Brushing Up on Right and Wrong

By EMILY MITCHELL.

When the phone rings for Michael Josephson, it usually means that something has gone wrong. Spectacular disgraces like the savings and loan mess and the police-brutality scandal in Los Angeles have aroused public concern about corruption, and corruption -- and how to avoid it -- is one of Josephson's chief concerns. A former law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, he specializes in teaching ethics courses to government officials, businessmen and just plain citizens. Whether the problem is statehouse wrongdoing or corporate misconduct, his telephone rings often these days with the same request: Can you help us?

Across the country, business and government leaders are brushing up on right and wrong by attending Josephson's seminars to re-educate themselves about ethics. The sessions are entertaining and combative, but their message is simple: ethical values are more than a series of rules. Josephson encourages people to look beyond the letter of the law to such principles as honor, fairness, honesty and justice.

Josephson began teaching ethics in 1976, when he was assigned a Watergate- inspired course on legal ethics. Later that year, he began to muse over the increasing distance between society's emphasis on measures designed to prevent bad conduct and its incentives to promote good behavior. In Los Angeles he founded the nonprofit Joseph & Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics, named for his parents, and started offering classes. During the past four years, he has taught thousands of people in hundreds of companies and organizations. One of his main precepts: "We judge ourselves by our best intention, but we are judged by our last worst act."

In recent months Josephson has conducted seminars for such diverse groups as the New York State Bar Association, Levi Strauss & Co. and the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. In January he spent eight days in Berkeley Springs, W. Va., teaching 55 senior executives of the Internal Revenue Service, who in turn will pass on what they have learned to the agency's 14,000 managers. Alaska asked him to draft a model ethics bill last year that is still pending in the state's legislature, and Tennessee is considering its own reforms based on the Alaska model.

In Sacramento, Josephson recently had a captive audience. A 1990 state ethics-reform law, passed after the felony indictments of two California legislators, makes attendance at biennial ethics courses mandatory for all state legislators and their staff members. It is probably the first time that an entire legislature has been sent back to school. Typically, Josephson asked participants to enact real-life situations that involve moral dilemmas. A pet example: When a senator is invited to speak out of town, is it proper for the sponsoring group to pay for the air fare and hotel bills of his family? Josephson explains that while such perks may be legal, they are not ethical because they have the appearance of skirting the no-honorariums rules.

Are such programs really effective? While many find them worthwhile, state senator Diane Watson, who took part in the Sacramento meeting, is not so sure. "Politics is about what you can negotiate," she says. "You cannot take the standard of ordinary people and lay it over every situation." On the contrary, says Josephson, personal values are the starting place for effective political ethics. As the century draws to a close, he is optimistic that every leading business and government organization will have an ethics-education program. "Without it," he warns, "they are going to get chewed up from inside and outside." He predicts, in fact, that the ethics movement will be to the '90s what the consumer movement was to the '60s. And his phone keeps on ringing.

With reporting by Sylvester Monroe/Sacramento