In Defense of Value Pluralism in Public Administration

Methodology and Value Pluralism

As I make clear in the first chapter of my book, my approach to normative theory, following that of Isaiah Berlin, is to

attempt to understand some of the basic categories, concepts, or patterns that all of us, including social scientists, have come to use in making sense of human experience and, most especially, those aspects of human experience concerned with politics and governance. (Spicer, 2010, p. 13)

In taking this approach, I recognize that moral and political ideas “permeate the categories or presuppositions that we bring to the examination of the facts of human experience and action in government” and that “we cannot shut them out” because “they shape the very language we use to describe these facts” (p. 14). Consequently, as I state more broadly,

one cannot think, talk, or write about human beings as such in the absence of moral considerations, because the concept of what it means to be a human being is inevitably suffused with value judgments of some sort or other. (p. 14)

What this means, then, is that what we think of as the facts of human experience are inevitably shaped by our values and that the line between facts and values is often not nearly as clear-cut as Overeem and Verhoef seem to suggest when they accuse me of reasoning illogically from “what is” to “what we ought to do” (i.e., committing Hume’s “naturalistic fallacy”). Especially, when talking about the facts of human experience in matters of politics and morality, there are few, if any, what Overeem and Verhoef term “purely factual” statements. To the contrary, as Richard Rorty (1979) argues, “to use one set of true sentences to describe ourselves is already to choose an attitude towards ourselves, whereas to use another set of true sentences is to adopt a contrary attitude” (pp. 363-364).

This blending of facts and values in our statements becomes even clearer, it seems to me, where we make statements about our moral experience, as in Chapter 2 where I argue that “value pluralism provides a more truthful account of our moral experience than monism both in our private lives and in government” (p. 19). The foregoing is certainly in part an empirical statement about what we experience or what we believe in moral matters but it is more than just this. Assuming the validity of our moral experience, it is also a statement that, at least implicitly for us, carries with it certain normative implications in regard to how we should think and act. For most of us, at least those of us who are not sociopaths, the notion that we should act on the basis of our moral beliefs or experience seems perfectly acceptable and the notion that we should not seems frankly more than a bit odd. In other words, in my exposition of value pluralism and its implications, to borrow Hanna Pitkin’s (1993) words, “the problem is not how to derive values from facts,” as Overeem and Verhoef claim, because “no derivation is necessary. The values are already in the facts” (p. 228).

Part of the problem here may be that Overeem and Verhoef may confuse my value pluralism with some sort of moral relativism or nihilism. However, as I make clear in my discussion of value pluralism,

the very fact that we are able to communicate with other cultures across both time and place, the fact that we are able to recognize the inhabitants of such cultures as human beings somewhat like ourselves, rather than as something else entirely, provides us with phenomenological evidence that all human beings seem to share at least some common values. (Spicer, 2010, p. 25)

Furthermore, as I note, “ individuals and groups certainly can differ quite sharply in their conceptions of the good” but “it is also true that much greater agreement is likely to be found with respect to what constitute evils” (p. 25) and, in particular, what Stuart Hampshire (2000) terms the “great evils,” the evils that are “truly perennial” (p. xii).

I will concede here that, given that value pluralism posits the inevitability of conflict among different human values, the normative implications of value pluralism taken alone are somewhat limited and mainly negative. However, this does not mean that they are negligible. From my perspective, chief among these is that, as Isaiah Berlin recognized, monistic practices of governance, whether in the single-minded pursuit of security, economic development, or, for that matter, social justice or environmental protection can be harmful to us because they can do damage to other values that are also important to us. Value pluralism as an idea here is not simply a fact but is of both normative as well as political importance, because it can help provide a vocabulary that we can use to think about such practices and, if we choose to do so, resist them.

Finally, it is important to note that we experience value pluralism at a variety of different levels. As I observe, “value conflicts can make themselves known at personal, interpersonal, intergroup, and intercultural levels,” so that

value conflict presents individuals or groups with not simply a moral problem in terms of what they ought to do. It also presents them with a political problem in terms of how different individuals and groups, who happen to hold different and conflicting values, should live together. (p. 20)

Because I emphasize that we experience value pluralism at a social, as well as an individual level, Overeem and Verhoef accuse me here of conflating value pluralism, as a normative idea, with the fact of moral diversity. I disagree. My point is that value pluralism is not simply an acknowledgment of the fact of moral diversity but rather that, in pointing to the incompatibility and incommensurability of many of our values, value pluralism also urges us to take moral diversity seriously.

Politics, Value Pluralism, and Liberal Values

Turning to my conception of politics, drawing initially on Bernard Crick’s work, I define politics very broadly as “a manner of governance in which whoever happens to rule a society . . . attempts to reconcile the different interests and values that exist within that society by using methods of conciliation and compromise rather than force” (Spicer, 2010, p. 37). Such a conception, I argue, “presupposes two conditions for the practice of politics,” namely, “a complex pluralistic type of society in which there has emerged a diversity of interests and different values” and a “shared desire within that society to avoid the use of violence in settling these differences” (p. 30). Again, as in the case of value pluralism, this conception of politics, for Crick as well as me, blends facts and values. It is certainly a description of a particular manner of governing a society, but is also a prescription about how we should seek to govern society.

As Overeem and Verhoef acknowledge, much to their credit, I never claim that this conception of politics is logically equivalent to the idea of value pluralism. However, I do believe that such a conception of politics is clearly congenial to value pluralism because, like value pluralism, it recognizes the value conflict that occurs within morally diverse societies. As I note, it presumes the governance of a type of complex society in which “the ends or values held by one group of citizens in society can be expected to come into conflict with the values held by others” (p. 49). Furthermore, as I argue, because an aversion to the use of force and violence as a shared common value is explicitly presumed in this conception of politics, governing a society in this political manner makes easier, in different ways, the practice of value pluralism.

Overeem and Verhoef see my conception of politics as simply a reflection of my liberal values and point to the ongoing controversy in political philosophy about whether or not it is possible to justify liberal ideas and practices on the basis of value pluralism. My response to this is that I have never attempted to hide my liberal values or the fact that these shape the way in which I approach philosophy and political theory and their relationship to public administration. For me to suggest otherwise would be disingenuous since, as noted above, our moral and political values inevitably shape how we interpret the facts of human experience. As I see it, therefore, there is no value-free conception of politics. However, the conception of politics that I borrow from Crick, who was incidentally a socialist, and that is offered here, if somewhat on the liberal side, is still a pretty broad one frankly that dates back at least to Aristotle. It has received support, as I demonstrate in Chapter 3, from a variety of different writers, not all of whom, by any stretch of the imagination, can be dismissed as merely liberal ideologues. In my view, one does not have to be a liberal ideologue, then, to find this conception of politics persuasive.

Moreover, there may well exist some alternative conception of politics somewhere out there that does not share my liberal aversion to the use of force in settling our moral differences and that can also, in practice, equally or better protect value pluralism than the one I offer here. However, my interpretation of history respectfully leads me to think otherwise, at least for now anyway. In this regard, to the extent that my conception of politics is a liberal one, then I am inclined to side with Berlin when he writes, along with Bernard Williams, that “it is from social and historical reality,” not from “logical possibilities,” that “we are likely to be instructed in liberalism’s strengths, and to be reminded of the brutal and fraudulent simplifications, which as a matter of fact, are the usual offerings of its actual enemies” (Berlin & Williams, 1994, p. 309).

Given, as noted above, my conception of politics is both empirical and normative, one may reasonably ask, as do Overeem and Verhoef, why it is necessary to connect politics to value pluralism to draw inferences about public administration. This is a fair question and my response is that, while admittedly not all political conflicts are value conflicts, connecting politics to value pluralism helps us understand and appreciate better the virtues of politics and to take political conflict seriously by connecting many of the conflicts we see in politics to the conflicts of values that we experience as part of our ordinary moral experience. I see this as important to do, given, as I emphasize in my introductory chapter, there is a clear antipathy toward politics that has long been expressed and continues to be expressed in much of the academic field of public administration. Such antipathy, to my mind, is not only misguided. It is potentially harmful given our role as academics in educating public servants.

Politics, Value Pluralism, and Public Administration

The normative implications for public administration that I draw from my conception of politics, discussed above, like that of value pluralism, are somewhat limited and negative in nature, although yet again not negligible. In particular, in Chapter 4, I am able to draw on this conception of politics to argue that many public administration writers advance a “scientific approach to the study of governance” that, “when taken alone, gives insufficient weight to its inherently political character” in that it “downplays the conflicts among different values and conceptions of the good, as well as the uncertainty, that are an inherent part of the way in which we have come to govern ourselves” (Spicer, 2010, p. 53). However, to derive further implications, in the chapter following, I choose to refine somewhat my conception of politics in a manner that, while still consistent with Crick’s conception of politics, I think deepens it.

In particular, drawing on the works of Stuart Hampshire, I argue here that our political institutions can be seen as providing a set of historically situated and locally accepted practices of adversarial argument that help different groups in societies avert force and violence in resolving the recurrent conflicts that arise between them over their rival conceptions of the good. This focus on the practices of adversarial argument, as I see it, has the advantage of making much clearer than is perhaps evident in my earlier chapters, that my conception of politics, while inevitably shaped by, is far more than just an expression of my liberal values. This is because, as I argue,

Unlike the variety of other values or conceptions of the good that . . . tend to divide us, the idea that we ought to settle disputes among ourselves by means of practices or procedures that allow for adversary argument or “hearing the other side” is a value that seems to command both longstanding and widespread, if not universal, assent. Despite our different cultural backgrounds our different histories, or, for that matter, our different moral or philosophical outlooks, many of us recognize and appreciate the value of settling disputes by argument rather than by force. (p. 71)

However, as I also make very clear almost immediately following this observation, this does not mean that “there exists some universal set of just procedures or universal rules for political discourses that are available to resolve the value conflicts that arise among us” (p. 72). Rather, as I argue, drawing on Hampshire,

the very character of the procedures, which have evolved within a given society at a given time, is inevitably contingent upon its particular historical experience . . . because, in order to earn our respect and for us to feel comfortable with them, these procedures must become familiar to us as part of our accustomed practices of living. (p. 72)

This latter idea that the practices of adversarial argument or procedural justice that are acceptable to us must always be contingent upon our particular historical and cultural experience is crucial to the derivation of my prescriptions for the practice of what I term a “politicized” form of public administration. It is precisely for this reason that I emphasize the “American context” of my prescriptions, a point that Overeem and Verhoef, in my view, conveniently miss, and that I devote more than a little attention to our peculiarly American constitutional and political practices and traditions and their implications for the exercise of significant administrative discretion within our particular system of governance. As a result, it is not my value pluralism alone but also my understanding of our American locally accepted practices and traditions of politics or adversarial argument that lead me to conclude that “the relevant question” for public administration is

not whether public administrators should or should not involve themselves in politics, but rather how they can do so in ways that would help to protect politics and value pluralism and to limit monist approaches to administrative action that do damage to values held to be important by different groups in society. (p. 88).

It is also why I emphasize that American public administrators should “understand and respect our political and constitutional traditions of practice and work within them” (p. 89).

This may go at least some way to explaining why Wagenaar and I, as well as Max Weber, for that matter, each come up with somewhat different and conflicting administrative prescriptions. Indeed, given our very different historical and cultural experiences, it would surely be remarkable if the prescriptions that each of us separately derived from our value pluralist perspectives turned out to be somehow, as Overeem and Verhoef insist they must be, “congruent” with one another. Furthermore, in light of the immense variety of different ways in which historically situated human beings all around the globe have developed, and continue to develop, their own particular practices of adversarial argument to help them settle their differences, why on this earth would Overeem and Verhoef possibly expect that our own particular administrative prescriptions should ever be “exhaustive”?

Interestingly enough, it might be argued that my reliance here on my own “locally accepted” practices of adversarial argument to come up with my administrative prescriptions leads to me to advance prescriptions that reflect “conservative” rather than “liberal” values. I can only reply that any answer to the question of what exactly are our locally accepted practices of adversarial argument and what exactly they mean will never be precise and will always be subject to ongoing argument and contestation. This is especially so, in my view, within cultures such as ours that have happened to inherit distinctly liberal practices of adversarial argument. As Williams (2005) puts it, in regard to these practices, “part of our ethical practice consists precisely in this, that people have found in it resources by which to criticize their society. Practice is not just the practice of practice . . . but also the practice of criticism” (pp. 35-36).

Conclusion

Notwithstanding Overeem and Verhoef’s long list of almost withering criticisms, therefore, I still see my value pluralist approach as useful in understanding the role that politics should play in how we think about, teach, and practice public administration. Part of the difference between us may reflect our differences in philosophical approaches. Whereas Overeem and Verhoef, in their insistence on logicalness, congruence, and exhaustiveness in our administrative prescriptions, seem at times to advocate the practice of what Richard Rorty terms “systematic philosophy” aimed at the discovery of some permanent, irrefutable, absolutely logical, and universal truths outside of ourselves, I prefer to see myself, if practicing philosophy at all, as practicing something more like an “edifying philosophy” aimed at “continuing a conversation” (Rorty, 1979, p. 73). Although both approaches have their merits, I see the particular systematic approach that Overeem and Verhoef implicitly advocate as having some troubling implications. Overeem and Verhoef will not have us accept any set of propositions that are, as noted above, not “logical (they do not follow),” not “exhaustive (other implications are also possible),” or not “congruent (they do not match to each other).” In matters of human morality and politics rather than mathematics or physics, this approach to me would seem the very definition of monism itself and, as such, it carries with it all of the attendant difficulties and dangers of monistic approaches to morality, governance, and public administration that I describe at length in my book. Furthermore, as an approach to political philosophy, it is remarkably bereft of the sense of conflict or contestation and contingency or uncertainty that, to my mind, are characteristic of politics.

Despite this, notwithstanding our significant differences, I see Overeem and Verhoef’s critique as helpful in bringing broader attention to the issue of value pluralism and its possible implications for public administration and I agree with them that this issue is debatable, in the sense, of course, that it is worth debating. Furthermore, their critique is also helpful in directing attention to the important ideas of Max Weber on value pluralism, which, as opposed to his ideas on bureaucracy, have been neglected in our field, a problem that I modestly hope to remedy a little in an upcoming article in this journal. Finally, the zeal with which Overeem and Verhoef argue their case against Wagenaar and me, perhaps somewhat ironically, lends support to my own argument that our desire to engage in practices of adversarial argument as a means of settling our differences is not simply a product of liberal ideology but a common value that, if not universal, is, thankfully for the sake of our species, one that is broadly shared.