On The Professional Morals Of Officials And Its Legalization

Under China's present circumstance of practising the policy of running a country by laws and with help of morals, it has both theoretical and practical significance to study the official morals systematically and probe into the efficient ways of strengthening its construction.The official morals, as the summation of moral rules in the official professional activity, expresses axiologically the interrelation among official duties, power and benefits. It is different from the political morals, the administrative morals, the morals of bureaucracy and the morals of cadre. Extensionally, the official morals intercrosses with the political morals and is subject to the administrative morals. The official morals originates in the ancient & modern morals of bureaucracy and derives immediately from the morals of cadre formed during the Neo-democratic Revolution and the socialist construction.With a deep ideological hue, the official morals admits of class differences in its universal application. It not only brightly reflects and strongly expresses the fundamental value orientation determined by certain social-economic relationship, but also provides a kind of spiritual support in axiology for the operation of that relationship.Compared with other kinds of professional morals, the official morals has a sharper political tincture, stricter and clearer imperatives, and a higher degree of compulsion.Other than the general functions of regulation and restriction, adjustment and harmonization, guidance and inspiration etc., the official morals has such specific functions of its own as improving administrative activity and thereofelevating the efficiency of administration, promoting the moral makings of officials and thereof reinforcing the construction of uncorrupt administration, and meliorating the social ethos and thereof accelerating the construction of spiritual civilization."For-whom" is the ultimate question of all kind of morals, including the official one. And in China, serving the people is the core of the official morals. It is the axiological reflection on the main professional-moral relationship of Chinese officials and the focused expression of their fundamental professional duties. It determines the ultimate orientation of the official professional activity. It is embodied in such fundamental imperatives as loyalty, selflessness, probity, impartiality in respect of the uncorrupt administration and as duteousness, enterprisingness, sureness, excelsiorness in respect of the industrious administration.The legalization of the official morals, as a main passage for its construction, doesn't convert the official morals into a set of law, butintegrate these both into a peculiar moral-legal system. It legalizes not alliofficially moral imperatives but only those with evidently realistic necessity and feasibility.We ought to, in the process of legalizing the official morals, observe the principles as follows: the principle of consistency of rights and duties, of universal applicability, of meeting the legally technical requirements, etc. According to these principles, only those moral imperatives can be legalized, which exist on the baseline and correspond to some specific rights, applicable universally to all officials, so definite and detailed as to be convenient for execution and evaluation.The legalization of the official morals provides a legal guarantee to theexecution of moral imperatives and thereof strengthen the heteronomous cultivation and the restricting mechanism of the official morals. It answers for the law of moral development, and it is the requirement out of the characteristics of official profession. Moreever, it is urgently needed at present because of the phenomena of serious moral weakness, unruliness and nihilism existing in the professional activity of Chinese officials.On a whole, at the moment of carrying vigorously out the policy of running the country by laws and with help of morals, it is of very importance to consti...