**2. Development**

In our opinion, it is essential to highlight that if we move toward new conceptions of the educational system, according to Arendt [4], we would be closer to the social justice advocated by Socrates, who saw as the purpose of politics and government, that the soul of the citizens would become sublime, which would induce an educating role both in politics and in governance, anticipating the sage, Plato's idea of the Educating State. In this process, it was natural for virtue to emerge, inducing in each person self-government by the cosmogony and with oneself. Plato [5], in agreement with Socrates, would say that this can only be achieved if the State promotes education as the only and indispensable means to achieving it. Thus, according to Jaeger [6], Plato shows himself to be an educator rather than a legislator in The Republic. It is clear then that the Platonic State was a gigantic pedagogical abstraction, in such a way that he conceived it as the ideal framework for the education of the just man, who is the true man. He saw that if in the ancient form of the Greek polis, the law was the educator of the citizens, in The Republic, the education of true men replaces the law.

As can be seen, in his turn toward teaching, he tried to crystallize a political philosophy containing the true desideratum of justice. Contrary to past generations regarding the written law as a panacea for all social ills, he endeavored to demonstrate that only through an optimal education could true justice be verified in the individual soul, from where it had to diffuse into all facets of community life. Hence his sentence: The ideal state can only emerge from the state in us if it can ever be achieved on earth. Hence, the first step toward its advent is an education, constructive of the human personality.

Given the above, both Greek thinkers are relevant since they aimed to modify the current legal system and possible constitutional reforms impacting the educational system. At this time, this perspective would imply the creation of legislation that would enable the reinforcement or redesign of a system of education, not only in the formal structure but at the level of all its social development, tending to the citizen to approach its relationship with the regional or state government differently in the understanding that, this new pedagogical approach without religious influence, must adequately include, in the manner of Plato and Socrates, a solid philosophical, ethical, and political content, so that it is verified that the social order, is nothing more than a triad component: harmony with nature, inner harmony, and social harmony. In the words of Puig [7], the above is stated without disdaining personal growth as a genuine effort of individual construction guided by an ethic that integrates historically established principles and values.

Now, as a corollary to this brief sketch and without wishing to go through the millenary path of the term "ethics," we cannot avoid the fact that ethics, as part of human nature, has always existed. However, according to Ferrater [8], Aristotle gives life to

the term when he defines it as the philosophical discipline whose object of study is morality, establishing an infinite field of study. As the father of ethics, Aristotle [9] left a whole treatise of obligatory reading for humanity with his splendid and transcendent illustration, *Nicomachean Ethics.*

As a manifestation of his thinking, the Stagirite, as Aristotle was called, never ceased his long search for a corrective and stabilizing force, which he embodied in his great work *Politics* [10], such as the figure of control, thus consecrating the Stagirite as the precursor of accountability at the end of the mandate, a meaningful way to monitor organizational behavior. For him, a good democratic system had as its natural substance the strict monitoring of the magistrates by the citizens, that is, popular intervention, insisting that its abandonment would promote the destruction of the democratic system. He emphasized that the sovereignty of citizens came from their quality of euthynoï (auditors), in other words, from controllers to form a shared power that he called Ephorate. It can be deduced that, in ancient Greece, the people's experience of corruption in progressive governments led to the constant vigilance of the rulers as the most effective method to prevent it.

Aristotle then alluded, as a great visionary, to the attitude of *being alert*, which the people should exercise over all the acts performed by the government to achieve increasingly intense political participation that limits or avoids the ravings of power due to inefficiency, abuse, or lack of ethics. In addition, the administration was thus obliged to design public policies with an order of priorities signed by the people, which would regulate governmental activity. The vision of a civil society looking out for its interests went beyond the simple image of the voting citizen. A similar figure, comments Démeunier [11], would be instituted in Roman antiquity with the *tribunes of the people* as the magistrates charged with protecting the people against the oppression of the grandees, as well as defending their rights and their freedom against the initiatives of the consuls and the Senate.

The Liberator Simón Bolívar nourished from this with three of his allusive phrases to the subject that concerns us, the first one: "Morals and lights are our first necessities;" from our point of view, here the great man established a sequence of priorities as follows, the first thing is morals and then education; that is why, as a wise continuation of this phrase, he also coined: "Talent without probity is a scourge." His visionary clarity also advocated something that corrodes us and that we are called to remedy: "An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction."

In this magnificent succession, it is the Liberator who, as a pioneer in Latin America, lays the foundations of control as an organizational principle through the creation of *moral power*, following in the footsteps of Aristotle in terms of the citizen's observation of the due performance of the rulers, in order to consolidate democracy. On this point, Rosanvallon [12] and Fernández [13] consider that this practice is called upon to guarantee the ethical behavior of administrators in the service of the State. About the latter, being consistent with his line and in the face of the administrative disaster of the Republic, in Lima on January 12, 1824, he decreed the "death penalty" for the corrupt. Decrees of the Liberator. Bolivarian Society of Venezuela [14].

It is conclusive, therefore, that the ethical issue must be addressed in the entire social framework; however, we consider it fundamental that the required reinforcement should start from the beacon of light called the *Educational System*. This enlightenment must be such that it moves civil society to decisively assume the paths provided by the new Latin American constitutionalism embodied in our legal system, a democracy of control where the supervisory power over the management of public finances is in the people's hands.

*The University as a Scenario for the Continuity of Ethics Education DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112335*

Now, it is surprising to note that the provisions of the guidelines of the new Latin American constitutionalism are constitutionally foreseen in Ecuador [15] as follows:

**Art. 85** (Provisions governing policies and services), numeral 3.

**Art. 95** (Citizen Participation), headed.

**Art. 100** (Objectives of the participation exercise), heading and numbers 1 and 3.

**Art. 101** (Participation in sessions of the autonomous governments).

**Art. 207** (Purpose of the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control).

**Art. 279** (National Planning Council. Attributions) second part.

**Art. 398** (Community consultation on environmental impacts).

At the time, the Organic Law of Citizen Participation [16] provides for a clear assurance of the presence of the people in their affairs, essentially through the constant precepts in articles 68, 69, 70, and 71. This is without detriment to the fact that both the Organic Code of Territorial Organization, Autonomy, and Decentralization [17] in its articles 5, 6, 186, and 192, and the Organic Code of Planning and Public Finance [18] in its articles 8, 10, 12, 106, 108 and 111, establish provisions that reaffirm the complete autonomy of each level of government to implement the procedures and mechanisms that guarantee citizen participation.

Equivalently, in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela [19], the protagonist participation of the citizenry is ensured as follows:

**Art. 62.** (Free participation of citizens and their organizations in the formation, execution, and control of public administration).

**Art. 66**. (Right of the electorate to demand accountability).

**Art. 166.** (Obligation to create a Public Policy Planning and Coordination Council, chaired by the Governor and composed of mayors).

**Art. 182.** (Mandatory creation of the Local Public Planning Council, chaired by the Mayor and composed of councilmen and councilwomen, the Presidents of the Parish Councils, and representatives of neighborhood organizations and other organizations of the organized society).

From the legal point of view, in the case of Venezuela, three normative instruments contemplate forceful protagonist participation of the people in their affairs through the following:

**Law of the Local Planning Councils** [20], when it assigns to the plenary of the organism the power to guarantee the protagonist participation in all its manifestations, not only in the Municipal Development Plan but also in its permanent follow-up.

**Law Against Corruption** [21], which binds the different agencies of the Public Administration in the following terms:


**Organic Law of Social Comptrollership** [22], development of popular power to prevent and correct behaviors, attitudes, and actions contrary to social interests and ethics in the performance of public functions. (Articles 1, 3, and 5).

It can be observed that both countries contemplate the same approach to citizen participation, in the sense that the one who controls should be the one who grants the power. Moreover, the normative devices of these countries incorporate mechanisms and procedures to monitor management and join the principal and the mandatary, as far as the management is concerned. In other words, Castellanos-Herrera [23] points out that, as a people, they not only grant power but also merge with the government to manage public money. It is more than evident, therefore, a clear concretization of the protagonist and participative democracy when this right and guarantee is foreseen in the budget, the planning, and execution of all matters associated with the community's interests. Under this scheme, it is clear that the people have power over the president and can force him to behave ethically and administratively as the community wants. Then, the most popular concept of power is perfectly materialized, with the novelty that now establishes the will to be followed, who initially was the addressee of the coercive action; additionally, the people have the power and the faculty to verify with the periodicity they wish, that the instructions assigned to the mandataries constitutionally and legally are being fully accomplished.

Without wishing to develop the process of citizen formation, it will only be said, with the same conception of Habermas [24], that the upturn of social constitutionalism is directed to the fact that there cannot be an actual democratic model without a valid agreement of redistribution of wealth between the dominant and dominated classes in which, for Viciano and Martinez [25] if constitutionalism is the mechanism by which the citizenry determines and limits public power, the first problem of constitutionalism must be to guarantee the faithful translation of the will of the constituent power (of the people) and certify that only popular sovereignty, directly exercised, can determine the generation or alteration of constitutional norms.

In light of the above, once the bases of the triad of education, ethics, and society have been established from the point of view that interests us, what should be the university's role in its consolidation? Above all, to promote in students—at the different levels of their student life—an ethical model that includes principles and values such as human dignity, freedom, equality, fraternity, justice, solidarity, respect, and tolerance, constantly bearing in mind the integration of constituent power in constituted power. This will imply stimulating a personal and collective lifestyle to achieve individual, family, and social happiness as a desideratum of existence. In this new university environment, it will be necessary to take into account the fact that both students and teaching staff come from a society that may suffer from certain moral shortcomings in the sense of what we have discussed; it is vital, therefore, to design some indicators that will allow the authorities to monitor the conceptual development of all those involved in the process.

Consequently, it will be necessary to revolutionize the syllabi of the subjects so that they naturally include the topics mentioned above; ethics, then conceived, will include the deontological issue as just one more item. The proposed model must automatically include the student's involvement in the environment to transform it through problem-solving linkage programs, but with the necessary condition of high moral content. These projects must be susceptible to monitoring by the faculty to verify that the ethical approach adopted by the university and induced in the student is indeed being verified in the relationship with the community. As a way of control, the university should be dedicated to designing a battery of impact indicators that

make it possible to visualize the resolution of problems and the evolution of the moral vision of the environment in which it operates. Only in this way will it be possible, from the academy, to open a door that will allow us to straighten out the possible deviations that could be brewing in society regarding its stability.
