My own experience as a Canadian parliamentarian from 1993 to 2002 has led me to conclude that reliance on an external code of ethics is an insufficient approach today as well. When the Chrétien government was elected in 1993 it introduced a code of ethics for parliamentarians and civil servants, accompanied by the appointment of an ethics commissioner and a tightening of laws and regulations governing lobbying and conflicts of interests. The government insisted that all of this would lead to a higher degree of ethical behaviour on the part of the administration and parliamentarians. But the sad reality was that the parliaments of which I was a part exhibited the following:
• A chronic inability to recognize moral and ethical issues when they arose, especially with respect to old practices sanctioned by time, routine, and habit.
• A persistent defaulting to “moral relativism” as an excuse for inaction when confronted with moral and ethical issues.
• An overreliance on ethical pragmatism and utilitarianism rather than code-based or “deontological” ethics when an ethical decision could not be avoided.
Insufficiencies Illustrated from My
Parliamentary Experience
The word parliament is derived from the French parler, meaning to speak. Communication is the essence of political and parliamentary discourse, and the principal ethical test of a communication is “Is it true?” This test can be applied to a speech, a news release, a ministerial statement, a party platform, a policy declaration, and so on, but when we do so in today’s world, what do we find? That of all our public communications it is political discourse that is so riddled with near truths, half-truths, outright lies, and political spin that the public has justifiably ceased to believe much of what politicians say.
Did the proclamation of a code of ethics for the 35th parliament of Canada change any of this? Did it increase the sensitivity of members as to whether what they were saying in debate or in committee or from a political platform met even the most elementary test of truthfulness? Not at all. Politicians, in general, simply do not see a moral or ethical aspect to our long-established habits of communication in the public arena, just as some business people see no moral issues in their long-established business practices and some media people see no moral issue in how they filter and present information and some bureaucrats see no moral issues in how they treat or mistreat people. Codes of ethics, no matter how well worded or communicated, seem insufficient to increase awareness of ethical issues or standards in areas where indifference, callousness, or habitual practices have blinded the practitioners to them.
To illustrate, let me cite just one bizarre incident that demonstrated for me how ineffective, in the final analysis, the Standing Orders of the House of Commons are in guaranteeing any degree of truthfulness in parliamentary debate. On this particular occasion a government member asserted that a certain opposition member was a “racist,” an assertion that I and others knew to be a lie.57 In the heated exchange that followed, the opposition member in question said so and labelled the first member a “liar.” The Speaker immediately ruled both members out of order and threatened them with expulsion from the chamber if they did not retract and apologize. In doing so, he was much more censorious of the second member than the first, giving the impression that the use of unparliamentary language—the word liar—was a much greater offence than the lie that provoked it. I later sought clarification from the Speaker, who ruefully confirmed that, as he interpreted the Standing Orders governing members’ conduct, the House is offended by the use of the word liar but not necessarily offended by the lie itself. Obviously there is a great need for upgrading the ethics of the House in regard to truth telling, but something much more than a code of ethics or amendments to the Standing Orders is required to achieve that objective.
At about the same time as this incident, several other issues involving serious violations of ethical standards were swirling about the head of the government. These included the alleged cover-up of the murder of a Somali civilian by Canadian Special Forces on a peacekeeping mission; the deaths of scores of Canadians from tainted blood and the allegations that an earlier Liberal administration had ignored early warnings of this danger because it did not want the matter to become an election issue; and the denial by the government that its leadership had ever promised to “kill, scrap, or abolish” Canada’s goods and services tax during the previous election campaign, when there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary.58
During the daily Question Period I asked the prime minister, “Do any of these activities violate the prime minister’s ethical standards, or by his standards are all these activities ethically acceptable?” Later in the day at a meeting of a special joint committee of the House and Senate on a code of ethics for members of Parliament I asked the prime minister’s ethics counsellor the same question.
In both cases, each professed to see no ethical issues with respect to the activities in question, only “differences of opinion on matters of policy between the government and the opposition.” In essence, this was a fall back to moral relativism, which eviscerates many ethical discussions in the political arena and elsewhere by adhering to the notion that you are entitled to your ethical standards and I am entitled to mine, but neither of us is entitled to judge or challenge the standards of the other, because there are no absolute moral standards, only differences of opinion as to what constitutes ethical conduct.59
On one further occasion during my last year in Parliament, I again became acutely aware of the insufficiency of the instinctive approach of politicians to ethics while dealing with an important piece of legislation. As a member of the Standing Committee on Health, I was involved in reviewing a draft bill for the regulation of assisted human reproduction, related stem cell research, and human cloning. These activities are fraught with ethical considerations, and we sought the advice of several expert ethicists to assist us in dealing with them. It soon became apparent, however, that a majority of my colleagues on the committee favoured a utilitarian approach to the ethical issues in question—an approach that pragmatic politicians instinctively favour. Simply identify the costs and benefits of the activity in question, and if the benefits outweigh the costs, then the activity is ethically justifiable. If the ratio of benefits to costs is not favourable enough, keep expanding the definition and scope of benefits until you get the justification you want.
This approach does not even rely on a code of ethics and is in conflict with so-called deontological ethics, which insist that we have an inherent obligation or duty to act in accordance with certain specific rules of conduct derived from reason or accepted beliefs, regardless of whether to do so maximizes some defined good or minimizes some defined harm.60 This is why attempts to ensure that the bill included a clause recognizing an inherent obligation on the part of Canadians to respect human life—regardless of pragmatic arguments for taking, preserving, or manipulating it based on the costs and benefits of doing so—were completely disregarded.
A Different Road to Ethical Behaviour
So what were the distinguishing features of Jesus’ approach to ethics and which features characterized his training of the disciples in this regard? And how does his approach differ from the conventional approach to ethics today?
First of all, he presents and demonstrates love—self-sacrificial love—as the supreme ethic, which if practised will ensure that all the other ethical demands of the law (the code) will be met. “Love the Lord your God” and “Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”61
According to Bruce,
[Jesus]
