The ethics of resigning

✍ Scribed by J. Patrick Dobel

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 150 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0276-8739
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6688(199921)18:2<245::aid-pam3>3.0.co;2-h

✦ Synopsis

Getting out or staying in marks a defining moment for a person in public life. Most decisions in office are woven into a fabric of habit, experience, and professional judgments. Only a few decisions threaten the fabric of integrity and can unravel a life or office. At these frayed edges of selfhood where people decide to stay or resign, persons define their integrity.

Very little has been written about resignation despite its importance to moral life within an institution. Often it remains the forgotten moral option because of the combined personal costs of leaving and the social pressures to conform. 1 The few analyses of resigning focus upon the high moral drama of resigning over principle. 2 The standard account argues that participating in a policy with which one morally disagrees requires resigning from office and usually adds that resigners should publicly oppose the policy. These moral dramas, however, are not typical cases, and they are seldom helpful to people trying to decide whether to resign. The moral reasons for resigning from office are more varied and often more prosaic because the moral landscape of participation involves more than principles.

This article presents a moral theory of resignation that accounts for the moral complexity of life in office and can help guide individuals in their deliberations. Unlike the accounts that focus upon the obligations either to oppose or leave when individuals disagree on principle, I argue that moral integrity in office has three separate components. Each component might be thought of as a support for the tripod of Resigning from office is a critical ethical decision for individuals. Resignation also remains one of the basic moral resources for individuals of integrity. The option to resign reinforces integrity, buttresses responsibility, supports accountability, and can provide leverage and boundary drawing. I argue that the moral reasons to resign flow from three related moral dimensions of integrity. Individuals in office promise to live up to the obligation of the office. This promise presumes that individuals have the capacity to make and keep promises, the competence to do the tasks of office, and the ability to be effective. This article examines how failure in each of these areas generates strong moral reasons to resign.