Essay About Greatest Happiness And Societal Benefits

Normative Theory and Policy Evaluation
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Public Administration & Management:
An Interactive Journal
6, 3, 2001, pp. 87-90
Normative Theory and Policy
Evaluation
Stuart Nagel
MKM-PSO-DSI Center and University of Illinois
I. PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
An interesting question concerns the ethical obligations of people
who do policy analysis research. Such research often involves ethical
dilemmas that relate to:
1. Whether ones purposes should include prescription or evaluation, as
well as prediction or explanation.
2. Whether or not to work to maximize the interests of a political party,
special interest group, or only general societal interests.
3. Focusing on intended consequences versus all consequences.
4. Efficiency versus equity as policy goals.
5. Evaluation along versus evaluation plus diverse replication as an
obligation.
6. Cost-incurring versus cost-saving in research.
7. Whether or not to share ones raw data.
8. Research validity versus questionable findings that are not
sufficiently questioned.
9. Whether or not to put people at risk in policy evaluation.
Openness may be the key factor underlying the resolution of ethical
dilemmas in policy evaluation. The situation is like the blue sky laws that
regulate the securities markets. A stockbroker can legitimately sell the blue
sky so long as he informs potential customers and others what they are
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getting. Likewise, policy evaluators may be complying with basic ethical
obligations when they make clear exactly what they are doing on matters
such as in the above nine dilemmas.
Perhaps, however, to resolve these ethical dilemmas, more
affirmative critique may be needed than just openness in reporting ones
research. In the analogy to the blue sky laws, one might argue that a
stockbroker should have an ethical obligation not to sell worthless stock,
rather than merely an obligation to report that she or he is selling stock in a
corporation whose liabilities exceed its assets and which has been taking a
loss in recent years.
II. SOCIETAL VALUES
In discussing ethical policy analysis, one should discuss both
individual and societal ethics. Individual ethics refer to standards of
professional behavior, as previously mentioned. Societal ethics refer to the
goals that society should be seeking and toward which public policy should
be directed. On a high level of generality, one can say that society should
be seeking to maximize societal benefits minus societal costs in making
policy decisions. The concept of “societal” refers to the collective good in
the sense of such ideas as:
1. The greatest happiness for the greatest number, as expounded by
such utilitarians as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and to a
lesser extent by American pragmatists such as William James and
John Dewey.
2. Bringing up the bottom with regard to those who are least well off,
as expounded by John Rawls.
3. Doing things that make everyone better off or at least no one worse
off, as expounded by Vilfredo Pareto.
Benefits refer to whatever the society and/or its leaders consider
desirable. Costs refer to whatever is considered undesirable. Benefits and
costs can refer to monetary or nonmonetary effects. Benefits and costs are
interchangeable concepts depending on how they are worded. Thus, high
employment is a benefit, and high unemployment is a cost, but they are the
complements or inverses of each other. It makes more sense to subtract
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costs from benefits in talking about overall goals than dividing costs by
benefits. The subtraction criterion gives more of a net gain to ones original
assets when one project is better on B-C, but another is better on B/C.
Other overall goals are also defective, such as (1) merely maximizing
benefits without considering costs, (2) merely minimizing costs without
considering missed benefits, (3) maximizing benefits subject to a maximum
cost level, (4) minimizing costs subject to a minimum benefit level, or (5)
maximizing change in benefits divided by change in costs. The fifth
alternative is only a means to maximizing benefits minus costs. The third
and fourth alternatives are sometimes justified because benefits and costs
are often measured