Classics Of Administrative Ethics

Willa Marie Bruce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367098865
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429981180
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This anthology will be appropriate for administrative ethics classes and professional thinking in public administration at both the masters and doctoral levels. It is a collection of administrative ethics articles published in journals of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) from 1941 (the earliest publication) through 1983 (the year that the first ASPA Code of Ethics was established). The articles are organized by themes of enduring importance to the field in order to provide graduate students with ready access to the classic works on ethics in public administration. Reading this collection will enhance student's knowledge and skills to think and act ethically and contribute to their ability to view current practices in light of traditional perspectives. The ASPA Classics volume serves to bridge the practice of public policy and administration with the empirical research base that has accrued and the models for practice that may be deduced from the research

Part One
Administrative Responsibility

The beginning discussion about public administration ethics in the United States is known as the "Friedrich-Finer debate." This debate began our search for understanding about what it means to be ethical in the public service, and it begins this collection of classics. The first argument in the debate was constructed by Professor Carl J. Friedrich, who believed that government needs moral and upstanding public servants who can be trusted to demonstrate responsibility because of their own conscience and personal moral codes. For Friedrich, the public employee should be responsible to the standards of the profession, should feel a sense of duty to the public, and should adhere to the technology of the job needing to be done. Herman Finer is appalled by this philosophy and rails against it. He does not trust public servants to be independently responsible and calls for strict laws to govern administrative behavior and provide a code of correction and punishment for those who deviate from legislated standards.

Friedrich first published his position on administrative responsibility in a book he coauthored,¹ and later in the journal Public Policy.² Finer's first rejoinder was in the 1936 Political Science Quarterly. Neither of these publications are related to ASPA at all, so the first round of the debate is not included in this book. Fortunately, Herman Finer chose Public Administration Review as the vehicle for his most comprehensive argument, and that article, which was published in 1941, begins this volume with Chapter 1. Fortunately, also, as a part of his rebuttal, Finer summarizes Friedrich's main points. Thus, readers of "Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government" are able to capture the essence of the debate.

Those who know the history of public administration as a field of study will remember that the period of the 1930s and 1940s was a time of public administration orthodoxy in the United States. People in this country had survived the Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt was embroiled in a reorganization that forever elevated the role and responsibility of government in the lives of citizens. The Friedrich-Finer debate was a part of the discussion about the right and proper role of government and the role played by those employed to administer it. In light of the massive increase in payroll and services, it was critical to consider the importance of administrative responsibility and ascertain how it could be encouraged. Surprisingly, the Brownlow Commission, appointed by Roosevelt in 1937 to assess and advise on the government's reorganization, did not address the issue of administrative responsibility, per se. Rather, the commission report focused on issues of structure, budget, and personnel management. It was left to the scholars who did not officially serve the president to consider the issues of administrative responsibility. Their concerns and solutions are as timely now as they were then. Now, more than fifty years after Carl Friedrich and Herman Finer debated how to achieve administrative responsibility, we still do not know, and our ideas still cluster around the two poles they represent.

Chapter 2, "Ethics and Administrative Discretion," was published in PAR in 1943 in the midst of World War II. Its author, Wayne A. R. Leys, argues that "the art of war cannot by itself save us from . . . tyranny. Improvements in the art of government are necessary, too." For Leys, the art of government requires understanding administrative discretion and practicing ethics, which he describes as "the art . . . of making wise choices." Leys clarifies the difference between philosophical ethics and administrative discretion, which is what we now call "applied ethics," and he calls for administrators to understand and rely on traditional ethical schools of thought. His arguments bridge the opposing arguments of Friedrich and Finer. For Leys, "both/and" is a better approach than "either/or."

The decade of the 1940s forever shaped our thinking about public administration in general and administrative ethics in particular. In his PAR article, "Trends of a Decade in Administrative Values" (Chapter 3 here), Wallace Sayre assesses the 1940s and concludes that the most powerful value to emerge was efficiency. He bemoans the emerging attempt to separate facts from values and the discussions that imply that ethics is not a legitimate part of administration. He also notes with satisfaction that "the construction of a system of administrative responsibility . . . has thus been the subject of a many sided debate" and concludes that the 1940s saw an increase in the importance of values in public administration.

What values were important was yet to be articulated. Whether emphasis should be upon normative institutional arrangements or upon responsible administrators had still not been agreed upon. The essence of the Friedrich-Finer debate was not resolved, and others took it up in one form or another.

The next frequently cited ASPA-sponsored article on the subject was Stephen K. Bailey's "Ethics and the Public Service" (PAR, 1964; Chapter 4 here). This article was originally written as a tribute to Paul Appleby. It refutes the argument that morality is influenced by a government system of hierarchy and rules. It offers, instead, a theory of personal ethics for the public service by suggesting that certain moral qualities and mental attitudes are necessary for responsible government administration. The three moral qualities are courage, optimism, and fairness tempered by charity. The three mental attitudes are a recognition of: the moral ambiguity of all persons, the contextual forces that condition moral priorities, and the paradoxes of procedures. The public administrator who has these qualities will be the one able to meet Friedrich's and Leys's high standards for administrative responsibility and discretion.

Bailey's article not only brings together the founding notions of administrative responsibility, but it lays the foundation for the developing trends in virtue ethics, integrity, and citizenship ethics. It, however, does not resolve the debate initiated by Friedrich and Finer.

Chapter 5, also first published in PAR, is Dennis Thompson's "The Possibility of Administrative Ethics," which demonstrates that a means for ensuring administrative responsibility was still being sought in the 1980s. In this version of the debate, Thompson views administrative ethics as individual moral actions that he defines as "the application of moral principles to the conduct of officials in organizations." He sees administrative ethics in the public sector as a type of political ethics, then affirms that disagreement still exists over whether morality in organizations is possible. He describes the 1980s "obstacles to administrative ethics," which are by then construed as the "ethic of neutrality" and "the ethic of structure." Arguing that these are not compelling reasons to negate the possibility of developing and using moral judgment, Thompson concludes that administrative ethics are possible. He leaves it to the next wave of scholars to identify ideas about how to operationalize that possibility.

So ends Part 1. It has provided the beginning framework for understanding the competing claims about how to identify and ensure administrative responsibility in public organizations. It has also identified the nascent themes in administrative ethics that have become permanent fixtures in the study of ethics in public administration.

Throughout this book, the reader will note that each chapter ends with a piece dated between 1982 and 1985. The year 1984 was a watershed for public administration ethics. This was the year of the first public administration conference about ethics, the same year that ASPA developed its first code of ethics. The early 1980s were the years after the crisis of Watergate, when administrative ethics came into its own as a field of study deserving of rigorous and dedicated pursuit. This was the period when the earliest voices were crystallized into concrete areas of concern. This was when the themes identified for organizing this book were solidified.

Notes

1. Carl Friedrich and others (1935), Problems of the American Public Service. New York: McGraw Hill.

2. Carl Friedrich (1940), "Public Policy and the Nature of Administrative Responsibility," Public Policy, pp. 3-24.

1
Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government

Herman Finer
University of London

Administrative responsibility is not less important to democratic government than administrative efficiency; it is even a contributor to efficiency in the long run. Indeed, it is tempting to argue that the first requisite is responsibility, and if that is properly instituted efficiency will follow. Elaboration of this point should be unnecessary in the era and under the stress of the events which now make up our days.

To the subject of administrative responsibility, Professor Carl J. Friedrich has made several interesting and sagacious contributions,¹ and lie deserves our gratitude for having reintroduced its discussion among primary problems. Yet these contributions have by no means said the last word on the subject. Indeed, he has put forward a number of propositions which must arouse earnest dissent. In answer to an earlier contribution of his I said,

It is most important clearly to distinguish a "Sense of duty" or a "sense of responsibility" from the fact of responsibility, that is, effective answerability. I am anxious to emphasize once again that the notion of subjective responsibility (in my definition of it), whether as intellectual integrity or general loyalty to the spirit and purpose of one's function, is of very great importance in maintaining the level of efficiency. It is stimulating and sustaining, like the will to believe. But we must first of all be perfectly clear about its nature in order that we may not burke the question of whether or not such responsibility is sufficient to keep a civil service wholesome and zealous, and how far, in its own nature, it is likely to break down so that political responsibility must be introduced as the adamant monitor of the public services. For the first commandment is, Subservience.²

My chief difference with Professor Friedrich was and is my insistence upon distinguishing responsibility as an arrangement of correction and punishment even up to dismissal both of politicians and officials, while he believed and believes in reliance upon responsibility as a sense of responsibility, largely unsanctioned, except by deference or loyalty to professional standards. I still maintain my belief while in a more recent article³ Professor Friedrich still maintains his, so far as I am able to follow his argument. I propose therefore to treat the subject in two divisions, first, a more extended version of my own beliefs and, second, a critical examination of his article.

I

Most of the things I have to say are extremely elementary, but since it has been possible for a writer of eminence to discount their significance I may be forgiven for reaffirming them. The modern state is concerned with a vast sphere of services of a mixed nature. They are repressive, controlling, remedial, and go as far as the actual conduct of industrial, commercial, and agricultural operations. The state, which used to be negative— that is to say which was concerned to abolish its own earlier interventions and reduce such controls as ancient and medieval polity had caused it to undertake—has for some decades now abandoned laissez faire and can be called ministrant. Its work ranges over practically every sector of modern individual and social interest, from sheer police work, in the sense of apprehending and punishing assaults on person, peace, and property, to the actual ownership and management of utilities. I need not dwell on this point further, nor upon the range and detailed intensity of the state's operation, nor the large percentage of men and women among the gainfully occupied population it employs in the strategic positions in society. The weight and immensity and domination of this behemoth, for our good as well as for our control, are well known to all of us. But academic persons are less subject to the power of the colossus than the worker, the economic entrepreneur, the sick and the needy of all kinds. The academic person is therefore likely to regard the weight of the administrator's hand as not needing to be stayed or directed by the public custodian.

Are the servants of the public to decide their own course, or is their course of action to be decided by a body outside themselves? My answer is that the servants of the public are not to decide their own course; they are to be responsible to the elected representatives of the public, and these are to determine the course of action of the public servants to the most minute degree that is technically feasible. Both of these propositions are important: the main proposition of responsibility, as well as the limitation and auxiliary institutions implied in the phrase, "that is technically feasible." This kind of responsibility is what democracy means; and though there may be other devices which provide "good" government, I cannot yield on the cardinal issue of democratic government. In the ensuing discussion I have in mind that there is the dual problem of securing the responsibility of officials, (a) through the courts and disciplinary controls within the hierarchy of the administrative departments, and also (b) through the authority exercised over officials by responsible ministers based on sanctions exercised by the representative assembly. In one way or another this dual control obtains in all the democratic countries, though naturally its purposes and procedures vary from country to country.

What are we to mean by responsibility? There are two definitions. First, responsibility may mean that X is accountable for Y to Z. Second, responsibility may mean an inward personal sense of moral obligation. In the first definition the essence is the externality of the agency or persons to whom an account is to be rendered, and it can mean very little without that agency having authority over X, determining the lines of X's obligation and the terms of its continuance or revocation. The second definition puts the emphasis on the conscience of the agent, and it follows from the definition that if he commits an error it is an error only when recognized by his own conscience, and that the punishment of the agent will be merely the twinges thereof. The one implies public execution; the other hara-kiri. While reliance on an official's conscience may be reliance on an official's accomplice, in democratic administration all parties, official, public, and Parliament, will breathe more freely if a censor is in the offing. To convince himself of this the student needs to scrutinize once again the rather uncomfortable relationship between Sir John Reith of the B.B.C. and the public and Parliament⁴ (Sir John was a man of moral hauteur), the deep shelter policy of Sir John Anderson's technical experts and parliamentary opinion thereof, and Sir John's Defence Regulations in draft and Parliament's attitude thereto.⁵

Democratic systems are chiefly embodiments of the first mentioned notion of responsibility, and dictatorial systems chiefly of the second. The leading textbooks by Germans on the Nazi system of government explain the essence of the Nazi system by a slavish dressing up of Hitler's dictum that all authority proceeds from above downward, and all responsibility from below upward. But when responsibility gets to Hitler, where does it go then? Mussolini's essay on fascism is nothing but an exercise revolving around the central thesis that since One Man can at times represent the people more validly than any other arrangement, that One Man owes no responsibility outside himself. The Stalinite doctrine is "democratic centralism," which simply means that after a period of discussion the central authority, that is to say Stalin and a few self-chosen friends, decides the course of policy and bears no responsibility to an agency outside himself.

In the democratic system, however, there is either a direct declaration in the constitution of the primacy of the people over officeholders, whether politicians or employees, or else in authoritative documents or popular proverbs the constitutional omission is made good. Thus, in the Weimar Constitution, Article I declared the issuance of sovereignty from the people. Thus, the Committee on Indian Reforms of 1934 said, "so there arise two familiar British conceptions; that good government is not an accepta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Credits
• Part 1 Administrative Responsibility
• Part 2 Solving Ethical Dilemmas
• Part 3 Corruption
• Part 4 Codes of Ethics
• Part 5 Enforcing Ethical Behavior
• Part 6 Ethics Education
• Part 7 Professionalism
• Part 8 Ethics in the Twenty-First Century
• Index