compliance, that being on the formulation and imposition of ethical rules in the organization. The second is the strategy of cost inclusion, a vision that treats unethical actions as a cost factor that needs to be reduced, minimized or eliminated. The third strategy is of learning, where the emphasis is on the ethical training processes and assimilation of ethical dispositions. Finally, the fourth is the strategy creating a moral organizational culture; this is considered the most promising of all, encompassing all the others”.169 One of the interesting conclusions of the research made by Valentin Mureşan regarding the situation of ethics in organizations in Romania is that although they recognize the importance of ethics, in general the representatives of the organizations reject the idea of professionalizing ethics management.170 Moreover, Cristian Ducu notices that when they have to choose between ethics and conformity, the tendency is to opt for conformity. We mention that within this context “ethics regards respecting some moral principles and values, while conformity concerns respecting the legal articles and national and international standards” (Ducu, 2009). This option may be explained by the privilege the juridical relation has when encountering the issue of choosing between ethical and juridical decisions. But, starting with this very attitude where juridical specialists are privileged, it would be ideal for solving problems regarding the institutionalization and ethics management to resort to a specialist “that knows how to analyze the de facto situation in an organization, to think coher                                                             Valentin Mureşan, “Managementul eticii în companii între realitate şi speran ă”, 87.  170 Valentin Mureşan, “Situa ia managementului etic în România”, publicat 3 July 2009, http://www.ccea.ro/home/publicatii/articole/valentin-muresansituatia-managementului-etic-in-romania 169

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ent and consistent strategies for responsibility, at the level of the organization as well as regarding its relation to stakeholders, to suggest solutions to prevent and/or solve internal conflicts (between employees, between employees and managers/owners and so on), to draft the guiding lines of an organizational culture and determine managers and employees to follow them, to examine internal policies and adjust them according to necessities and so on”.171 Thus the importance of the ethics and conformity respondent can be emphasized by the fact that he/she contributes to the strategic development and supports the manager of the organization in the processes regarding ethics management. A more colored perspective on ethics management is given by Donald Menzel when trying to answer questions such as: what is, why is it necessary, who achieves ethics management? To the first question, the answer may be: ethics management represents “the cumulative actions taken by managers to engender an ethical sensitivity and consciousness that permeates all aspects of getting things done in a public service agency. It is, in short, the promotion and maintenance of a strong ethics culture in the public workplace”.172 A complex answer is needed for the question: why has ethics infiltrated among the important values in modern public administration, why is management ethics necessary? One of the explanations regards the connection we establish between ethics and efficiency. We are witnessing today “a growing recognition by private and public sector managers                                                              Cristian Ducu, “Rolul Responsabilului de etică şi conformitate şi beneficiile pe care el le aduce (I.)”, publicat 3 July 2009, http://www.ccea.ro/ home/publicatii/articole/rolul-responsabilului-de-etica  172 Donald C. Menzel, “Ethics Management in Public Organizations. What, Why, and How?” in Handbook of administrative ethics, Terry L. Cooper (ed.)., 2nd ed., rev. and expanded, (New York, NY: Marcel Dekker, Inc, 2000), 355.  171

 

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that productive, high performing units are value driven units that place ethics high on their list of values”.173 Following the conducted research, Menzel shows that the organizations that have managed to create an adequate ethical context have better results, and where employees are under unethical pressure, the results are diminished, work satisfaction is low and conflicts inside the organization are growing. The importance assigned to ethical values, at the same time, a sign of the democratization of society.174 Who are those who achieve ethics management? Analyzing various specialty journals, Donald Menzel notices that in the role of the practitioner is the civil servant, who must act having at hand four components: hiring, performance, training, and auditing.175 Concurrently, in the process of building an organizational culture that implies ethics management, Menzel considers that we must eliminate a few false beliefs about the role and the place of ethics that we may find in the mentality of those working in public administration: 1. Ethical values are personal and are not expressed within the organization 2. Ethical people always act ethically regardless of what goes on in the organization 3. Ethics discussions in public organizations contribute little, if anything, to productivity, morale, or problem solving 4. Ethics cannot be learned, taught or even discussed in any meaningful way 5. Creating and distributing a written ethics policy eliminates any further responsibility of the organization or its leaders                                                             

Donald C. Menzel, “Ethics Management in Public Organizations”, 355.  Donald C. Menzel, “Ethics Management in Public Organizations”, 357.  175 Donald C. Menzel, “Ethics Management in Public Organizations”, 357.  173 174

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6. Appearing to do wrong and actually doing wrong are different matters.176 Beyond the difficulties that come with the institutionalization of ethics and the elimination of preconceived ideas about the role and the place ethics must have in public administration, Menzel is convinced that “There is no magic elixir or formula for achieving the ethical workplace, but there are ways and means to strengthen the ethical environments of public organizations”.177

                                                             176

Donald C. Menzel, “Ethics Management in Public Organizations”, 362364.  177 Donald C. Menzel, “Ethics Management in Public Organizations”, 364. 

 

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6. Deontological Codes and Their Importance in Professional Development and the Shaping of Public Space Most professions today have ethical or deontological codes. They are either general codes particularized to each profession, either specialized codes that concern the exigency and particularity of the profession. Among the well known codes that bring standards of professional conduct are the codes of medical professions, the codes of magistrates, PR or advertising professionals, the code of journalists, the code of psychologists and so on. Beside the codes of the professional associations, there is an unprecedented tendency towards a development of codes specific to various organizations, economic organizations, especially multinational ones. The field of public administration also enjoys preoccupations regarding codes. In Romania, the code of conduct of civil servants is part of the legislative documents that regulates the field of public administration.

The Etiquette Code and the Ethical Code Etiquette codes are guides that tell us which conduct is desirable in a certain situation. Thus, gestures become significant, and significations are ethically charged. Etiquette is also associated with “the art of living beautifully”. And this aesthetics on the plain of the conduct is translated with ethically valued attitudes. Etiquette is not only important regarding private relations and conducts, but also regarding the way  

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we relate to others in our work place. There are authors that advise us to keep in mind etiquette at work, considering we spend a great part of our lives at work, and to bear in mind that “the art of living” must be also applied to work relations. Personal values must be significant also in our professional lives concerning practices that regard etiquette, even if some professions have their own rules that come to complete, to color or sometimes restrict the general norms of conduct.178 Etiquette tells us that professionalism, politeness and modesty, fair conduct and honoring the interests of the organization can be important elements in career evolution. In such a context of ethical and professional relations we are advised to value collegiality, but not to mistake work relations for friendship. Those promoted to management jobs are advised not to forget their previous position, not to forget where they started and to keep their politeness good intentions regarding the others. To be aware of the fact that when we accept the advantages and honors that accompany a function, we also accept the duties, and etiquette is an intrinsic part of those obligations.179 If civil servants were aware that efficient and competitive action is connected to ethical communication, we could avoid the often encountered situation when “the counter separates two worlds without a common language. From each side it is possible to improve this state of things with a minimum of cordiality, understanding and humor”.180 Usually talks on ethics are considered to pertain to personal options, measurable preferences of a personal nature, individual standards. Thus, the compliance to the articles of a                                                              178

Aurelia Anastasia Marinescu, Codul bunelor maniere astăzi, (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1995), 194.  179 Marinescu, 195.  180 Marinescu, 196. 

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code is more each person’s internal option. Etiquette is each one’s explicit option. It is difficult to impose it to everyone. Unlike the particular situation regarding etiquette codes, there is a series on administrative instruments that can determine us to accept the articles of a professional conduct code understood as an ethical code. It is usually the exercise of an institutional authority that engages the ones involved in the institution in adopting common ethical standards. This authority may be exercised on the basis of an ethical code which encompasses the premises of a common assumption of the code understood as the means to state the professionalism of those working in public administration.181 Regarding the necessity of assuming an ethical code, an example suitable for public institution managers can be taken from one of Donald C. Menzel where he relates the attitude of a civil servant in an intermediary management position and who was constantly stressed by his colleagues to advise them in problems concerning professional ethics. Noticing that what his/her colleagues lacked in ethical decisionmaking was an acceptable level of standardization, a platform to offer decision guidelines, he/she would give them a copy of one of the ethical codes that regulated institutionally their profession. Each one of these had discovered that an ethical code can be an instrument to aid them in their work.182 Thus, the deontological code seems a friend in need, a conduct guide, a platform of principles, rules and techniques to follow, an instrument to help us make ethical decisions and so on, but also a useful instrument in constructing professional identity. Therefore, beyond etiquette, beyond the po                                                             181

Phillip Monypenny, “A Code of Ethics as a Means of Controlling Administrative Conduct” in Classics of Administrative Ethics, edited by Willa Bruce, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2001), 216.  182 Donald C. Menzel, Ethics moments in government: cases and controversies, 125. 

 

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liteness we owe to each other, the harmony we try to cultivate in inter-human relations, the codes establish a place for the construction of the professional image and identity. They are important because they place professionalism on ethical grounds and condition ethical evaluation by the growth of professional competence.

Ethical Codes – An Instrument for Optimizing the Profession The conduct of civil servants in Romania establishes a series of nine principles, with different relevance and variable applicability, which civil servants must respect in their daily activity. Among them a central principle is: “Professionalism, a principle according to which civil servants shall be responsible, competent, efficient, honest and conscientious in pursuing their duties”.183 Therefore, in the process of professionalization of each individual involved in activities in the public sector, the educational institutions, that have a role to train professionals in the public sector, the organizations in which these professionals are doing their jobs, and these professionals should prioritize the merging of professional competences with ethical competences and ethical expertise. The codes of professional ethics are important instruments in accomplishing a favorable ethical context for decisions of optimizing ethics management in public administration. One of the objectives of the Code of conduct is the growth of ethical competence and professionalism. This must be an instrument that works in a combination supposed by                                                              183 Legea nr. 7/18 februarie 2004 privind Codul de conduită al funcţionarilor publici, republicată în Monitorul Oficial nr. 525 din 2 august 2007. (Law no. 7/February 18th 2004 regarding the code of conduct of civil servants, republished in the Official Monitor no. 525 from August 2nd 2007), Art. 3 – d. 

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the institutionalization of ethics in public administration. To reach such a goal, an increased effort is necessary in implementing public policies that favor this undertaking. It is concurrently necessary to have ethics management in each institution, with an emphasis on the continuous formation of the personnel through ethical trainings and institutional development in the spirit of the values assumed by each institution in part and the public system as a whole. Based on the conclusions of many authors, Jeremy F. Plant synthesizes a few of the ways to circumscribe deontological codes: 1. codes are guides to help civil servants to distinguish between right and wrong; 2. codes emphasize the ethical standards of the conducts of those in public administration and therefore produce a higher level of trust in the institutions; 3. codes are meant to offer guidelines on interpretation of the situation where different values are conflicting, being an instrument for ethical decision; 4. codes define the ethical conduct of civil servants, strongly correlating professional standards and public action.184 Jeremy F. Plant notices that one of the important debates on codes in the public administration concerns the existence of confusion about three possible significations we associate with deontological codes and the purposes we attach to those: juridical systems, moral systems or instruments of symbolic communication.185 Beyond such possible confusions, it is important to start from the premise that ethics is a distinct dimension of the life of organizations and that it is closely related to performance in public administration.                                                              184

Jeremy F. Plant, “Codes of Ethics” in Handbook of administrative ethics, Terry L. Cooper (ed.), 311.  185 Plant, 311. 

 

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Bogdan Diaconu reveals the importance of ethical codes in close relation to the managerial function and the development of professional ethics: 1. The ethical code as a component of organizational culture. In this sense, the ethical code is the depository of the values of the organization, it does not only set the principles, the norms, the rules that guide conduct and ethical decisions, but also formulates the apotheoses of the organization. The code sets the ethical context where the personal and professional development of individuals takes place; it regulates the way to protect shareholders, managers, administrative apparatus employees and organization, seen as responsible subject interests; it guides the organization towards various public categories and towards the whole society; it develops the image and the prestige of the organization by correlating the interest of the organization with serving public interest.186 2. The ethical code as an instrument of decision. It concerns the fact that once adopted, ethical codes become instruments of decision for all administrative structures and individual options, through a close correlation of the articles of the code and the functioning and internal regulations policies with legal articles. Codes are described as instruments of prevention and solving conflicts. Consequently, the ethics commission must dispose of a series of clear regulations and a series of ethical or administrative sanctions that should be clearly specified in the text of the code. Beyond the general articles, “what must be well described, publicly repudiated, discouraged and sanctioned are the immoral practices, especially generalized ones such as bribery, backstairs influence, nepotism, preferential relations”.187 3. The ethical code as a management instrument in human resources. Because it aims at making decisions and                                                              186 187

Diaconu, 140.  Diaconu, 142. 

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shaping actions in all levels of organizational structures, from the simple employee to the higher level of administration board, the ethical code “must guarantee justice and equity in: employment, promotion, internal integration, prize giving, eligibility”.188 4. The ethical code as an instrument of branding and marketing. The code has important functions in establishing relevant relations with other institutions, various organizations, public categories that they must involve in ethical relations and make loyal to the ethical and responsible principles of the organization.189 These four ways are emphasized by Bogdan Diaconu as forms of a possible optimization of ethics oriented towards the development of professionalism by offering solutions, imposing decisions and generating efficient changes for all those involved, individuals, organizations, various public categories. An important aspect of ethical and efficient action is correlating the deontological codes proposed by the professional associations with the ethical codes of the organizations. Starting from a principle-orientated position, Valentin Mureşan considers there is a series of advantages in elaborating an ethical code based on principles: 1. “Principles include moral values and are largely recognized throughout the world, beyond professional borders”; 2. “Principles circumscribe the sphere of the moral”; 3. “Together with principles we have a certain guide to extend the code”;

                                                             188 189

Diaconu, 142.  Diaconu, 143. 

 

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4. “With the largely recognized ethical principles, we have the sense of belonging to a mutual ethos”.190 A classical text that tries to operate the principles that must be at the basis of ethical conduct in public administration is that of William C. Beyer. He is convinced that those who work in public administration cannot accomplish their mission unless they aim to attain public welfare; he manifests a preoccupation with the ethics that governs their conduct, but also for the terms of their employment, and the condition in which they develop their activity. Starting with this, William C. Beyer suggests a series of principles that should guide the activity of those working in public administration: 1. “He should at all times be courteous, especially in his dealings with citizens who come to him with complaints or for information, assistance or advice. 2. He should give the best that is in him to the work he is called upon to perform. 3. He should deal fairly with all citizens, and should not accord to some more favorable treatment than to others. 4. He should not limit his independence of action by accepting gratuities or favors from private citizens who have business dealings with the government. 5. He should never be a party to any transaction which would require him, as a representative of a department of government, to pass upon the quality or price of goods or services which he, in some other capacity, is offering for sale to that department. 6. If a public servant is asked by his superior to do something which would jeopardize the vital interests of the public, he should first endeavor to dissuade his superior from                                                              190

Valentin Mureşan, “Principiismul – ghid în realizarea codurilor etice”, 30 January 2010, http://www.ccea.ro/home/publicatii/articole/valentinmuresan-ghid-realizare-cod-etic-principiismul 

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pressing the request, and if this method proves unsuccessful he should tender his resignation, stating publicly his reason for doing so. 7. A public servant who is charged with the enforcement of a law with which he is not in sympathy should either sub-ordinate his personal views or resign from the service. 8. He should work in full cooperation with other public servants in furthering the ends of government and in promoting public welfare. 9. He should be true to his obligations as a custodian of public property and regard its misuse or waste as serious an offense as the direct misuse or waste of money from the public treasury”.191 All these elements are significant for combining attitudes that are relevant for professionalism in public administration with ethical principles. However, another tendency is also present, to reject the idea that ethics and its validation through ethical codes could provide significant results in pursuing an efficient public activity. These critiques depart especially from the weaker character of the measures of a deontological code in relation to the rules imposed by law. Moreover, those that criticize the function mode of codes and the exaggerated importance given to them, claim that deontological codes should actually propose employees the highest standards the profession has, regarding competence as well as ethics.192 Ethics management seen as part of public management emphasizes the importance of control exercised through ethical codes, legislation, other control forms and mechanisms,                                                              191

William C. Beyer, “Ethics in the Public Service: Proposals for a Public Service Code”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 101, The Ethics of the Professions and of Business (May, 1922): 156-157.  192 Lewis, Gilman, 191. 

 

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understood as external modes of influence of civil servants. In this context, ethical behavior is especially encouraged rather than proposing policies regarding the sanctions imposed for the infringement of the codes of conduct.193 Beyond any ethical minimalism, we must bear in mind that some codes are formalized as laws or juridical regulations. In this case, the infringement of elements of the code can attract sanctions or even conviction to a certain number of years in jail. “Legislated codes provide legal penalties and protections as necessary and effective constraints on official power, public authority, and the potential for abuse of administrative discretion. Administrative standards and procedures assist decision making and managers by providing an operational framework tied to workaday realities”.194 Even if they imply coercion, even if they envisage various types of sanctions, deontological codes are not an inquisitorial instance. They do not come to punish, but to trace the limits of the comfort of the professional activity and the benefits that derive from a mutual ethical conduct in the workplace. They come to clarify the level of ethical standardization, implication and evaluation. Consequently, codes should be regarded not as an instrument of coercion, but more like a structure of ethical standards that offer security to those under the power of an ethical code. It is natural that the employees of an organization know the expectations of the organization regarding the norms of conduct, principles and values embraced by the organization, the level of tolerance and the degree of sanctioning in relation to possible infringements of the respective regulations, the support as re                                                             193

Jeroen Maesschalck, “Ethics and Administrative Reform” in Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, edited by Jack Rabin, First update supplement, (Boca Raton, FL.: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005), 96.  194 Lewis, Gilman, 191. 

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gards solving ethical dilemmas or conflicts, the type of loyalty and degree of responsibility implied by being part of the respective organization and so on. Carol W. Lewis and Stuart C. Gilman consider that we can associate codes with three general objectives and each of these can direct us towards different models of interpreting the importance of the codes: 1. inside the organization, codes encourage conducts based on a very high ethical standard; 2. they are the instrument of ethical communication with a special effect regarding the degree of trust in the organization in question by various public categories that the organization communicates with and serves; 3. they come to the aid of those faced with making ethical decisions.195 In his turn, Joseph F. Zimmerman indicates that, in the act of governing, ethical codes have become an important instrument in implementing public policies. They follow three objectives: 1. “Maintaining high ethical standards in government service, 2. increasing public confidence in the integrity of public officials and employees, 3. assisting officials and employees in determining the proper course of action when they are uncertain about the propriety of a contemplated action, thereby preventing them from unwittingly entangling public and private interests”.196 Thus, codes have a special impact upon shaping conduct as well as upon making decisions. Codes come to establish rules of conduct and ways to perpetually improve them,                                                              Lewis, Gilman, 191.  Joseph F. Zimmerman, “Ethics In The Public Service” in Classics of Administrative Ethics, edited by Willa Bruce, 222.  195 196

 

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have the role of making available for the public instruments of ethical standards, of rewards and sanctions, even if, it is true, just as in the case of laws, they do not provide any guarantee that once adopted, they will automatically act upon those that are the aim of the regulations present in the codes in question.197 But, as we notice in the case of laws, applying sanctions for regulation infringement does not derive from the necessity of consciously assuming or not assuming the regulations of the code, but from the fact that they act in the ethical context in question.

Ethical Training as Instrument of Professional Development Codes become more and more important for those working in public administration because codes are seen as a result of public expectations with regard to values that professionals in public organizations must promote. Therefore, Jeremy F. Plant shows that we have professionalization, on the one hand, which determines ethics to become a daily concern, and on the other hand, a request from the public for responsibility and for professionals’ standards of conduct in public organizations. Codes are seen as part of a training process of civil servants in competence, honor, integrity, serving public welfare and so on.198 Thus, codes play an important part in eliminating trust deficit. It is well known that there is better internal communication within the organizations in which individuals are treated with respect and at the same time such organizations succeed to build trusting relations with the community more easily. Trust in relations with the community is based on a                                                              197 198

Lewis, Gilman, 192.  Plant, 327. 

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complex process of communication, consulting and collaboration, which implies, among others, drafting ethical codes and providing ethical trainings.199 An important part of ethics management involves knowing and applying the articles of the ethical codes. This is how the importance of ethics management training programs is revealed. Trainings on ethical problems are not only meant to solve the situation that arises because of ethics deficiency in a professional environment, but also have the role to permanently emphasize the importance of ethics and propose specific solutions to the ethical problems that occur, to engage each individual in the process of promoting ethics in the workplace.200 Those working in public administration are not subject to the strong control that should come from professional associations, as it happens in other cultural spaces with various professions that have the right to license and to authorize practice in the respective professions. This is probably why at the moment of hiring we do not have imposed rules to verify the fulfillment of all ethical standards, but they are implied as being taken for granted, until proven otherwise. These standards can be more easily verified by the employer rather than by the professional association, which greatly diminishes the responsibility of the public administration professional to his/her profession per se and to the professional association. Concurrently, we can notice that in the case of civil servants "training in the application of a given public sector’s code of ethics is typically of minimal duration and relevance, even though it usually provides the primary mechanism for exposing new officials to the “core values” of the institution”.201                                                              Donald C. Menzel, “Ethics Management in Public Organizations”, 360.  Donald C. Menzel, “Ethics Management in Public Organizations”, 358.  201 Whitton, 238.  199 200

 

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Hence, it is imperative that a greater attention must be paid by public institutions to continually train personnel in domains concerning the growth of professional competence, and the acquiring and development of ethical competence has an important role in this matter. Valentin Mureşan suggests the need for three types of ethical training: 1. conformity training, that has as fundamental purpose the understanding of moral principles and rules and then acting according with these, understood as an adequacy to rules, principles, laws and so on; 2. formation training of moral dispositions, that has as main purpose the introspection of rules, development of virtues, cultivating ethical situational thinking and so on; 3. training for development of moral thinking, that especially concerns the necessary forming of ethical competence and developing abilities and methods of ethical decision.202 Bearing in mind the dose of relativism that a society rebuilt on minimal ethics permits,203 bearing in mind the increase in deontological codes of professional associations and of various organizations that adopt their own ethical code, it is natural for the public administration to raise the issue of the necessity of general guidelines and of a unified ethical context so that the particular organizational provisions of the deontological codes destined for those working in public administration should be drafted. Although we live in the age of the decline of duties, although the strong sense of an absolutist moral or of a thorough and unique theory of obligations can no                                                              Valentin Mureşan, “Principiismul – ghid în realizarea codurilor etice”.  Gilles Lipovetsky, Amurgul datoriei; Antonio Sandu, Oana M. Ciuchi, “Affirmative dimensions of applied ethics”, Revista de cercetare şi intervenţie socială, No. 30 (2010): 53-62; Antonio Sandu, “Post-modern Bioethical Challenges”, Revista Română de Bioetică, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2012): 87-88.  202 203

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longer function in the new society, we cannot disregard the fact that public administration offers us the ethical context to speak about multiple duties that the various categories of workers in the public system have. Beside the general sense of the duties we have regarding ourselves or regarding otherness, from the perspective of “a minimal ethics”, a “weak ethics”, we can talk about a series of duties for those who want to work in public administration. Among these duties we mention: 1. duties to the profession, the organization we are part of, the various categories of public the organization serves; but also, 2. duties to ourselves in line with personal development, professional accomplishment, and perpetual growth of ethical competence. From the perspective of professional ethics it is important to stress the obligations of civil servants as ethical and juridical duty: “The civil servants are required to fulfill their duties with professionalism, impartiality and lawfulness and to withhold any act that could incur prejudices to natural or legal persons or to the prestige of civil servants body”.204 The imposing of the Ethical Code by means of legal codification such as Law no. 7/2004 is a new argument to underline the imperative character of the Code measures, the essential connection between ethical action and the wellfunctioning of institutions,205 between the quality of the leader as bearer of the organization values206 in a context in which “both marketing and leadership have a new meaning for pub                                                             204

Legea nr. 188/1999 privind Statutul funcţionarilor publici, publicată în Monitorul Oficial nr. 600 din 8 decembrie 1999. (Law no. 188/1999 regarding the statute of civil servants, The Official Monitor no. 600, December 8th 1999), Art. 43 – 1.  205 Codru a Liana Cuceu, “An Overview of the Feminist Critiques of the Public Sphere”, European Journal of Science and Theology, Vol.8, No.3 (2012): 223-231.  206 Hin ea, Mora, iclău, 93. 

 

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lic organizations”207 and the quality of the legislative content that should be based on the idea that “laws need to be constantly adjusted depending on the evolution of crime, mode of expression, risks and vulnerabilities”.208 Thus, ethical action, ethical expertise or exercising ethical competences is involving both moral values and the legal or the constitutional ones.209 This juridical manner of exercising ethics in the professional space has as model the medical field. The overlapping of ethical and juridical is done in the tradition of professionals’ practice, but also under the pressure of the international documents ruling the bioethical issues.210 Using this model in the public administration, ethical action is overregulated in becoming an action that is voided by any possibility to subjectively choose, and that is under the pressure of obligation brought by the imposing law. One must start from the premise that in all democratic societies “the formal training of a professional, whether in law, medicine, or ministry, is one of the first and most striking characteristics of the practitioner, a characteristic which decidedly sets him apart from everyone else within his commu                                                             207

Andrei igănaş, Tudor iclău, Cristina Mora, Laura Bacali, “Use of Public Sector Marketing and Leadership, in Romania’s Local Public Administration”, Revista de cercetare şi intervenţie socială, vol. 34, (2011): 212.  208 Dana Copot, Gabriela Vatavu, Vlad Diaconescu, Rodica Diaconescu, Iulian Rusu, “Juridical Protection of the Romanian Cultural and Religious Patrimony”, European Journal of Science and Theology, Vol. 8, Supplement 1 (2012): 110.  209 Elena Toader, Tudorel Toader, “Ethical and Constitutional Values Reflected in Medical Law”, Revista Română de Bioetică, Vol. 10, Nr. 3 (2012): 6-10.  210 Beatrice Ioan, “Decisions Regarding Medical Treatment in End of Life Situations – A Subject of Debate at European Level”, Revista Română de Bioetică, Vol. 9, No. 4, (October – December 2011): 63-64; Daniela Cojocaru, “The Issue of Trust in the Doctor-Patient Relationship: Construct and Necessity”, Revista Română de Bioetică, Vol. 10, Nr. 3 (2012): 3-5. 

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nity of service”.211 This concern is all the more important in the context in which we assume that a laicization of ethics is needed, at least when we have in mind the public space,212 in terms of the relation between secularism and religious resurge that tends to become quite ambiguous in contemporary public attitudes.213 If we accept that universities “may be understood as fundamental organizations in any nation even as they need to modernize their approaches of institutional management”,214 it is obvious that universities must contribute to a significant extent to providing a competitive environment in economy, politics, and administration. One way could be the development of a system of lifelong learning, a central concept in the EU ideal of building a society based on knowledge, communication and ethical values. It is necessary to understand that “the lifelong learning concept aiming to equip learners with the skills and competencies”215 should lead both to an in                                                             211

John H. Morgan, “Professionalization Of Islamic Ministry In America Components Of The Legitimizing Process In Western Society”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, vol. 9 issue 26 (2010): 116.  212 Adrian Paul Iliescu, “The Autonomy of Morals. Two Analytic Arguments”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, Vol. 9, Issue 26 (2010): 3-17; Sandu Frunză, Comunicare etică şi responsabilitate socială.  213 Erdogan Yildirim, “Return of the Spirit and the Demise of Politics”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, Vol. 9 issue 27 (2010): 107-131; Virgil Ciomoş, “The Deterritorialization of Human Rights”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, Vol. 9, Issue 25, (2010): 17-27; Claudiu Her eliu,”Religion and Rural Development in Romania”, Journal of Academy of Business and Economics, JABE, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2012): 149-152.  214 Emerson Wagner Mainardes, Helena Alves, Mario Raposo, “The process of change in university management: from the “ivory tower” to entrepreneurialism”, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, No. 33 E (2011): 140.  215 Alina Irina Popescu, “Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy: Considerations on the Lifelong Learning System in Romania from a Euro-

 

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crease in professionalism and to an improvement of ethical competence. In this sense, the ethical training practiced in the university programs of public administration should be supplemented with educational programs, postgraduate programs and trainings on ethical topics, with the declared purpose to form ethical competencies and build ethical expertise. No program of university training in public administration can afford not to provide such courses dedicated to specialists in public administration that are already in various stages of their professional careers. This is an important way in which the public administration departments of universities may participate to the community life, “can maximize the experience, competence, knowledge and resources in order to better meet citizens’ needs”.216 This kind of elements is the basis of the new ethical standards we must have in view while elaborating institutional strategies and deontological codes. Good governing, efficient administration of public affairs implies that in the system we, the employees, are “good people with the character, vision, and courage to do the right thing”.217 Hence the special importance the managerial function has from an ethical perspective in drafting, adopting and implementing the ethical codes and all other elements that derive from this. At the same time, the necessity of developing professional completion programs is evident and should be constantly included in these programs of ethical training.

                                                                                                              

pean Perspective”, Revista de cercetare şi intervenţie socială, 37 (2012): 49-76.  216 Marius Profiroiu, Alina Profiroiu, Laura Mina, Marian Nica, “Romania – New E.U. Member State, A New Phase of its Transition”, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, No. 33 E (2011): 281.  217 Lewis, Gilman, 270. 

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7. Ethics in the Conduct of Civil Servants The conduct of civil servants in Romania is regulated by Law no. 7/February 18th 2004 regarding the code of conduct for civil servants, republished in the Official Monitor no. 525 of August 2nd 2007218. In general, by code of conduct we understand a set of rules containing the acceptable responsibilities and practices for individuals or groups of individuals. In the case of civil servants, their statute (adopted by Law no. 188/1999 on the statute of civil servants, modified and republished in March 2004) implies developing special prerogatives which entail a series of correlating rights and duties.219 The detail of the ethical component that is at the base of these prerogatives, rights and duties makes the object of the Code of conduct. By including them in a legal text, these elements of conduct become mandatory for all civil servants, and their disregard brings about disciplinary, or even worse, penal consequences (Art. 23). This legal frame is not used to create a new ethical vision, but to create the ethical context to facilitate the continuous ethical development and to impose the constant preoccupation to improve the moral condition of professionals in

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From now on we will use for this law the abbreviation ‘code of conduct’. The references to the paragraphs of the code have between parenthesis the number of the article and, if there is the case, the letter of the quoted paragraph.  219 Valentin I. Prisăcaru, Funcţionarii publici, (Bucureşti: Ed. All Beck, 2004), 83. 

 

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public administration. Thus, the legal function of public authority is used to develop this ethical context.220 We can ask ourselves: to create such an ethical context, is it necessary to devote texts of the law to moral behavior? Do the rights and duties established by the law attract ethical rights and duties? Can the ethical obligations that derive from a legislation process be eliminated with the change of the legal articles that created them? To draw the premises of a discussion on the relation between ethics and rights, or the debate whether morality is based on rights or not, we will evoke Joseph Raz’s analyses. He distinguishes between the legal rights imposed by the authority of the state under the threat of sanctions encoded in laws, and moral rights that are imposed under the threat of public disapproval, social marginalization and so on. To help us adequately distinguish between the two types of rights, Joseph Raz explains: “Whereas legal rights are supported by existing law, moral rights are supported by moral principles and rules. Legal systems do not require reference to moral systems for their understanding, just as moral systems require no reference to legal systems. One may have a legal right to do something immoral, or have a moral right without any corresponding legal guarantee. Legal rights are derived from codified bodies of law, legislative enactments, common law, and the executive orders of the highest government official. Moral rights, by contrast, exist independently of, and form a basis for, criticizing or justifying legal rights. Finally, legal rights can be eliminated by amending existing bodies of law (or by revolution), but moral rights cannot be eroded or ban                                                             220

Cynthia E. Lynch, Thomas Dexter Lynch, “Democratic Morality Back to the Future” in Ethics and integrity in public administration: concepts and cases, Raymond W. Cox III (ed.), 21.  

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ished through the political process”.221 In the same light, legal and moral duties can be regarded. Even if sometimes the legal dimension and the moral one intertwine, we also have situations when moral duties are distinct. When we have situations such as the one of the Code of conduct for civil servants, the moral duties are encoded in a juridical manner, what is ethical and what is legal are under the incidence of the sanction deriving from the juridical encoding. When it is not clear enough that a moral right or a moral obligation are respected we can appeal to a way to generalize their practice, because the purpose is to strengthen the level of moral duties through legislative documents. Not any moral duty can be protected by the state, but when these duties concern the principles of democratic government, for it to be both ethical and efficient we can resort to a juridical encoding. In the case of the Code of conduct, it is about strengthening the moral duties of professionals in public administration, and the consequences of infringement are both ethical and legal sanctions. In this case this is a way to protect individual values, democratic values and generally the efficiency of the rule of law. Like in other social, cultural and political contexts in Romania, we can see a great variety of codes and levels of their influence. Thus, we have codes proposed by professional associations that have consequences at the level of ethical regulation and sanctions deriving from the infringement of such codes are rather symbolical, implying the moral blame of fellow professionals. For example, this is the case of the Code of Professional Practice in Public Relations by the Romanian Association of Public Relations Professionals.                                                              221

Joseph Raz, “Right-Based Moralities” in Philosophical Ethics. An Introduction to Moral Philosophy, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), second edition, (New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1991), 324-325. 

 

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Another type of codes is the one with a greater regulation force because the text of the code is a separate ethical code, having the quality of code, not the quality of a juridical document, but drafted in close correlation to the legislation regulating the field in question. Such is The Code of Practice in Advertising which is drafted interdependently with The Law on advertising no. 148 of 26.07.2000, even if it does not have the quality of a document that legislates, being just a document of a professional association, the Romanian Advertising Council – RAC, the unique self-regulating organism meant to represent the interests of the advertising industry in relation to Romanian authorities as well as its consumers. However, there are also codes like the present one. Drafted as a juridical document, with impact in the whole field, they regulate with the imposition of maximal regulations as regards their compulsoriness.

Definition of Key Terms in the Professional Conduct of Civil Servants Currently, in the head notes, codes comprise a series of general references to the values of the profession, the legal, national and international frameworks, the rights and duties, the duties of professionals in the field in terms of their own professional competitiveness, the profession per se as well as the duties to various institutions and categories of public. An important part is concerned with the way prizes and sanctions are administered. Additionally, included in the introduction to the codes is a series of terminological clarifications, definitions, key concepts establishing a common language inside the profession. The code of conduct provides definitions of the main terms regarding the conduct of civil servants (Art. 4). We emphasize the importance of the following definitions:

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“c) public interest means the settling of legitimate requests by natural and legal persons, of public and private law, Romanian and foreign, as well as the fulfillment of duties by public servants regularly and continuously, with impartiality and fairness, in keeping with the responsibilities they have under the law; d) personal interest means any patrimonial or nonpatrimonial advantage that civil servants may pursue, for themselves or their families, parents, friends or closed ones or for legal persons and organizations they have had business or other types of relations with, which might affect their impartiality and integrity in pursuing public duties; e) conflict of interests means the situation in which the personal interest, direct or indirect, of a civil servant is against the public interest, so that it affects the independence and impartiality in making decisions or in carrying out duties in time and with objectiveness.” (Art. 4) The text of the code of conduct clearly distinguishes between personal and public interest, providing the conflict of interests a definition with no ambiguities: the situation in which the personal interest of a civil servant is against the public interest, so that it affects impartiality in the decisionmaking.

The General Principles of the Professional Conduct of Civil Servants The code of conduct establishes a series of nine principles, with different relevance and variable applicability, which civil servants must respect in their daily activity: “a) The supremacy of law, meaning that civil servants shall observe the Constitution and the Romanian laws;

 

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b) The priority of the public interest, meaning that civil servants shall place the public interest above any other interest in pursuing their public duties; c) Securing the equal treatment of citizens in their relation with public authorities and institutions, meaning that civil servants shall apply the same legal principles in identical or similar situations. d) Professionalism, a principle according to which civil servants shall be responsible, competent, efficient, honest and conscientious in pursuing their duties. e) Impartiality and independence, meaning that in pursuing their public duties civil servants shall be objective and neutral when it comes to any political, economic, religious or any other interest. f) Integrity, the principle according to which civil servants must not request or accept, directly or indirectly, for themselves or for others, any advantages or benefits in pursuing the duties of their civil service position or to take any unfair advantage of the positions they hold; g) Freedom of thought and expression, meaning that civil servants can express and implement their opinions by observing the rule of law and good morals. h) Honesty and fairness in pursuing public duties and responsibilities. i) Openness and transparency, meaning that the activities carried out by the civil servants in performing their positions are public and can be monitored by the citizens.” (Art. 3) Consequently, a major problem here is the issue of responsibility. Bearing in mind the central place it occupies, we must remember that, as Bogdan Diaconu emphasizes, “the particularity of professional obligations in general and of the responsibilities of civil servants in particular, is that they are responsible not only for what they are doing, but also for

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what they are not doing; they are responsible not only for what they are intentionally doing, but also for what they are doing unintentionally, out of ignorance. Due to the importance of the function, the magnitude of her/his decisions, the civil servant is responsible not only for abuse of office or accepting bribery, but also for mistakes like: delays, for example not making decisions in due time or blocking the decision process in the middle of solving issues; incompetence, that is to say ignorance, unawareness or incapacity to understand the activities of the public field in their whole dimension, economic, legal, social; laziness, negligence, arbitrariness or incapacity to organize, for example, administrative chaos, legal or decision incoherence.222 At the same time we notice that three of the principles mentioned by the Code of conduct are principles inspired by general philosophy: moral integrity, freedom of thought and expression, respectively honor and equity. Moral integrity represents a trait valued by philosophers. Thus, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy it is specified that a contemporary author, Mark Halfon, describes integrity in moral terms, speaking of a person’s engagement to lead a moral life and to assume intellectual responsibilities in the attempt to understand the requirements of such life. In his vision, incorruptible people “embrace a moral point of view that urges them to be conceptually clear, logically consistent, apprised of relevant empirical evidence, and careful about acknowledging as well as weighing relevant moral considerations. Persons of integrity impose these restrictions on themselves since they are concerned, not simply with taking any moral position, but with pursuing a commitment to do what is

                                                             222

Diaconu, 81. 

 

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best”.223 According to the code, such a morally honorable person refuses to take advantage of any benefit her/his function would bring. Theorists in public administration consider that integrity must be associated with the idea of acting according to dominant norms and values. When it is part of the articles of deontological codes it is associated with incorruptibility, honor, equity and abandoning self-interest in favor of the interest of the organization or society.224 Freedom of thought and expression represents one of the fundamental rights of the human being and this Code of conduct affirms it. However, the right of civil servants to state their own opinions is limited by the code through the principle of impartiality and independence, which demand of the civil servant to adopt a neutral attitude towards any type of religious, political and ideological opinion. Is this a contradiction within the code? We may say it is not, in the case that the statute of the civil servants imposes some restrictions of civil rights, justified by the nature of their functions. Civil servants are free to express their opinions, but these opinions must not be contrary to the services they provide to beneficiaries, regardless whether the beneficiaries have different political, religious and other opinions. In this sense, civil servants are required to limit their (natural) right of expression, when their expression of opinions may contradict the opinions of someone who benefits from the civil services.                                                              223

Mark Halfon, “Integrity: A Philosophical Inquiry”, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) quoted by Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine, “Integrity”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/integrity/, 37.   224 Frédérique Six and Leo W.J.C. Huberts, “Judging a public official’s integrity” in Ethics and integrity of governance: perspectives across frontiers, edited by Leo W.J.C. Huberts, Jeroen Maesschalck, Carole L. Jurkiewicz, with a foreword by John Rohr, (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2008), 68. 

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Finally, honor and equity represent a particular aspect of moral integrity correlated by the Code of conduct to one of the principles of ethical virtue: good-faith. About this latter virtue, Andre Comte-Sponville says that: “good-faith is simultaneously a transitive and a reflexive sincerity. It regulates, or should regulate, our relations with others and with ourselves. It searches to accomplish, between people as well as inside each human, the maximum of truth, of authenticity and, consequently, a minimum of falseness and dissimulation. There is no absolute sincerity, but neither absolute love nor justice: this does not stop us from aspiring to them, to make efforts and, sometimes, even to get a little close to this ideal… Good faith is precisely this effort, and the effort in itself becomes a virtue”.225 From the perspective of ethics in the public function, the good faith civil servant is the one that delivers the required information with honesty, providing all elements he/she knows may help solving the problem of the beneficiary, of the various categories of public. The practice of keeping secrets, telling only half-truths or concealing the truth must be limited to strictly special situations when the secret is kept on the basis of ethical and juridical argumentation. Thus, the tendency to enlarge the zone of secrecy beyond natural secrecy can become a practice with negative consequences in civil practices. As Sissela Bok shows, “Three circumstances have seemed to liars to provide the strongest excuse for their behavior – a crisis where overwhelming harm can be averted only through deceit; complete harmlessness and triviality to the point where it seems absurd to quibble about whether a lie has been told; and the duty to particular individuals to protect their secrets. I have shown how lies in times of crises can expand into vast                                                              225

Andre Comte-Sponville, Mic tratat al marilor virtuţi, (Bucureşti: Ed. Univers, 1998), 215. 

 

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practices where the harm to be averted is less obvious and the crisis less and less immediate; how white lies can shade into equally vast practices no longer so harmless, with immense cumulative costs; and how leis to protect individuals and to cover up their secrets can be told for increasingly dubious purposes to the detriment of all”.226 A few other principles are close to the juridical system: the supremacy of the Constitution, ensuring equality of treatment. The supremacy of the Constitution is meant to remind civil servants of the general legal framework that their entire activity must honor, that ensuring an equal treatment for the beneficiaries represents a guarantee of honoring the legal framework for anyone accessing public services. Finally, three principles are particular to public policies: priority of the public interest, professionalism and openness and transparency. The first principle, the priority of the public interest, reminds civil servants that personal advantage must be abandoned in favor of the general interest, as defined by the law. Professionalism encompasses all ethical traits that the civil servant must manifest, in the particular sense of her/his own profession, and openness and transparency represent principles that must illustrate all public activities subsidized from public funds. James S. Bowman and Jonathan P. West consider that ethics in public administration is influenced by two dimensions: public transactions and civil culture. While the first dimension is based on contractual premises and is susceptible to reach corruption, the second one is based on the idea of public welfare, professionalism and applying universal laws. Accordingly, public administration ethics built on the exi                                                             226

Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 

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gency of civil culture is meant to promote public interest and accomplish public welfare.227

Civil Servants’ Norms of Professional Conduct Starting with the nine principles described in the code, we have 15 deriving general rules of conduct which civil servants must honor. If the principles have a higher degree of generality, the norms are a guidance of particularized action, offering models of behavior in practical situations. As regards providing civil services, the civil servants must provide high quality, professional, legal, transparent services (Art. 5). Civil servants must be loyal to the Constitution and law (a practical transposition of the principle of the supremacy of the constitution – Art. 6), as well as to the public authorities (Art. 7). In this latter case, a series of restrictions are mentioned in the text of the code: (2) “Civil servants must not: a) publicly express untrue opinions about the activity of the respective public authority or institution, about its policies and strategies or about normative or individual draft acts; b) make unauthorized remarks about disputes pending, to which the public authority or institution is a party; c) divulge information that does not have a public character, in circumstances other than those provided by the law; d) divulge information they have access to as civil servants, if that may bring about unwarranted advantages or                                                              227

James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, “Removing employee protections: a ‘see no evil’ approach to civil service reform” in Ethics and integrity of governance: perspectives across frontiers, edited by Leo W.J.C. Huberts, Jeroen Maesschalck, Carole L. Jurkiewicz, 181. 

 

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harm the image or the rights of some civil servants, natural or legal persons; e) provide advice and assistance to legal or natural persons in carrying out legal or other kind of actions against the state or the public authority or institution they work for, unless they have responsibilities of this kind.” (Art. 7, paragraph 2). In other words, civil servants are prohibited to publicly denigrate the institution they work for, to divulge information that is not of public interest or to contribute with their actions to the denigration of the institution. These legal assignments are similar to the codes of conduct or the codes of professional associations of other professions – like of physicians, magistrates, prosecutors (Deontological code of magistrates and prosecutors, Art. 20) and so on. The text of the code also mentions that interdictions are extended to a period of two years after the cease of the public service (Art. 7, paragraph 3). Another general rule is about the freedom of opinion (Art. 8) where, to complete the principle of freedom of expression, it is additionally mentioned that civil servants must correlate “the freedom of dialogue to promoting the interests of the authority or public institution” (Art. 8, paragraph 1), respectively, to manifest a “reconciliatory attitude”, avoiding conflicting exchanges (Art. 8, paragraph 2). With regard to public activity, civil servants are required to honor and promote the point of view of the institution (Art. 9), and if that activity takes place in an international context, to add national interest along with the interests of the institution (Art. 13). In a series of code articles, the law regulates a few important norms regarding the daily activity of civil servants. In a similar manner, the Deontological Code of Magistrates and Prosecutors, where they are required to stand outside of poli-

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tics (Art. 4 and 5 of the Deontological Code of Magistrates and Prosecutors), civil servants are prohibited to make political propaganda for any party (Art. 10). In this case, the norm is detailed based on the specificity of the position of civil servant, public interdiction receiving a series of particular flavors: civil servants cannot participate in fund raisings for a party, they cannot collaborate with the donors of parties nor expose in their office elective signs (Art. 10, paragraphs a-d, Art. 11). A very detailed article is about the aspects of daily interaction between civil servants and beneficiaries (Art. 12 On relationships in the public function). Probably trying to correct the popular stereotype of the inefficient civil servant – masterfully illustrated in I.L. Caragiale’s short story “Urgent…”228 – this article compels civil servants “to have an unbiased and justifiable stand so as to efficiently solve the problems of the citizens” (Art. 12, paragraph 3). Beside these requirements, civil servants must abstain from using verbal abuse, from divulging aspects regarding private life or from denigration (Art. 12. paragraph 2). Civil servants must not demand nor accept gifts or personal advantages, or for relatives (Art. 14), in other words they must not accept the prevalence of personal interest in favor of public interest. Articles 15 to 18 mention the way to ethically relate to the prerogatives of the public function. Hence, in the process of making decisions, civil servants must cultivate impartiality and not promise the making of decisions by a third party (Art. 15), in evaluating professional situations they must equally report to                                                              228

The short story presents a long series of letters addressed to the city hall by the headmistress of a school, soliciting wood for heating during the winter. The letters of the headmistress are intercalated with letters to a minister, inspector reports addressed to the parliament, the first letter dating in November and the final, affirmative answer of the city hall arriving in March, right when spring begins and there is no more need for wood. The short story can be read at: http://biblior.net/momente-si-schite/urgent.html 

 

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solicitants, abstaining from favoring on discriminating criteria (Art. 16) and in using public resources and prerogatives they are limited to the purposes and objectives of the public function, being prohibited the influence of decisions, the unauthorized use of resources or the external use of institution goods. A special article regards the use of work information, their use for personal purposes could lead to injury: “(1) Civil servants can purchase goods owned by the state or by local government units, put up for sale legally, except for the following situations: a) When they learnt about the value or the quality of the goods to be sold during or following the fulfillment of their public duties; b) When they participated, as part of their public responsibilities, in organizing the selling of the respective good; c) When they can influence the selling or when they have information to which those interested in purchasing the respective good had no access” (Art. 19). All these detailed situations from paragraphs a) to c) seem to give the civil servant an unfair advantage compared to a regular buyer. Either he/she has information regarding the price which, in the case of an auction, could give her/him advantage, either he/she could influence stabilizing the price for her/his own benefit. The text of the article completes the list of interdictions, mentioning that these restrictions apply even in the case of lending or leasing a material good (Art. 19, paragraph 2), respectively, all cases of use of the material good in question. From adjoining these norms, we have configures the moral profile of the civil servant: an honest individual, impartial, fair-play, efficient, judicious with public funds, careful with the representation of her/his institution and with administrating personal image.

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Ethical Counseling and Monitoring Norms of Professional Conduct Generally, counseling activity implies a well inscribed activity that needs a high level of specialization. It is the same with ethical counseling. It cannot simply be accomplished by a person working in human resources. It needs previous specialization, training in the field of professional ethics and ethical counseling. This implies a continuous process of institutionalizing ethics in public administration. Many authors in the literature of the field emphasize the fact that the mere existence of an ethical code of conduct is not sufficient to change the practices and the mentalities of the people working in the field. The code has to be known, discussed, implemented, and later monitored, applied and eventually partially modified, in the situation that some aspects are no longer relevant. For this it is necessary to have an integrated ethics management system,229 or an institution for ethical counseling/consultancy.230 In the Code of Conduct, the latter solution is adopted. Thus, public institutions have the duty to name one person responsible for the monitoring of the application of the code, that person being named “ethics counselor”: “For the purpose of efficiently applying the articles of the present code of conduct, the coordinators of authorities and public institutions will assign a civil servant, usually someone working in the department of human resources, for ethics counseling and                                                              229

Valentin Mureşan, “Situa ia managementului etic în România”, publicat 3 July 2009.  230 Ion Copoeru, “Coordonate ale profilului moral al magistratului. Studiu de caz cu privire la implementarea Codului deontologic al judecătorilor şi procurorilor din România” in Ion Copoeru, Nicoleta Szabo (coord.), Dileme morale şi autonomie în contextul democratizării şi al integrării europene, (Cluj: Casa Căr ii de Ştiin ă, 2007), 225. 

 

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monitoring the application of the norms of conduct” (Art. 21, paragraph 1). A necessary observation regarding these people, whose role, as we will see, is essential in implementing the Code of conduct, regards the previous training of the counselors in question. Thus, the text of the law does not stipulate anything about this previous training, except for the fact that the counselors are usually part of the human resources department. However, this observation says nothing about the ethical notions the person has, especially given the situation that the professionalization of human resources education has been quite slow in Romania after the Revolution of 1989. Under these terms, a later modification of the law should mention, as a condition of filling the position of ethics counselor, at least having some training in moral philosophy, professional ethics and respectively public administration ethics. This observation is legitimate, especially if we take into account the attributions the law assigns to ethics counselors: “The persons mentioned in the above paragraph have the following attributions: a) to administer consultancy and assistance to civil servants within the authority or public institution on observing the norm of conduct; b) to monitor the application of the articles of the present Code of conduct within the authority or public institution; c) to draft quarterly reports regarding the compliance with the norms of conduct by civil servants within the authority or the public institution” (Art. 21, paragraph 2) Thus, ethics counselors must, according to the law, provide consultancy when their work colleagues require it, when they are faced with ethical dilemmas in their daily activity. They must pay attention that the articles of the code of

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conduct are respected, thus exercising an activity of monitoring and control. Moreover, they must draft three times a year a report to explain how the indicators regarding the public conduct of civil servants in the institution are met. These reports make up the basis for the annual reports prepared by the National Agency of Civil Servants (NACS), these reports being public. All these activities imply more than the knowledge of a human resources graduate, respectively they imply a deeper knowledge of ethical theories. In the absence of such knowledge, theoretical as well as practical, the entire ethics counselor activity remains purely formal. This is visible in the reports of the NACS. For example, the report on 2010 emphasizes that “few ethics counselors report on their activity to the Agency. The number of civil servants that resort to the ethics counselor is very low”.231 However, civil servants that report counseling activities mention very important issues, such as: “the regime of the conflict of interests – with the greatest weight among ethical dilemmas; the conduct of civil servants during work hours, with an emphasis on the conduct towards those that benefit from public services; the complexity of civil servants’ responsibilities; the rights and duties of civil servants”.232 All these problems are essential in the text of the law and their prevalence is probably greater, but in the absence of an open attitude, even pro-active from the ethics counselors, they remain covered up and unresolved to the disadvantage of the beneficiaries. A thorough ethical training, for example as provided by the postgraduate programs in moral philosophy                                                             

Raport privind managementul funcţiilor publice şi al funcţionarilor publici pentru anul 2010, published by Agen ia Na ională a Func ionarilor Publici (the National Agency of Civil Servants – NACS), (Bucureşti: 2011), 55.   232 Raport privind managementul funcţiilor publice şi al funcţionarilor publici pentru anul 2010, 55.  231

 

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and ethics, is extremely useful for ethics counseling; the counselors with training in the field of ethics and moral thought have the ability to transfer to the role of “educator or trainer, clarifying and improving moral argumentation of groups, committees and so on. These are trained in solving ethical dilemmas and can help clients to reach a rational accord, on fundamental bases”.233 Beside ethics counselors, public institutions must have, according to the law, discipline committees, assigned with researching Code of conduct infringements and respectively sanctioning the culprits (Art. 23, paragraph 2). The activity of ethics counseling, and more generally, of supervising civil servants is coordinated at national level by the NACS. Its attributions are the following: “a) to monitor the application and observance of the norms stipulated in this Code of Conduct b) to receive reports and complaints about breaches of the provisions of this Code of Conduct c) to recommend solutions to the cases it was notified of d) to draft studies and reports on the observance of the norms included in this Code of Conduct e) to cooperate with the NGOs whose activities focus on promoting and protecting the legitimate interests of the citizens in their relation with civil servants” (Art. 20, paragraph 1) The decisions of the NACS cannot substitute the decisions of the discipline committees. Instead, the NACS must draft, based on the reports of the ethics counselors, annual re                                                             233

Heidi von Weltzien Hoivik, “Introduction” in Heidi von Weltzien Hoivik, Andreas Follesdale (eds.), Ethics and Consultancy: European Perspectives, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1995), 4. 

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ports regarding the compliance with the articles of the Code of conduct, in which they must mention: “a) the number and the object of the notices regarding the situations of norms of professional conduct infringements; b) the categories and the number of civil servants that have infringed the norms of moral and professional conduct; c) the causes and consequences of the non-compliance with the articles of the present code of conduct; d) the emphasis of the cases where civil servants have been required to act under the pressure of the political factor” (Art. 22, paragraph 1). Publishing these reports represents an important element of the transparency of the public function. As we can notice from the example of the NACS report for 2010, ethical monitoring is made fragmentarily, “in most of the reports to the Agency (over 95%), the authorities and the public institutions have not mentioned aspects regarding the evaluation of the impact of non-compliance with the norms of conduct of civil servants”.234 Even when irregularities are reported, most often those caught by the manager of the institution or of the department where the civil servant works.235 This tendency to leave it to the discretion of the boss to report the unpleasant aspects implied by a notice regarding the non-compliance with the norms of conduct signals the continuing dominance of a model of authoritarian leadership, where employees on the one hand and beneficiaries on the other hand, do not act unless they find themselves in preset roles, leaving the leader the responsibility and the authority to make unpopular or difficult decisions.                                                             

Raport privind managementul funcţiilor publice şi al funcţionarilor publici pentru anul 2010, 56.  235 Raport privind managementul funcţiilor publice şi al funcţionarilor publici pentru anul 2010, 57.  234

 

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The coherent application of the code of conduct and the continuous formation, by participating in trainings on topics of ethics, applied ethics and moral philosophy, of ethics counselors on the one hand and of civil servants in general on the other hand are methods through which these mentalities can be abandoned in favor of a democratic, ethical and efficient style of management. So as not to be stuck with a simply technical discussion on the Code of conduct, it is useful to mention a few words by Bayard Catron when evoking Peter Vaill in his effort to convince us on the importance of teaching and learning ethics in professional environments and for individual experience: “Ethical and moral learning occurs in us in the context of authentic encounter – with ourselves and with others who are important to us. The challenge to invent settings in which authentic encounter can be fostered as a precondition to the caring display of and reflection upon the choices which face us as responsible actors”.236 The growth of ethical competence is one of the objectives of the Code of conduct. This must be an instrument that works in a combination supposed by the institutionalization of ethics in public administration. To reach such a goal, an increased effort is necessary in implementing public policies that favor this undertaking. It is concurrently necessary to have ethics management in each institution, with an emphasis on the continuous formation of the personnel through ethical trainings and institutional development in the spirit of the values assumed by each institution in part and the public system as a whole.                                                              236

Bayard Catron, “Teaching Ethics, Teaching Ethically” in Combating Corruption Encouraging Ethics. A Sourcebook for Public Service Ethics, edited by William L. Richter, Frances Burke, Jameson W. Doig, (Washington, DC: The American Society for Public Administration, 1990), 288. 

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8. Advertising – Between the Suspension of Desire and the Ethics of Seduction An Inferno Named Desire A common criticism of advertising, from an ethical point of view, regards desire and the different types of desire triggered by advertising. Advertising has, among others, the purpose of generating desire. Many times our desires offer us things we do not need, or things that embarrass us or make us feel ashamed of the possibility of fulfilling some of our desires. In this case, we are dealing with the mechanisms of the relation with taboo objects and the transgression of interdictions. When desire leads to the transgression of interdictions that regard innocent pleasures or the gratification of our needs, in tune with our existence and our principles, it places us in an existence defined by comfort, wellbeing, and authenticity. When desire is so powerful that it takes control over us, when it is never fulfilled (even though it is intense and fills us with content), it becomes an obstacle for personal achievement, despite the fact that it tricks us into believing in the illusion of fulfilment. The complexity of desire can be observed in the duality highlighted by Cristina Gavrilu ă when she affirmed that the human being “has always been driven towards unknown realms; he wanted to look at what was forbidden to him, wanted to possess what he could not have. It seems that Plato was right when he said that interdiction will only in-

 

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crease desire.”237 On the one hand, we are facing the fear of the unknown present in the process of fulfilling a desire, as well as the fear that the fulfilment of the desire will never be complete, that the desire’s satisfaction will always be limited in its intensity and dimensions. On the other hand, we are aware of the theory that prohibitions never lead to moderation of the desire to possess something. The absence of an object will increase the desire to possess it, as well as the prohibition of a possession will increase the desire to own, to consume, thus to buy it. Prohibitions can accentuate the attraction of desire, especially when we talk about excessive attachment in relation to the experience of desire and the prolongation of this experience as a necessary relation with things. Although prohibitions usually imply some boundaries that we value, even from an ethical point of view, those boundaries can turn into unethical instruments when the transgression of prohibitions is made through violence, or when things get out of hands and cannot be controlled through stability and a sense of moderation. If there is an unethical dimension of advertising, it should be related to “the dark side of consumer behavior”. It manifests itself as pathology of desire, which reflects an extreme addiction to consumption, uncontrollable and inexhaustible. Michael R. Solomon described consumer addiction as an addiction to products and services. It can be physical or psychological in nature, but it is always manifest as an extreme addiction to consuming a specific product. It is a desire that has gotten out of hand, and the consumer is no longer capable of regaining control over the desires and behavior. In other words, the consumer is being controlled by the consumption in such a way that it obscures any trace                                                              Cristina Gavrilu ă, The Everyday Sacred. Symbols, Rituals, Mythologies, (Saarbruchen, Germany: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2013), 129.  237

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of rational behavior and logical choosing of products. In the case of desires transformed into addictions, the phrase “I shop therefore I am”238 reflects not only a playful paraphrasing of market behavior, but also a case of double addiction: on the one hand, there is the case when the product controls the consumer, reducing his mobility and restricting his decisional freedom; on the other hand there is the case when the act of buying is an addictive experience in itself, acting as an irresistible exterior urge, even though it is based on false needs or on a meaningless desire. Solomon finds that the most dangerous forms of addiction have 3 elements in common: 1. the behavior is not a chosen one, it manifests as an irrational impulse that can be accentuated through persuasion, 2. the satisfaction derived from the consumer’s behavior is temporary, thus any external communication that suggests the possibility of eliminating this lack of fulfillment can aggravate the addiction in relation to the consumer’s behavior, 3. the person experiences an immense feeling of regret or guilt after fulfilling the desires, which may generate new ways of manipulating the consumer through persuasive actions that offer to him the escape from insecurity and the achievement of a long awaited happiness.239 We are used to consider shopping as a pleasure or as something functional, something that guarantees our func                                                             238

Some authors claim that between one and six percent of the population are compulsive buyers. See April Lane Benson (ed.), I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self, (Lanham: Jason Aronson, Inc., 2000).  239 Michael R. Solomon, Consumer Behaviour. Buying, Having, and Being, third edition, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 624625. 

 

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tioning as biological, social, and spiritual beings. But theoreticians who analyze the consumer’s behavior reveal that there are consumers for whom the phrase “born to shop” has a literal meaning, although it represents a symbolical relationship. When the symbolic is reduced to a literal interpretation, this existential interpretation of shopping is obviously a pathological one. These consumers deviate from the norm because they don’t buy to satisfy their needs (real, imaginary, or false) but because they feel committed and impelled to do so, stimulated by an external urge that cannot be controlled by their own will. More than that, Solomon sees the existence of a “compulsive consumption” that possesses those that we call “shopaholics” because they go shopping driven by an impulse similar to that of drug addicts. Compulsive consumption is commonly described as a repetitive and excessive shopping behavior, sometimes thought to be an antidote for tension, anxiety, depression, or boredom, but which should be regarded as a deviation of human behavior in a society of consumption, rather than a characteristic of consumerist culture.240 Desire, as seduction, can be understood by referring to the symbolic register in which it operates. When desire cannot be contained, it reminds us of the lost realm of paradise: it encompasses the perception and the materialization of finiteness; it reveals a gap that negatively affects the exercise of freedom. When desire becomes extreme, when it becomes an addiction, it imprisons the individual into believing in the promise of a paradise lost, impossible to fulfil in the future and experienced as an existential drama in the present. Unlike desire, seduction is genuine, it is paradisiacal, and it holds out to us both the possibility of failure and of success. The outcome depends on how it is being valued                                                              240

Solomon, Consumer Behaviour, 625. 

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and used. It holds this duality of diurnal and nocturnal register, of personal fulfillment under the sing of authenticity, or of a pitiful failure in relation to objects. Advertising reflects the image of a society of opulence, where a mechanical reproduction of ritualistic signs takes place in order to generate abundance and to perpetuate the repetition of consumption. It is natural that the evocative power of advertising could offer us images capable of influencing our perceptions, our preferences, and our behavior. This is why we need to find a coherent balance between the exterior and the interior, between the world of objects and the experience of personal satisfaction generated by those objects. The same balance should exist in the relationship between the chimerical nature of advertising and the personal ability to invest objects with significations that will bring individual accomplishments to fruition. Usually, those who are trapped on the level of repetitive desire, without purpose or escape, are not able to achieve happiness as it is defined by the consumerist society. Their paradoxical behavior is caused by their inability to enjoy the fruition of consumerism, this coming from those that are responsible for the creation and perpetuation of the consumer culture. The concept of happiness introduced by the culture of a consumerist society implies not only the development of intersubjective relations and the relation between person and objects, but also a simultaneous improvement of interpersonal relations, an ongoing sharing of this experience to others. Desire is frequently linked to the idea of the pursuit of happiness, a concept as vague as that of desire. Thus, instead of explaining each other, desire and happiness accentuate the mystery that surrounds them, especially when we ask ourselves what the fulfilment of desires or happiness means.  

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Pleasure represents one of the ways in which desire and happiness come together, overlapping in their goal. Happiness is usually understood as the intense experience of pleasure, as desire is associated with the achieving of pleasure, as endeavor and purpose. From an ethical point of view, the experience of pleasure can only be a desirable one to some extent, and this extent can be evaluated according to the amount of existential authenticity it produces. When we perceive hedonism as a way of achieving happiness, we must take into consideration Richard Schoch’s interpretation of Epicurus’s view of pleasure. Epicurus believed that everyone has a natural tendency to seek pleasure. Therefore it is only logical to use this natural tendency in order to achieve happiness. Pleasure was considered a good thing because it was meant to extinguish desires, channeling them towards personal fulfillment, to guide them to develop pleasure from the pleasures of the senses towards the pleasures of the spirit. Schoch proposes a reinterpretation of Epicureanism by cultivating the idea that pleasure is a suspension or even an absence of desire. Pleasure does not mean surrender to desire, but its fulfillment, its ascending into the realm of non-desire. We are presented here with the idea that an authentic pleasure means reaching a state of peace and detachment in relation to desire.241 From an ethical point of view, the desire to have is complementary to the constant desire to be, and especially to the desire to be among others. Thus desire is no longer a blockage in the tendency to accumulate and poses things. It is accompanied, in all its aspects, by the acknowledgement                                                              241

Richard Schoch, Secretele fericirii. Ce putem învăţa din trei milenii de căutări, translation by Ciprian Săucan, (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2008), 1618. 

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that it is impossible for all our desires to come true so that we can possess everything that the consumer society is producing. Although comparative advertising is forbidden as an instrument of communication, advertising always offers us, in its own way, the ability to compare. This positive aspect of advertising in a pluralist culture has been highlighted by Leiss, Kline, and Jhally. They find that while traditional cultures offer a limited set of functions and behaviors, of models to guide our taste, imposing limitations to intersubjective comparisons, the consumer society is known for removing these limitations. Thus advertising can be free of limitations, becoming one of the most important mediums for presenting, suggesting, and reflecting on potential comparative judgments through which we can express an infinite set of options, choices, and relations.242 Although advertising represents a permanent incentive for consumption, it also belongs to a consumer culture where buying, having, and being are connected to a way of imagining reality wherein the approach of a representational world in order to stimulate desire is situated somewhere between the authentic experience and the experience of happiness. The fact that consumer society can create addictions or that advertising can be, in some cases, one of the causes of addiction, does not mean that advertising is a negative element in public communication, or that we should blame consumer culture. We should rather acknowledge the importance of ethical counseling and existential therapies in our culture. Each of these can serve as a means of escaping the inferno of desire.

                                                             242

Leiss, Kline, and Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising, 296. 

 

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Seduction as a Paradisiacal State Due to the fact that seduction is a concept that is difficult to define, we must take into consideration its ethical manifestation or at least attempt to separate seduction from the lack of ethics or its encounter with ethics. At the same time we cannot ignore the fact that seduction is part of a relational universe that delineates human existence in its biological as well as spiritual dimension, for humans define themselves in terms of economic production and realize themselves against an ethical backdrop. From the perspective of advertising, seduction is a positive concept, functioning as an intrinsic advertising principle of image making and of connection between the individual and the product. Even when the negative aspect of seduction is in view, as is suggested by Jean Baudrillard,243 advertising has the power to regain, at a symbolic level, not the paradisiacal state, but the promise of paradise; not the achievement of the absolute, but the quest to discover and achieve it. Through these particular manifestations of sacredness, seduction becomes positive. Although it holds a moral and religious dimension, Jean Baudrillard’s analysis is important because it discusses seduction from the perspective of communication. What interests us is the encounter between ethics and communication, and this is the reason why we are investigating the perspective of communicational ethics to reveal the ethical pressure to which advertising is submitting in its central endeavors. As a symbolic structure, seduction implies the promise of a paradise achieved through a personal com                                                             243

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, translated by Brian Singer, (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 2001), 1. 

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mitment that is accessible to all those that decide to follow the path of a profane initiation through the acquisition of a product and the acknowledgment of the significance of consumption. Seduction plays with desire. It turns it inside out; it enhances it, and finds its fulfillment in a perpetual delay. This is why in consumer culture, seduction is perceived as an erotic game, more than an excessive consumption of eroticism; it resembles the annunciation of consumption rapture, more than a pathological consumption. Seduction is in fact the golden mean between to be and to have that generates the entire dynamic of acquisition and consumption. As nostalgia of a paradisiacal state where the abundance of consumption is exceeded only by the abundance of the supply of goods, seduction is associated with a special experience of an endless journey inside the consumer culture. Besides being an incentive for production, exchange, and consumption, advertising has other purposes, at least as important as the economic ones. Advertising is an element of consumer culture that creates new connections in the social or political sphere, as it develops new forms of spirituality in a new axiological universe created through the marketization of interpersonal relations.244 Essential from this mythological perspective is the repercussion that the mythical has in everyday reality, entangling its symbolic behavior with the banality of daily consumption. In this situation, advertising delineates a special relation between human beings and things that affect the way we conceive personal achievement. This triggers a persuasive endeavor that influences all the important aspects of individual and social life. The value of consumption, as                                                              244

Liz McFall, Advertising. A cultural economy, (London: SAGE Publications, 2004). 

 

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well as the needs of the individual and his or her personal experiences, is acknowledged from a spiritual perspective and through the manifestation of the individual’s biological existence. A controversial aspect of seduction is its manipulative nature. The claim that in economic communication seduction’s purpose is not only to manipulate behaviors is truer in advertising than in any other field.245 It proposes a way of existing in the world that generates a system of options and behaviors related to experiences, values, and specific ways of thinking. It also involves a way of perceiving things and a transition of intersubjective value to the world of things. This also determines a rearrangement of interpersonal relations in a culture where the subject can rethink itself only as a relational being. The concern for terminological nuances is legitimate from an ethical point of view. The Western religiousness views the term “seduction” as negative. The term “manipulation” is also a negative one due to its correlation to political and economic communication. The term “propaganda” seems compromised because it has mainly been used as an instrument of communication in totalitarian systems. The term “persuasion” is ambiguous but is probably negative. All of these demand a proper definition of ethical and efficient communication actions. In line with these concerns, by analyzing the development of theories in the field of communication, Aurel Codoban sees value in the position of theorists who prefer “another concept for the effects of communication, a concept broader than persuasion – influence – a concept that included manipulation and seduction and emphasized the relational aspect of                                                              245

Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive. The Mystique of Seduction, (Berlin: Black Swallowtail Publishing, 2009), 6. 

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communication... After postmodernism and in the context of globalization this new model of communication became more than visible, became bright and radiant, and this because globalization, through mass-media and the new technologies, has pushed further the implementation of manipulation and the techniques and procedures of seduction in political communication and advertising. The new theoretical model of communication and the new practical skills of communication, which emphasize both the relational aspect of communication, come together.”246 I welcome the idea of influence as long as it embraces the ethical mechanisms of manipulation, seduction, and networking. The legitimacy of this terminological mixture can only be conferred by the idea of ethical communication. Seduction, as a product of intersubjective communication, gives advertising the power to assert itself as a central element in the construction of human reality conceived as a consumer society. The experience of seduction is positive when it relies on trust ethics. From an ethical point of view, advertising is important due to its power to increase self-confidence, as well as to increase self-respect and respect for others. Respect is one of the issues so creatively exploited by the advertising language. Although the experience of pleasure is not the main concern of seduction, we cannot ignore the close relationship between seduction and pleasure. Oftentimes seduction is regarded as a way of cultivating pleasure. Pleasure has the power to motivate creativity, satisfaction, and efficiency. Thus, it reveals itself as a way of drawing out things from the everyday order and ranking them in the hi                                                             246

Aurel Codoban, Body, Image, and Relationship. From Culture of Knowledge to Culture of Communication, (Saarbruchen, Germany: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2013), 60. 

 

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erarchy of satisfaction. Appealing to the principle of pleasure, seduction proves to be an ethical endeavor because it places individuals in a hierarchy established as a free choice where every individual places himself on a value scale. When advertising resorts to the mechanism defined by Pierre Bourdieu as the presentation of ordinary things in such a way as to highlight their peculiarities,247 removing them from the banality of everyday implies the interpretation of the world of objects according to the hierarchy of satisfaction. In this way advertising avoids a dualist interpretation of pleasure that forces a choice between a devouring pleasure based on voluptuousness and an exercise of boredom.248 Pleasure becomes an important, but ordinary ingredient of everyday life, without being less important than the existential experience of desire or seduction. Being an essential tool for consumer culture, advertising is efficient because: 1. it has the ability to associate different meanings with everyday objects, setting them apart from other objects in the same category, 2. it has the ability to increase the value of an object, thus differentiating it from the banality of other existing objects, and it also makes it special and desirable for the consumer, 3. it targets messages by adjusting them to mentalities, spiritual needs, and cultural requirements, influencing the way things work in the world of economic and spiritual exchange,                                                              247

Pierre Bourdieu, Despre televiziune. Dominaţia jurnalismului, translation by Bogdan Ghiu, (Bucureşti: ART, 2007), 28.  248 Roland Barthes, Plăcerea textului, translation by Marian Papahagi, afterword by Ion Pop, (Cluj: Ed. Echinox, 1994), 81. 

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4. it has the ability to create values and the power to create special needs by assessing consumption standards and a reasonable but continuous increase of consumption without subordinating individual consciousness, personal freedom, and reasonable choice in relation to consumption and to the false needs generated by advertising persuasion and by the particular instruments of economics communication. All of these advertising virtues are part of an aesthetic of seduction that functions as a cultural parameter for postmodern humanity. Advertising is continuously developing under the pressure of ethical communication requirements. The conditioning of ethics is based on an aspect of consumer society discussed by Leiss, Kline, and Jhally who believe that consumer society has determined a profound transformation of social existence through creating a symbolic existence that facilitates the transition from the perception of goods as elements capable of fulfilling desires to the perception of goods as significance communicators.249 Advertising’s positive contribution to the development of society depends, according to the authors, on at least four aspects: 1. the recognition of consumption as a legitimate field where the individual can experience an authentic achievement and personal development, 2. the findings of advertising specialists that reveal the fact that in the marketing process they have to focus on the consumer’s personal, psychological, interpersonal characteristics, or on social concerns, rather than focusing on the product’s characteristics that are developed during the communicational process, 3. the technological revolution, and everything that this means for the advancement of mass-media, contribut                                                             249

Leiss, Kline, and Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising, 285. 

 

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ing to the unexpected evolution of advertising in all its forms, and 4. the importance of visual, pictorial elements and iconic images and their prevalence over written text and speech.250 Using the above elements as an advantage in its integration in consumer culture, advertising contributes to the development of a social process in which: 1. the individuals associate the idea of consumption with the achievement of personal happiness and social success, 2. the patterns of social etiquette encourage experimentation in order to obtain satisfaction without referencing established cultural norms regarding the ways of achieving happiness and success, and 3. delivering commercial messages via visual interpretations intended for private space will generate assessment results and patterns of general behavior in relation to goods destined for consumption.251 Leiss, Kline and Jhally elaborate these three aspects as key elements in the understanding of the importance of satisfaction in the lives of individuals. In consumer society, satisfaction does not only represent the accumulation and the possession of goods. These are complementary and oftentimes secondary elements. Satisfaction, as wellbeing, implies something extra derived from the relations with others and the way in which the most important values that enable this relation coalesce. From this perspective we should grasp the idea that in consumer culture,

                                                             250 251

Leiss, Kline, and Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising, 286.  Leiss, Kline, and Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising, 286. 

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goods play an important part in the dialogue between human beings.252 Thus advertising offers us a new kind of relation with the world of objects and services accessible to us. Investing objects with intersubjective assets in the process of consumption stimulates the dimension of ritualization of social behavior that Jean Baudrillard describes as a desire to achieve total and miraculous opulence.253 The magical and the miraculous are part of the economic logic of production of goods where objects and services are delivered as images charged with seduction. Proposing an ethical perspective on this phenomenon, we are concerned with the impact of seduction on the individual, even if the individual is perceived as part of a group or of a community. At the same time we must take into consideration the analyses of seduction as a phenomenon of mass-communication, different in relation to the communication instruments that affect the individual. In this respect, we can mention that “The postmodern seduction is a phenomena focused on masses, because it is interested in quantity, just like manipulation, and in its difference from persuasion which is individualized.”254 The ethics of seduction asserts that, more than the achievement of quantitative goals, seduction should endow the processes of persuasive communication with a qualitative dimension that considers the mass of consumers but has as its main focus the individuals who make up the masses. Although the purpose of advertising is to sell as many products as possible, being a part of market communication, it does                                                              Leiss, Kline, and Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising, 291.  Jean Baudrillard, Societatea de consum. Mituri şi structuri, translation by Alexandru Matei, foreword by Ciprian Mihali, (Bucureşti: comunicare.ro, 2008), 213.  254 Codoban, Body, Image, and Relationship, 58.  252 253

 

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not address an indiscriminate mass of consumers, but every individual, leading the individual consumer to seek satisfaction in buying and consuming products or services. In order to be ethical and efficient, advertising cannot neglect the consumer’s identity, personal values, and choices.

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9. Ethics in the Code of Advertising Practice The Culture of Ethic Attitudes Advertising communication follows a complex codification process. It must constantly observe the requirements of the codes issued by various institutions and professional associations, as well as the legislation which regulates public and commercial communication. As a self-regulating entity in the field of Advertising, the Romanian Advertising Council (RAC) proposes, with the Code of Advertising Practice, a set of ethical rules for all involved in advertising to observe in order to ensure that communication follows professional practice principles and legislation. As part of this entity which takes the role of a professional organization, RAC members commit to not only observe the rules of the Code, but also determine the other participants in advertising to observe the requirements of the Code.255 The Code is accompanied by a series of special regulations in some areas of commercial communication which are provided by RAC as annexes of the codification in advertising communication256. In this respect we mention documents such as: Rules of commercial communication in telecommunication services and products (2009), Rules of responsible commercial communication on beer (2009), RFRD Code                                                              255

The Code of Advertising Practice issued by the Romanian Advertising Council (RAC), 2011  256 http://www.rac.ro/cod 

 

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(2013), Cosmetics Code (2013), Food Supplements Code (2013). At the same time, although the Ethics Committee is defined as an “organizational structure within the RAC, having as main attribution the assessment of conformity between commercial communications and the requirements of the Code”, those who implement the requirements of the Code must also take into account the legislation in the field just as those in advertising who must consider the entire legal framework corresponding to their activity area. If in administration ethics we also call on individual conscience, personal commitment and value undertaking, advertising ethics mainly refers to organizational ethics, business and especially commercial communication ethics as well as public communication. When acting as ethical instances, organizations behave as personal instances with a responsibility resembling individual responsibility. Even if, as regards responsibility, we use metaphorical language, the relationship between responsibility and accountability applies to the types of relationships which are developed both within the organization and with various public segments it serves or interferes with. This is precisely why ethical relationships are established at the level of responsibility towards the individual as consumer, at the level of inter-organizational relationships as well as at the level of relationships with the community which pursues the public good. These ethical relationships are in fact the scopes of the ethics code. The purpose of the Code of Advertising Practice is to ensure the general framework of self-regulation in communication, with the following main objectives: “protecting consumers’ interests, protecting the interests of the general public against the possible negative consequences of communication, ensuring the framework necessary for loyal competition”. It must correspond to the realities of the market and, at the same time, must express the ethical ideals of the profes-

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sion which is developed in the professional and cultural environment. An important meaning of the scopes of the Code is encountered in a more recent version of the text which, unlike the version in 2006, modifies the applicability area along with the replacement of the word advertising with communication, in the essential parts of the code. Thus, the RAC made a clear distinction between advertising as form of communication and other economic communication instruments, and most importantly, between advertising and other marketing instruments. In this manner, instead of speaking of general principles terms which regulate publicity, the terminology used is extended to the general principles of communication, which suggests the special status of advertising as a form of communication. On this background, ethics in advertising is not only part of business ethics, but becomes a distinct area of ethical communication. Thus, it is not by chance that in the context of the Romanian education, the programs which educate advertising specialists are not managed by economic science departments, but by communication science departments. In an attempt to establish the desirable conduct rules in the communication market, the Code of Advertising Practice enunciates a few ground principles of communication. They may be synthesized in the terms of the first paragraph which refers to these principles: 1. Advertising must be honest, in the sense that it must provide verifiable content, must not exploit customers’ naiveté, lack of experience or reduced information; it must not alter consumers’ orientation from one product to another because the first would be improper for consumption. Relevant in this sense are the Code stipulations with reference to comparative advertising and denigration. Their purpose is to avoid a misleading advertising as well as a dishonest attitude towards other institutions, individuals,  

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products or services. Comparative advertising should be avoided because it is often associated to a dishonest attitude. Nonetheless, comparative advertising is allowed when it is objective and is not intending to place in an inferior rank, to cast a negative light upon, or discredit products, brands or a specific competitor. At the same time the “denigration of people, organizations, companies, commercial and industrial activities, professions, products, marketing elements or of other elements associated to them, without being explicitly mentioned”257 is categorically forbidden. Advertising does not have the role to determine the refusal to use competitor products; it must be used in an ethical manner in order to guide consumers’ preferences for the product it promotes. 2. Advertising must be clear, in the sense that it should avoid any deceptive formulation or representation, whether it is an omission, suggestion, ambiguity or exaggeration and the design should make all the elements of the message easily perceptible; advertising creation must be conceived in such a manner as to be perceived as advertising message, without there being any ambiguity on the advertising nature of the conveyed message. At the same time, the advertisement must not be masked or subliminal. 3. The advertisement must be decent, in the sense that “it should avoid any message which may be considered indecent, vulgar or repulsive as per common-sense or consumers’ sensitivity”258. All these elements are included in the Code as a guarantee of the fact that the subjects of communication have the constant preoccupation of cultivating a trustworthy environment for commercial communication and of constantly developing consumers’ trust as a central element in the complex                                                              257 258

The Code of Advertising Practice, Articles 10-11.  The Code of Advertising Practice, Article 1 (1.1 – 1.8). 

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relationship of the advertising communication. The communicators cultivate ethics as an implicit dimension of any behavior because “communicators become actants when action to carry out some purposes which are not their one only as communicators. Communicators become actors, when, they are personages with a defined role to carry out another’s purposes”.259 A controversial subject in communication is that of subliminal messages. The Code lists, among the basic principles of communication, the fact that advertising “should not be masked or subliminal”, Art 1 (1-6). We must mention that according to Art. 4(d) of the Law on publicity, subliminal publicity is defined as “any publicity using stimuli too weak to be consciously perceived, but which can influence a person’s economic behavior”. It is forbidden according to the Law260. While some theoreticians believe subliminal advertising does not exist, others accept its existence but don’t grant it any real influencing capacity and others believe subliminal messages are used for manipulation by those who influence consumption markets. One of the most convincing theoreticians and critics of subliminal communication is Wilson Bryan Key. Throughout various papers he underlines the danger of subliminal seduction and the forms of alienation experienced by the human beings found under the pressure of subliminal communication. His analyses regarding consumers’ manipulation start from the assumption that publicity managed to build an Era of Manipulation by conveying contents which are stored at                                                              Ştefan Vlădu escu, “Communication Beings: Four Communication Prototypical Figures”, International Journal of Education and Research, Vol. 1 No.11 (November 2013): 4.  260 Law regarding publicity, Law no. 148 of July 26th, 2000, Art. 6(b)  259

 

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the level of the unconscious, by triggering subliminal experiences. He ascertains that since the publication of his book Subliminal Seduction261, subliminal techniques have become increasingly performing, sophisticated and developed. His speech in The Age of Manipulation should thus increase the interest of the individuals enslaved by the consumption society to a great extent and in a personal manner, in such a way that it helps them free themselves “from the dehumanizing effects of media merchandising upon their personalities and relationships”262. Exaggerating the dimensions reached by subliminal stimuli manipulation, he states that “subliminal indoctrination may prove more dangerous than nuclear weapons”263. Wilson Bryan Key expresses his conviction – which I do not share – that advertising built its Era on the grounds of human weakness, on the inferiority cultivated by constant comparison with models which cannot be reached, by inducing desires which can but partially be fulfilled, by creating needs which can never be satisfied to their end. This limitation, weakness, unsatisfactory feeling is considered to be extremely important from the perspective of manipulation, because it is the foundation on which the illusion is built that only through consumption one can overcome this state of weakness. It seems like the best support for the idea that there are objects which can bring self-satisfaction and fulfillment, and they become desirable through consumption. Thus, advertisers can orient the individuals towards the ideal of consumption in itself. Consequently, any product can be a promise for reaching perfection. This subliminal stimulation of the                                                              261

Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction. Ad Media’s Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, (New York: Signet, 1973).  262 Wilson Bryan Key, The Age of Manipulation. The Con in Confidence the Sin in Sincere, xvii.  263 Wilson Bryan Key, The Age of Manipulation. The Con in Confidence the Sin in Sincere, xviii. 

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weakness and of the desire for perfection leads in the end, to the situation that “they consume therefore they exist”264. Other authors believe that subliminal advertising is the greatest myth of communication. Max Sutherland and Alice K. Sylvester believe that this myth has been endowed with a special power in the minds of some consumers for two reasons: 1. The discomfort created to the consumers by the fact that they don’t understand how it is possible for a flow of images to influence them without even being aware of the seductive effect of those images. This type of misunderstanding creates a sort of fear regarding the subliminal effects of advertising, and on the grounds of these experiences, the role of subliminal elements has been overstated. 2. The fact that in some cultural contexts rules and laws have been put in place in order to prohibit subliminal advertising also contributed to its legitimation and to accepting its existence and its capacity to manifest as a manipulation force. The diffuse threat posed by subliminal seduction can help develop and maintain the myth of the presence, power and efficiency of subliminal advertising265. Thus, there is the idea that subliminal advertising rather has the power we grant to the myth of subliminal seduction. The conclusion of such analyses can only be that subliminal advertising has but a mythical existence and can only have effects by merely undertaking this myth as a more or less conscious form of existential communication. Consequently, when we draw conclusions about the effects that                                                              264

Wilson Bryan Key, The Age of Manipulation. The Con in Confidence the Sin in Sincere, 90.  265 Max Sutherland, Alice K. Sylvester, De la publicitate la consumator. Ce “merge”, ce “nu merge” şi mai ales de ce, translation by Aurelia Ana Vasile, (Iaşi: Polirom, 2008), 55-58. 

 

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subliminal advertising may have, we should always keep in mind that human beings have a limited capacity to receive messages without being fully aware of them, even if we accept the existence of subliminal advertising, it must be extremely inefficient and weaker than the advertising which acts at a conscious level.266 The references to subliminal advertising, both in advertising professionals’ ethic code and in advertising legislation, lead us to recognize its existence. However, regardless of the beliefs we may about the intensity of subliminal advertising and its efficiency, we must mention that the interdiction on subliminal advertising in regulations has generated its delegitimation both ethically and legally. It must be tackled from an ethical perspective as it implies the consumer’s manipulation which is prejudicial to its capacity and liberty to choose. The idea that the individual has control on his choices as consumer is relevant from the standpoint of advertising ethics in a consumption society. Even if it lacks penetration force, even if it is but a myth built by the consumerist imaginary, we cannot ignore the existence of the debate around this challenge in commercial communication. All the more reason, that advertising has – among others – the role of granting a strong ethical dimension to all consumption culture manifestations.

Ethical Aspects of Advertising Addressed to Children The Code contains a series of special rules regarding sales systems and certain product categories. Among the special product categories we find: alcoholic drinks (Art. 25),                                                              266

Max Sutherland, Alice K. Sylvester, De la publicitate la consumator. Ce “merge”, ce “nu merge”. Şi mai ales de ce, 66. 

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cosmetics and personal hygiene products (Art. 26), dietary products (Art. 27), drugs and food supplements, healing treatments and alternate healing methods (Art. 28), training classes, offers for employment or business collaboration and teaching or study methods (Art. 29), financial and real-estate transactions (Art. 30), organized holiday packages (Art. 31), games, toys and educational products for children (Art. 32). Additional regulations regarding some products and services can be found in the Codes referring to those product categories and can be consulted as annexes to the Code of Advertising Practice. The code applies to all communication forms used by advertising. However, Article 15 presents some exceptions. The Code does not apply to political communication which is intended to inform or influence the polls in electoral campaigns or referendums. Being a special product of communication, political advertising develops according to the regulations regarding elections and election laws. Political advertising, also named political propaganda in Romanian legislation, is developed only during electoral campaigns. Broadcasting electoral materials is forbidden outside the electoral campaign, which is a period of time in which opposing candidates conduct political propaganda activities.267 A very sensitive subject in advertising is the ads for children. It could not remain unregulated by the Code. The requirements on communication to children included in Article 7 address the exploitation of credulity and lack of experience, minimizing information on the skills necessary to use a product, exaggeration of product features, inducing a misleading perception of the product value, including information which can cause moral prejudices, presenting children in                                                              267

Law regarding the organization and development of local public elections and for Deputy and Senate Chambers elections in 2012, Article 2(h) 

 

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dangerous situations, encouragement of antisocial behaviors, possibly undermining family or educators’ authority or minimizing the importance of social-cultural values. The following statement has a special ethical relevance: “communications destined to children must not suggest than owning or using a product will give a physical, moral or social advantage over other children, or that the lack of that product should have an opposite effect.”268 Such a requirement includes not only the avoidance of social hierarchization depending on the consumption level that various people can demonstrate, but also the avoidance of defining personal identities based on the purchased goods. Such situations may have a negative influence in a child’s emotional, identity-related and generally cultural development, and can also have a negative impact on any person’s positioning in the world whose self-evaluation depends on the possessed objects without the awareness of the person’s intrinsic value independently of the relationships established in the world of objects. Not only in the case of children, although the Code makes special references to them, but also in the case of any person, the attachment to objects is only one dimension of the human being as consumer. Consumption culture is complex and implies a large variety of needs, a most special ones being the need of interpersonal communication. Goods can intermediate this communication, but communication can never be reduced to them. Contemporary philosophy has proven many times that, beyond the materiality of objects, human beings need to communicate meanings. Generally, when speaking of children, any tendency in advertising to present the purchase of goods as a personal virtue must be stopped, because “adults are in a position to understand that other values are more important to health, hap                                                             268

The Code of Advertising Practice, Art. 7 (7.1 – 1.12) 

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piness and relationships, but children view advertising from a much less well-developed frame of moral reference. In the absence of moderating influences on their development, advertising shows children a world in which you are what you own, and if what you own is not a desirable brand, you are not worth very much at all. At least, that is one possible construction that can be placed on much children’s advertising.269” Among the products for children, which are increasingly becoming the subject of advertising, there are games, toys and educational products for children. Article 32 of the Code includes general rules referring to this type of products: 32.1 – “communication referring to games, toys and educational products for children must not induce error about: a) Product nature, characteristics, performance and dimensions; b) The skills necessary to use the product; c) The amount to be spent, especially if it involves the purchase of additional products to make the product function. 32.2 – In no case may this communication minimize the price of the product or suggest that its purchase is, normally, accessible to the budget of any family.”270 The importance of these products both as entertainment instruments and as elements which contribute to children’s emotional and intellectual development is well known. This is the reason why the ethical exigencies imposed on the advertising messages accompanying these products are welcome. The methods of persuasion used must be ageappropriate and the messages should avoid delicate situations which may occur between parents and children when pur                                                             269

Chris Hackley, Advertising and Promotion Communicating Brands, (London: SAGE, 2005), 192.  270 The Code of Advertising Practice, Art. 32 

 

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chasing this type of products. Children as well as their parents must be protected from inappropriate persuasive methods or from deceptive commercial contents which may be prejudicial to children or family relationships. Taking into account that advertisements create reality, advertisements for children must be ethical from the formal aspects to the more in-depth ones. In the general discourse about advertising and persuasion we note statements regarding the ethical imperative to protect children in many forms, including categorical statements such as: “it is unethical to persuade vulnerable groups like children”. Starting from such criticisms on persuasion we can mention analyses as those proposed by Jörg Müller, Florian Alt, and Daniel Michelis which show that “persuasion is an integral part of advertising, and ethical use of persuasion is an important challenge facing pervasive advertising. With regard to advertising, it is our belief that any intention to persuade audiences against their own interests is unethical. Similarly, persuasion of vulnerable groups is unethical, as well as all methods that are deceptive, use coercion, operant conditioning, or surveillance”.271 When assessing persuasion, we must take into account the fact that it is not persuasion which must be challenged from the ethical point of view. It is part of the mechanisms used by advertising, and from this perspective it is, ethically and ideologically, neutral. What must be brought into discussion is the ethic, or the lack of it, of the messages which persuade the public. Discussing persuasion we challenge the very status of advertising and the ethical or non-ethical character of the advertising addressed                                                              271

Jörg Müller, Florian Alt, and Daniel Michelis, “Pervasive Advertising”, in Jörg Müller, Florian Alt, and Daniel Micheli (Editors), Pervasive Advertising, (London: Springer, 2011), 27. 

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to children or the advertising for children’s products, in general. In order to diminish the possible unwanted effects of advertising on children, Bonnie L. Drewniany and A. Jerome Jewler believe that we must pay attention to what we show children as what may be appropriate for adults, may be an inacceptable message to children.272 Marcia Amidon Lusted believes that the positive or negative effect of commercial communication on children depends on the methods used and the messages conveyed. They must be thought through the perspective of the ethical responsibility that the transmitters have not only to the consumers but also to future generations. The ethical investment in children is meant to be an investment into a better future. The content transmitted should be in the spirit of the specific responsibility that economic organizations have versus various public categories. Thus, “this kind of responsibility to children in marketing and advertising includes advertising only those products that are of high quality and safe for children. It is also important to maintain truth in advertising and not make false claims that will destroy a child’s trust in a product. Advertisers hold each other accountable for being honest about products and not abusing the freedom they have to market products directly to young consumers”.273 Attitudes towards advertising vary. In Chris Hackley’s analyses we note that: 1. The preoccupation with the effect of advertising on children is increasing. Studies show that a large part of children under 10 years old who watch commercials on TV                                                              272

Bonnie L. Drewniany, A. Jerome Jewler, Creative Strategy in Advertising, Ninth Edition, (Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008), 26.  273 Marcia Amidon Lusted, Advertising to children, (Edina, Minnesota: ABDO Publishing Company, 2009), 62. 

 

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don’t realize that they are being offered a transaction, that they are submitted to a process of commercial communication through “the sophisticated techniques of persuasion used by advertisers”. 2. At the same time, there is also the perspective according to which “in fact children are very commercially aware and are capable of critically evaluating advertising”.274 Two instances are employed in this process of regulation and children’s protection versus commercial communication: on the one hand, the state with its specialized institutions, and on the other hand, the family with its responsibility in cultivating children’s legitimate interests. Chris Hackley accurately reveals the role parents have in cultivating a critical awareness in children towards commercial communication. An open position as to what advertising is about in this context is “that the social context children occupy when engaging with commerce is supported by adult attention and counsel. Where this context is lacking, for example when children engage in consumer activities such as watching TV unsupervised, there is no guarantee that they will develop a sophisticated understanding of commerce. Children may not become more critical consumers by watching ads if their domestic circumstances are not conducive to their moral and intellectual development in other ways”.275

                                                             274

Chris Hackley, Advertising and Promotion Communicating Brands, 191.  275 Chris Hackley, Advertising and Promotion Communicating Brands, 192. 

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10. Advertising and Social Responsibility Ethical Communication and Responsibility In organizational ethics, ethic codes work as a guiding instrument for employee behavior and as an open path to building organizational culture. Patrick M. Erwin reveals the existence of a strong link between the quality of a company’s deontological codes and its social responsibility programs. The presence of codes place organizations “among top CSR ranking systems for corporate citizenship, sustainability, ethical behavior and public perception”.276 An ethical dimension included in the Code of Advertising Practice is social responsibility and social communication. They are conceived as an essential value of communication. Social responsibility is becoming more and more a field of ethics in the activity of economic organizations and of any organizations for that matter, especially those which are linked to public communication. It develops on the grounds of sustainability theories, durable development and ethical behavior in a global market. It is not limited to ethics imposed to corporations but implies managerial and communication ethics and refers to the activity of all organizations and all agents which enter the market or interfere with it. The article about social responsibility actually synthesizes the essential elements of ethical content in advertising. It highlights                                                              276

Patrick M. Erwin, “Corporate Codes of Conduct: The Effects of Code Content and Quality on Ethical Performance”, Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 99 issue 4 (2011): 535-548. 

 

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the major role that advertising plays as a central element of the consumerist culture, a role which cannot be reduced to just a communication instrument in economic relations. Advertising is the one which can shape these relations, give them ethical content, new meanings to human actions and choices, and even contribute to building an ethics, efficiency and consumption-based global coherence. Social responsibility however, as it is presented to us in Article 6 of the Code, is primarily a manner of implementing respect for humans as consumers: 6.1. “Communication must not contain any form of discrimination or offense on social, political, racial, national, gender, age, religion, origin, ethnicity, disability or sexual orientation, etc. criteria. 6.2. Communication must observe human dignity in all its aspects. 6.3. Communication must not contain statements or representation which may incite to verbal psychic or physical violence. 6.4 Communication must avoid the exploitation of fear, suffering and superstition, except when this is justified. 6.5 Communication must not incite and must not appear to support and encourage disobeying the law or good conduct.”277 Organizations’ involvement in social responsibility activities has a dedicated place in advertising communication. Social communication used in advertising thus occupies a special position. The Code defines social communication as: “the message meant to formulate moral and social values, to communicate attitudes responsible for acceptable social norms, to encourage citizens to involve in actions which have in impact in their community through initiatives aimed at                                                              277

The Code of Advertising Practice, Article 6 (6.1 – 6.5) 

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arising public interest and awareness, to request, directly or indirectly, voluntary contributions consisting in money, goods or services of any sort.”278 It is natural to distinguish social campaigns from the other forms of commercial communication as it is also natural to make a distinction among social responsibility campaigns and advertising, even when advertising contains social messages. Nonetheless, we cannot ignore the fact that the effect of advertising on viewers, in its many facets, resembles the effect of social responsibility campaigns. It unites energies around products, ideas or emotions with individual values, which are published in the fullness of individuals and communities’ daily lives. Unlike advertising in general, which builds reality starting from consumers’ needs, social advertising builds reality depending on a set point of communication, which becomes the starting point for the general meanings of individual, community or cosmic existence. Further on, social communication is line with the dynamics of advertising language in informing ont, convincing of, influencing or guiding towards certain choices while aware of a fellowman’s case, of community issues, or of the responsibility to the daily aspects of life which we usually neglect or to the future generations. Advertising stirs this type of solidarity, communion and hope within consumerist cultures and presents it as an ethical part of consumption. It often stimulates that part of one’s willingness to find oneself by participating in other people’s lives, by removing suffering or part of the harm in the world, by rediscovering all interdependencies with other human beings and the world they live in. As we can see in the experience of the consumption society, these ethical elements of the Code become more visible in advertisements during holiday seasons. Social mes                                                             278

The Code of Advertising Practice, Definitions. 

 

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sages are associated with the idea of giving during holidays especially winter holidays. Gift is distanced from any exchange relationship and is introduced in the sphere of dialogue, inter-subjective relationships, and personal accomplishment through empathy with the others. Giving is no longer an exchange of products, like an economic transaction, be it material, symbolic or spiritual, and it cannot be reduced to a donation as unilateral action. The gift is an expression of inter-subjective commitment with a dialogical structure. Metaphorically speaking, it always supposes asking a question which awaits an answer. Consequently, gift contains in itself a form of relational reciprocity. When Steinhardt named his book Giving you shall acquire279, he had in mind that a gift attracts another gift. Giving cannot be accomplished beyond this reciprocity. Borrowing the gift concept from his Jewish tradition, Nicolae Steinhardt offers it to the Christian world as an ideal way to give. But beyond this interference of the gift with religious symbolism, we note that giving is not a unilateral act of selfless donation, it is rather always completed by another gift. However, what makes a radical differentiation between a gift and an exchange is that a gift is always accomplished on a level superior to the one it was initiated on. A gift implies such an ontological leap and this is the source of its beauty and greatness. We can notice it especially in the way giving was presented in video advertisements preceding the Christmas holidays in 2013. There was a general tendency of advertisers to depict a transfiguration, spiritualization of giving, the gift being included in a cycle of dialogue which makes human transfiguration possible, human fulfillment possible in the sphere of consumption and in the sphere of giving at the                                                              279

Nicolae Steinhardt, Dăruind vei dobîndi, 2nd edition, edited, revised and with additions by Ioan Pintea, (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1997). 

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same time. The idea of giving was wrapped in various advertising languages, most often in the form of storytelling. We can conclude that there are two characteristics of the most important TV ads of the 2013 Christmas period: on the one hand, the unusual length, and on the other hand, the emotional build-up of the story which is intended to have both an affective and an intellectual appeal. What would make advertisers use this type of mythological construction? Could we possibly believe that being eased into the storytelling s itself could be the reward (the gift) for not making use of the remote control and changing to another communication channel when we are exposed to an unusually long advertisement? Or maybe the return to the land of storytelling has precisely the role of introducing us into the story, in a period when we have the mood to see the special significance of the holiday season and treat it as a time of personal fulfillment? Without claiming to be giving an answer, we can use the perspective according to which “men of letters have tried to make the most of stories; historians have tried to find historical justifications for them; hermeneutists have preferred to find hidden and long forgotten meanings for them, whereas anthropologists and ethnologists have chosen to uncover man and society with all their inventory of traditions and beliefs. Moreover, one could hardly imagine today a human being who is not fascinated by stories (irrespective of their nature). The desire to read and to listen to stories is justified, among other things, by the hidden and unexplained human pleasure of travelling into imaginary universes”.280 It is beyond any shadow of a doubt that advertising not only has the role of storing imaginary structures, mythical, symbolical remains, in the context of a postmodern man’s lay                                                              Cristina Gavrilu ă, The Everyday Sacred. Symbols, Rituals, Mythologies, (Saarbruchen, Germany: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2013), 148.  280

 

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life condition281, but also of being the spring of rediscovering the simple meanings, the daily joys, the human being as such. Making the giving capacity the subject of storytelling is an exercise which advertising uses in order to bring together the consumer and the person who discovers authenticity by being involved in external issues as if they were internal ones. Ethically, we would expect social advertising to have certain contents, and at the same time to develop according to certain rules. According to Article 33 of the Code, social communication must include the elements necessary for it to be identified as such. It must refer to the social objective to be reached and must exactly define the amount or the percentage dedicated to the social purpose. It must obviously have another end than a commercial one, and must be developed in such a way as to not create guilt or embarrassment for those who don’t wish to participate in the campaign. In order to reach campaign objectives it must not resort to appeal emotional blackmail, must not depict shocking, exaggerated or situations of extreme suffering in order to persuade public participation, as it must not hurt human dignity in any way, neither those who make the object of the social campaign nor the potential supporters of it.282 The development of new media facilitates tremendously both the control over advertiser’s assumed social responsibility and the transmission of social messages. Thus, an entire culture of responsibility is produced to which also contributes the fact that “the social media imposes the need for an open corporate culture and a democratic leadership”.283 As Delia Cristina Balaban shows, the advertising                                                              281 Roland Barthes, Mitologii, translation, foreword and notes by Maria Carpov, (Iaşi: Institutul European, 1997).  282 The Code of Advertising Practice, Article 33  283 Mirela-Codru a Abrudan, “Online Public Relations: Opportunities and Threats for Corporate Communication”, in Delia Cristina Balaban, Meda

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consumer is no longer passive but it in search of information, usefulness, opportunities, has a special relation to brands and shares his/her own experiences, directly or via the virtual world.284 Advertising may put in value several dimensions of communication according to some patterns (epistemological pattern, axiological pattern, hermeneutical pattern, ecological pattern285) through which we can sketch a complex univers. The encounter in the virtual space makes new interactions possible, new emotional, relational and axiological interactions. Virtual communities reunited under the mark of social responsibility behave as groups similarly to those united by the sacred. Thus, we would not be wrong to speak of a new type of sacrality which models virtual relationships both formally and at an in-depth level of significance. Ştefan Bratosin and Mihaela Alexandra Tudor highlighted not only the importance of these trends to the sacral metamorphoses in the virtual world, “but also the manner in which these innovations facilitate a better understanding in terms of norms and practices of the information society”, at the same time emphasizing that in this context “any practice of the sacred on the Internet is an innovative experience of some norm. To be more precise, we argue that in any study                                                                                                                Mucundorfeanu, Ioan Hosu (ed.), PR Trend. New Media: Challenges and Perspectives, (Mittweida, Germany: Mittweida Hochschulverlag, 2013), 113.  284 Delia Cristina Balaban, “Publicitate versus rela ii publice” in Delia Balaban, Mirela Abrudan, (coord.), Tendinţe în PR şi Publicitate. Planificare strategică şi instrumente de comunicare, (Bucharest: Tritonic, 2008), 22.  285 Ştefan Vlădu escu, “A Completion to the Traditions Matrix-Standard – R. T. Craig, Induced By the Transformation of Communication-As-A-Field Membrane in Communication-As-A-Universe Membrane”, American International Journal of Contemporary Research, Vol. 3 No. 10 (October 2013): 9. 

 

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on the sacred relating to the Internet should necessarily be taken into consideration: (a) the transgressions of technological norms and the relations of representation, (b) the theoretical background in the process of the production of the meaning, (c) the functional norm of the ritual dialectic, (d) the constant innovation of the norm”.286 The change of paradigm revealed by the Internet era, including the need of transgressing traditional habits and norms, influences the dose of relativism towards norms, habits, and sometimes even towards the laws of the real world. This transfer between the virtual space and the real space is occurring without violence only due to the fact that it belongs to a cultural space in which minimal ethics has substituted the absolute exigencies of traditional ethics. This communication between the two worlds has consequences not only on the symbolic universe but also on the day to day life, including the daily ethics. Reflection on the way the sacred is present in the virtual world as well as existing ritual practices, symbolic expressions, even some behaviors indicating the persistence of religious-like remains, are elements which constantly encourage us to make an ethical assessment of the messages received by and the situation of man living in a consumerist society. This duality of the world between the immanence of the real and a form of virtual transcendence is not built according to the patterns of separate worlds, leaving space for the participation of the real to the virtual, as it happens in Plato’s imaginary transcendence. The two worlds are intertwined and the postmodern man may take the chance to in                                                             Ştefan Bratosin, Mihaela Alexandra Tudor, “New Media and Communicating the Sacred”, in Delia Cristina Balaban, Meda Mucundorfeanu, Ioan Hosu (ed.), PR Trend. New Media: Challenges and Perspectives, (Mittweida, Germany: Mittweida Hochschulverlag, 2013), 35.  286

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habit both of them. The relationship is not phantasmal, as in the relationship between the imaginary and the real universes. This time, it is a symbolic relationship, accessible to individuals. It is not by chance that the terms used to describe virtual reality seem to imply its consistency is similar to that of the immediate reality. In a communication-based society, advertising construes reality. Considering the symbolic elements used by advertising to bring together immanent and transcendent meanings, we can conclude that it is the communication form best adapted to unify the two worlds. Advertising also has this unification function in the daily reality. It resembles an outburst of sacrality in the daily platitude. It is the moment of a breakthrough inside reality which makes possible moving beyond the breakthrough to a level of unification perceived as superior. In the consumerist culture, advertising is meant to answer a call of which Vasile Sebastian Dâncu spoke in a different context of different meanings, but found the appropriate expression for it: “In a society under the sign of mythology, emotions and phantasms, idolatries, one must search for moments of interruption in the flow of images which replaced the flows of information, in order to find each other, even if only for a few seconds.”287 Against this background we must decipher the social responsibility of advertising. Here we can note the founding place of ethics in advertising. Responsibility to individuals and responsibility called for by our common values can meet in the field of responsibility for the common good. These elements of ethical responsibility are the gift that advertising brings to the consumption society.                                                              287

Vasile Sebastian Dâncu, “Argument pentru sinteză”, Sinteza editorial, December 18, 2013, http://vasiledancu.blogspot.ro/2013/12/argumentpentru-sinteza.html 

 

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Social Responsibility as Protector of Privacy One form of manifestation for the responsibility to individuals is presented by Article (12) with reference to privacy protection: 12.1 – Advertisement must not portray persons – private or public – or refer to them without their consent. 12.2 – Advertising must not refer to the assets owned by a natural person or legal entity without their consent. Ethical issues which occur in other areas of communication also appear in this situation. For instance, we find these imperatives in mass media ethics accompanied by dilemmas as to what we communicate: what is interesting to the audience (and risk not providing information but trivia), or only reflect what is of public interest (thus following the ethical ideal of media communication and respecting any person’s right to privacy). We can mention the ethical dilemmas in administration ethics with respect to what exactly we reveal about persons and institutions. The question we may ask ourselves is: are there, in advertising, things which we perceive to be so personal that we believe to be confidential, secretive, or simply un-exposable or undisclosable to the public? In order to reach an answer we must question the status of secrets and the necessity to keep them. Sissela Bok explains keeping secrets as an intentional concealment of information in one’s own mind, information which he or she does not want to share with others, and acts in such a way as to prevent others from reaching that information, becoming aware of it or using it. Secrets can take multiple forms: 1. the secret as a separation element between the insider and the outsider;

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2. the secret associated to mystery, like in the case of religion; 3. the secret as inexpressible, in the sense that it is not or cannot be spoken of; or 4. the secret referring to something which is acceptably intimate and private. As it may be seen in the case of commercial or professional secrets, the secret is a result of concealment and implies various methods to conceal, codify or camouflage.288 Thus, secrets and especially, the control over them and over what is accessible are in fact a form of exercising power. Secrets are a powerful weapon in the field of communication and influencing opinions and preferences, because they can influence what people do, know or choose to do in certain circumstances.289 We may note the importance for advertisers of possessing confidential data on consumers in Adriana Năstase and Oana Apopei’s suggestions in the analysis of the behavior targeted online advertising. Information becomes accessible due to the fact that an internet provider and its partners have access to their users’ entire online activity and based on this data, in their personal pages different ads are displayed, according to the user’s interests. Thus, unlike traditional advertising, which had no access to confidential data, and provided the same content to a general audience, online advertising can now be directed in different manners to consumers depending on the general profile given by each user’s particular searches, and increasing the impact of the advertising message.290                                                              288

Sissela Bok, Secrets. On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 6.  289 Sissela Bok, Secrets. On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, 282.  290 Adriana Năstase, Oana Apopei, “Este publicitatea online targetată comportamental o problemă pentru utilizator?” HotNews.ro, May 21st, 2013. http://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-dosare_juridice_media-14845740-este-

 

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Starting from the legitimacy of being in control over certain secrets, but also having in mind the danger a secret can present to those involved, as well as the fact that ethically, one cannot formulate a clear statement for or against secrets, and accepting that it is ethically difficult to either approve the existence of a secret or reject it, Sissela Bok highlights the possibility of two attitudes which must be avoided when it comes to secrets: 1. It is possible for the secret to be associated to the sacred and thus mislead us both regarding its legitimacy and the temptation to deem it valuable in itself. 2. There is also the possibility of an exclusively negative positioning to secrets, and an association with everything believed to be shameful, compromising, which must be kept hidden in order to maintain appearances and avoid being compromised. Both attitudes must be avoided, and the author encourages a neutral approach, placed beyond showing respect and humbleness and beyond believing secrets are threatening, evil, with bad effects.291 Sissela Bok places secrets in the dialectic of freedom: “secrecy, moreover, preserves liberty, yet this very liberty allows the invasion of that of others”.292 Sissela Bok notices that when secrecy occurs in institutions, especially state institutions, there is a conflict of interests in which “every government has an interest in concealment; every public in greater access to information.”293 This conflict is solved by professionals in confidentiality and conflict management. Professional secrecy is surrounded by confidentiality in                                                                                                                publicitatea-online-targetata-comportamental-problema-pentruutilizator.htm  291 Sissela Bok, Secrets. On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, 9.  292 Sissela Bok, Secrets. On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, 28.  293 Sissela Bok, Secrets. On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, 177. 

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such a way as to ensure restrictions to direct access. The more professional secrecy is extended, the more it becomes vulnerable, and confidentiality areas must be extended, strengthened and protected. Professionals are bound to keeping secrets because the principle of confidentiality includes this obligation even in the situation that a secret outside the system would bring no prejudice.294 We can notice the same ethical imperative in the Romanian legislation which regulates personal data concealment. Both professionals who have the duty to keep or manipulate personal data and the surveillance authority have the obligation to keep the secrecy of personal data. According to Article 21 (4), the entire staff “ has the obligation to maintain professional secrecy, except for the situations described by the law, for an unlimited period of time, with respect to confidential or classified information which they had access to through work duties, including after they have ceased to have a legal rapport with the surveillance authority.”295 Secrecy is described by Sissela Bok as a special state which derived from the very way people are positioned versus other people, especially in a world where the technological development leads to an erosion of the standards of secrecy keeping and can be perceived as a threat to private life intimacy. All the things that humans wish to protect – the sacred, intimacy, fragility, danger, and the forbidden – can be a secret. The protection granted to realities of the world of things or relationships reveal human reality with its meanings originated from the desire to live together but also                                                              Sissela Bok, Secrets. On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation,119.  Law no. 677/2001 on the protection of people regarding personal data manipulation and free circulation, published in the Official Gazette no. 790 on December 12, 2001, Article 21.  294 295

 

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to save an area inaccessible to others, the natural tendency to share everything with everyone but also keep something hidden, the desire to explore things which demand exploration but also to keep some of them in the unknown so that they do not become dangerous.296 Actually, in Romania, Law no. 544 which establishes free access to public information also excludes from this category a series of information, such as: c) “Information regarding commercial or financial activities, if their advertisement would be detrimental to loyal competition, according to the law …. d) Information regarding personal data, according to the law…. g) Information which, if published, would bring prejudice to youth protection measures.”297 Secrecy understood as a right to personal image, confidentiality and personal intimacy or organizational security is guaranteed by Article 12 of the Code for Advertising Practice as an ethical invitation to respect persons, their private lives, and their property and assets rights. In a broad sense, we could say that secrecy, understood as respect for what is intimate and private, aims to prevent any damage to dignity. This is why, in the notices addressed to the RAC, when the Ethics Committee faces violations of these provisions of the Code, it can base the sanctioning decision on the Code and on the paragraph of the advertising law that forbids advertising which “brings prejudices to the respect for human dignity and public morals.”298                                                              Sissela Bok, Secrets. On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, 281.  Law544on the free access to information of public interest, Published in the Official Gazette, Part I no. 663 of 23 October 2001, Art. 12.  298 Law on advertising, Law no. 148 of 26/07/2000, Art. 6 (c)  296 297

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Among the rules that advertising specialists must obey are the ones in Law no. 677/2001, in which Article 1(1) “has the purpose to guarantee and protect natural persons’ fundamental rights and freedoms, especially the right to intimate, family and private life, with reference to personal data processing.”299 The Law establishes legitimacy conditions in data. According to Article 5, “any personal data processing…can be performed only if the person in question has expressly and unequivocally agreed with that specific processing”. Any exception to this rule is granted, provided “it does not contravene legal stipulations which regulate public authorities’ obligation to observe and protect intimate, family and private life”. Some categories of special data processing are also regulated. For instance, Article 7 stipulates that: “Processing of personal data regarding racial or ethnical origin, convictions of political, religious, philosophical or similar nature, union affiliation as well as personal data regarding health state or sexual life is forbidden”.300 Data protection is ensured both as an ethical pressure inside the profession and as an external requirement deriving from the European Union legislation. In the process of protecting intimacy, of what is personal and intimate, we take into account the fact that “personal data includes any information about a person, whether it refers to private, professional or public life. This data can take many forms, such as names, photographs, e-mail addresses, bank details, social networking websites contributions, medical information                                                              299

Law no. 677/2001 on the protection of people regarding personal data processing and free circulation, published in the Official Gazette no. 790 on December 12, 2001, Art. 1 (1).  300 Law no. 677/2001 on the protection of people regarding personal data processing and free circulation, published in the Official Gazette no. 790 on December 12, 2001, Art. 7 

 

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or the IP address of the personal computers. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union stipulates that any person is entitled to personal data protection in all aspects of life: at home, at work, when shopping, when benefitting from medical treatments, in police stations or on the Internet.”301 Technological development constantly challenges the degrees of confidentiality and the tendency to keep confidentiality. Intimacy and private life are invaded by technology. Human beings tend to share intimate lives with technology and the instruments it proposes. Especially among the users of the new technologies we notice the lack of distinction between public and private space, as a consequence of the lack of borders between the real world and the virtual one. This is precisely why the virtual world is an inexhaustible supplier of personal data, which in terms of traditional relations would be seen as confidential, regarding personal secrets or private life. Monitoring the activities in the virtual world can be a constant source of data useful to commercial communication and advertisers. Advertisers must consider the impact that the collection and possession of this data can have on online advertising. As Adriana Năstase and Oana Apopei show in the analysis of behavior targeted online advertising, individuals manifest a great variety of attitudes when it comes to the surveillance and monitoring of their activities by an external entity, and to the use of data in economic-driven activities.                                                              301

Adrian Vasilache, “Reforma în normele UE privind protec ia datelor personale: «Dreptul de a fi uitat» în cazul datelor postate online şiamenzi de până la un milion de euro pentru companiile care încalcă regulile”, HotNews.ro, January 25th, 2012. http://economie.hotnews.ro/stiri-it-11331176reforma-normele-privind-protectia-datelor-personale-dreptul-uitat-cazuldatelor-postate-online-amenzi-pana-milion-euro-pentru-companiile-careincalca-regulile.htm 

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As long as performed with the consent of those involved, such a collection and use for commercial purposes can be deemed ethical as it is not intended to gather information which can directly identify persons but to make behavioral profiling; however, it does have a negative side as it gives enough data to make this identification possible. It is obvious that the sensitivity regarding the collection and processing of this data can increase depending on the level of detail and analysis of online behavior or on the degree of sensitivity shown by individuals when it comes to various types of information collected and purpose of use.302 Most probably, in subjects sensitive to their personal lives, users will show more reservation to have their information accessed and would prefer keeping it secret. But even when it is not about information we may deem confidential, specialists in communication must respect individuals’ right to decide what is public and what is private in terms of what may be displayed in public in connection to their public image and presence. Although in the Code of Advertising Practice, the article referring to observing intimacy and private life seems formulated very briefly, it is essential to understand ethical codification in advertising. The Code is somewhat elliptical because it is intended to note, from an ethical perspective, a legal requirement which is already stipulated in Romanian law. Beyond the pressure put by the legal environment, professionals in advertising must reach high standards regarding the responsibility they have to consumers, to communities as recipients of their messages, to society as a whole. Advertisers’ professional ethics is a sign of the consumption culture.                                                              302

Adriana Năstase, Oana Apopei, “Este publicitatea online targetată comportamental o problemă pentru utilizator?”, HotNews.ro, May 21st, 2013. 

 

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Towards an Ethics of Responsibility The consumption society is based on ethical responsibility in commercial communication. Playing a central role in communication, advertising is requested to especially bear this responsibility. Chris Hackley points to the existence, in various countries, of a complex system of restrictions on advertising for it to comply with requirements regarding context, manner of exposure, the period of the day in which an ad may be transmitted: •“In France TV advertising for movies, alcohol, tobacco and medicines is not permitted. The ban on advertising books and newspapers has recently been changed to allow limited advertising. • In Eastern Europe alcohol advertising is heavily restricted. • In Sweden TV advertising for toys cannot be directed at children under 12. • In the UK tobacco advertising is banned. • In Argentina all advertising was banned on subscription cable-TV channels in January 2004. • In Austria and Finland the use of children in ads is heavily restricted. Italy also banned the use of children in advertising in 2003. • In many predominantly Muslim nations advertising cannot portray practices that are not permitted under Muslim law, for example females must be fully clothed and wearing headscarves, and advertising of non-halal food products is not allowed. • In Hungary, it is prohibited ‘to use erotic and sexual elements in advertising for purposes not justified by the object and substance of advertising’ and no advertisement ‘may be such as to reduce the reputation of the advertising

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profession or undermine public confidence in the advertising activity’. • In the UK alcohol advertisements cannot use actors who appear to be under the age of 18 and they cannot show people drinking quickly; they must sip their drinks. • In Greece TV advertising of toys to children is banned between 7 pm and 10 pm”.303 Consequently, we notice the commitment of states, through specialized institutions, to protect individuals, special needs groups and the general community of consumers from the possible negative effects of commercial communication. For this very reason, persuasive communication through advertising must always take into account the pressure put by market rules, competition and profit on the one hand, and the sometimes overvalued imperatives of the ethical market behavior requirements and of the responsibility versus various audience categories and consumption society in general. From an ethical perspective, it is important to note the fact that in modern states, one of the governing requirements was revealed by David Seth Jones, in his demand for governors to have a strict observance of the ethical standards in goods and services acquisitions for governmental programs and structures. This special concern is not only based on the fact that the amounts circulated represent significant percentages of taxpayers’ money, but also on the fact that acquisitions have a great impact on public services and on important parts of the economy. In order to observe ethical principles clear rules, transparent procedures must be established and followed, contracts must be signed for                                                              303

Chris Hackley, Advertising and Promotion Communicating Brands, 188. 

 

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committing to legal and administrative procedures.304 An important principle is the Government’s responsibility to promote fair and equitable practices. When speaking of correctness, David Seth Jones states that, in governmental responsibility, the use of the term has multiple meanings: 1. the first refers to providing rewards based on merits, accomplishments, involvement level; 2. at the same time, it implies the principle of fairness, which also means satisfying the needs deriving from circumstantial situations or from belonging to disadvantaged groups, regardless of merits, accomplishment or efforts; 3. the third interpretation of correctness considers the prohibition of actions which are detrimental to the legitimate interests of others; 4. a forth meaning is linked to cultivating a justice sense, based on the obligation to keep a promise; from this perspective, the terms of a contract, freely agreed upon by the parties, must be rigorously respected in order to honor the agreement.305 In Romania, we note the governmental preoccupation with the strategic development of ethics in public acquisitions and investments in advertising made from public funds. To this end, a good practice guide was elaborated for public institutions involved in advertising services acquisition. This guide is meant to develop ethical competencies in advertising specialists. According to the guide’s authors, “although public communication disciplines are found in many practices and applications, this document is intended to train communication specialists for developing clear, co                                                             304

David Seth Jones, “Public Procurement Ethics”, in Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, edited by Jack Rabin, First update supplement, (Boca Raton, FL.: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005), 234.  305 David Seth Jones, “Public Procurement Ethics”, 234. 

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herent and realistic Task Notebooks when it comes to purchasing institutional advertising services and publicity.”306 There is a constant concern for the implementation of ethics in the public space of commercial communication, even when the term ethics is used minimally, various substitutes being used instead, such as integrity, which only refers to some ethical aspects, although in administrative language it is sometimes used to refer to the entire ethical spectrum. With reference to the ethics of acquisitions, public policy and ethics in general in the public sector, we must remember an aspect presented in Frédérique Six and Leo W.J.C. Huberts’ analyses. They believe that the examination of public servants’ integrity must be made by experts outside the profession and using criteria established both inside and outside of the professional community. They choose a glance from outside not because their own analysis of public servants’ integrity wouldn’t be credible, but because they find necessary a voice which expresses the perception of those benefitting from the activity of public servants. To this end, researchers insist on analyzing and taking into consideration what citizens believe to be moral behavior on the part of the public worker. Thus, integrity criteria should be based on three categories: 1. Formal criteria included in laws, codes, sets of rules, based on ethical values, norms and rules and on a community’s behavior, but which are objective, consistent and universally applicable.

                                                             306

Mihaela Barbălată, Florin Beldiman, Victor Dobre, Cezarina Rozalia Fălan, Marius Gheorghe, Cristina Guseth, Costin Juncu, Victor Stroe, Arina Ureche, Achiziţia serviciilor de publicitate. Ghid de bună practică pentru instituţiile publice, Agen ia pentru Strategii Guvernamentale, 2009, 7. 

 

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2. Clear procedures to solve the issues deriving from breaking the ethical rules presented by the documents which are established as community rules. 3. The expectations of the public from public servants when it comes to observing ethical rules and moral behavior. The researchers’ constant effort in ethics was to establish and update a set of integrity criteria based on the public’s expectations as an indicator of public servants’ integrity.307 Consequently, an integrity analysis implies criteria which come from within the profession, reflecting ethical behavior and communication inside the profession, and from the outside, an external look at the public’s perception, various categories of public which benefit from public servants’ services. This external view is built on the spirit of ethical communication, starting from the daily activity of the public servants inside their organization, but also from a set of expectations which the general community establishes as publicly accepted integrity criteria. Another type of pressure, possibly even more powerful on advertising, is the criticism brought to advertising from anti-consumerist positions. It starts from the fear and insecurity advertising induces by invoking the negative consequences of product’s lack of consumption or the refusal to respond to the call of solidarity around a cause based on responsibility to alterity. It is especially believed that “some advertisers are guilty of influencing consumer behavior by appealing to negative emotions such as fear, guilt, and hu                                                             307

Frédérique Six and Leo W.J.C. Huberts, “Judging a public official’s integrity”, in Ethics and integrity of governance: perspectives across frontiers, edited by Leo W.J.C. Huberts, JeroenMaesschalck, Carole L. Jurkiewicz, with a foreword by John Rohr, (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2008), 79-80. 

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miliation”.308 Responding to such criticisms, Terence A. Schimp states: “advertising possesses no monopoly on this transgression. For example, theologians sometimes threaten that non-believers will go to hell; politicians assert that our fate will be even worse if we vote for their opponent; teachers warn that our futures are in jeopardy if we do not get term papers in on time; and parents intimidate their children on a routine basis using a variety of ’fear appeals’. Looked at it this way, it might be deduced that advertisers are rather innocent by comparison”.309 Appealing to such elements is regulated both by communication legislation and by the requirements of the Code which speak of social responsibility. When appealing to such elements, the sense of measure is what ensures the ethical frame of advertising creation and dissemination. In maintaining this balance there is a need for the state and organizations’ institutional commitment as well as for individual ethics that engages every person and implies managerial ethics be assumed by decision makers. Starting from Harold Lasswell’s perspective considering human dignity the end-scope of all theories and practices of public policy, Steven A. Peterson places human dignity at the root of all values. This way, democratic society’s entire effort is oriented to undertaking democratic practices as central value to every individual. One must abandon the idea that individual values automatically conflict with community values. They can be recovered through public policy as complementing the values essential to public good. Steven A. Peterson does not exclude the                                                              308

Terence A. Shimp, Advertising, Promotion, & Other Aspects of Integrated Marketing Communications, (Mason, OH: South-Western, Cengage Learning, 2010), 613.  309 Terence A. Shimp, Advertising, Promotion, & Other Aspects of Integrated Marketing Communications, 613. 

 

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possibility that individual values be perceived as more important than community ones, or that the values of the person analyzing public policies be in conflict with those of public policy creators. In each of the conflicts it is necessary for mechanisms of consensus to be set in motion, starting with cultivating the values expected by most citizens from themselves, from politicians, from other agents of the public space.310 The state, with its specialized institutions, has full responsibility for providing an ethical context in which the individual good should be correlated to the public good in the consumption society. At the same time, in the spirit of minimal ethics, as the postmodern man’s ethics is, individual values are the foundation of common good. This is why the involvement of each individual as part of organizational responsibility is part of the responsibility logic in an organization which encourages ethic behaviors on the market. Managers’ ethics cannot be separated from ethical management and from organizations’ ethical manifestation in commercial communication. The ethical requirements of an organization must manifest even when there isn’t a legal frame to oblige. We have always opted for the development of social responsibility as individuals and organizations’ voluntary commitment.311 There is a very powerful tendency to impose social responsibility actions as compulsory for organizations, even by the law. We vote for a voluntary nature of social responsibility, as there is no guarantee that including this obligation in the law, the efficiency of this action would increase. The beauty and the virtue of social responsibility come pre                                                             310

Steven A. Peterson, “Values and Policy Analysis”, in Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, edited by Jack Rabin, First update supplement, (Boca Raton, FL.: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005), 321.  311 Sandu Frunză, Ethical Communication and Social Responsibility, (Saarbruchen, Germany: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2013), 145. 

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cisely from individuals’, managers’ and organizations’ ethical commitment, which is far superior to simply fulfilling a legal obligation. All the more that social responsibility does not refer only to the way part of the profit is redirected to charitable purposes or to solving delicate problems of the community surrounding the organization. Social responsibility is an ethical attitude which concerns the entire activity of an organization: internal and external communication, the attitude towards employees, shareholders, partners and various categories of the public, the way an organization develops its activity, ethical resource exploitation and profit obtaining means, but also what is established as responsibility to future generations. The organizations are challenged to present an ethical behavior and they must commit to individual ethics and individual accountability. Even if this is a metaphorical language about organizations as persons, they must respond to the challenges of responsibility. It is true that organizations have certain obligations to society and to the community. However, these obligations must be developed in the direction of a responsible attitude and ethical accountability instead of being regulated as obligations that organizations must meet according to the law. Of course, the relationship between ethics and law is complex, and it is not the subject of our discussion now, but we must underline the fact that it is preferable to have an ethical pressure with direct consequences in responsible actions, rather than to have neutral obligations as actions to meet legal requirements. From an ethical perspective, excessive regulation brings no profit. In a consumerist culture, communication is preferable if it is ethical and efficient. It must constantly leave room to personal options and self-regulation actions by the professional environment. The desire to establish deontological codes as printed law can in no case lead to an  

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increase of ethical behaviors in the professional environment. Where professional ethics Codes have appeared in the form of a law, we can see no increase of the ethical virtues of the professional environments. The law creates a kind of neutrality space versus its observance. The neutrality can tremendously diminish personal commitment and the ethical vocation of responsibility. A certain type of obligation is installed which makes personal option insignificant to ethical decisions, a behavior based on compliance being favored instead. Ethical responsibility cannot be built outside individual option and free personal commitment. Professional codes as ethical instruments have precisely the role to valorize, in a professional framework, the ethical meanings of every person as a value-bearing being.

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Acknowledgements This volume includes several previously published texts and some new texts. A part of first chapter and the chapters 2-7 were published as my personal contribution to the volumes Liviu Radu, Alin Iuga, Sandu Frunză, Etică în administraţia publică, (Bucureşti: Tritonic, 2013), Chapters VI-XII, and Liviu Radu, Alin Iuga, Sandu Frunză, Ethics, (Bucureşti: Tritonic, 2013), Chapters VI-XII. The other chapters of mentioned volumes belong to the two authors. Also, a part of chapter 1 was published as Sandu Frunză, “Minimal Ethics and the New Configuration of the Public Space”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, Vol 11, No 32 (2012): 3-17; and chapter 6 was published as Sandu Frunză, “Increasing competence – an ethical duty of civil servants”, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, Special Issue (2012): 32-41.

 

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Index

A abandon, 65, 185 ability, 28, 30, 31, 66, 76, 84, 130, 137, 139, 144, 145 abortion, 5, 60, 61, 63, 65 Abrudan, Elena, 9, 190 Abrudan, Mirela-Codru a, 168, 169, 190 absolutism, 17, 23 abundance, 137, 141 access to information, 55, 174, 176 accountability, 55, 150, 187 achieving of pleasure, 138 active euthanasia, 57, 58 Adams, Guy B., 80, 190 addiction to consumption, 134 administrative ethics, 5, 15, 35, 36, 41, 51, 89, 97, 105, 200, 204-206 Adorno, Theodor W., 13, 14, 190 advertising addressed to children, 161 advertising communication, 149, 153, 164 advertising language, 143, 165, 167 advertising nature, 152 advertising professionals, 95, 156 Alt, Florian, 160, 200

alterity, 25-27, 184 Alves, Helena, 111, 199 Antohi, Mona, 8, 195 Apopei, Oana, 173, 178, 179, 201 appearance, 174 applied ethics, 35, 68, 108, 132, 203 Arpinte, Daniel, 9, 192 Asiminei, Romeo, 11, 196 assisted death, 60 assisted suicide, 58 Astărăstoae, Vasile, 9, 190 Audard, Catherine, 54, 69, 70, 197, 200, 203 authentic, 47, 71, 132, 138, 139, 145 authenticity, 121, 133, 137, 138, 168 authority, 12, 13, 18, 23, 24, 26, 43, 45, 54, 78, 86, 97, 104, 114, 123, 124, 128, 131, 158, 175 autonomy, 12, 23, 46, 59, 69

B Bacali, Laura, 22, 110, 204 backstairs influence, 100 Bagdasar, Nicolae, 48, 69, 197 Balaban, Delia Cristina, 168170, 190, 192 Balfour, Danny L., 80, 190 banality of everyday, 144 Barbălată, Mihaela, 183, 190  

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208 Barthes, Roland, 144, 168, 190 Baudrillard, Jean, 140, 147, 191 Bauman, Zygmunt, 13, 191 Bălu ă, Oana, 68, 202 Beauchamp, Tom L., 115, 203 being, 7, 12, 17, 18, 25-27, 32, 36, 46, 49, 51, 54, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 70, 71, 77, 84, 90, 99, 105, 107, 116, 120, 126, 127, 129, 133, 134, 136, 139, 141, 142, 144, 147, 152, 155, 156, 158, 161, 162, 166, 168, 174, 183, 187, 188, 199 Beldiman, Florin, 183, 190 Benson, April Lane, 135, 191 Bercu, Ana-Maria, 88, 191 Beyer, William C., 102, 103, 191 bioethical issues, 110 bioethics, 11, 68 biological existence, 142 Boari, Vasile, 57, 196, 198, 205 Boc, Emil, 22, 191 Bocioc, Florentina, 66, 67, 191 Bok, Sissela, 54, 121, 122, 172-176, 191 Bolovan, Ioan, 10, 191, 202 Bolovan, Sorina Paula, 202 born to shop, 136 Bowman, James S., 81, 82, 122, 123, 191, 197

Bratosin, Ştefan, 169, 170, 192 bribery, 100, 119 Bruce, Willa Marie, 36, 41, 97, 105, 192, 200, 204-206 bureaucracies, 53 Burke, Frances, 132, 192 business ethics, 68, 151 buying, 32, 135, 139, 148

C Cace, Corina, 9, 192 Cace, Sorin, 9, 192 care ethics, 68 Carpov, Maria, 168, 190 Catron, Bayard, 132, 192 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 67, 198 cerebral death, 59 Champion, Francoise, 8, 192 Ciomoş, Virgil, 111, 192 Ciuchi, Oana M., 108, 203 code of advertising practice, 6, 149, 150-152, 157-159, 163-165, 168, 179 code of conduct of civil servants, 95, 98, 198 code of journalists, 95 code of psychologists, 95 codes of conduct, 81, 86, 104, 124 codes of magistrates, 95 codes of medical professions, 95 codes of the professional associations, 95 Codoban, Aurel, 142, 143, 147, 192

Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of Ethics

Cohen, Richard A., 27, 193 Cojocaru, Daniela, 9, 10, 110, 193 Cojocaru, Ştefan, 9, 10, 192, 193 collegiality, 96 commercial communication, 149, 150, 152, 156, 161, 162, 165, 178, 180, 181, 183, 186 commitment, 79 commodities, 33 communication deontology, 23 communication science, 151 communication to children, 157 community experience, 20 community values, 20, 185 comparative advertising, 139, 151 competence, 5, 20, 29, 31, 74, 75, 106, 205 competitor, 152 compliance, 90, 96, 128, 131, 188 compromise, 87 compulsive consumption, 136 Comte-Sponville, Andre, 121, 193 concealment, 172-175 confidentiality, 54, 55, 82, 174, 176, 178 conflict of interests, 117, 129, 174 conformity, 42, 90, 108, 150 consumer addiction, 134

209

consumer culture, 33, 137, 139, 141, 144, 146 consumerist culture, 33, 136, 164, 165, 171, 187 consumerist imaginary, 156 consumerist society, 33, 137, 170 consumers’ sensitivity, 152 consumption society, 154, 156, 165, 171, 180, 181, 186 Cooper, Terry L., 91, 99, 197, 200, 201 Copoeru, Ion, 127, 193 Copot, Dana, 110, 193 Corbea, Andrei, 14, 190 corruption, 12, 19, 20, 86, 122 Cox III, Raymond W., 32, 75, 80, 81, 85, 114, 190, 194, 198, 199, 205 Cox, Damian, 120, 196 Craig, Edward, 40, 194 Crăciun, Dan, 44, 193 Cuceu, Codru a Liana, 109, 193 cultural pluralism, 15

D Dâncu, Vasile Sebastian, 171, 193 death of God, 7 death with dignity, 60 deception, 5, 52, 53, 55 decision-making process, 87 deliberate abortion, 65 Delumeau, Jean, 8, 192 democratic values, 82, 115  

210 demographical decline, 68 denigration, 124, 125, 151 denigration of the institution, 124 deontological code, 17, 77, 82, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 104, 108, 112, 120, 163, 187 deontology, 23, 28, 41 desire, 6, 133, 136, 137 Diaconescu, Rodica, 110, 193 Diaconescu, Vlad, 110, 193 Diaconu, Bogdan, 22, 100, 101, 118, 119, 194 dignified death, 9, 58 dignity, 54, 57, 79, 164, 168, 176, 185 distorted information, 55 divulge information, 123, 124 Dobre, Victor, 183, 190 Doig, Jameson W., 132, 192 Donagan, Alan, 8, 194 Dragomir, Otilia, 62, 67, 191, 204 Drewniany, Bonnie L., 161, 194 Ducu, Cristian, 90, 91, 194 Duff, R. A., 40, 194 Dumezil, Georges, 8, 194 Dumitrescu, Adelina, 76, 194 Dumitrescu, Marilena, 198 duties, 5, 35, 46, 51

E economic behavior, 153 economic communication, 142, 151

Sandu Frunză

educational system, 10, 28, 29 efficient and competitive action, 96 Eliade, Mircea, 8, 194 embryo, 61, 64 environment ethics, 68 epicureanism, 138 Epicurus, 138 Erakovich, Rodney, 85, 194 erotic game, 141 Erwin, Patrick M., 163, 194 ethical action, 39, 73, 85, 109, 110 ethical and efficient communication, 85, 142 ethical audit, 89 ethical behavior, 28, 38, 41, 72, 73, 104, 163, 184-188 ethical code, 6, 95, 98, 109 ethical commission, 17 ethical committee, 89 ethical communication, 6, 163, 186, 195 ethical competence, 32, 7577, 83, 84, 98, 108-110, 112, 132 ethical conscience, 51, 89 ethical context, 12, 16, 17, 35, 79-82, 85, 86, 89, 92, 98, 100, 106, 108, 113, 114, 186 ethical control, 17, 81 ethical counseling, 6, 127 ethical decision, 49, 60, 73, 84, 88, 97, 99, 100, 105, 108, 188

Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of Ethics

ethical development, 89, 113 ethical education, 89 ethical evaluation, 98 ethical expertise, 75-77, 98, 110, 112 ethical government, 83 ethical illiteracy, 83 ethical management, 5, 81, 82, 198 ethical maximalism, 16 ethical minimalism, 14, 104 ethical norms, 85 ethical performance, 79 ethical pressure, 140, 177, 187 ethical principles, 22, 30, 35, 84, 86, 102, 103, 181 ethical responsibility, 53, 86, 161, 171, 180 ethical sensitivity, 91 ethical standards, 21, 31, 78, 97, 99, 104-107, 112, 181 ethical training, 6, 106 ethical value, 21, 30, 37, 77, 92, 111, 183 ethics agencies, 81 ethics commission, 100 ethics counselor, 127-130, 132 ethics culture, 91 ethics management, 5, 81, 89, 91-93, 107, 198, 200 ethics of neutrality, 36, 37 ethics of responsibility, 11, 18, 24 ethics of structure, 36 ethics officer, 86

211

etiquette, 6, 95, 96, 97 euthanasia, 5, 55 existential communication, 155 experience of pleasure, 138, 143 external communication, 135, 187

F fair conduct, 96 fairness, 33, 117, 118, 182 false needs, 32, 135, 145 Fălan, Cezarina Rozalia, 183, 190 fetus, 61, 64, 66 Follesdale, Andreas, 130, 205 Frankena, William, 8, 194 freedom, 19, 37, 50, 65, 119, 124, 135, 136, 145, 161, 174 Freeman, Edward R., 89, 194 Frunză, Mihaela, 22, 59, 76, 195

G Gal, Susan, 195 Gauchet, Marcel, 8, 195 Gavrilu ă, Cristina, 11, 133, 134, 167, 195 Gheorghe, Marius, 183, 190 gift, 166, 171 Gilbert, Daniel R., jr., 89, 194 Gilman, Stuart C., 77-79, 86, 87, 103-106, 112, 199 global culture, 15 global ethics, 16, 62  

Sandu Frunză

212 Goodpaster, Kenneth E., 39, 196 Gould, Carol C., 64, 67, 196, 197 Graaf, Gjalt de, 19, 196 Gruen, Lori, 196 Guseth, Cristina, 183, 190

H Hackley, Chris, 159, 161, 162, 180, 181, 196 Halfon, Mark, 119, 120, 196 happiness, 5, 69, 138 having, 68, 76, 83, 92, 116, 128, 139, 150, 174 Hayat, Pierre, 25, 26, 196 hedonism, 138 hedonistic, 32 Hegel, 14 Her eliu, Claudiu, 22, 111, 195, 196 hierarchy of satisfaction, 144 Hin ea, Călin Emilian, 22, 38, 109, 196, 197 Holmes, Helen Bequaert, 67, 197 honesty, 79, 121 honor, 54, 84, 106, 119, 121124, 182 Hosu, Ioan, 169, 170, 190, 192 Huberts, Leo W.J.C., 82, 120, 123, 183, 184, 192, 203 human body, 49 human condition, 7, 9, 25, 44, 49, 60 humor, 96

I iconic images, 146 identity, 15, 23, 33, 98, 148, 158 ideologies, 13, 15 Ikola-Norrbacka, Rinna, 20, 21, 203 Iliescu, Adrian Paul, 111, 197 illusion of fulfilment, 133 imagining reality, 139 implementation, 87 incompetence, 80, 190 individual ethics, 86, 185, 187 individual responsibility, 5, 7 inferno, 6, 133 influence, 85, 194 information society, 169 insecurity, 65, 135, 184 institutional communication, 17 institutionalization of ethics, 35, 79, 89, 93, 99, 132 instrument of branding and marketing, 101 instrument of decision, 100 integrity, 19, 31, 118, 120, 196 intercultural communication, 23 intersubjective communication, 143 intersubjectivity, 25 Ioan, Beatrice, 10, 110, 197 Iuga, Alin, 189

Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of Ethics

J Jewler, A. Jerome, 161, 194 Jhally, Sut, 32, 33, 139, 145147, 199 Jones, David Seth, 181, 182, 197 Juncu, Costin, 183, 190 Jurkiewicz, Carol L., 82, 120, 123, 184, 192, 203 justice, 47, 79, 85, 101, 121, 182

K Kaltenbach, Jeanne-Helene, 69, 197 Kaltenbach, Pierre-Patrick, 69, 197 Kant, Immanuel, 48, 69, 70, 71, 197 kantian imperative, 71 Key, Wilson Bryan, 6, 116, 153, 154, 155, 198 Kligman, Gail, 195, 198 Kline, Stephan, 32, 33, 139, 145, 146, 147, 199 Kushe, Helga, 57-60, 198

L La Caze, Marguerite, 120, 196 labor market, 29 laws, 19, 21, 41, 43, 44, 51, 63, 66, 68, 82-84, 104, 106, 108, 110, 114, 117, 122, 155, 157, 170, 183 Lawton, Alan, 81, 86, 198

213

leadership, 22, 38, 83, 109, 131, 168, 197 leadership myopia, 83 legal, 21, 31, 36, 38, 41, 43, 44, 58, 61, 65, 66, 75, 90, 100, 104, 109, 113, 114, 116-119, 122-124, 150, 172, 175, 177, 179, 182, 186 legal rights, 114 legislation, 21, 103, 114, 116, 149, 150, 156, 157, 175, 177, 185 legitimacy, 19, 20, 78, 84, 143, 174, 177 Leiss, William, 32, 33, 139, 145-147, 199 leisure time, 82 Levinas, Emmanuel, 24-27, 193, 196, 199, 201 Levine, Michael, 120, 196 Lewis, Carol W., 77-79, 86, 87, 103-106, 112, 199 Lică, Doina, 13, 191 life preservation, 49 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 7, 11-13, 15-20, 24, 45, 46, 60, 108, 199 literal meaning, 136 local communities, 22 Lohmann, Nancy, 199 Lohmann, Roger A., 199 loyal competition, 150, 176 Lury, Celia, 33, 34, 199 Lusted, Marcia Amidon, 161, 199 lying, 54, 122, 191 Lynch, Cynthia E., 114, 199  

214

M Macaulay, Michael, 81, 86, 198 Maclagan, Patrick, 37, 199 Macoviciuc, Vasile, 43, 44, 193 Maesschalck, Jeroen, 82, 104, 120, 123, 192, 199, 203 magic, 93 Mainardes, Emerson Wagner, 111, 199 Malraux, 7 managerial action, 81 managerial responsibility, 38, 88 manipulation, 142, 147, 153, 155, 156, 175 Marinescu, Aurelia Anastasia, 96, 200 market behavior, 135, 181 market of ideas, 33 marketing instruments, 151 marketization of interpersonal relations, 141 Martinez, J. Michael, 89, 200 mass-communication, 147 mass-media, 11, 143, 145 Matei, Alexandru, 147, 191 Matei, Ani, 76, 88, 191, 194 maximal regulations, 116 Mărincean, Raluca, 57, 196, 198, 205 McFall, Liz, 141, 199 McFarland, Dalton E., 88, 200 medical ethics, 49 medical interventions, 48

Sandu Frunză

mentality, 59, 92 Menzel, Donald C., 82-85, 9093, 97, 107, 200 metaphorical language, 150, 187 Michelis, Daniel, 160, 200 Mihali, Ciprian, 147, 191 Mina, Laura, 112, 202 Mincu, Ştefania, 12, 205 minima, 5, 7, 13-15, 190, 201 minima moralia, 13 minimal ethics, 5, 7, 15, 23, 189 minimum of cordiality, 96 Miroiu, Mihaela, 62, 67, 191, 200, 204 misconduct, 83 misleading advertising, 151 modesty, 96 Montefiore, Alan, 54, 200 Monypenny, Phillip, 97, 200 Mora, Cristina, 22, 38, 109, 110, 197, 204 moral behavior, 77, 79, 114, 183, 184 moral character, 79 moral habits, 72 moral institutional culture, 89 moral integrity, 119, 121 moral judgment, 15, 40, 79 moral mediocrity, 15 moral motivation, 79 moral responsibility, 13, 18 moral rights, 44, 45, 66, 114 moral sensitivity, 79

Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of Ethics

morality, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 24, 28, 35, 42, 43, 51, 72, 78, 114 Morar, Vasile, 43, 44, 193 Morgan, John H., 111, 200 Mucundorfeanu, Meda, 169, 170, 190, 192 Müller, Jörg, 160, 200 murder, 55, 58, 59, 61-64 Mureşan, Valentin, 22, 89, 90, 101, 102, 108, 127, 201 Mureşan, Vianu, 27, 201 mythical, 141, 155, 167 mythological, 141, 167

N Năstase, Adriana, 173, 178, 179, 201 nepotism, 100 new technologies, 143, 178 Nica, Marian, 112, 202 Noica, Mariana, 8, 194 Noonan, John T., Jr., 62, 63, 201 norms of conduct, 96, 104, 128, 131

O objectification, 71 obligations, 47, 51, 87, 96, 103, 108, 109, 114, 118, 187 Onofrei, Mihaela, 88, 191 Oprescu, Dan, 62, 201 optimizing the profession, 6, 98

215

organizational communication, 17 organizational culture, 85, 9092, 100, 163 organizational ethics, 38, 83, 86, 150, 163 organizational values, 85, 87

P Papahagi, Marian, 144, 190 paradise, 136, 140 paradisiacal, 6, 136, 140, 141 Parsons, Patricia J., 72-74, 77, 201 participation, 87 passive euthanasia, 57, 60 pathological consumption, 141 patient rights, 58 perception of goods, 145 personal achievement, 133, 141 personal development, 30, 44, 72, 77, 109, 145 personal history, 20 personal interest, 117, 125 personal prestige, 80 personal satisfaction, 137 personal values, 23, 37, 87, 148 persuasion, 32, 135, 142, 145, 147, 159, 160, 162 Peterson, Steven A., 185, 186, 201 philosophical, 7, 11, 25, 36, 47, 57, 58, 60, 115, 120, 177, 196, 203  

216 philosophy, 7, 10, 14, 22, 25, 26, 35, 40, 56, 64, 67-69, 76, 115, 119, 120, 128, 129, 132, 158, 194-197, 203 pictorial elements, 146 Pintea, Ioan, 166, 204 Plant, Jeremy F., 99, 106, 201 Plato, 133, 170 Pleşu, Andrei, 14, 15, 18, 201 pluralist culture, 139 Poede, George, 57, 202 politeness, 96 political ethics, 36, 68 Pop, Ioan-Aurel, 10, 202 Pop, Ion, 144, 190 Popa, Raluca Maria, 68, 202 Popescu, Alina Irina, 111, 202 postmodern, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 24, 25, 28, 145, 147, 167, 170, 186 practical skills of communication, 143 Preda, Marian, 39, 202 preferential relations, 100 Prisăcaru, Valentin I., 113, 202 privacy, 74, 172 private interests, 105 private life, 78, 125, 175, 177, 178, 179 private space, 146, 178 problem solving, 92 pro-choice, 62, 64 production of goods, 147 products for children, 157, 159

Sandu Frunză

professional accomplishment, 109 professional competence, 19, 77, 98, 108 professional development, 6, 95 professional duties, 82 professional environment, 7274, 76, 80, 107, 132, 187 professional ethics, 16, 18, 23, 29, 31, 79, 97, 98, 100, 109, 127, 128, 179, 188 professional expertise, 84 professional identity, 23, 78, 97 professional image, 98 professional training, 29, 84 professionalism, 5, 74, 98, 118, 122 professors, 73 Profiroiu, Alina, 112, 202 Profiroiu, Marius, 112, 202 prohibit abortion, 64, 67 pro-life, 42, 62, 64 propaganda, 125, 142, 157 protecting consumers’ interests, 150 public communication, 139, 150, 163, 182 public confidence, 105, 181 public debate, 5, 55-58, 60, 65, public duties, 117, 118, 126 public health, 9 public interest, 35, 38, 40, 41, 54, 56, 84, 86, 100, 117,

Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of Ethics

118, 122-125, 165, 172, 176 public opinion, 19 public policies, 19, 41, 49, 56, 57, 60, 68, 85, 99, 105, 122, 132, 186 public relations, 7, 30 publicity, 151, 153, 183 publicly denigrate, 124 punishment, 58

R Rabin, Jack, 104, 182, 186, 197, 199, 201 Radu, Liviu, 189 Ranta, Ana Elena, 16, 202 Raposo, Mario, 111, 199 Raz, Joseph, 114, 115, 203 Rădulescu, Crina, 76, 88, 191, 194 Regan, Tom, 44, 45, 203 regulations, 11, 17, 19, 21, 27, 43, 44, 51, 100, 104, 106, 149, 156, 157 relativism, 17, 18, 22, 23, 63, 64, 108, 170 religion, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 22, 24, 26, 27, 46, 164, 173, 193 reproduction policies, 67 reputation, 54, 180 respect, 5, 69, 71, 72, 74, 79, 143 respecting the law, 84 responsible stewardship, 79 reward, 43, 44, 58, 106, 167, 182

217

Richardson, William D., 89, 200 Ricoeur, Paul, 70, 203 right, 115, 203 right to die, 57, 60 ritualization of social behavior, 147 Roe versus Wade, 64 Rohr, John, 82, 120, 184, 192, 203 Romanian Advertising Council (RAC), 116, 149, 151, 176, 192 Rubenstein, Richard L., 8, 203 Rusu, Iulian, 110, 193

S, Ş sacred, 10, 134, 167, 170, 192, 195 Salminen, Ani, 20, 21, 203 Sandu, Antonio, 9, 108, 193, 203 Săucan, Ciprian, 138, 203 Schoch, Richard, 138, 203 secrecy, 175, 176 secret, 54, 121, 172-175, 178, 179, 191 secular, 8, 12, 32 secularization, 10, 204 seduction, 6, 133, 140-143, 154, 191, 198, 204 self-respect, 71, 143 Shafritz, Jay M., 36, 192 Sheeran, Patrick J., 36, 38, 42, 43, 46, 47, 49-56, 59, 60-63, 65, 68, 203  

Sandu Frunză

218 Shimp, Terence, 185, 203 shopaholics, 136 shopping, 135, 178 shopping behavior, 136 Singer, Brian, 140, 191 Singer, Peter, 57, 65, 196, 198, 203, 205 Six, Frédérique, 120, 183, 184, 203 Smith, Michael B., 25, 26, 196, 199 social communication, 32, 139, 145-147, 199 social equity, 35, 88 social peace, 44, 82 social problem, 88 social responsibility, 30, 56, 88, 163-165, 168, 169, 171, 185, 186 social rights, 66, 67 social success, 146 social value, 81, 164 society of consumption, 136 society of opulence, 137 Solomon, Michael R., 134136, 204 solve the conflict, 87 soul, 47, 49, 60, 81 special needs, 145, 181 spiritual needs, 144 status of advertising, 33, 151, 160 Stăniloae, Dumitru, 26, 204 Steinhardt, Nicolae, 166, 204 strategic development of ethics, 182 strategic thinking, 88

Stroe, Victor, 183, 190 subliminal, 152-156 suffering, 13, 57, 59, 164, 165, 168 supremacy of law, 117 sustainability, 88, 163 sustainable development, 88 Sutherland, Max, 155, 156, 204 Sylvester, Alice K., 155, 156, 204 symbolic communication, 99 symbolic space, 33 symbolical relationship, 136 Szabo, Nicoleta, 127, 193 Ştefan, Cristina, 61, 62, 204

T, Ţ taboo objects, 133 temptation, 70, 174 Thompson, Dennis F., 15, 3640, 204 to die in dignity, 57 Toader, Elena, 110, 204 Toader, Tudorel, 110, 204 Tofan, Ioan Alexandru, 10, 204 toolboxes of ethical decision, 89 traditional culture, 139 transcendence, 23, 25, 26, 27, 170 transgression of interdictions, 133 transparency, 79 trust, 20, 106, 110, 193, 203 Truth, Taylor, 142, 204

Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of Ethics

Tudor, Mihaela Alexandra, 169, 170, 192 iclău, Tudor, 22, 38, 109, 110, 197, 204 igănaş, Andrei, 22, 110, 204

U unethical, 19, 20, 37, 39, 48, 53, 55, 58, 63, 64, 72, 90, 92, 134, 160, 203 Ureche, Arina, 183, 190

V Van der Wal, Zeger, 19, 196 Vasilache, Adrian, 178, 205 Vasile, Aurelia Ana, 155, 204 Vatavu, Gabriela, 110, 193 Vattimo, Gianni, 12, 205 violation of duties, 70 violence, 12, 42, 46, 134, 164, 170 virtu, 78, 121, 193 virtual communities, 169 virtue, 15, 37, 78, 121, 158, 186 visual, 146 Vlădulescu, Victor-Dinu, 7, 199 Vlădu escu, Ştefan, 153, 169, 205 Von Weltzien Hoivik, Heidi, 205

219

W Warnock, G. J., 8, 205 Warren, Mary Anne, 65, 66, 205 weak ethics, 16, 109 week conscience, 13 wellbeing, 12, 33, 56, 57, 84, 133, 146 West, Jonathan P., 63, 82, 122, 123, 191, 201, 204 White, James E., 63, 64, 201, 204 Whitton, Howard, 30, 31, 75, 77, 79, 80, 107, 205 Willbern, York, 41, 205 William L. Richter, 132, 192 woman’s rights to decide, 67 world of objects, 33, 71, 137, 144, 147, 158 wrong, 8, 28, 42, 51, 68, 93, 99, 169 Wyman, Sherman, 85, 194

Y Yildirim, Erdogan, 111, 206

Z Zalta, Edward N., 120, 196 Zimmerman, Joseph F., 105, 206 zygote, 61

 

Sandu Frunză

220

Dépôt légal: Mars 2014