A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy

Finding Our Way

D. Don Welch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138013797
• eBook ISBN: 9781317746478
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Developed by D. Don Welch during his 28 years of teaching ethics and public policy, the rationale behind A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy is to present a comprehensive guide for making policy judgments. Rather than present specific cases that raise moral issues or discuss the role a few concepts play in the moral analysis of policy, this book instead provides a broad framework for the moral evaluation of public policies and policy proposals. This framework is organized around guiding five principles: benefit, effectiveness, fairness, fidelity, and legitimacy. These principles identify the factors that should be taken into account and the issues that should be addressed as citizens address the question of what the United States government should be able to do. Organized by concept, with illustrations and examples frequently interspersed, the book covers both theory and specific issues.

A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy outlines a comprehensive ethical framework, provides content to the meaning of the five principles that comprise that framework through the use of illustrations and examples, and offers guidance about how to navigate one's way through the conflicts and dilemmas that inevitably result from a serious effort to analyze policies.

1 Introduction

 

 

 

If you think that all of the good arguments in any public policy debate are on your side, you probably haven’t thought enough. This book presents a framework for thinking about public policy—thinking deeply and broadly and carefully. What should the government do about terrorism, health care, education, unemployment, deficit spending, energy independence, climate change, and a host of other issues? Serious efforts to figure out answers to such questions encounter mountains of data, unknowable futures, with one complexity piled on top of another. When we look for guidance, the path is often cluttered with dueling experts and bombastic media stars who are more interested in generating heat than in shedding light.

In such a world, it is not surprising when citizens retreat to simplifying slogans and knee-jerk ideologies. The purpose of this book is to provide an alternative, to offer a framework for answering questions about what our government ought to do. The conclusions we reach about what our government should do are fundamentally moral choices. Many of our public policy debates are so contentious, and seemingly without end, because important and conflicting moral values can be found on all sides of virtually any public policy discussion. This reality should not induce paralysis, but should prod us to extend ourselves, to reach beyond readily apparent or comfortable solutions.

In the public policy world, we do not have the option of refusing to make a decision. When we choose not to decide we are, in reality, making a choice in favor of the status quo. Sometimes choosing the status quo is appropriate. After all, the present situation is the result of prior choices, and surely many of those prior choices were good ones. But when the status quo is affirmed, that affirmation should be given intentionally and deliberately, and not because we lack the energy, initiative or compassion to attempt an improvement.

This book presents a framework for ethical analysis that avoids both a simplistic reliance on party lines, and a paralysis in the face of daunting complexity. This framework offers an approach to identifying and understanding competing moral values, and to assessing their significance for particular public policy issues. The goal of this book is not to offer definite answers to all of the specific policy problems that bedevil us, but to improve the quality of our individual and collective deliberation about our responses to social problems. The aim is to establish a sure footing for ethical reflection about public policy decision making. “Public policy,” simply stated, is whatever governments choose to do (or not to do). Public policies are the responses of government, through action or inaction, to social problems or to claims that are brought by the governed.

The essential question is, “What do we want government to do?” The answer is that we want government to provide benefits and prevent harms. We want government to provide those benefits and prevent those harms in an effective way. We want benefits and burdens to be distributed fairly. And, we want policies to be implemented in a manner that is respectful of persons. Further, we also want to ask, “What do we want government not to do?” We want government action to be limited to a sphere of influence that we consider legitimate.

From this statement, we can identify five benchmarks to be used in the moral evaluation of public policy: Benefit, Effectiveness, Fairness, Fidelity, and Legitimacy. I believe there is a broad-based national consensus that this short list describes what we as a nation want government to do. From sound bites in the media, through carefully crafted speeches to scholarly books and articles, these concerns appear again and again. If this perception is accurate, if there is widespread agreement that these statements reflect what we want government to do, then why is our national discussion about public policy marked by disagreement, acrimony, hostility, and deadlock? The divisions, and often stalemate, come when we provide content to these aspirations in particular cases, and especially when we have to establish priorities among these aspirations when they conflict with one another in specific policy choices. The rest of this book is devoted to a discussion of the content of, and the priorities among, these five benchmarks,

This conversation is fundamentally a moral conversation. Morality is inescapably at the heart of public policy choices. The formulation and evaluation of social policy is a matter of choosing among competing values, whether the decision makers recognize it or not. Policy considerations regularly entail examinations of clashes between such values as justice, liberty, security and equality. Some observers attempt to avoid this reality that policy choices are moral choices. These commentators fear that personal values will creep into policy analysis and decision making, and will thus displace an objectivity that they believe should guide policy making. As a result of this fear, discussions of the moral values that are embedded in policy proposals are often missing.

However, any attempt to engage in a “value-free” discussion of public policy will fail. We cannot make policy choices that are disconnected from value choices, and any effort to do so obscures the roles that beliefs and values do play. When we fail to acknowledge the role that morality plays, the result is the surreptitious and sometimes arbitrary introduction of beliefs and values into our discussions. Normative assumptions are not eliminated, they are just hidden from public scrutiny. The explicit consideration of values in policy discussions is the best protection against “creeping values.” When the moral values are out in the open for everyone to see, it is then possible to subject them to careful scrutiny, a far better outcome than pretending that they do not exist.

Policy debates are moral debates, because policy making should be more than practical horse-trading. Ethics forces us to explore what should be done before we settle for what can be done. Ethical reflection leads us to look past how things are and are likely to be, and to consider how things ought to be. There is, of course, no moral responsibility to do that which is impossible, so adding a dose of ethics into the public policy discussion should not send us off on endless quixotic quests. Politics is still an art of the possible. Indeed, public policy discussions in the United States often move within relatively limited boundaries. These boundaries focus discussions on what is “doable” or what the country can or is willing to pay to solve a particular problem. A general consensus often exists that sets limits on the range of such policy debates, and these limits guide searches for answers along relatively well-established tracks. This self-imposed limitation on policy arguments grows out of a strong pragmatic element in the American public scene.

Pragmatism focuses on concerns of feasibility, practicality and possibility. Thus, many policy debates are limited by agreements, acknowledged or tacit, about what most of the American people want, what Congress would approve, what powerful constituencies would accept, or the amount of funding that is available. The strength of this pragmatic approach lies in the national cohesion it can foster and the efficiency it can bring to searches for solutions to social problems. But if this pragmatism fosters a climate in which agreements can be more easily reached, it may also blind us to possibilities for renewal and reform. It shackles the participants in the policy conversations, limiting their vision and preventing them from imagining all of the futures that might be.

Ethics is a challenge to pragmatic politics as it is often practiced. We should look beyond the walls of established convention, and not settle too quickly for what seems to be most feasible. When we accept a pragmatic alternative because it can be easily implemented, we ought to question whether we are accepting something less than the ideal, and we should be very clear about why we are accepting a compromise. If we don’t lift our eyes higher, we may fool ourselves into thinking that today’s feasible option is a permanently desirable option. Policy choices benefit from a full ethical deliberation that is not short-circuited by a pragmatic override. Honest, searching ethical discussions can illuminate options that have not previously fallen within the immediate general consensus. Such discussions may change the boundaries of the possible. What can be done is a function of social structures that have been created by people and that can be changed by people. When practicality does force us to do less than we want to do, we should be aware that we are doing less, we should know why we are doing less, and on occasion we should even do it with regret or anguish.

This book proposes a framework that incorporates both idealistic aspirations and pragmatic constraints. The aim is to foster a public discourse that is open, robust, and informed, which would lead to public decisions that are more firmly and openly grounded in the moral choices that are inevitably being made. The approach is holistic, in that it attempts to encompass all of the factors that should be taken into account in a moral assessment of policy—including principles or benchmarks that are often conflicting and contradictory. The purpose of the framework is to provide direction for analyzing responses to countless social problems, a blueprint for assessing public policy.

The core of the framework consists of the five principles of benefit, effectiveness, fairness, fidelity and legitimacy. These principles identify the values that should guide our evaluation of policies and policy proposals. Benefit and Effectiveness reflect our desires that policies produce benefits and avoid harms, and that they do so in an effective way. Fairness embodies our concern that public policies allocate burdens and benefits in a just manner. Fidelity gives voice to our sense that the government has certain obligations rooted in a respect for those who are affected by its actions. Legitimacy is the criterion for judging when the government should become the instrument for solving our social problems.

On the face of it, these principles seem unobjectionable. Yet, their meaning and significance are highly contested in the policy process, and each of them is subject to distortion. To mention just a few examples at this point: Benefit has been captured by a radical subjectivism that relies on “revealed preferences” to understand what is good. Effectiveness has been shrunk by an economic reductionism in which the only preferences that matter are economic. Fairness is weakened by an increasing polarization in the tension between liberty and equality. Fidelity is often ignored in a political climate which is short-sighted, temporally and spatially. Legitimacy has become little more than a grab bag of options that are used inconsistently, opportunistically, and hypocritically in pursuit of personal agendas.

This framework of five principles is offered to keep policy debates from becoming chaotic and directionless. However, presentations of theoretical frameworks that are divorced from concrete issues run the risk of becoming too abstract and meaningless. For this reason, examples will always be close at hand in the chapters that develop the five ethical benchmarks. These examples illustrate the significance of these principles, demonstrating the stakes involved and the consequences for applying these theoretical concepts in the real world. At the same time, the particular cases can be used to test the adequacy of the principles, giving the reader an opportunity to assess the framework in light ofjudgments about concrete issues.

Chapter 2 presents an introduction to ethics that is tailored to public policy discussions. This brief introduction is not meant to serve as a comprehensive look at the discipline of ethics.¹ The purpose of the chapter is simply to introduce the kinds of reasons that can be given for arguing that a public policy is morally desirable, and the chapter concludes with a fuller description of the five ethical benchmarks that provide the structure for the remainder of the book.

Chapters 3 through 7 explore the meaning and value of the principles of benefit, effectiveness, fairness, fidelity, and legitimacy. The working hypothesis of this book is that the ethical analysis of public policy issues can be usefully organized around this set of principles. As is emphasized later, these “principles” do not function in a mechanical way. My suggestion is not that these principles or rules should be applied to particular cases in order to produce logical conclusions. These principles, rather, are meant to identify factors that should be taken into account, concerns that should be given due consideration, matters that ought to be addressed when reflecting morally on a public policy option. They provide a framework within which moral problems can be identified, examined and resolved.

I have attempted to capture the tone of this kind of moral assessment by introducing the concept of the “benchmark.” Benchmarks, in surveying, were fixed points left on a surveying line to provide points of reference at a later date. These benchmarks consisted of such things as cuts in trees and pegs driven into the ground. They came to refer more specifically to a surveyor’s mark that was cut into some durable material, such as a rock or wall. The purpose of these wedge-shaped incisures (

) was to mark points in a level line that was used to determine altitudes. In the twenty-first century the term benchmark has come to refer to standards that are used to measure performance in a variety of activities, ranging from computer programs to national economies.

A key feature of the surveyors’ benchmarks was their imprecision, due to the imperfection of the instruments and errors inherent in their use, as well as their movement over time. The nature of the surveyor’s art is reflected in this textbook observation: “The best surveyor is not the one who makes the most precise measurements, but the one who is able to choose and apply the appropriate measure of precision requisite to the purpose.”² The concepts introduced here are similarly imprecise, and our task of ethical assessment will be to apply these moral benchmarks in ways that are appropriate to different contexts. The benchmarks are offered as ingredients in a thoughtful analysis of public policy. When we praise someone as being thoughtful, we are not simply saying that she thinks a lot, but that she has a sense of what is important to think about. These principles identify things that are important to think about.

The eighth and final chapter draws these five disparate elements together into a cohesive approach to policy issues. The most interesting policy debates are those in which there is a conflict of values, in which, for example, a highly beneficial policy appears to violate notions of fairness, or is one that can only be implemented through shortchanging the demands of fidelity. Complicating matters further is the reality that policies do not neatly yield yes-or-no answers to these principled questions. Actual policies or proposals will satisfy, or fail to satisfy, these moral standards to varying degrees; there will be degrees of effectiveness, degrees of fairness, and a sensitive ethical analysis must take this complexity into account. The purpose of Chapter 8 is to explore the relationships that exist among these principles and to make some observations about how we can assess the importance of these competing values in a meaningful way.

Notes

1 For examples of fuller explorations of the subject of ethics, see John Deigh, An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

2 Milton O. Schmidt and William Horace Rayner, Fundamentals of Surveying, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1978), p. 8.

2 Ethical Discourse and Public Policy

Ethics is thinking about the question “What ought I to do?” Or, in the collective form in which the question...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Excerpts
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ethical Discourse and Public Policy
• 3 Defining the Good: Benefit
• 4 Stewardship of Resources: Effectiveness
• 5 Serving Justice: Fairness
• 6 Honoring Commitments: Fidelity
• 7 Ownership of Problems: Legitimacy
• 8 Benchmarks and Moral Discernment
• Benediction
• Sources Cited
• Index