3. Doing ethical policy analysis Introduction In contemporary society, economic and social processes are shaped by vast numbers of complex and subtle interactions between private, decentralised activities and the activities of governments. Like the demand for many professional services, the demand for policy analysis arises from knowledge gaps. Government decision makers, such as cabinet ministers or councillors, continuously confront public problems for which solutions must be found. Typically, those decision makers adopt new public policies or adjust current policy settings to address the problems at hand. Outside of government, decision makers in many non-governmental organisations also seek policy analysis. Such decision makers rely on policy analysis to help them interpret how changes in government policies could affect their operating contexts, revenue streams, and the cost of doing business. The knowledge gaps that drive demand for policy analysis also create problems of trust. Over the centuries, government decision makers have developed various ways of structuring bureaucracies and using systems of checks and balances to reduce concerns about the trustworthiness of advisers (Kelman 1988; Le Grand 2003). Yet even when such systems are in place to promote honest and high-quality work, verifying the merits of advice given by policy analysts can be costly. The good motives and actions of individual advisers, therefore, remain a key to good governmental decision-making processes. Decision makers must be assured that the policy analysts who advise them are acting with integrity. We can never be entirely sure that individual policy analysts will prove trustworthy. But steps can be taken to reduce the chances that they will behave badly. Those steps include carefully screening applicants for advice-giving roles, creating organisational cultures that promote truthfulness, and instructing policy analysts on good practice. This chapter contributes to good practice by offering suggestions for how to do ethical policy analysis. For the purpose of the current discussion, the focus is placed on the work of policy analysts serving as advisers to elected and appointed decision makers in government. This simplification allows us to discuss the practice of policy analysis in the context where most of it is performed, without the need to continually discuss exceptions. Even so, much of what is said here will be relevant to policy analysts serving any clients, be they public or private decision makers. It is also useful to remember that ethical questions are almost always context-specific. Therefore, the broad treatment of ethical issues offered here is intended as an invitation to consideration of dilemmas in many instances. The next section offers background to our explorations of policy analysis and ethical practice. It is followed by a general discussion of policy analysis and ethical practice. Consideration is then given to how aspects of ethical practice can inform each of the essential elements of policy analysis. The overall argument is that policy analysts should avoid shaping their work in ways that simply reinforce prevailing views in local policy conversations. Although such an approach is pragmatic in some ways, it can reduce the usefulness of policy analysis. At their best, policy analysts maintain critical distance from political debates – not to the extent that they become disengaged, but so they can view problems in fresh ways and offer evidence and insights capable of creating bold changes in policy thinking. Performing like this, policy analysts can exhibit trustworthiness while also infusing policy conversations with ideas and analyses that can promote significant, positive change in policy-making communities. Policy analysis and ethical practice The public expect government decision makers to address problems caused by private, decentralised aspects of social and economic interactions, others caused by governmental processes, and yet others caused by unintended, negative interactions between public and private activities. Those decision makers face knowledge gaps concerning the nature of the problems and how they might be resolved. Decision makers also must be careful that any responses to given problems represent workable solutions. As Charles Wolf cautioned, ‘the cure may be as bad as the illness’ (Wolf 1979, p. 133). Policy analysts are employed to close knowledge gaps that inhibit effective policy making. As the discipline of policy analysis has evolved, a consensus has emerged on how policy analysts conduct their work. Here, I follow Eugene Bardach’s (2008) portrayal of that view, encapsulated in eight general steps. My wording differs slightly from Bardach’s, but the nature and order of the eight steps does not. Policy analysts add value to decision-making processes when they:
My portrayal of policy analysts emphasises their role in closing knowledge gaps for government decision makers, but this work is rarely straightforward. Policy analysts have significant discretion when considering how to define a problem and the nature of the analytical work that flows from there. They also face many choices when they develop their policy reports and present their advice to their clients. Further, policy analysts face choices over the extent to which they consult with stakeholders during the policy development process. Even when requirements are made for consultation, everyone knows that stakeholder engagements can be perfunctory. Sometimes, consultation can be used primarily for pushing specific solutions rather than for genuinely listening to stakeholders and understanding their concerns. Among other things, policy analysts acting ethically must strive to promote outcomes that are good for society. They must also be transparent about the choices embodied in their work. Contemporary notions of ethical practice are informed by a variety of philosophical and religious ideas that have been discussed and developed through the ages. Here, I draw from that tradition to develop five ethical principles that can guide the practices of individual policy analysts. However, before turning to those principles, it is useful to review three highly influential ethical perspectives: universalism, utilitarianism, and altruism. Universalism tells us there are certain appropriate behaviours and that those behaviours should be followed without any reference to the mediating effects of context. The Ten Commandments fit the universalism model.[1] The Golden Rule offers another example of universalism and has been proposed by many religions and cultures. It is summed up in the words of Jesus: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.[2] Immanuel Kant presented a variation of the Golden Rule, ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’.[3] Universalism promotes persistence and consistency, but it is difficult to apply because exceptional circumstances abound. The focus is on strict adherence to a code of practice; the assumption being that this will generate desirable outcomes. In public policy, having uniform standards that all applicants to university must meet to gain entry would represent a case of universalism. Utilitarianism focuses on outcomes; the maximisation of pleasure and the minimisation of pain. Here, consequences of actions are considered to be more important than whether those actions fit a universal code of practice. The perspective is most closely associated with the thinking of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.[4] Within the utilitarian perspective, individuals are expected to promote the attainment of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. There are many instances where deviations from a universal law would be justified within this perspective. For example, there may be times when failing to attend to the neediest people in a group allows effort to be devoted to securing the best outcome for the group as a whole. Utilitarianism is easily understood and is frequently used. However, outcomes are often difficult to predict, and people might have different views about the likely consequences of an action. In public policy, tying enrolment numbers for specific university degrees to labour market demand for graduates with those degrees would represent a case of utilitarianism. Altruism requires that love of others serves as our ethical standard. People are not treated as the means to an end. People are what matter most. Altruism guides us to always take account of the position of the least-advantaged person and make that position as dignified and comfortable as possible. This perspective has been espoused by many people who have dedicated their lives to working among the poor, or who have used their political careers to promote the social circumstances of the least fortunate. Although informed by imperatives that characterise universalism, altruism takes account of context. Difficulties surround the application of this perspective, because people can disagree on what is best for others. In public policy, allowing exceptions to admissions standards to university so that individuals who do not meet those standards may enrol if they demonstrate maturity and profess a thirst for knowledge would represent a case of altruism. The three ethical perspectives mentioned here offer distinctive views on what individuals should care most about. Should we follow a strict code of practice, focusing on good process? Should we care most about maximising the outcomes of society? Or should we attend most to the fair treatment of the least-advantaged person? A crucial part of the ethic of being a good policy analyst involves helping others to better understand the choices they face and the likely consequence of any given course of action. At the level of the individual professional, we also need to be aware of the choices we face in our daily practices. When would it be appropriate for us to follow universal principles? When would it be more appropriate for us to focus on outcomes? When should we pay special attention to the situation of those who could be most harmed by the advice we give? Identifying the ethical dilemmas we face in our work and discussing them with others around us can serve to improve the overall quality of the analysis we do and the advice we give. We can be better people as a consequence of this kind of reflexivity and offer better support to government decision makers. Inevitably, though, there will be times when our efforts will fall short of what is expected of us. At such times, my suggestion is that we follow the advice of the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus, ‘Human betterment is a gradual, two-steps-forward, one-step-back effort. Forgive others for their misdeeds over and over again … Forgive yourself over and over and over again. Then try to do better next time’. [5] Other policy scholars have considered how policy analysts might use ethical perspectives to guide their work. The literature falls into two camps. In one, consideration is given to the practices of policy analysts themselves. In the second camp, consideration is given to how policy analysts can integrate ethical frameworks and analysis into the development of policy advice. A common concern is that policy analysts do not make sufficient use of ethical analysis to guide their comparisons of policy options. The concerns of each camp were neatly represented in articles published back to back in an issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management that appeared several decades ago. Representing the camp concerned with doing ethical policy analysis, Guy Benveniste (1984) argued that a code of ethics should be developed for policy experts and advisers. Benveniste recognised the power and status that can accrue to policy analysts because of the knowledge they hold. He worried that individual policy analysts could become enamoured with playing the game of political influence. In doing so, they could undermine their legitimacy as sources of independent expert knowledge. Benveniste argued that an effective code of ethics would cover the scope of responsibilities, what should be done about identifying and managing conflicts of interest, how issues of secrecy and the exposure of information should be managed, how policy analysts should manage consultation with stakeholder groups, and how decision-making processes should be conducted during crises (Beneviste 1984, p. 569). Benveniste recognised that establishing a code of ethics would be difficult and that many clients and policy analysts would see little point in its adoption. He noted, for example, that recipients of policy advice are usually powerful political actors, which distinguishes them from the clients of other professionals, such as lawyers and doctors. In the latter cases, the asymmetries of power and knowledge between clients and professionals are more pronounced than in the case of policy advising and tend to run in the favour of the person rendering the services. Representing the camp calling for more application of ethical principles as guides to the analysis of public policies was Douglas J. Amy (1984). Amy suggested the strong emphasis on policy analysis as a technical exercise, combined with issues of administrative structure, reduced the opportunities for consideration of ethical issues. In the decades since Amy wrote this, the contributions made by ethicists to policy debates across a variety of policy domains have grown significantly. For example, in their introduction to public policy, Michael E. Kraft and Scott R. Furlong (2007) note the ways ethical considerations inform aspects of health care policy, environmental policy, and foreign policy, along with public policies relating to other fields of human activity. Note also that many of the chapters in this volume offer examples of how ethical principles can be applied to the analysis of public policies. The present chapter falls in the camp concerned with doing ethical policy analysis, the camp Benveniste (1984) defined. The goal here is to consider how policy analysts exhibit ethical behaviour in the conduct of their work. Models for this kind of exercise can be found in cognate areas of professional practice. For example, a literature exists exploring how social scientists can be ethical in their practices. As well as covering topics such as informed consent, confidentiality, and the researching of sensitive topics, this literature covers motivations for conducting social science research, the need for competency among researchers, and the appropriate reporting of research findings (Reynolds 1979; Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 1996). Within the field of programme evaluation, efforts have been made to develop standards (Sanders et al. 1994). Among other things, these include standards for designing evaluations, collecting information, engaging in analysis, and reporting results. Policy scholars David L. Weimer and Aidan R. Vining (2005) have offered a useful guide for how policy analysts might exhibit professional ethics through their work. To do so, Weimer and Vining proposed that policy analysts be viewed as performing one of three roles: the objective technician, the client’s advocate, or an issue advocate. Each policy analyst can be seen as holding fundamental values. Those values can be a commitment to analytical integrity, responsiveness to the client, or adherence to one’s conception of what is socially good. At any given time, policy analysts might view themselves as performing more than one of these roles and show joint commitment to analytical integrity, their client, and their own values, but ethical dilemmas often arise. Weimer and Vining explore how policy analysts might respond to values conflicts, noting available options. These range from discussion of those conflicts with the client to resigning from a given role and even showing disloyalty to the client. This chapter explores how ethical challenges arise at each step in the process of doing policy analysis. As such, it offers the prospect of reducing the tendency for policy analysts to profess an ethical orientation and good intentions, while routinely engaging in practices that undercut the contributions they could make to improving policy discussions and promoting high-quality public decision making. Ethical principles for policy analysts Most general ethical principles hold relevance for people in both their private lives and vocational settings. Contributions to the contemporary literature on leadership and management emphasise the importance of ethical behaviour for supporting effective team processes, organisational transformation, and the emergence of cultures of excellence.[6] Here, five ethical principles are introduced: integrity, competence, responsibility, respect, and concern. In selecting this set, I have followed Thomas G. Plante (2004). Although other principles are relevant, these five offer a sound basis from which to explore how a focus on ethics can promote good practice among policy analysts. Having set out these principles for policy analysts, I use them to assess how policy analysts might act ethically at each step in the process of doing analytical work. Integrity When people act with integrity, they are directed by an internal moral compass. They strive to do the right thing in any given situation and to achieve consistency in their intentions and actions across contexts. Plante (2004, p. 61) has suggested that ‘integrity is the foundation for living an ethical life’. In his view, people display integrity when they follow high standards of honesty and when they show commitment to the values of justice and fairness. People of integrity do not seek selfish, short-term gains through opportunistic actions that harm others. Rather, they take the view that their commitment to honesty and fairness will produce the best outcomes all around. Evidence from cognitive psychology suggests that people have fine-tuned skills for detecting when others are not being honest with them (Kramer 1999; Meyerson et al. 1996). As a result, acting with integrity can lay the foundations for building long-term relationships of trust and mutual support (Covey 2006). Policy analysts are called to advise decision makers about the nature of the public problems they must confront and the relative merits of alternative responses. In all cases, clients must have faith that the policy analysts have performed their work with integrity. Advice based on limited engagement with appropriate evidence, lack of consideration for how various policy approaches will affect different groups of people, and limited attention to good design and implementation could result in poor outcomes both for those affected by the policies and the decision makers who adopted them. That is why policy analysts must act with integrity. Adherence to the values of honesty, justice, and fairness is important. Being around others who exhibit integrity can also help to reduce the risk of behavioural lapses. Competence A strong relationship exists between competence and ethical behaviour. When you talk or act as if you can do something, then the qualities of honesty and integrity dictate that you can actually do it. It is dishonest for anyone to say they can do something when they cannot. Most professionals have specialised knowledge and skills, making them highly competent in a narrow set of areas. To undertake work outside your specialisation carries the risk that you could fail at it. In some professions, such as medicine and engineering, incompetence could result in serious injuries and the loss of lives. In the field of policy analysis, the level of knowledge and skill required to perform competently will depend on the substantive area of focus. However, all policy analysts should aspire to delivering high-quality work, to do so without unnecessary cost, and to continuously improve their analytical skills. Seeking feedback from clients, working with mentors, and identifying high-quality work to emulate are some useful strategies that policy analysts can use to strengthen their competencies. Often, the nature of the analytical task will require that teams of policy analysts work together, so that all team members can contribute in their areas of expertise, without straying into territory where their skills would be inadequate. Policy analysts also have reason to form teams with specialists from other fields who possess substantive knowledge and skills relevant to the analytical task. The teamwork required by many policy tasks illustrates the importance of policy analysts building people skills that complement their technical expertise. The skills of working effectively in teams, communicating with a variety of stakeholders, and managing conflict are highly relevant to the work of policy analysts (Mintrom 2003). Responsibility Taking responsibility means acknowledging the part you play in contributing to expected or observed outcomes. It is commonplace for people to willingly accept the credit when good outcomes occur but to deflect blame for poor outcomes. People who take responsibility do more than accept that they are accountable to others. They tend to be proactive, striving from the start to achieve good outcomes. They also quickly acknowledge instances where their actions or lack of action created problems. They then do what they can to make good on past mistakes. Making good can range from sincerely apologising for what happened to doing all that is necessary to address and fix the problem. Acknowledging problems you have caused and undertaking service recoveries takes courage. It can also mean spending valuable resources to make things right. However, when such actions are taken with good grace, they not only serve to mend endangered relationships but they can even strengthen them (Covey 2006; Quinn and Quinn 2009). Policy analysts face many situations where responsible action is called for. They face choices about how thoroughly to investigate policy problems and explore creative ways to address them. When policy analysts recognise and respect the trust that decision makers place in them, they can scope their work and conduct it in ways that break with conventional wisdom and offer new insights for policy design and implementation. Of course, there will be times when policy problems are neither significant enough nor novel enough to justify extensive new work being performed. Part of being responsible involves taking the time to listen to clients and evaluate their willingness to pursue significant policy innovation. Responsible policy analysts work to develop good relations with their clients. They look for appropriate ways to close knowledge gaps. They also work quickly to defuse problems or misunderstandings that arise because of their actions. Respect When we show respect for others, we acknowledge their humanity, their dignity, and their right to be the people they are. Respect means being considerate and appreciative of others. It means treating others as you would like to be treated (Plante 2004). It is relatively easy for us to respect others when we like them, when we have known them for a long time, and when we share with them common views and interests. The tough part of respect is looking for the humanity, the good, and the reasonableness in people who our gut instincts lead us to despise. Hard as it is, part of being an ethical person involves seeking to understand others, to appreciate how they see things. The quality of forgiveness can be especially valuable as an aid in such efforts, so, too, can patience; particularly when it means slowing down the pace of our actions and listening hard. Respecting others is an important attribute in policy analysts. First, policy analysts need to respect others who they engage with when they are conducting their analysis and developing ideas for ways to address policy problems. Often, policy debates grow heated because of the different interests at stake (Schön and Rein 1994). Although it can be challenging, policy analysts can gain valuable insights into effective policy design by listening closely to others, even when they profoundly disagree with what they are hearing. Respecting others and turning conflicts into opportunities for learning can promote creative problem solving (Quinn and Quinn 2009). Second, policy analysts need to respect the lives, the needs, and the aspirations of the people who will be directly affected by policy change. Often, policy analysts work to develop policies that will significantly affect the lives of people with whom they share little in common. At such times, showing deep respect for the views, feelings, and hopes of others can be vital for resolving differences. Making conscious use of gender analysis or analytical strategies that take account of differences across racial groups and people of different ethnicities can serve as a useful starting point for recognising social differences and their policy implications. Marianne Williamson (2004, p. 175), who proposes love as a key to addressing the world’s problems, has observed, ‘It’s amazing how positively people respond when they feel respected for their thoughts and feelings. Learning to feel such respect – and to actually show it – is key to a miracle worker’s power’. We might add that, in the cut and thrust of policy disputes, showing respect for others can be both courageous and transformative. Concern Living an ethical life requires that we show concern for others, and not just those who are close family members or friends. Concern means caring about, showing an interest in, and being involved in the lives of others. When people devote their lives to working with and advancing the interests of the poor, they demonstrate exceptional levels of concern for others. Without making that level of sacrifice, many people – through their work, their philanthropy, and their acts of altruism – do an enormous amount to help others to live better lives. Policy analysts often choose their vocation because they are concerned for the lives of others and they want to make a positive difference in the world. As such, many policy analysts share a people-focused orientation that has roots in the same goodwill towards others that can be found among people in the caring professions, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, counsellors, and social workers. However, the day-to-day work of policy analysis can easily become rarefied and removed from the lives of those who will be affected by policy change. This suggests that value lies in policy analysts gaining exposure to the communities that their policies affect. By keeping the lives of others salient to themselves, policy analysts can remain alert to the impacts of their work. Doing ethical policy analysis Policy analysts are called to close knowledge gaps faced by decision makers. Given inherent information asymmetries in these relationships, decision makers must place trust in policy analysts to act ethically. Having discussed five ethical principles for policy analysts, we now explore the implications those principles hold for the actions of policy analysts at each step in their work. Ethical problem definition Defining policy problems is inherently political work. Rarely do the objective facts of a problem receive uniform interpretations from all relevant stakeholders (Majone 1989; Rochefort and Cobb 1994). At this most preliminary stage of policy inquiry, policy analysts face choices about the conduct of their work. Those choices are significant, because how problems are defined strongly influences which policy responses are likely to gain serious attention and which will be brushed aside. How should ethical policy analysts act at the problem-definition step? First, they should identify relevant stakeholder groups and learn how members of those groups see the problem and how they would like it to be addressed. Second, they should assess their findings and identify the key lines of disagreement. Based on this information, they should collect more basic information about the nature of the problem, the problem’s causes, and the feasible solutions that might be available to address the problem. All of this information should be assessed and synthesised into a problem statement. It should be shared and discussed with the client, with the goals of conveying potential risks associated with the development of policy solutions, achieving clarity around how the client views the problem, and getting support for moving ahead to other steps in the analytical process. High levels of integrity and competence are required of policy analysts at this stage to avoid conflicts based on stakeholder perceptions of exclusion or beliefs that a favoured solution has already been selected and that everything else will be spin.[7] Ethical construction of alternatives Introducing a range of alternative policy responses to a problem can be done in ways that significantly advance policy discussion and good decision making. The subject of how we identify relevant solutions to problems has been considered at length, both by scholars of decision making and political scientists (see, for example, Cyert and March 1963; Jones 2001; Kingdon 1995). Typically, solutions and problems come intertwined. That is, when feasible solutions become apparent, perceptions of problems change, and arguments are made that government action is necessary. For example, as treatments have been discovered for life-threatening diseases, arguments for government funding of those treatments have grown compelling. Likewise, evidence of the life-preserving effects of airbags in cars produced compelling grounds for airbags to become required features of all new cars. We see in these examples that the suitability of the fit between solutions and problems tends to change over time, predicated on the flow of evidence and of technical innovations. A challenge for policy makers involves avoiding the adoption of policy responses that lock in present technologies and potentially inhibit the discovery of improved solutions. Another challenge is the way that interest groups tend to promote their favourite solutions to problems, even when evidence would suggest that those solutions might not produce the best outcome for the greatest number of people. What is an ethical approach to constructing the set of alternative policy solutions? First, we should acknowledge that there are limits to how many alternatives can be considered in any decision-making process (Schwartz 2004). Three or four would seem a reasonable number. To promote useful discussion, alternative approaches included within the set should each be quite distinctive, so decision makers can get a good sense of the range of possibilities open to them. Second, we should include alternatives that appear most relevant, given the problem and discussions surrounding it. If an alternative is well known to be favoured by key stakeholders then it is appropriate to include it – or a close approximation to it – in the set. Decision makers will need to know how it stacks up against other alternatives. Third, the set of alternatives should be constructed taking account of the broader financial context. For example, when government spending is highly constrained, there is little point in proposing costly policies without accompanying the proposal with suggestions for cost-savings in other areas. Fourth, the construction of alternatives offers an opportunity for policy analysts to broaden policy discussions. Learning about approaches tried in other jurisdictions or in other related areas of policy can help analysts to devise innovative policy solutions (Mintrom 1997; Mintrom and Norman 2009). This shows evidence of both competence and concern. Finally, we should treat our analysis as a vehicle for facilitating discussion of additional alternatives. If, on reviewing our advice, decision makers request more alternatives to be considered that build on those already presented, that should be treated as good feedback. Ethical selection of criteria Policy analysts are required to weigh up the relative merits of alternative policy responses to any given problem. To do this in a systematic fashion, they must establish a set of criteria for judging each alternative, and then make sure they assess the expected performance of each alternative on each criterion of interest. It is common for policy analysts to analyse policy alternatives using three criteria: efficiency, equity, and administrative simplicity. Taken together, these criteria lead us to consider the relative costs of each alternative, the fairness by which different groups of people are affected by each alternative, and the relative degree of burden that each alternative would place on those required to implement it and those required to comply with it. There is good reason to believe the use of these three criteria is both sound and ethical. However, focusing on only these criteria can limit policy analysis in unhelpful ways. It is often important to assess policy alternatives in terms of their implications for personal freedom, human dignity, social harmony, and environmental sustainability. When should other criteria be introduced? The development of policy analysis as a discipline has seen increasing calls by various groups in society to have their interests and their concerns reflected in the criteria used to judge policy alternatives. While there is no conceptual limit to what criteria might be applied, in practice we need to keep our analysis manageable. Reflecting on the concerns expressed by stakeholder groups who have weighed in at the problem-definition stage is helpful here. It can lead to the development of a set of evaluative criteria that is appropriately suited to the context. Discussing with others what they care about and how their concerns could be captured in the evaluative criteria is a good way to show both respect and concern during the process of policy development. Ethical prediction of outcomes Decision makers need high-quality information on the likely effects of adopting specific policy solutions. The challenge for policy analysts is to generate that information, paying careful attention to the criteria judged most appropriate. Policy analysts can use various methods to gather information, generate information, and analyse the information to predict likely policy effects. Several ethical concerns arise. First, all analytical work requires that we make simplifying assumptions, that we make estimates when good data are not present, and that we work with models that, at their best, only approximate real-world processes. None of this is a problem, so long as we carefully document our work and have others peer review it. Other people should be able to follow our analytical procedures and come to much the same conclusions. They should also be able to clearly understand the limits of our analysis. Strong technical work should be accorded value by decision makers. However, analysts should never try to hide behind technical matters, or try to win support for a favoured solution using opaque, but smart-sounding, analysis. Second, because we know there is room for manipulating evidence, we should promote high standards of technical ability and clarity of explanation in our work. This raises the bar for those who would be happier to win policy disputes by playing fast and loose with the evidence. Through the work of predicting outcomes, policy analysts will usually become clear about the relative merits of each alternative and the trade-offs associated with pursuing one over the others. It is important that these trade-offs be made explicit. Policy analysts should also be prepared to state their views on what policy alternative would be most appropriate in the given context. Doing so can be clarifying to decision makers. Just as importantly, it forces the analyst to work hard at making their arguments for the choice they favour. The most effective way to do this is to make the strongest possible argument for each alternative, rather than paying more attention to a favoured position and doing limited or sloppy analysis of the other alternatives. Exposing their work to peer review is a further check on the validity of the analysts’ evidence and arguments. Ethical reporting practices Knowledge gaps can be closed only when relevant information is presented in ways that work for the clients. If a busy decision maker requests that all material be initially presented in an oral briefing and a one-page memo, then the onus is on the policy analyst to meet that requirement. Meeting such a requirement can take a lot of careful thought and effort. Policy analysts need to become adept at writing and presenting their work for multiple audiences (Mintrom 2003). It is both ethical and smart to tell the same story in multiple ways, so long as the story remains consistent across the audiences being reached. Having said this, it is clear that any organisational conventions around reporting must be met. Increasingly, policy analysts working in government settings find they must follow report templates that come with their share of positives and negatives. The key is to not let the conventions inhibit the development of effective communication with clients and stakeholders. Working at different ways to present your work to different audiences is an important means of showing respect to others. But throughout, policy analysts must be sure that they also have a version of their report that they feel most comfortable with, that pulls together in one place all the documentation associated with the analytical process. Increasingly, we can make use of technology to produce reports where different audience members can choose the features of the analysis that they wish to focus on. To do this well is likely to mean working with experts in website design, communications, and marketing. That is what is required when we take responsibility for improving policy discussions and when we desire to help others understand the problems they face and how policy changes can address them. Conclusion Knowledge gaps provide the primary rationale for the work of policy analysts. At its best, their work can enlighten decision makers about policy problems and effective ways to address them. Given the nature of these knowledge gaps, decision makers must trust that the information provided to them is based on sound, honest work. The asymmetries in expertise create the potential for problems to arise. For example, policy analysts might deliberately narrow the definition of a problem, limit the selection of alternatives to address the problem, or place undue weight on cost issues when other criteria should be made salient. This chapter has discussed how policy analysts might develop and deliver their work in accordance with sound ethical principles. By adhering to the proposed approaches, policy analysts can find ways to advance and even transform policy conversations. It is important that policy analysts understand the political contexts within which they operate. But it is disappointing when apparent contextual constraints are used to justify analytical work that does little more than support the political consensus of the day. I have suggested that, when exploring alternative policy responses, policy analysts should aspire to being creative and look for innovative solutions from elsewhere that could usefully inform local policy discussions. This way of doing policy analysis does not depart greatly from standard approaches, but it sets us in a direction that can promote significant, positive change. More than most people in society, policy analysts can catalyse new thinking on policy issues. To do so is ethical. In a world filled with challenges, where routine responses yield limited gains, such work is urgently needed. References Amy, D. J. 1984. ‘Why policy analysis and ethics are incompatible.’ Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 3(4): 573–91. Bardach, E. 2008. A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The eightfold path to more effective problem solving. 3rd edn. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Bennis, W. 2003. On Becoming a Leader. 3rd edn. New York: Basic Books. 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4. The public servant as analyst, adviser, and advocate Much of the work of public officials – elected or appointed – involves choices amongst values; indeed, it is this characteristic of their role in a liberal democracy that often makes their decisions contestable, debateable and requiring public justification. Therefore, nothing is more dangerous to the well-being of the body politic than a public official who is technically competent or strategically astute but ethically illiterate or unfit. (Preston 1994, p. 1). Introduction Public servants involved in policy making fulfil at least three distinct functions within Westminster-style parliamentary democracies: those of analyst, adviser, and advocate (cf. Gallagher 1981, pp. 72–3). These functions are not necessarily distinguished by role or position and correspond to the interplay between information, interests, and ideology in public policy making (Weiss 1983). This paper explores tensions within and between analysis, advice giving, and advocacy, and proposes that the three functions be distinguished without separation or division. Maintaining appropriate distinctions is, in fact, encouraged in law and by convention, ethical codes of practice, and statements of public sector values. It requires above all, however, the intentional cultivation of what Kenneth Winston (2002, 2009) has termed ‘moral competence in public life’ and its institutionalisation through public sector management and leadership. The analyst As analyst, the public servant collects and analyses data and other information and provides this to ministers, parliament, and the public. Examples include preparing departmental annual reports for the portfolio minister to table in the House of Representatives, assisting Vote ministers with Estimates debates, providing information to and appearing as witnesses or advisers before select committees, assisting with responses to parliamentary questions and ministerial correspondence, providing briefings to ministers and their staff, and responding to requests made under the Official Information Act 1982. In this role, the public servant is expected to be technically competent and politically neutral. Policy analysis also commonly requires public servants to articulate two or more options, using an appropriate ‘evidence base’ and analytical framework or frameworks, in order to enable the government to determine its preferred means to achieve its agreed ends. Those ends are defined by the manifesto commitments and electoral mandate of the party that leads the government, by coalition and confidence-and-supply agreements with minor parties, and by direction provided from time to time by ministers and cabinet. In this sense, the public servant is an implementer and ‘rational functionary’ (Parsons 1995, p. 7), who ‘faithfully serves the government of the day’ by aligning public administration with government priorities. A positivist account of policy analysis, and of the role of social science in public policy, requires the separation of facts and values, means and ends. Callahan and Jennings (1983, p. xvii; cf. Moroney 1981, p. 81) describe this 1960s–1970s approach, whereby policy analysis was taken to be primarily an administrative, technical activity concerned with the efficient fitting of means to given ends: Having been assigned a particular goal by the policymaker (who, in turn, was acting on authority delegated by democratically elected representatives), the social scientist was to analyze particular policy options which, on the basis of empirically confirmed generalizations about human behaviour, could be evaluated in terms of their potential consequences, the relationship between costs and benefits, and their likely effectiveness. State Services Commission guidance reflects this sort of approach (SSC 2007b, p. 13): The work we do must not be influenced by personal beliefs or commitments. These personal interests can be wide-ranging, including party political, religious, philosophical, and vocational, and can be shaped by all sorts of experiences and upbringing. What we do in our organisation must reflect State Services standards of integrity and conduct and not be undermined by any personal conviction or particular ethical viewpoint we may embrace. The Frankfurt School, however, and Habermas in particular, has challenged scientistic conceptions of objectivity, which identify objectivity with neutrality and freedom from normative commitments (Nielsen 1983). It is increasingly accepted, as Callahan and Jennings (1983, p. xix) argue, that ‘even the most quantitative and formalistic policy-analytic techniques contain concealed value choices and inextricable normative implications’. This requires the public servant as analyst to manage tensions between the objective and the subjective nature of reality (and hence the empirical and the normative) and between short-term alignment to government priorities and longer-term responsibility to the public good. Quite apart from the incomplete and imperfect information we have to work with, no analyst is a purely ‘rational functionary’. We all have complex interests, values, beliefs, ideologies, and goals of our own that cannot be entirely separated from ‘evidence-based’ public policy analysis (Parsons 1995, pp. 7, 87–8; Bardach 2000, p. xiii). These shape our perceptions of reality and influence, in particular, the critical ‘problem definition’ stage in policy analysis (Parsons 1995, p. 88, emphasis in original): policy analysts could be said to be in the business of problem-structuring and ordering so as to facilitate problem-solving by decision-makers. Politics arises because we do not share perceptions of what the problems are, or if we do, what follows from the definition in terms of what can be or should be done. A definition of a problem is part of the problem. Geva-May (1997, p. 4) similarly reflects that: Casting and recasting the problem is one of the most important functions a policy analyst performs. Problems do not exist as objectively defined entities out there ‘waiting to be solved’. Rather, a single set of conditions can yield any number of problems depending, among other things, on the reference frame of interested parties. Analysts are, thus, not a species of social scientist in the (positivist) sense of ‘technicians of the social life’ (Nielsen 1983, p. 117); neither can the mere fact of electoral competition alone be expected to carry normative weight, given the imperfection of democratic institutions and processes (McPherson 1983, pp. 69, 75–6). The analysis of data and information is, therefore, somewhat indirect – ‘one small piece in a larger mosaic of politics, bargaining, and compromise’ (Callahan and Jennings 1983, p. xiii). Nevertheless, there is a continuing expectation that public sector analysis will be evidence-informed, professional, and politically neutral. A further challenge for the public servant as analyst is to balance short-term priorities against long-haul thinking about hard questions and ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973; Australian Public Service Commission 2007). Public servants are required to be responsive to government priorities and to support their ministers in aligning policies, programmes, and services to those priorities. Ministers naturally tend to be focused on the short term and the three-year electoral cycle. The Westminster system of a permanent, professional public service also requires, however, investment in medium- to long-term analysis that may not be immediately important to the current government but may prove critical, nevertheless, to the public sector’s ability to respond to future crises and priorities of the next government or the one after that. The system is based on the idea that governments, present and future, will be served well when the public service retains ‘expertise, institutional memories and wisdom about good policy which is developed over years’ (Scott 2008, p. 12). The tension between short-term alignment and medium- to long-term policy development is highlighted when ministers themselves demand, on the one hand, alignment to current priorities, ‘exploitation’ rather than ‘exploration’ modes of research and evaluation (Lindquist 2009, p. 15) that enable rapid evidence assessment (Rapid Evidence Assessment Toolkit n. d.) and ‘real-time learning’ and, on the other hand, innovative and forward-thinking ‘transformative’ approaches to emerging challenges and ‘wicked problems’ (Baehler and Bryson 2009, pp. 15, 17). The adviser As adviser, the public servant is responsible for ‘speaking truth to power’ (Wildavsky 1987), providing advice to the government of the day that is ‘free and frank’ (SSC 2007a, 2007b, p. 14). In the Westminster system of government, this advice is to be professional, politically neutral, and of such integrity as to maintain the confidence of present and future ministers, parliament, and the public (SSC 2007b, pp. 13, 14, 16, 2008c, p. 4). At the same time, public servants are required to ‘faithfully serve the government of the day’ by implementing its policy decisions, once made, without criticism or re-litigation (SSC 2008c, pp. 5–6). In doing so, public servants are further expected to uphold duties to the public to protect the interests of society generally through the manner in which policies are implemented and programmes and services delivered (Woodward 1994, p. 228). This raises the question of what ‘success’ looks like in the policy advice role (Radin 2000, p. 28; cf. Bardach 2000, pp. 23–4). Is the adviser successful when the agreed policy ‘outputs’ have been delivered within the agreed timeframes? When decision makers have been convinced to adopt the adviser’s recommendations? When decision makers are helped to understand the complexities and dimensions of a policy choice (which may result in a different policy being adopted)? When a policy adopted by decision makers has broad public support? When, with or without public support, a policy is endorsed by key stakeholders or academic experts? When the policy is consistent with the nature, aims, and purposes of public services and the values inherent in these? When policy once implemented can be demonstrated to have improved outcomes for citizens? The answer, of course, is some combination of all of the above. This in turn implies that the public servant as adviser juggles conflicting demands from multiple clients. As Martin (1994, p. 106) explains: Currently the accepted expression in New Zealand of the duty of a public servant (within the law) is that ‘the minister is my client’. This immediately throws into relief the claims of competing duties: to the government-as-a-whole? to the public? to the chief executive (who is the employer)? to values such as justice, democracy, efficiency or rationality? Advice, moreover, has become highly contestable, with a growing demand from ministers for advice sourced from beyond the public service and an increasing number of ‘political’ (or ‘ministerial’) advisers being employed to support their ministers in advancing the government’s political and policy agenda (Eichbaum and Shaw 2005, 2007, 2010; cf. SSC 2008c, pp. 7–8). Political advisers can play a useful role within New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional electoral system, assisting with negotiations around the formation of a government, managing relationships between the government and its coalition and parliamentary support parties, and assisting ministers to prepare political (as distinct from factual) responses to parliamentary questions and ministerial correspondence. There are risks, however, that political advisers may filter and contaminate the free flow of information and communication between ministers and departmental officials, dilute the robustness of officials’ advice, and provide ill-informed and uncritical second-opinion advice on policy proposals (Pollitt 2003, p. 87). Consequently, the employment of ‘political advisers’ in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom has not occurred without criticism (Uhr 2005, p. 25; Hood and Lodge 2006, p. 159; Lodge 2009, p. 53; Scott 2008, p. 5). The challenge for the public servant as adviser is to balance rigour and relevance in the real-world hurly-burly of politics. As Gregory (2005, p. 26) puts it: Analysis can be rigorous (but of course it sometimes/often is not) but it may also be rigorously irrelevant (to actual policy-making) if it does not speak constructively to the agendas that are driving decision makers. Neutrality is, in this sense, a naïve and even dangerous aspiration. Gregory (2005, p. 27) cites Brian Chapman (1959, p. 275): Neutrality in public office tends in the end to moral corruption. If all governments are to be served with equal impartiality and loyalty there are no grounds at all for criticizing the German official who served Hitler to the best of his ability. Consequently, Gregory (2005 p. 27) argues that: Government officials as individuals must retain, even nurture, a capacity for personal reflective judgement, even as they work in contexts and roles which by their nature insidiously limit that capacity. Government officials ought, moreover, act to preserve and protect the integrity of the process and the broader democratic values they serve as public servants. McPherson (1983, p. 76) sums up the issue like this: We can catch some of the complexities here by saying that the adviser really has a three-sided obligation: (1) to serve his or her superiors honestly, (2) to promote better policies, and (3) to respect and improve the democratic process by which decisions are made. The advocate Public servants are to be ‘imbued with the spirit of service to the community’ (State Sector Act 1988, para (a) of the Long Title). A frequently voiced motivation, in fact, is the desire ‘to make a difference’, according to personal and (actual or assumed) collective understandings of such desired outcomes as ‘social justice’, ‘the public interest’, or ‘the common good’. Given the convention of offering ‘free and frank’ advice, can and should advice giving by permanent public servants extend to ends as well as means? Can public servants legitimately advocate for particular social and economic outcomes within the performance of their public duties? And how are public servants to balance their desire (and obligation) ‘to do the best for New Zealand’ with narrower policy agendas and demand for short-term fixes within typical government policy processes (Baehler and Bryson 2009, p. 17)? Policy making involves, indeed requires, political argument. As Wildavsky (1987, p. 13) puts it, ‘Analysis, which is in part rhetoric, should be persuasive’. If carried beyond the modelling and alternative design stages of the policy-development process, the analyst’s search for rationality and neutrality can be nothing more than an ill-conceived attempt to side-step the demands of democratic contestation (Radin 2000, pp. 92, 104). To be effective, advisers must have regard for the authorising environment and the ideological and political preferences and perspectives of decision makers (Scott 2008, p. 2), and it is naïve to pretend otherwise. Geva-May (1997, p. 145) explains: Neutrality serves policy analysis well during evaluation conduct – at the modelling and alternative design stages – but it becomes impedimentary once findings and recommendations are presented, discussed and acted on by organizational actors. Then it becomes subjected to the power and politics of major organizational players. Lacking advocacy and organizational basis, proposals have little capacity of survival. Moving into an advocacy role as a public servant, however, is a risky business. In an increasingly pluralistic society, whose ‘common good’ is the public servant advocating for? Whose interests, values, ideology, and vision of what is ‘best for New Zealand’ are to be voiced? And how are unelected officials accountable to the public for the advocacy they engage in? Hawke (1993, p. 37) urges policy advisers to focus on the issue, not a routine application of individual beliefs, because, ‘Working together may be damaged by officials following their own agendas rather than showing commitment to the policy process. Officials have varying beliefs and values, personality differences and distinctive professional backgrounds’. State Services Commission guidance further reminds us that (SSC 2008b, p. 3): A partisan statement made or position adopted by a State servant may not be forgotten easily and it could colour the way that Ministers (or future Ministers) relate to that State servant or to the agency employing that person. The consequences could be to reduce the credibility of the State servant and the agency (and the State Services generally). What, then, are the options? Radin (2000, p. 101) identifies three.
There is, of course, a fourth option (most commonly pursued by public servants): live with and manage role proliferation and confusion (Baehler and Bryson 2000, p. 17) by exercising judgement on a case-by-case basis and seeking advice as required from one’s manager, chief executive, or the State Services Commission (SSC 2008a, pp. 3, 8). A Chalcedonian challenge The fifth-century Christian churches were divided over whether, how, and to what extent the second person of the Trinity could be both fully human and fully divine. As in all disputes over big ideas, the arguments were as much political as doctrinal. In 451, the emperor Marcian issued a decree, on behalf also of the Western Emperor Valentinian III, calling an ecumenical council to address this and other issues. The council met in October 451 in Chalcedon, a city in Bithynia in Asia Minor (now part of the greater city of Istanbul, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus). In the fifth session, held on 22 October, the bishops published the Chalcedonian Definition of the Faith, which asserts that ‘the one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation (in duabus naturis inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter)’. Notwithstanding the resulting major schism between Eastern Orthodox and Western churches, I propose that public service functions of analysis, advice giving, and advocacy be similarly distinguished without separation or division. This is because the three functions correspond to an inescapable interplay between information, interests, and ideology (or fact, value, and theory) in public policy making (Weiss 1983; Gregory 2005; Rein 1983, p. 83). The challenge for the public servant is to live creatively with the tensions within and between the three functions of analysis, advice giving, and advocacy, maintaining appropriate distinctions and exercising sound judgement – and to do so within inevitably imperfect democratic institutions and processes. Public sector policy making occurs within a real-world context of conflict over facts and values, information and power, means and ends, and where multiple, complex, and complicated ‘public service bargains’ (Hood and Lodge 2006) are operative. What then, are the principles, values, and institutional arrangements that might guide and support public servants to make and maintain appropriate distinctions between analysis, advice giving, and advocacy, without separating or dividing them? Public sector ethics Public sector ethics are promoted, explicitly or implicitly, by:
Legislation and convention The roles and requirements of the New Zealand public service are legislated in the State Sector Act 1988, Public Finance Act 1989, and Official Information Act 1982, as well as in statutes that govern particular agencies and their functions (for example, the Education Act 1989 and Children’s Commissioner Act 2003). Legislation and convention support four broad propositions, as identified by the Right Honourable Sir Kenneth Keith in his introduction to the Cabinet Manual (Keith 1990, p. 4). Members of the public service are:
Sir Kenneth adds (p. 5), ‘Public servants meet those obligations in accordance with important principles such as neutrality and independence, and as members of a career service’. In other words, public service occurs within a democratic compact whereby society delegates coercive powers to the state but does so on the understanding that public powers are to be exercised for the public good, in accordance with the law, and with forbearance, good reason, and transparency. Codes of ethics and conduct In a pluralist society, individually generated moral beliefs, values, or principles are unlikely to constitute a coherent and consistent body of ethical guidance for public service. While public servants certainly have private lives, the ethics we are concerned with here relate primarily to the performance of public duties (Uhr 2005, p. 10). What is required is a set of norms that is socially constructed in such a way as to align individual behaviour with institutional purposes (Hardin 2006). These sets of norms are commonly articulated in the form of codes of ethics or conduct. In an independent survey of New Zealand state services integrity and conduct (Ethics Resource Center 2007), 75 per cent of those who had observed misconduct believed it breached the organisation’s standards of integrity and conduct, rather than the law or both combined. State servants commonly recognise, therefore, a distinction between what is legal and what is ethical. In New Zealand, the first written public service code of conduct was issued by the State Services Commission in 1989 (Hicks 2007, p. 12). This was followed by a comprehensive guidance series (SSC 1995) on public sector ethics and standards. In 2001, a revised state services code of conduct was issued (SSC 2001), and accompanying guidance material later developed (SSC 2007a, 2007b). In addition, many public sector agencies have their own codes of conduct. The Ministry of Social Development’s code applies to all employees, contractors, and consultants who are working for the ministry on a full-time, part-time, temporary, or casual basis (MSD n. d., a). The code is both aspirational, setting out ‘principles that guide the way we work’, and disciplinary, establishing specific responsibilities and outlining investigation processes and the likely consequence of disciplinary action should the code be breached. As Rhode (2006, p. 34) notes: Codes of conduct can clarify rules and expectations, establish consistent standards, and project a responsible public image. If widely accepted and enforced, codified rules can also reinforce ethical commitments, deter ethical misconduct, promote trust, reduce the organization’s risks of liability, and prevent free riders (those who benefit from others’ adherence to moral norms without observing them personally). On the other hand, codes tend to restrict only the behaviour of those who are already ethical (Sampford 1994, p. 20). Codes also do not clarify the standards public servants should aspire to, and against which they will, or ought to be, assessed. As Uhr (2005, p. 38) comments: It is one thing to know that corruption means conduct falling below the standard; it is another to know how far above that standard official conduct should go, or aspire to go, in the direction of, for example, honesty and impartiality. Moreover, as Uhr (2005 p. 140) adds, ‘No code is any better than the competence of those empowered to investigate its breaches’. Rhode (2006, pp. 34–5) acknowledges that codes of conduct, in particular, are less effective in promoting ethical behaviour than are ‘approaches that stress values by encouraging self-governance and commitment to ethical aspirations’. Statements of organisational values As well as codes of conduct, many agencies, including the Ministry of Social Development (MSD n. d., b) have statements that define organisational vision, purpose, and values. In addition, the ministry’s leadership team developed a set of operating principles in 2008 that is reproduced on internal stationery and the ministry’s intranet: Ministry of Social Development (MSD) Principles MSD PEOPLE:
Above all, we do the right thing for New Zealanders. The OECD (2000, p. 2) advises that, ‘Identifying core values is the first step to creating a common understanding within society of the expected behaviour of public office holders’. The eight most frequently stated core public service values in OECD countries in rank order are impartiality, legality, integrity, transparency, efficiency, equality, responsibility, and justice. A survey of public organisations in Canada (Kernaghan 1995) identified 19 core values in the following rank order: integrity and ethics, accountability and responsibility, respect, service, fairness and equity, innovation, teamwork, excellence, honesty, commitment and dedication, quality, openness, communications, recognition, responsiveness, trust, effectiveness, professionalism, and leadership. As can be seen from these lists, values statements commonly contain a broad mix of goal values (where we want to go) and conduct values (how we will get there) (Starling 2008, p. 183). Pollitt (2003, p. 135) has further classified these as:
Statements of organisational values need to reflect and be integrated with the purpose of the agency, so that policy, programme, and process are coherent (Gawthrop 1984, p. 120; Rein 1983, pp. 86–7). Ideally, as Sampford (1994, p. 19) argues, they are created and reviewed regularly with and by the staff who are to work in accordance with them: If you want people to behave ethically and internalise the relevant values, you have to get the staff who will live by them to take an active part in their creation. Do not just give them the rules but ask them to look at the ways in which their practice is ethically vulnerable, to discuss such vulnerabilities and to reflect on the kinds of rules they should adopt for themselves. Values statements are empty rhetoric unless they are embodied in and expressive of institutional design, work processes, recruitment, and performance management and are consistently modelled by chief executives and their senior staff. Moral competence in public life Distinguishing public service functions of analysis, advice giving, and advocacy without separating or dividing these functions is encouraged and supported by legislation and constitutional convention, codes of conduct, and the promotion of public sector and organisational values. In my experience as a public servant, however, even in combination these are necessary but not sufficient. They are more effective at drawing the line at unethical behaviour than at enabling staff consistently to exercise sound judgement in the normal course of their duties, let alone when we are put on the spot and must decide quickly how to respond or act. This is particularly the case because the hard choices in public policy making are ‘not just between right and wrong, or good or bad, or just and unjust, but between right and most right, or ethical and most ethical’ (Hicks 2007, p. 11). ‘Walking the line’ requires what Winston (2002, 2009) has termed ‘moral competence in public life’. The generic attributes that Winston (2009, p. 1) regards as constituent components of moral competence are ‘not character traits or personal virtues in the ordinary sense, but qualities of those acting in their official capacities’. In other words, public servants, like all citizens, cannot escape exercising ‘personal reflective judgment’ (Gregory 2005, p. 27), but the judgement required in the exercise of public service is about what the purpose and principles of the political order require in a particular case, rather than what the public servant might personally like or approve (McPherson 1983, pp. 77–8).Winston (2002, 2008, 2009) defines six components of moral competency.
To simplify matters, I propose that components 1 and 6 be merged, as also components 3 and 4. Thus, the moral competencies required for public service are fourfold: civility, fidelity to the public good, respect for citizens as responsible agents, and prudence. Civility Civility is the capacity to engage in reasoned, reflective judgement that makes itself accountable to a diverse public. That is, it requires the recognition of diversity and some level of commitment to a politics of difference and to democratic inclusion (Bromell 2008, 2009a, 2009b). It follows Dewey (1927, 1939) in understanding democratic decision making as a mode of communication and experimentation in which ideas are exchanged in a public manner and problems solved through experimentation, testing, and learning. It does not aspire to ‘pure’ rationality, but rather ‘communicative rationality’ (Habermas 1984), whereby people who live together in difference (and the conflicts this creates) engage in inter-subjective communication about facts, values, and preferences in order to arrive at a workable and more or less common understanding within a given social context at a particular point in time. This may require different modes of reasoning and argument, facility in dealing with incomplete and ‘pluralist’ rather than ‘monist’ information (Sen 1985), and different modes of communication; so while it will not be uniform, it is nevertheless internally consistent, transparent, and subject to contestation as public deliberation. What must not be lost in the ‘policy circus’ (deLeon 1994, p. 202) with its less than rational stunts and tricks is precisely the imperative of publicity, or the liberal restraint principle. As Baehler (2005, p. 6) expresses this: Citizens (including officials) who propose policies that involve coercion of their fellow citizens ought to restrain from using non-public reasons to support those proposals, out of respect for each other and the democratic system. Public reasons are understood as the kinds of reasons that other reasonable people might accept as reasonable without necessarily having to agree with them. Baehler (2005, p. 7) goes on to propose the following features of a public argument model for public policy, which usefully summarise some practical implications of civility.
Fidelity to the public good Fidelity to the public good requires skill and responsibility in dealing with vast complexity and dynamic change along the horizontal continuum of time, as distinct from being merely responsive to the demands of the present moment and to vertical accountabilities. Public sector organisations ought not to be merely reactive and incremental. Fidelity to the public good requires rather ‘a sense of purpose that transcends the present and serves as a sense of direction in shaping public policies to improve the long-term well-being of society’ (Gawthrop 1984, pp. 120–1). Fidelity to the public good requires a sense of purpose, a sense of consequence, a sense of history. It requires responsibility as well as responsiveness. Fidelity to the public good means public servants go about their work in such a way as to maintain the confidence of future as well as present ministers, parliament, and the public. It means ‘faithfully serving the government of the day’ without being captured by it or losing longer-term perspectives inherent in being public (as distinct from government) servants. It means engaging in the sorts of research and evaluation that enable an estimation of trends in citizens’ well-being over time. It requires attention to issues of intergenerational equity and to a horizontal sense of purposefulness over medium- to long-term timeframes that is convergent and consensus building. It requires building and maintaining a professional public service. Respect for citizens as responsible agents Respect for citizens as responsible agents is a necessary moral competence, if as a society we want to do better than implement paternalistic (or ‘nanny state’) welfarism through a cadre of technocratic bureaucrats and ‘we know best’ political masters and mistresses. As Amartya Sen (1985, 1999; cf. 2009, ch. 13) has argued, both the ‘well-being aspect’ and the ‘agency aspect’ of persons are relevant to the assessment of states of affairs and actions. He distinguishes (1985, pp. 203–4) agency freedom as ‘open conditionality’: Whereas well-being freedom is freedom to achieve something in particular, viz., well-being, the idea of agency freedom is more general, since it is not tied to any one type of aim. Agency freedom is freedom to achieve whatever the person, as a responsible agent, decides he or she should achieve. This open conditionality does not imply that a person’s view of their own freedom is beyond challenge or constraint. Aims, objectives, and consequences for the public good all need to be assessed, and agency freedom exercised as responsible freedom. ‘But’, Sen (1985, p. 204) adds, ‘despite this need for discipline, the use of one’s agency is, in an important sense, a matter for oneself to judge’; that is, the substantive freedoms (the capabilities) to choose a life one has reason to value (Sen 1999, p. 74). Respect for citizens as responsible agents requires skill in situating public policy between power and rationality (Arts and Van Tatenhove 2004), in managing increasing demands for subsidiarity, ‘multi-actor’ or ‘network’ governance, and citizen ‘co-production’ (Alford 2009a, 2009b), and in otherwise facilitating citizen participation in self-government. Wildavsky (1987, p. 255) argues that, ‘Whatever else policy analysts may be … they should be advocates of citizen participation. … Designing policies that facilitate intelligent and effective participation is an essential task of policy analysis’. Prudence Prudence is the exercise of practical and not only technical reason to make moral judgements in concrete situations (that is, within the limits and opportunities of specific social and historical contexts) that can be challenged and defended through an exchange of public reasons. Technical reason is the rational selection (using techniques such as cost–benefit analysis) of instrumental means to achieve given ends. Practical reason concerns the acceptance or rejection of norms, especially norms for action, the claims to validity of which can be supported or opposed with public reasons (Habermas 1974, p. 3). Robert Bellah (1983, p. 55) argues that practical social science should take priority over technocratic social science and that the purpose of prudential practice ‘is not to produce or control anything but to discover through mutual discussion and reflection between free citizens the most appropriate ways, under present conditions, of living the ethically good life’. Accordingly, its vocabulary is the common moral vocabulary of a free society, with justice, equality, and freedom among its basic terms (p. 62). Practical social science can only ever hope to achieve ‘disciplined knowing’, not the degree of certainty that might be expected in the physical sciences. Prudence is required precisely because scientific demonstration is not possible (Bellah 1983, p. 64). Public policy making is, for this reason, more art and craft than science, ‘a projection of frames of reference on reality, around which action is taken’ (Geva-May 1997, p. xxii). It focuses, as per Socrates, on ‘What ought one to do?’ rather than on ‘What is right, what is wrong?’ or ‘What is good, what is evil?’ (Longstaff 1994, p. 142). It draws on cumulative experience to make strategic, contingent judgements in the full awareness of moral ambiguity, the fallibility of human planning, and the inevitability of unintended consequences (Winston 2009, p. 5; cf. Uhr 2005, ch. 3). Prudence, however, does not replace the need for technical reason. We might rather follow Dewey in seeing the practical and the technical as two indispensable aspects or dimensions of policy making, rather than as two distinct and self-contained kinds of enterprise (McPherson 1983, p. 71). Policy making may be more art and craft than science (Wildavsky 1987, ch. 16), but the sound application of technical reason can help prevent the craft from being exercised in ways that are merely ‘crafty’. Moral leadership How, then, might the cultivation of moral competence in public life be encouraged and supported, and institutionalised through public management and leadership? In a career public service where everyone starts as a cadet and has opportunity for eventual promotion to leadership roles only by working their way up through the ranks, sound judgement can be cultivated through the accumulation of experience and relationships forged with one’s seniors and peers, who have likewise had long-term exposure to the purpose, values, and principles that govern the agency and wider public service. Promotion and reward are tied, moreover, to behaviours aligned with the agency’s ethos (cf. Hood and Lodge 2006, pp. 168–9). In New Zealand, this model now applies only in the defence force and police. It has previously applied in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has offered a ‘lifetime career path’, but even senior positions in the ministry are now being opened up to people with wider public or private sector experience. I myself came into the public service mid-career. If we assume that, for various reasons, the days of a lifetime career public service are numbered, then the cultivation of moral competence in public life depends on staff recruitment, training, and development, and, above all, on the exercise and modelling of moral leadership by chief executives and their senior staff. Recruiting and retaining a workforce with diverse professional backgrounds and academic training (arts and humanities as well as ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sciences) is one protection against a ‘group think’ application of technocratic reason to public policy making. Ethics can also be taught – in the sense that public servants can learn to think more reflectively and systematically about professional practice and to engage with others in critical reflection on ‘hard cases’ (cf. Dworkin 1977, ch. 4). There certainly ought to be a place in the induction of new employees for an introduction to public sector ethics, the state sector code of conduct, and the agency’s own code, purpose, values, and principles. This should be more than a cursory formality whereby the employee signs that they have received a copy and read it, but rather the initiation of a continuing process of critical reflection on the ethics of public service and the ethos of the employing agency. In the 2007 survey of New Zealand state services integrity and conduct, although 55 per cent of state servants believed their organisations provide training on standards of integrity and conduct, just more than one in five reported that they ‘do not know’ whether their organisation does (Ethics Resource Center 2007, p. 5). The Ethics Resource Center recommended (2007, p. 9), ‘In order to promote a strong ethical culture and foster positive outcomes, establish programmes that are consistent, genuine, and relevant to the needs of State servants’. As Preston (1994, p. 6) notes, however, ‘The teaching of ethics to those determined to be corrupt or unethical is unlikely to make a difference’. Ethics is caught rather than taught, and if we concentrate only on the individual’s behaviour, or narrowly focus on ‘risk and assurance’ in the prevention and detection of unethical behaviour, the impact on public sector ethics will be limited (Rhode 2006, pp. 34–5). What is required is rather the socialisation and institutionalisation of ethics within the structure, relationships, and distribution of power within public sector organisations (Preston 1994, p. 8; Sampford 1994). I have myself benefited from opportunities to work alongside older and more experienced public policy practitioners. Trusting relationships with senior colleagues have provided me with ‘sounding boards’ and ‘safe space’ for critical reflection on ‘doing the right thing’ as a public servant. This implies deliberate attention to organising workplace teams in ways that maximise formal and informal contact and mentoring between ‘wise hands’ and less-experienced staff, and not so overloading principal analysts and advisers with project work that they are unable to contribute as mentors and coaches to more junior staff in any significant way or to provide robust second-opinion advice. Ultimately, however, what makes or breaks public sector ethics is the tone created by chief executives and their senior staff. And what most counts is not what we say and do on the good days but how we conduct ourselves when confronted with ambiguity in the performance of our public duties – ‘the disquieting internal tension that comes from competing duties, colliding considerations, and dissonant emotions’ (Rhode 2006, p. 85). Rhode further reminds us that, ‘No corporate mission statement or ceremonial platitudes can counter the impact of seeing leaders withhold crucial information, play favorites with promotion, stifle dissent, implement corrosive reward structures, or pursue their own self-interest at the organization’s expense’ (p. 39). She particularly urges senior managers to solicit diverse perspectives and dissenting views, on the grounds that a defining feature of moral leadership is a willingness to ask and to hear uncomfortable questions (p. 40). Moral leadership demands going beyond responsiveness to responsibility; beyond doing no wrong, to doing the right thing (Hanson 2006, pp. 291–2; cf. Uhr 2005, ch. 8). And whether or not chief executives do in fact provide moral leadership will depend, in large part, on the incentives and accountabilities that apply to them and the transparency of those incentives and accountabilities. Conclusion This chapter has analysed tensions within and between public policy functions of analysis, advice giving, and advocacy. It has proposed that, because of the inescapable interplay between information, interests, and ideology in public policy making, the three functions need to be distinguished, without separation or division. While maintaining appropriate distinctions can be encouraged in law and by convention, ethical codes of practice, and statements of public sector and organisational values, ethical policy making requires above all the intentional cultivation of ‘moral competence in public life’. Four key competencies are civility, fidelity to the public good, respect for citizens as responsible agents, and prudence. The long-term integrity of a professional public service depends on the socialisation and institutionalisation of these competencies through public sector management and leadership that is moral and not narrowly or merely ‘ethical’. References Alford, J. 2009a. Engaging Public Sector Clients: From service delivery to co-production. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Alford, J. 2009b. Public Value from Co-production by Clients. Working paper. 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5. Be careful what you wish for Introduction This chapter contrasts two competing models of an ethics of office suitable for democratic policy systems.[1] The one I favour is a model of dispersed ethical responsibilities where the precise ethical content varies with the nature of the public office. I label the model I oppose ‘stealth ethics’ because it promotes ethical public policy by subverting democratic ethics, which it sees as too conservative. Most conventional policy systems operate somewhere in-between, with mixtures of my favoured pluralism and my disfavoured paternalism. My aim is to nudge policy systems away from paternalism towards pluralism. My chapter begins with a general warning about expecting too much from ethics in public policy and a more specific warning about the misguided ethical idealism I associate with the ‘esoteric morality’ promoted by influential utilitarian ethics theorists, of whom the model is British 19th century philosopher Henry Sidgwick. My recovery of a more realistic set of expectations for ethics is based on an artificial but I think productive distinction between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’. For policy purposes, I define ‘ethics’ in terms of right relationships among policy actors and ‘morality’ in terms of deeper value commitments that we each make as individuals, separate and distinct from our public roles. I conclude by contrasting the Sidgwick model of centralised ethical paternalism with my preferred model of dispersed ethical pluralism. I suggest that contemporary policy systems rely on ethics regimes that confer considerable regulatory power on political executives, which tilts them in the direction of paternalism rather than pluralism, at some cost to the ethics of sustainable democracy. Great expectations The idea behind the title of my chapter is a warning: be careful or beware of what you wish for. My argument is that we should not ask too much of ethics. We should ask a lot of ethics, because it has a lot to offer: but we should not ask too much. I am confident that ethics is necessary, in public policy as in all aspects of our lives, and that we have better public policy when we construct policy on solid ethical foundations. My argument about not asking too much of ethics reflects my view that ethics, like so many good things, has its limits, which we should acknowledge. We respect ethics when we recognise its limits and do not call on it to do more than it is capable of: which is considerable, but not necessarily as far-reaching as some ethics enthusiasts want it to be. To respect the power of ethics means to accept the limits that define its integrity as an instrument of good public policy. My warning is against inflated expectations of what ethics can contribute to public policy. Managing expectations is an important part of political and policy leadership, as we have seen over the last year of remarkable intergovernmental cooperation to deal with the global financial crisis. This involves raising expectations so that our political communities can strive to do more. This also involves moderating expectations so that our communities are protected against unrealistic expectations that policy makers can never meet. Moderating expectations can also protect communities against the impact of unforeseen and therefore uncontrollable shocks that policy makers fear are more likely than not to emerge out of the unknown. One of my aims is to help manage and moderate our expectations about what can be expected of ethics and public policy. My tone might strike some as inappropriate or even offensive for a book on ethics. After all, what sort of friend of ethics is a person who talks ethics down? Where one might expect a visitor to be enthusiastic with helpful suggestions about strengthening the ethical foundations for public policy, here I come along with a cautionary tale about the ethical foundations of public policy. I risk disappointing those who are advocates of better ethical foundations for better public policy. I share that advocacy. My problem is that, having taught ethics and public policy for over 20 years, and having watched the remarkable growth of policies designed to encourage ethical conduct within governments, I fear that ethics may not be able to carry the load of our weighty expectations for ‘better’ government and ‘better’ public policy. Ethical foundations Analysts of public policy have long debated the precise place of ethics in theories and practices of public policy. One difficult question asks how useful ethics can be in both policy theories and policy practices. One really challenging answer comes from utilitarian policy analysts who take their inspiration from 19th century English moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), revived for contemporary readers in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). This school of policy analysis takes its inspiration from Sidgwick’s so-called doctrine of ‘esotericism’, which holds that policy elites can, under certain circumstances, have good moral reasons for hiding the practice of acting unethically. Sidgwick’s model army of elite policy makers subscribes to the view that democracy is best ruled through policy arts that hide some of the hard truths from citizens, including the hard truth that policy elites will have to lie when exercising their policy responsibilities. Against that background, I will try to help frame our discussion of ethics and public policy. My own view is that many of the strongest ethical foundations of public policy are matters of process rather than structure. Policy making works through process, and good policy making should be all about ethical processes. Ethics is particularly relevant to one type of process: managing the untidy but vital network of relationship processes – formal and informal, public and private. We recognise ethical relationships as those that measure up against processes of fairness. And how is fairness itself measured? In practical terms, ethical relationships are fair when they comply with agreed and acceptable standards. Our general topic is ‘ethical foundations’. The usual test of the quality of ‘foundations’ is whether the foundations are strong enough to ‘carry weight’, which is a test of structural strength. I think the better test of ‘ethical foundations’ is whether they are acceptable enough to ‘carry conviction’, which is a test of a different sort of strength: the strength that comes from shared purpose.[2] To promote ethical foundations, we need skills of advocacy and persuasion (‘outreach’) as much as knowledge of ethics (‘insight’). The big test is this: can we persuade and convince the policy community to support a set of agreed ethical standards? Given that there are so many legitimate policy communities, as there should be in a democracy, what manner of ethics will serve our common purposes? My answer is an ethics of due process seen as fair by as many policy participants as possible. The ethical foundations of public policy include agreement on standards of due process by those sharing the making and implementation of public policy. Getting these policy-making relationships right means stepping forward to acknowledge our shared public roles, so that we can then agree on what those involved in the policy process can reasonably expect of one another. Constructing ethical foundations is, thus, an exercise in community building. One common test of the value of a public policy is whether it is democratic: produced by democratic processes for clearly democratic purposes. This test of policy value seems a core test for many contemporary democracies, with its comforting assumption that the alignment of democratic form and substance is what is good about democracy. But what if a powerful school of ethics is or was convinced that democracy was not so much the solution but rather the main problem confronting ethical public policy? This question anticipates my examination of Sidgwick, which follows later in this chapter. But the question at this early stage is more general: is it so easy to define the nature of ethical policy? It is easier to define ethical policy analysis (the means: laying out all relevant considerations) than to define ethical policy (the end: once all the hard decisions have been taken). Almost everyone agrees that ethics should be prominent in the study of public policy. But what about the place of ethics in the practice of public policy? Internationally, there is surprisingly little agreement on the precise place of ethics in the practical world of public policy. This chapter tries to promote fresh discussion about such matters by drawing critical attention to the often-unacknowledged limits of ethics as a guide for policy makers. Esoteric ethics Ethics has many dimensions. Shortly, I will provide my own policy-relevant definition of ethics as not simply individual ‘right conduct’ but ‘right relationships’ among those sharing policy responsibilities. But before I step forward with my own definition, I want to step back and take note of an alternative policy-relevant definition associated with utilitarianism: the philosophical doctrine associated with influential policy reforms in the 19th century, which contains a challenging alternative to my own approach to ethics and public policy. This influential ethics doctrine is also about relationships of public power, but not one that many contemporary democrats would call their own. I will review the place of a fascinating school of ‘esotericism’ in democratic public policy, inspired by 19th century English utilitarian social theory, recently revived by Peter Singer.[3] This school of political thinking has influenced policy analysts not only in England but around the English-speaking world. Contemporary ‘ethics entrepreneurs’ who want lessons in how to ‘make democracy more ethical’ can find them in such classic utilitarian theorists as Sidgwick. Sidgwick stands out as an exemplary theorist of ethics and public policy who saw the importance of schooling policy elites in what he called ‘esoteric’ social doctrines that would strengthen emerging democracy by substituting a higher but hidden social morality for the lower social morality favoured by democrats. Critics have saddled Sidgwick with responsibility for championing ‘Government House utilitarianism’: a form of policy paternalism not unlike colonial rule where a ruling class does it best to advance the welfare of subject peoples, even to the point of disguising the underlying utilitarian logic of government programmes if that helps cement popular consent (Williams 1993, pp. 108–10).[4] John Rawls featured Sidgwick in his A Theory of Justice (1971) as a prominent representative of the (not unqualified) virtues of utilitarianism.[5] This chapter serves as a reminder about the role of policy elites in democratic policy systems and a warning about the recurrence of unethical use of ‘ethics talk’ in democratic public policy. To some extent, I am examining a neglected but important feature of democratic ethics: the ethical role of policy elites. I am drawing on Sidgwick to generalise a portrait of ethics entrepreneurs who view democracy as a threat to ethics and whose solution involves a fascinating form of democratic deception: deception exercised by policy elites who fear that democracy tends to get in the way of ethical public policy. My critique of the Sidgwick framework is based on two core distinctions: generally between ethics and morality, in order to minimise opportunities for high-minded morality to justify unethical practice; and specifically between democratic ethics and esoteric morality, in order to minimise opportunities for esoteric doctrines to undermine democracy. Although democracy might well need policy elites, Sidgwick’s ‘esoteric ethics’ eventually fails to show why policy elites need or even value democracy. I contend that some contemporary ethics advocates discount the ethical value of democracy. Those who value the conventional procedural ethics of democratic policy making should be on guard against the secret policy designs of utilitarian ‘esotericism’. Surprisingly, this conviction about the need for ‘esoteric morality’ remains a model for contemporary ethics advocates (or ‘ethics entrepreneurs’).[6] Many such advocates adopt a form of what I call ‘stealth ethics’ that hides their policy preferences behind what the original utilitarian theorists called an ‘esoteric’ social philosophy. As used in this sense, ‘esotericism’ refers to a disguised social doctrine that protects its anti-democratic ethics behind the façade of an ‘exoteric’ policy doctrine. Many advocates of ethics see democracy as one of the primary problems confronting ethical public policy: either we have ethical policy or democratic policy but we cannot have both. Democracy should give way to ethics. In practice, democracy should be regulated by an ‘esoteric’ social philosophy that hides or disguises its ethics: protecting its anti-democratic ethical content beneath an ‘exoteric’ policy exterior that cause no harm to democracy. In fact, the hope is that the esoteric morality can strengthen democracy by importing ethical elements that democracy, if left to itself, would reject. Esotericism is normally associated more with conservatives (think of recent debates over ‘neo-conservatives’) than social progressives like Sidgwick. What is remarkable is how infrequently debates over ethics and public policy pay any attention to the sort of ‘stealth ethics’ practised by Sidgwick and his followers, who illustrate many of the ways that friends of democracy can turn towards a form of democratic elitism to overcome what they see as democracy’s fragile ethics infrastructure. Unfortunately, their remedy can become worse than the disease if the policy elite distance themselves too far from the democracy they disdain. Debates over ethics and public policy can benefit by paying closer attention to the sort of ‘hidden hand’ or ‘stealth ethics’ favoured by Sidgwick and followers and by holding policy elites to greater public accountability as one way of restraining their self-avowed elitism from straying too far from the conventional requirements of democratic ethics. Although democracy might well require policy elites, Sidgwick’s school of ‘esoteric ethics’ fails to show why policy elites need or even value democracy. All the more reason for democracies to hold policy elites accountable for the power they exercise in the name of social utility. Ethics defined For simplicity’s sake, let me define ethics as the agreed standards we expect of, say, public policy or even private policy if it comes to that. Thus, to have the right ethics means having the right standards: recognising the standards expected of us, and to the best of our ability living up to these standards. When we speak of the ethical foundations of public policy, we are speaking about our agreed standards we expect of public policy: standards appropriate to the various instruments of rule and regulation governments use to manage public affairs. Being ethical means doing the right thing consistent with our agreed standards. This is much more than compliance with the rules of the game. Being ethical typically means doing the right thing according to the spirit of the game. Hence, being ethical means doing what is expected according to the unwritten rules known to all who want to be regarded as ‘a good sport’, even in the competitive world of politics and public policy. Ethics is thus about obligations or duties that we accept because we accept agreed standards. Almost always, doing the right thing means accepting our part in a relationship: doing what we owe others as part of a shared agreement. Of course, there are limits. Much depends on our bargaining power in such relationships: ‘accepting our part’ might cover many forms of acceptance that reflect unequal power relations, such as accepting our part as an instrument of convenience for power-holders. In this summary of an ethical relationship, I am highlighting the importance of voluntary cooperation as an ethical ideal. Acknowledging the inequalities of power is one thing, all too common in most government circumstances: less common is a situation of mutual respect among officials sharing public power, which helps point us toward a set of appropriate ethical standards. As a regulatory ideal, doing the right thing more often than not means respecting the rights of others to be treated according to the standards we mutually acknowledge. As we can see, ethics and justice are closely related: ethics is accepting what others expect of us and justice is ethics at its fullest, when we act on ethical principle even when the law or the rules might not be so demanding. Doing the right thing more often than not means respecting the rights of others to be treated according to the standards we mutually acknowledge. My model of justice here is about basic fairness rather than any model of comprehensive social justice: in other words, my approach to justice as ethics-in-action is an admittedly ‘thin’ rather than ‘thick’ model, comprising norms of due process and fair procedure for all citizens, regardless of their claims to special treatment based on their self-confessed moral worth. My approach is standard fare in theories of liberal pluralism, which many communitarians will find too thin and spare an interpretation of ethics, with too formal an account of justice to promote moral public policy. In explaining the reasons for my restraint, some readers will detect my reliance on Stuart Hampshire, the noted English philosopher and author of Justice is Conflict (1999), which provides a classic defence of the ethics of due process in politics and public policy. I am drawing from Hampshire the view that agreement about an ethics of fair procedure in public decision making is a top policy priority in liberal-democratic societies that tolerate extensive moral pluralism. That is, the greater the diversity of moral belief-systems, the greater the benefit from consensus on procedural ethics. Policy architects have to anticipate the need for reconciliation and instruct institutional designers to devise procedures that cause each of us to ‘hear the other side’. This of course is easier to do in theory than in practice. But if ethics means anything, it means something practical. Being ethical means aligning the fair and the feasible. Saving ethics from morality Where does or should ‘morality’ feature in our analysis? Perhaps surprisingly, I propose that we make a distinction between the smaller topic of ‘ethics’ and the larger topic of ‘morality’. I think we already distinguish in practice between the practical discourse of ‘ethics’, which can stimulate discussion over role relationships in the policy process, and the other-worldly discourse of ‘morality’, which has many virtues but lacks the pragmatic value of ‘ethics’ discourse. Where morality is intensely theoretical and speculative, ethics is quite practical. Talk of morality is talk about the meaning of fundamentals; ethics, as I am using that term here, is talk about action: what we do here and now in the social roles we occupy.[7] I admit that the discourse of ‘moral philosophy’ frequently frames our approach to discussions of ethics and public policy. Prominent examples typically come from newly elected governments believing they have some sort of ‘moral mandate’ to steamroll opponents. The former Rudd Labor government in Australia is a good example where the prime minister has been explicit about his moral heroes, such as the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in ways that his opponents protest as ‘moralistic’ (Rudd 2006).[8] The prime minister had a tendency to reach for the high moral ground, identifying climate change as ‘the moral crisis of our times’ and describing opponents of his border-protection policies as ‘lacking a moral compass’. These are useful examples because they illustrate the way that public use of the discourse of morality often says ‘no compromise’, as though the stated public policy response is fundamentally right, with no room for alternative views. Bonhoeffer’s uncompromising stand against Nazi policy and practice is truly admirable. Rudd deserves praise for bringing Bonhoeffer’s religious commitments back into public consideration. But to what extent can we use this rare and valuable example of moral courage as a feasible model for the routines of policy making under less extreme circumstances? The problem here is not morality but ‘moralising’. There is nothing in ethical practice that quite matches ‘moralising’ (‘sermonising’ or being judgemental about others’ lack of morals), and that is one very good reason to retain our focus on ethics. In fact, ‘moralising’ suggests why moral discourse is unhelpful for our purposes: moral discourse is more judgemental and exclusionary than ethics discourse, which suits the purposes of those uncompromising policy makers who want to take ‘the high moral ground’ and condemn, rather than converse with, their opponents who allegedly lack a ‘moral compass’. The deep and rich discourse of morality can be distinguished from the conventional and comparatively superficial discourse of ethics. This distinction between two related discourses is a useful way of separating out ethics and protecting it from too heavy a burden of moral expectation. My use of this distinction mimics the famous distinction between ‘the right’ and ‘the good’ in English philosophical discourse, with ethics approximating the former and morality the latter. My claim is that policy analysis can benefit by distinguishing between issues of right and good, both of which are of fundamental importance, where ‘the right’ refers to right relationships among policy actors and ‘the good’ refers to the less visible world of deep personal value to which each of us as individuals are personally committed (Ross 1930, pp. 155–73). My distinction is admittedly artificial but arguably a useful way of relating two realms that overlap. Think of morality as the social plant with deep roots and ethics as the social plant with shallow roots. Both are socially useful but in different ways. Our everyday language illustrates that the discourses of morality and ethics are frequently put to different social uses, with morality indicating the deeper realm of beliefs about conscience and personal identity (for example, belief systems), while ethics often, but not always, indicates a social realm of relationships based on the shared identity of interdependent roles (for example, public service roles). Relating ethics to morality All of this careful distinction between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ is nicely academic. The learned will tell us that the two terms ethics and morality are almost interchangeable. They will point out that the word ethics comes from the Greek language and that morality comes from the Latin language and that both terms refer to the same thing: in fact, the Latin term ‘mores’ was probably invented by Cicero when trying to translate the Greek term ‘ethos’ from Aristotle’s classic treatise on ethics. But I follow where others have been prepared to tread in adhering to this distinction of convenience between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’.[9] For example, Ricoeur’s (1992) use of a similar distinction refers to ‘the primacy of ethics over morality’ where ethics refers to the internal character or characteristics we desire in order to do well in life and morality refers to the externally imposed obligations or norms expected of us by others. My rough and ready distinction is simpler than Ricoeur’s grand theory, which seeks to promote Aristotle’s school of virtue ethics over Kant’s alternative school of strict compliance with duty. Our two approaches converge in thinking of ethics as having primacy over morality, even if our underlying justifications differ. Both approaches draw on Aristotle’s virtue theory to spell out the ethical content of contemporary role ethics. Both approaches see moral theory as serving other purposes. Where we differ is that my approach is quite pragmatic. I see morality as the world of confessional responsibilities (for the good things we value as fundamental, which we are reluctant to compromise). Accordingly, I see ethics as the world of professional responsibilities (for the right things we accept as part of our role or office or job). This is an artificial but useful distinction about two realms that overlap. Ethics here refers to doing the right thing and morality here refers to our deepest beliefs about good and evil. Ethics relates to our duties and obligations in the roles we carve out for ourselves; morality relates to the concept of the good that shapes the inner individual. The term ‘morality’ often refers to unconditional value commitments that trump all other values. Here I am using the term morality much as it is often used in the policy process to designate the deepest reservoirs of our belief-system: the deepest springs of our value commitments that define who we are and what, at the end of the day, we stand for. The topic of ethics and public policy shifts away from an intractable wrangle over competing moral visions of different belief communities and becomes a debate over the important but limited role responsibilities we as a political community expect of one another in public life. My point is that fruitful discussion over ethics and public policy can begin by separating ethics from morality in order to lessen the weight of value that ethics will be asked to carry. Devising agreed standards for public policy will be much harder if the task is approached in terms of an agreed morality informing the substance of public policy, compared with my suggested approach of an agreed ethics informing our roles in making and managing the processes of public policy. My distinction is between morality as a world of deep substance and ethics as a shallower world of process. We inhabit both worlds of course, but I am suggesting that ethics marks out the agreed social space we share when we play our allotted part in the public policy process; and morality marks out the personal space of individual conscience that I share with my belief community, however large or small that might be. Ethics by example An example will help. Think of the language we use around ‘ethics committees’ to refer to regulatory bodies that oversee communities (of employees or researchers or contractors) with shared and agreed expectations about the ethical norms expected of those carrying out the business of that community. We do not refer to ‘morals committees’. Why is this? I think it is because we make a distinction between ethics as role-related (for example, my role as an employee of a hospital or healthcare facility) and morals as me-related, in my personal capacity when my professional or social role has been put to one side. Ethics committees perform important functions in many organisations in the public and private sectors, helping clarify appropriate on-the-job conduct. For academic researchers, an important stage in the research process occurs when we get our ethics clearance, which means our employer or funding authority approves our research plan on the basis that we will comply with the relevant code of conduct for fair and honest dealing as researchers. But we do not have to undergo tests by a ‘morals committee’. The reason for this is that we envisage a ‘morals committee’ as something quite different, potentially examining things much more deeply personal than our role-responsibilities. I admit that the two spheres of ethics and morality are not separate and distinct but often overlap. Think only of the process called for by many professional associations when determining whether particular individuals measure up and deserve to be recognised as professionals: as medical professionals, legal professionals, or military professionals. One of the tests, not always made explicit, is whether particular persons are ‘fit and proper persons’ to take on the responsibilities of the profession: that is, whether they have the personal capacities to use and not abuse whatever responsibilities come with the professional office they seek. Such tests can drill down into the deeper layers of personal morality if there is reason to suspect that particular persons might hold or harbour deep value commitments that make them unlikely to honour the rights and privileges that go with professional standing. But most of the time, ethics committees and related ethics processes stay closer to the surface of our roles as employees or functionaries, making a rough and ready distinction between our deepest moral wells of personal meaning and our conventional worlds of on-the-job performance in the roles or offices expected of us. What is the practical implication of this proposition about separating ethics from morality? Negatively, to accept that our task is not to arrive at a consensus about agreed moral belief-systems. Positively, to focus on the practical roles of those formulating and implementing public policy. Here we note the many networks of shared responsibility for public policy, in order to devise codes of practice to clarify the responsibilities of those exercising public power in the policy process. Ethics entrepreneurs In my view, some of the most committed ethics enthusiasts need to increase their commitment to democracy. Just as political executives can confuse their particular institutional interests with those of good government more generally, so too some influential ethics gurus are more impressed with their own school of ethics than they are with the norms and values of democracy. Until ethics experts make their peace with the messy realities of practical democracy, I think we should take their advice with a grain of salt. Again, this situation is not all bad. The welcome implication is that ethics has important political implications and we should judge ethics regimes as much by their political qualities as their moral qualities. My example comes from utilitarianism: the same school of ethics (‘consequentialism’) identified in the Stern Review as the core of the ethical foundations of contemporary public policy (Stern 2006, pp. 31–4, 46–9).[10] This is the school of ethics that holds that the value of an action is judged by reference to its consequences, which seems a sane and sensible enough view. Much of utilitarian ethics is designed to undercut our tolerance for those well-intentioned blundering types who ask us to excuse them by claiming that the wrong they did was not all that bad, because after all, they meant well. Plenty of public policies come off the rails, even though the policy actors meant well. Many policy actors defend such policy failures on the basis that they did not intend any harm and, in fact, they meant well.[11] The point of utilitarian ethics is to turn things around so that good intentions are no longer a sufficient reason for policy actions to be judged as right. Consequences also matter: results matter, perhaps even more than intentions. You can see where this is going: at a certain point, advocates of utilitarian ethics discount or undervalue both intentions and process, and privilege, or indeed overvalue, results. This approach has the air of worldly realism about it. I am all for realism. But I want to warn us against a downside risk of utilitarian realism, which is the link between thinking in utilitarian terms and acting with what are called ‘dirty hands’. Most forms of the ethic of ‘dirty hands’ have to do with an embrace of the belief that the ends justify the means: valuable policy ends (‘peace’) can justify disreputable administrative means (‘war’). I want to suggest that many of our contemporary ethics entrepreneurs walk in the shadow of this utilitarian cloud. In fact, the original ethics entrepreneur of this school went out of his way to justify why taking ethics seriously can mean not taking democracy seriously. My evidence comes from the first great policy publicist for utilitarian ethics: Henry Sidgwick, a truly remarkable example of the ethics entrepreneur who models the sort of ‘stealth ethics’ I want to highlight.[12] Sidgwick is the very model of a theoretically informed policy innovator. But I want to identify a private ‘moral’ theory nested in the public ‘ethical’ theory. The public doctrine is about using concepts of public (or social) utility to construct new ethical foundations for public policy: a classic and very influential advocacy of a progressive version of utilitarianism, designed to sweep away traditional public policies that served no clear public utility. What is most interesting about Sidgwick as policy reformer is his inner conviction that ethical reformation would require special political dedication by his core followers. They would have to work from within established systems and structures, steadily seeking to transform established society without publicly disclosing all of their reformist agenda.[13] Ethical reform might require a kind of high-minded ethical deceit where Sidgwick’s followers would be called on to say one thing in public (‘comply with social norms’) and do another more important thing in private (‘break social norms, but for the greater good of the public benefits this will produce’). If this is characteristic of ethics advocates generally, then those of us favouring democratic values of open public participation have a few problems. We have to look very closely at the elitist ethics being practised by well-intentioned but anti-democratic reformers, for whom the slow process of building public acceptance is reason enough to try an alternative reform strategy of what I call ‘stealth ethics’. In two of his very influential works, Sidgwick (1898, 1907) draws his more attentive readers to the importance of what he terms the ‘esoteric morality’ (that is, the hidden or undisclosed morality) that utilitarian reformers should adopt.[14] In passages of quite cryptic prose, perhaps designed to deflect all but the most persistent of readers (the ‘enlightened few’), Sidgwick teases out the example of lying for the greater good. He warns his readers that the people generally believe that lying is wrong, yet utilitarians know better: lying is not wrong if the public benefits outweigh the public losses. Trouble is, if utilitarians publicly admit to their inner conviction that lying is in principle beneficial, this would then cause significant public harm by weakening public confidence in the prevailing social morality prohibiting lying.[15] Stealth ethics Sidgwick’s energetic ‘stealth ethics’ provides a standing example of a potential weakness in ethics advocacy. He is realist enough to acknowledge that many policy makers act unethically; for example, by lying. He is idealist enough to wish this were not so. Usually, lying politicians have no excuse for their wrong conduct. Sidgwick is also experienced enough in the practicalities of policy making to know that professional ethics confers special privileges on many socially powerful groups to act in ways that are in tension with the rules of ordinary morality. For example, lawyers do their best to protect their client’s interests by stretching the truth in ways that would be unacceptable according to the rules of everyday ethics, so too do leading opposition politicians when holding governments to account, and that rough and tumble activity is consistent with their socially useful ethics of role. Further, Sidgwick notes that many powerful groups in government are given authority to deny the truth that they are breaking the ordinary rules of ethics; for example, spies and military authorities and their political ministers deceive the enemy, even if this means deceiving friends as well. But Sidgwick takes this notion of professional political ethics one step further: he illustrates for us the temptation facing ethics advocates to devise a specialist form of professional ethics for ethics reformers. This warrant not only allows them to lie for the greater good but to lie about this practice of lying, and to deceive the public about the presence of the ‘esoteric morality’ that persuades the ethical elite of the justice of their covert practice. Of course, the historical Sidgwick was not as bad or as troubling as I am making him out to be.[16] I am exaggerating and making the worst case for an otherwise good person. I concede that few ethics advocates fit the template I have constructed here. But my point is to identify a very real risk, which is that ethics advocates can be so keen to take ethics seriously that they forget to take the checks and balances of democracy just as seriously. My interest here is not in Sidgwick as such, but in Sidgwick as a type or exemplar of ethics reformer (‘innovator’ is his preferred term) who drills his followers in the importance of appearances. Policy innovators should manage publicity in ways that deflect public attention from their deviations from conventional social norms. The ethical reformer in this school of utilitarianism thus balances two truths: the general or popular truth about the wrongness of acting unethically (as in the case of lying); and the secret or esoteric truth known only to the committed reformers that acting unethically (for example, lying) is right under certain conditions. Appearances are everything because reformers such as Sidgwick appreciate that the ethical foundations of public policy rest in community sentiment, which disapproves of unethical conduct such as lying. But if reformers want to take ethics seriously, then they have to use every instrument, including well-calculated lying, to manage the policy process in ways that produce the social benefit that is the underlying measure of ethical policy. What would be an example of such a policy deception that produces public benefits but only where the people generally remain ignorant of what is going on? Think of it in these very broad terms: any deception by anyone in a position of policy power that keeps the public ignorant about calculated wrongs done to produce right results. The systemic example is the very denial that such an esoteric ethic of exceptionalism exists! Sidgwick knew the risks he was taking with his ‘paradoxical’ doctrine about esoteric or exceptional ethics. In Practical Ethics he noted that this warrant for public officials to manage their public duties in ways that are inconsistent with their private duties was ‘not a proposition that a candidate for Parliament would affirm on a public platform’ (Sidgwick 1898). But once elected, what becomes evident is the ‘esoteric professional morality current among politicians, in which considerable relaxations are allowed of the ordinary rules of veracity, justice, and good faith’ (Sidgwick 1898, p. 57). Building on this rather self-serving form of esotericism, Sidgwick constructs a marvelous edifice of public-serving esotericism, fit for the purpose of ethics reformers who can not afford to wait for democracy. Does this make Sidgwick’s account sound like special pleading: excusing certain policy agents of routine duties? There is something to Sidgwick’s doctrine.[17] But it is a doctrine liable to misuse or abuse. At its best, Sidgwick’s careful anatomy of ethical exceptionalism resembles traditional casuistry, as he himself noted when examining ‘the esoteric morality of any particular profession or trade’ (Sidgwick 1898, p. 19). At its worst, Sidgwick’s doctrine about the ethical ends justifying the unethical means illustrates the disdain for the routines of democracy and popular government that well-intentioned but impatient ethics experts can display. The practical implication of this discussion is that democracy is a core part of the ethical foundations of public policy. Negatively, this means we should downgrade the credit rating of those ethics advocates who want to short-circuit the slow but necessary processes of popular decision making. Positively, this means we should value democracy for the way it contributes to ethical foundations of public policy by holding ethics to public account, causing ethics advocates to demonstrate how their ethics schemes can strengthen rather than bypass or subvert democracy. Contemporary ethics regimes We can detect a distaste for democracy among some influential schools of ethics experts or ethics entrepreneurs. We forget that ethics advocates can pose risks to democratic policy making, particularly when their fervour for ethics outstrips their fondness for democracy. Some ethics advocates are quite elitist, with an impatience for the slow grind of democratic processes. This elitism often matches the concentrated ethics adopted by political executives seeking to bolster the policy power of centralised government institutions. I think ethical public policy includes or presupposes democratic processes of public policy, in contrast to the anti-democratic sentiments of some influential ethics experts. One practical suggestion I have about improving ethics and public policy is that, despite Singer’s advocacy, we learn from the Sidgwick case study to be wary of policy elites bearing ethics (de Lazari-Radek and Singer 2010, pp. 51–8). The problem is not that policy elites generally do not take ethics seriously but that generally they do not take democracy seriously. Their dedication to their chosen school of ethics can mean they treat democracy as vulnerable to unethical tendencies. Their solution is to do what they can to prevent social or exoteric morality from disintegrating in ways traditionally feared of democracy, while devising an ‘esoteric morality’ to allow the policy elite to escape public distrust while engaged in their unrevealed but well-intentioned policy arts. Contemporary democratic governance never quite lives up to Sidgwick’s high expectations for stealth ethics. Instead, what we have is a preference by governing elites for ambitious ethics regimes devised by those in the political executive at the centre of government to regulate activities of those across the policy landscape. Such ethics regimes are prominent features of contemporary public policy. Nothing so bold as Sidgwick’s stealth ethics seems to inspire the ethics regimes regulating contemporary policy systems. But one can detect a form of ethical zeal in the ambition that heads of governments have for taking responsibility for regulating official ethics, where ethical conduct in effect means acting responsively to implement government policies. Democratic political executives are often tempted to use ethics as part of a credentialling package when searching for ways to increase public confidence and trust in government. Increasingly governments are attracted to ethics policies as a public relations exercise: that is, governments look to ethics not as an end in itself but as a means of strengthening public confidence in government. This is not all bad: the welcome implication here is that good government is wider and deeper than simply the good of ‘the government’ and that if the ethics initiatives of political executives stimulate ethics initiatives from other branches and components of our governments, then well and good. But it is mistaken to think that any one part of the system of government can take out a ‘site licence’ on ethics and claim that whatever use they make of ethics is proof that government has gone ethical. A bit of due diligence by other branches of government and a bit of auditing are in order to protect us from whole-of-government claims exercised by subordinate parts of the system of government. If ‘concentrated’ ethics is the problem, one solution is along the lines of ‘dispersed’ ethics. My own approach (echoing F. H. Bradley’s (1962) case against Sidgwick)[18] to dispersed ethics is the concept of the ‘lattice of leadership’, which emerged in my book Terms of Trust as a way of trying to explain the character of dispersed leadership in a democracy (Uhr 2005, pp. 78–81).[19] The concept derives from the theme of power-sharing across many different locations of authority. The lattice of leadership attempts to describe a style of dispersed public leadership based on a spread of locations where powers and influence intersect. In my view, ethical policy leadership in a democracy requires dispersed rather than concentrated foundations. Ethics as it emerges from the central structures of government is a classic case of concentrated ethics: ethics concentrated in the hands of executive officials, political and bureaucratic. However welcome might be the many ethics initiatives emerging from the central structures of government, the ethical footings of public policy require wider foundations than simply those of central agencies in executive government. Dispersal of policy power does not have to imply lack of energy or focus or impact: in fact, I argue that dispersed power can enrich the ethics of public policy by calling into play a richer blend of ethical viewpoints.[20] Conclusion My image of the ‘lattice of leadership’ is another way of conveying the message found in many traditional doctrines of ‘ethics of office’, where expectations about the right conduct of public figures derive from the nature of the specific office in question. One advantage of this type of so-called institutional or role ethics is that it helps officials avoid unnecessary abstraction in ethical thinking by keeping their focus on concrete circumstances and the practical responsibilities of role. Ethical responsibilities vary with role. Although general obligations to act honestly might be common, specific forms of honest ethical conduct can vary according to the role or office in question. This traditional orientation to public ethics undercuts expectations about a ‘one size fits all’ model of ethical conduct, deferring instead to a wide variety of clusters of ethical priorities varying with different types of public office. Theories of ethics of office have survived so long precisely because they match the living realities of the public realm, where what is considered appropriate public conduct for officials derives substantially from the nature of the offices being occupied: take the occupant into another public office and you probably change most of their official ethical obligations. The practical implication is that responsibility for maintaining the ethical foundations of public policy cannot and should not be left solely to executive government, which is the default position in most democratic systems. Negatively, this means there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. Positively, this means a democratic ethic of dispersed public decision making. Democratic governance is much broader than the government of the day, and ethical policy systems rest on networks of dispersed public responsibility involving many types of public offices, each of which deserves to have its own distinctive code of practice reflecting its own particular ethical contribution. References Billington, R. 2003. Living Philosophy: An introduction to moral thought. 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Bok, S. (ed.). 1978. Lying: Moral choice in public and private life. New York: Pantheon Books. Bok, S. 1984. Secrets: On the ethics of concealment and revelation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bradley, F. H. 1962. Ethical Studies. 2nd edn. London: Oxford University Press. De Lazari-Radek, K., and P. Singer. 2010. ‘Secrecy in consequentialism: A defence of esoteric morality.’ Ratio (March): 34–68. Hampshire, S. 1999. Justice is Conflict. London: Duckworth. Hardin, R. 1988. Morality within the Limits of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kane, J., H. Patapan, and P. ‘t Hart (eds). 2009. Dispersed Democratic Leadership. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melzer, A. 2007. ‘On the pedagogical motive for esoteric writing.’ Journal of Politics 69(4): 1015–31. Murphy D. 2009. ‘Rendering to Caesar, and a nod to God.’ Sydney Morning Herald, 31 October – 1 November. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, P. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ross, W. D. 1930. The Right and the Good. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rudd, K. 2006. ‘Faith in politics.’ The Monthly Magazine, October, no. 17. www.themonthly.com.au/print/300. Schultz, B. 2004. Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the universe. An intellectual biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sidgwick, H. 1898. Practical Ethics: A collection of addresses and essays. London: Swan Sonnenschein. www.archive.org/details/cu31924031432275. Sidgwick, H. 1907. The Methods of Ethics. 7th edn. London: Macmillan. Stern, N. 2006. The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Toulmin, S. 1976. Knowing and Acting. New York: Macmillan. Toulmin, S. 2001. Return to Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Uhlmann, C. 2009. ‘St Kevin’s halo may choke him.’ Weekend Australian, 24–25 October. Uhr, J. 2005. Terms of Trust: Arguments over ethics in Australian government. Sydney, NSW: University of New South Wales Press. Uhr, J. 2008. ‘Distributed authority in a democracy: The lattice of leadership revisited.’ In P. ‘t Hart and J. Uhr (eds). Public Leadership: Perspectives and practices. Canberra: Australian National University E-Press, pp. 37–44. http://epress.anu.edu.au/anzsog/public_leadership/pdf_instructions.html. Ward, T. 2009. ‘Punishment and correctional practice: Ethical and rehabilitation implications.’ Policy Quarterly 5(2): 3–8. Williams, B. 1981. Moral Luck. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. 1993. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press. Page 4
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