Arguable? Probably not. I suspect the vast majority of us feel that these are sound tenets and guidance.

But how does one become an ethical administrator? Is one simply born more or less ethical? James Q. Wilson argued more than a decade ago in his book The Moral Sense that all of us are born with a moral sense, an innate quality that enables us to understand and act on the difference between right and wrong. He points to how children at the very earliest age know when they are being treated fairly or unfairly. Still, even if we accept this view, we are not likely to believe that each of us has an ethical autopilot that will prevent us from straying onto the path of wrong behavior. So, there must be more.

Maybe the more has to do with how we were raised. What did we learn from our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends? Fairness is certainly one of those ethical values that we probably learned about. It's also likely that we were told to treat others the way you would like to be treated--the Golden Rule. We may even have had a mother or a father tell us about the importance of human dignity, although maybe not in those exact words.

Treat others as an end, not a means--each of us is worthy--timeless advice from 18th Century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Perhaps we were given a list of virtues--honesty, courage, bravery, patience, respect, trustworthiness, loyalty, to name a few, and told to follow your heart. And, if practiced often enough, these virtues would become so fully instilled in your being that you would no longer face the dilemmas posed by right and wrong choices. Your "habits of the heart" would have taken over your life so completely that you are becoming a virtuous person, a lofty goal that, however worthy, is never attained. Pursuing a life of integrity is just that.

Oh you say, these are noble possibilities but they don't make sense in the rough and tumble world of the 21st Century. Men and women of ambition are thrown into the lion's den of "getting ahead" no matter what. How then is one to make sense of right and wrong? Enter the utilitarian. Serve the public interest gets translated into make decisions that benefit the most people.

As the top executive of a public agency, you might conclude that recommending an across the board pay raise to the agency's employees is better than a recommendation to raise the pay of a smaller number of employees on the basis of performance. The organization as whole, you might rationalize, would perform worse if there are a small number of satisfied employees and a large number of unsatisfied employees.

This utilitarian approach, of course, is attractive because one can calculate, however roughly, possible desirable outcomes. Thus, the right thing to do becomes an exercise in smart and maybe lucky calculations. But where does the administrator learn to do this? Maybe it is in the common sense of life to make such calculations. Or, maybe it is in the educational experience one receives.

Public executives typically hold master's degrees in business, public administration or public policy. And, educational institutions that award these degrees are often committed to teaching students how "to act ethically," to borrow the phrase in the standards promulgated by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA).

Accredited business schools are equally vociferous in this regard, although not everyone feels that such standards make a dime's worth of difference. One business school graduate put it this way: "We had classes on ethical behavior. But if you are a rotten person going into B-school, you will probably still be a rotten person when you came out." (New York Times 2/14/2005:A22)

Learning how to calculate right and wrong outcomes may well grate on one, and it might be incorrect to charge public administration educators with teaching ethics as an exercise in calculation. Yet, many educators believe that one can learn how to engage in a reasoning process that will more likely than not yield a "right" behavior or decision.

Within ASPA ranks, Terry Cooper is the best-known proponent of what he calls moral reasoning. And, if the popularity of his 5th edition book The Responsible Administrator is any indication, he is certainly not alone. At the risk of oversimplifying his argument, Cooper contends that learning how to resolve an ethical choice, one involving right versus wrong and sometimes, right versus right, one must develop the skill of moral imagination--have the ability to produce a "movie in our minds" that takes into account the dynamics of the environment in which a choice must be made.

Try for a moment to imagine how Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North might have reasoned through the choice he had when faced with selling arms to Iran to raise cash to support the Contra rebels in their fight against the government in Nicaragua. In testimony before Congress in 1987 Lt. Col. North explained why he lied about the Iran-Contra affair: "I want you to know lying does not come easy to meŠ but we all had to weigh in the balance the difference between lives and lies." Did he engage in moral reasoning? Did he choose one virtue over another--life versus honesty? Did he calculate what was in the best interests of the Nation? Would you have done the same?

The making of an ethical administrator remains something of a mystery but there is a growing belief that educational institutions and professional societies such as ASPA can contribute to this very important task. The challenge for ASPA as well as others is to identify approaches and tools for undertaking this assignment. The development of an ethics training package for ASPA chapters and student members would be a valuable step in this direction.

ASPA member Donald C. Menzel is ASPA's president and professor emeritus of Northern Illinois University. E-mail: dmenzel1@tampabay.rr.com .