Public Administration And Ethics: A Problematic Co-Habitation

Public ethics is about the good of the community, the common good.Public ethics represents the public interest and citizen's responsibility, understood as collective and distinct from private ethics, for its peculiar and individualistic nature.Ethics in public administration is needed to strengthen public confidence. The Italian Public Administration has about three and a half million employees, is the largest Italian company for numerical size and presents a great variety from a qualitative point of view. Bureaucracy is a synonym for public administration. In the common language assumes a negative value, as bad administration, not working, slow and ineffective. In this way office power has created a sort of meta-language, the so-called bureaucratic language, hard and incomprehensible to the citizens: the triumph of bureaucratic ethos and proceduralism. In the fight against maladministration, is required the promotion of effective education processes, the social condemnation of corruption and moving from a bureaucratic administration model to a service-oriented public administration model.Because public ethics is not an abstract value but the necessary condition for renewing public administrations and, ultimately, liberal democracies.