Are public officials morally justified in threatening violence, engaging in deception, or forcing citizens to act for their own good? Can individual officials be held morally accountable for the wrongs that governments commit? Dennis Thompson addresses these questions by developing a conception of political ethics that respects the demands of both morality and politics. He criticizes conventional conceptions for failing to appreciate the difference democracy makes, and for ascribing responsibility only to isolated leaders or to impersonal organizations. His book seeks to recapture the sense that men and women, acting for us and together with us in a democratic process, make the moral choices that govern our public life.

Thompson surveys ethical conflicts of public officials over a range of political issues, including nuclear deterrence, foreign intervention, undercover investigation, bureaucratic negligence, campaign finance, the privacy of officials, health care, welfare paternalism, drug and safety regulation, and social experimentation. He views these conflicts from the perspectives of many different kinds of public officials—elected and appointed executives at several levels of government, administrators, judges, legislators, governmental advisers, and even doctors, lawyers, social workers, and journalists whose professional roles often thrust them into public life.

In clarifying the ethical problems faced by officials, Thompson combines theoretical analysis with practical prescription, and begins to define a field of inquiry for which many have said there is a need but to which few have yet contributed. Philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts, sociologists, lawyers, and other professionals interested in ethics in government will gain insight from this book.

• Contents 
• Introduction
• Problems of the Ethics of Office
• Methods of the Ethics of Office
• 1. 
• Democratic Dirty Hands
• The Persistence of the Problem
• The Limits of Democratic Distance
• The Assumption of Accountability
• Reviewing the Decision
• Generalizing the Decision
• Mediating the Decision
• The End of Dirty Decisions
• Democratic Deterrence
• 2. 
• The Moral Responsibility of Many Hands
• Hierarchical Responsibility
• Collective Responsibility
• Personal Responsibility
• Alternative Causes
• Causing and Advising
• Good Intentions
• The Ignorance of Officials
• The Compulsion of Offices
• 3. 
• Official Crime and Punishment
• The Problem of Moral Responsibility
• The Problem of Political Responsibility
• Limits of Criminal Responsibility
• 4. 
• Legislative Ethics
• Minimalist Ethics
• Functionalist Ethics
• Rationalist Ethics
• The Particulars of Generality
• The Autonomous Legislator
• The Pecuniary Connection
• The Necessity of Publicity
• 5. 
• The Private Lives of Public Officials
• The Value of Privacy
• The Scope of Privacy: Substantive Criteria
• The Scope of Privacy: Procedural Criteria
• 6. 
• Paternalistic Power
• The Concept of Paternalism
• The Justification of Paternalism
• The Paternalism of the Professions
• Compulsory Medical Treatment
• The Law of Involuntary Guardianship
• The Distribution of Public Welfare
• The Regulation of Drugs
• The Regulation of Safety
• 7. 
• The Ethics of Social Experiments
• The Story of the Denver Income Maintenance Experiment (DIME)
• The Ethics of the DIME
• Evaluations and Implications of the DIME
• Notes
• Credits
• Index