Moral corruption, croneyism, lying, theft, and malfeasance are as old as human history. However, there are times when they become so commonplace among a society's political, economic, and/or spiritual leaders that they signal a profound crisis of integrity in public life. Cicero was a witness to such a crisis in the late Roman Republic, which, in his estimation, was falling prey to dangerous levels of manipulative and self-serving behaviour among its political elite. The Roman Catholic Church underwent such a crisis in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as many of its leaders strayed from their original mission of humbly and generously loving and serving God's people. The German nation experienced a similar crisis of integrity in the 1930s and 40s, when it failed to resist the spread of totalitarianism and anti-semitism in the heart of its political and cultural elite.

Arguably, a similar crisis of integrity is currently afflicting Western constitutional democracies. Although it is not manifested in the triumph of totalitarian and fascist ideologies, we are witnessing a dramatic decline of trust in public institutions and a rash of scandals of abuse and malfeasance that have left almost no profession or sector of public life untouched. Numerous Christian churches in Ireland, the UK, and the USA have been rocked by a series of distressing revelations concerning the abuse of minors by a small but significant minority of clerics; the financial sector, once a symbol of respectable prosperity, has been disgraced by revelations of reckless investing and shameless fraud; major corporations have been found guilty of concealing financial losses with "creative" accounting practices; and a disturbing number of "respectable" politicians have been caught embezzling state funds and accepting political payoffs.

The decline in the moral caliber of our civic, economic, and religious institutions has been greeted in various quarters by calls for more "transparency" and "accountability," the formulation and revision of "ethical codes," and the convening of tribunals to investigate and expose past wrongdoing. Efforts at legal and institutional reform and oversight have met with some success. For example, public inquiries have uncovered many of the facts about institutional corruption, bank loans are now more rigorously monitored by bank regulators, and politicians' financial affairs are more closely scrutinized than ever before.

However, something more than regulation and oversight is needed. Institutional and legal reforms are unlikely to be effective without a fundamental transformation of the ethos of society's leaders. It is they, after all, who will be primarily responsible for driving and implementing reforms on the ground. Thus, we need a moral renewal of the culture of our public institutions, a reform of the ethos or ethical attitudes and dispositions that have led those in positions of political, religious, and economic leadership to default on their public responsibilities, and a concerted effort to cultivate the virtues of public service, such as justice, courage, truthfulness, and magnanimity, in the next generation of political, economic, and spiritual leaders.

We might begin the path of ethical reform by engaging in a candid public conversation about the virtues and guiding norms of public service, understood in the broadest terms to encompass services provided by government, civil service, churches, industry, charities, media organs, educational institutions, financial regulators, and banks. Once a clearer picture emerges of what sort of social functions our civic, religious and economic institutions serve, and concomitantly, what sorts of attitudes we expect or hope for in our institutional leaders, we can then identify strategies for cultivating the relevant ethos in the circles they move in and emerge from.

These strategies would likely include some element of moral education for public service; but they might also include citizens' forums to foster serious public debate about the values of public service; internal forums within public institutions for periodic deliberation about their long-term goals and day-to-day policies; conscience opt-out clauses for institutional actors who cannot in good conscience collaborate with all of an institution's tasks; and legal protections for "whistleblowers" who feel obliged to report serious infractions of legal or professional norms. These and other reforms of the ethos of society's public institutions could be initiated by both State and nonstate actors, whether separately or in public-private partnerships.

It would be remiss of me to conclude without highlighting one serious obstacle to the sorts of reforms I have proposed, namely, the view, which has regrettably gained some currency in modern societies, that one can immerse oneself in a public role and accept its corresponding demands while "privately" subscribing to an entirely different set of moral and religious principles.

Admittedly, this view is not without its advantages. For example, bureaucratic efficiency is better served by full "assimilation" to an institution's values than constant moral conflict. Furthermore, by going along with the ethos of the institutions we join, in spite of our personal misgivings about them, we save ourselves much interpersonal conflict and grief.

However, recent revelations of high-level institutional corruption and/or ineptitude have reminded us that the values and customs of public institutions are often a mix of good and bad. While some degree of adaptation and deference to institutional norms is reasonable and appropriate, institutional actors ought to exercise their roles with a profound sense of personal responsibility, and a willingness to judge for themselves whether the alleged demands of their roles are reasonable and just, or unreasonable and unjust. That sort of judgment can only be made if public service is undertaken not as a mindless routine, but as a personal commitment that implicates the actor's deepest values and concerns.

The moral renewal I am calling for in the ethos of our main political, economic, and religious institutions is, of course, no simple matter. However, the recent cascade of scandals rocking our public institutions, ranging from professional incompetence to criminal wrongdoing, suggests that it is long overdue. Perhaps a good place to begin such a renewal is with the acknowledgment that participants in public institutions are not merely "cogs in a machine," but persons with a conscience and a right and responsibility to employ it in the service of truth and justice.