Harutyun
2011-09-04 21:27:42 UTC
First of all the discussion will be started from Cooper. As it is mentioned above, Cooper (2006) focuses more on ethical conduct of the responsible administrator in organizational settings, and also focuses on how public administrators need to act and behave when they confront with ethical problems. Cooper thinks that responsible administrators are not only required to do their regular duties but one of their essential qualities must be ability “to account for their conduct to relevant others such as supervisors, elected officials, the courts, and the citizenry, which means being able to explain and justify why specific actions they took resulted in particular consequences” (Cooper 2006, p. 6).
In some typical administrative cases Cooper tries to show that it is not easy for public administrators to make a decision about specific ethical problem, because the reasons of the problem may be different and may also have more than one possible solution. Ethical problems also bring with them difficult questions about administrative responsibility and for responsible administrator in decision making process a huge role plays also their values of life and very often, a possible decision of the problem can be beyond their personal values which makes it much harder to make final decision. Though many organizations have adopted codes of ethics which have purpose to clarify minimum standards of conduct, they are not enough support for public administrators in decision making process.
Cooper views “the treatment of ethical problems as an ongoing process of designing the best courses of action for specific situations. As an important step, public administrator must have a framework for understanding ethics in dynamic rather than static term” (Cooper 2006, p.19) Cooper goes forward and also suggests a decision making model which helps people to move an ethical problem from its descriptive levels to prescribed courses of action. Cooper identifies that “this model represents a framework for arriving at a judgment and then deciding what to do. No model, this one included, can lead you to the one best possible “correct” solution, but it can provide a template for creatively designing situation within the uncertainties and time limits of real administrative life”. Cooper also finds that using this model will help public administrators to become more aware of “their own values and the external obligations under which they act” (Cooper 2006: 25-40).
Now the discussion will be moved to Sen’s (2009) approach. His approach is mainly based on criticism of Rawlsian theory of justice. Though, it cannot be entirely viewed as critical because Sen also indentifies some ‘positive lessons’ which are worth to mention from the theory. First of all talking about criticism Sem don’t quiet agree with the Rawlsian approach that justice has to be seen only in terms of the demands of fairness. As Sem writes “I would argue that we have good reason to be persuaded by Rawls that the pursuit of justice has to be linked to the idea of fairness”. Though Sem thinks that this central idea is not only important for Rawlsian theory but also “it is deeply relevant to most analyses of justice, including what he is trying to present in his book”. Sem thinks that fairness as foundational idea can be viewed in different angles and it is important not to take only one angle to view it ( Sen 2009: 52-54).
One of the other opinions which Sen doesn’t share with Rawls that he identifies some very specific principles of justice, and makes “the strong claim that these principles would be the unanimous choice that would emerge from the political conception of justice as fairness”. Sen thinks that these set of principles can’t satisfy different issues concerning to justice equally, it is necessary and important also to have ‘alternatives’ which can answer on questions which standard set of principles can’t give fair answers, otherwise as Sem mentioned in his book “the entire procedure of ‘justice as fairness’, as developed in Rowls’s classic theory, would be hard to use ( Sen 2009: 56- 57).
Sen has another disagreement with Rawlsian theory of justice, which is also worth to mention, that it is only focusing on determining principles of justice for institutions but avoiding paying attention on actual behavior of people. In Rawlsian system the selection of the principles of justice ensures not only right choices of institutions but also the necessary behavior by citizens. It is a skeptical question for Sem because he thinks, “how the c