What do you understand by 'values' and 'ethics'? In what way is it important to be ethical along with…

Question

What do you understand by 'values' and 'ethics'? In what way is it important to be ethical along with being professionally competent?

Ghissu Editorial · Accepted Answer

Values are enduring personal beliefs about what is worth pursuing, while ethics is the shared code that judges conduct right or wrong, and competence needs ethics to direct it. Satyam's falsified accounts, confessed in 2009, show expertise without integrity harming thousands.

**Introduction**

Gandhi counted "knowledge without character" among his Seven Social Sins (1925). Values and ethics supply that character, which a public servant needs as much as skill.

**Understanding Values and Ethics**

1. **Values**: Values are enduring beliefs about what is worth pursuing, such as honesty, compassion and patriotism; Milton Rokeach saw them as beliefs about preferable conduct or end-states.
2. **Ethics**: Ethics, from the Greek "ethos" (character), is the system of moral principles that judges conduct as right or wrong, as in the Nolan Committee's seven principles of public life (1995).
3. **The difference**: Values are personal and motivate action, while ethics is shared and regulates it, asking whether loyalty to a superior may override the law.

**Why Competence Must Be Joined to Ethics**

SKETCH: matrix | Competence and Ethics
cols: High ethics | Low ethics
rows: High competence | Low competence
tl: Ideal public servant
tr: Dangerous expert
bl: Sincere but ineffective
br: Liability

1. **Direction to skill**: Competence decides how a task is done, ethics whether it should be done; Satyam's founder used financial skill to falsify accounts, a fraud confessed in 2009.
2. **Public trust**: E. Sreedharan built the Konkan Railway and finished the Delhi Metro's first phase ahead of schedule with integrity, earning the trust that lets projects succeed.
3. **Moral courage**: T.N. Seshan enforced the Model Code of Conduct on the powerful, joining legal mastery with courage.
4. **Safeguard**: The 2nd ARC's report "Ethics in Governance" (2007) sought a code of ethics, since skill alone cannot stop misuse of office.

**Conclusion**

Competence without ethics breeds a clever wrongdoer, and ethics without competence a sincere failure. The public deserves officers who are both able and upright, discharging governance as a trust under constitutional morality.

What do you understand by 'values' and 'ethics'? In what way is it important to be ethical along with being professionally competent?

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