INTEGRITY MANAGEMENT AND THE CODES OF ETHICS IN ADMINISTRATION

The ethics of public administration can be understood as a field that refers to well-founded criteria of right and wrong conduct, which directs public servants on how to act within the framework of duties of the public administration service, professional and ethical principles, personal virtues, and well-being of the community as a whole. It develops and provides an understanding of public servants' responsibilities, of the main postulates of the criteria and guidelines for public administration as a whole or for specific fields within it, and directs our attention to various factors and pressures present in the administrative environment, which may affect (un)ethical conduct. The main objective of the paper is to define more precisely the ethics of public administration and relate it to the field of ethics in general, and to explore the relationship between integrity and ethics legislation. At the beginning, the thesis that the individual professional ethics should not deviate too much from the very core of ethics is defended. The paper then focuses on the problem of ethics legislation in the field of public administration and identifies its strengths and weaknesses, with specific reference to ethical legislation in the Republic of Slovenia. The very idea of ethics and integrity management of an organization implies a certain level of control. It also implies a planned process, which must be managed with the attentive, precise, and systematic considerations of all the essential postulates of administrative organization, its limitations, mission, and goals. At the end, the paper deals with the concept of integrity and argues that it is most appropriately understood as a metavirtue that connects moral and epistemic aspects of public administration ethics and as a regulatory virtue, which is a vital part of the ethical infrastructure and an essential basis for the effectiveness of ethics legislation.