My feeling is that they're very focused on how to do things - how to follow directives from the Senate, how to preserve the Jedi traditions etc. So they're too busy figuring out the details of how to do what they're doing to take a step back and start thinking about what exactly they're doing and why.

They do seem to answer to Palpatine, so I assume, before him, they used to answer to the Senate. They seem more like a police force than a branch of the government.