The Determinants: Why People Behave Ethically, or Fail To
If consequences are the effects of ethics, determinants are its causes. This is the part of the chapter that explains why two officers in identical circumstances behave differently.
2. What Ethics Does to an Organisation: Infosys, Tata and Enron
3. What Ethics Does to a Society
4. What Ethics Does to Governance and Public Administration
5. The Determinants: Why People Behave Ethically, or Fail To ← you are here
The first four parts of this chapter traced what ethical and unethical conduct produces. This one runs the question backwards: what produces the conduct? The answer matters practically, because you cannot design a reform around a factor you have not identified.
1. The individual
Conscience, upbringing, and the person’s stage of moral development. Kohlberg‘s sequence is worth naming: behaviour governed first by fear of punishment, later by desire for social approval, and finally by internalised principle. Most people operate at the middle stage most of the time, which is why the surrounding environment matters so much.
2. Family and early life
The first and deepest determinant, and the one no policy can reach. Children copy conduct rather than instruction — a parent who lectures about honesty and then boasts about evading a fare has taught the second lesson, not the first.
3. Society and culture
Norms decide what feels normal, and what feels normal quickly starts to feel right. This is why corruption is so difficult to dislodge once it becomes routine: each participant is behaving reasonably by local standards. It is also why visible enforcement changes behaviour faster than exhortation — it changes the standard itself.
4. Law and the regulatory framework
Law sets the floor. It cannot make people good, but it can make wrongdoing expensive and, crucially, it can protect those who refuse. The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 as amended in 2018, the Right to Information Act, 2005, and the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 are the machinery; their effect depends entirely on whether they are enforced predictably or selectively.
5. The organisational environment
The single most actionable determinant for an administrator. Juniors read the behaviour of seniors far more accurately than they read circulars — the tone at the top is not a metaphor. An office in which one officer is known to have been protected after wrongdoing has been taught something no training programme can undo.
6. Situation and circumstance
Scarcity, crisis, opportunity and pressure all test standards, and many people are honest precisely until honesty becomes costly. This is not cynicism; it is the reason ethics is designed as a discipline rather than left as a sentiment. The purpose of recorded reasons, declared interests and independent audit is to hold conduct steady when circumstances stop supporting it.
7. Religion and philosophy
For most people the earliest ready-made moral code, and for many a lasting source of restraint. Its administrative relevance is double-edged: it supplies conviction, but a public servant’s conduct must be defensible in secular, constitutional terms to every citizen regardless of belief.
You cannot exhort a system into integrity. You can only change what it rewards, what it records, and what it protects.
Putting determinants and consequences together
Read as a pair, the two halves of this chapter give you a complete argument for any question on why ethical failure persists. Consequences establish that the stakes are real. Determinants establish that conduct is produced by identifiable forces — most of them structural, and therefore alterable. The conclusion follows on its own: reform works on the environment, the incentive and the record, not on appeals to conscience alone.
Revision — carry these five lines
- Determinants are the causes; consequences are the effects — a complete answer uses both.
- Individual (Kohlberg’s stages), family, society and culture, law, organisation, situation, belief.
- Norms make conduct feel normal; enforcement changes the norm faster than exhortation.
- Tone at the top is the most actionable determinant available to an administrator.
- Most determinants are structural — which is why reform targets incentives and records, not sermons.
Practice this sub-topic · 10 marks, 150 words
“Ethical behaviour is produced more by environment than by exhortation.” Examine the determinants of ethical conduct in public organisations.
Approach: Set out the determinants briefly — individual conscience and moral development (Kohlberg’s progression from punishment to approval to principle), family, society and culture, law, the organisational environment, situational pressure, and belief. Then argue the proposition: most of these are structural rather than personal, so sermons address the smallest lever. Give the organisational case its due weight — juniors read the conduct of seniors more accurately than any circular, and an office where wrongdoing was once protected has learnt something training cannot undo. Note that visible, predictable enforcement changes the norm itself, which is what culture responds to. Conclude that reform works on incentives, records and protection: change what an organisation rewards, what it documents and whom it defends, and conduct follows.
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