18.        In this argument, the head of a government department concludes that the
department does not need to strengthen either its ethics regulations or its enforcement
mechanisms in order to encourage ethical behavior by companies with which it does
business. The first reason given is that businesses have agreed to follow the
department's existing code of ethics. The second reason is that the existing code is
relevant to the current business environment. This argument is unacceptable for several
reasons.
      The sole support for the claim that stronger enforcement mechanisms are
unnecessary comes from the assumption that companies will simply keep their promises
to follow the existing code. But, since the department head clearly refers to rules
violations by these same businesses within the past year, his faith in their word is
obviously misplaced. Moreover, it is commonly understood that effective rules carry
with them methods of enforcement and penalties for violations.
      To show that a strengthened code is unnecessary, the department head claims that
the existing code of ethics is relevant. In partial clarification of the vague term
"relevant," we are told that the existing code was approved in direct response to
violations occurring in the past year. If the full significance of being relevant is that the
code responds to last year's violations, then the department head must assume that those
violations will be representative of all the kinds of ethics problems that concern the
department. This is unlikely; in addition, thinking so produces an oddly short-sighted
idea of relevance.
      Such a narrow conception of the relevance of an ethics code points up its
weakness. The strength of an ethics code lies in its capacity to cover many different
instances of the general kinds of behavior thought to be unethical to cover not only last
year's specific violations, but those of previous years and years to come. Yet this author
explicitly rejects a comprehensive code, preferring the existing code because it is
"relevant" and "not in abstract anticipation of potential violations."
      In sum, this argument is naive, vague and poorly reasoned. The department head
has not given careful thought to the connection between rules and their enforcement, to
what makes an ethics code relevant, or to how comprehensiveness strengthens a code.
In the final analysis, he adopts a backwards view that a history of violations should
determine rules of ethics, rather than the other way around