The Necessity of Value Pluralism in Administrative Practice

Joanna is a social worker in a welfare office in a large city in the Netherlands. She works mainly with homeless people. One of her clients is an emaciated, drug-addicted young woman who, through another social worker, has applied for an emergency cash grant of €90. The problem is that the law prescribes, as a condition for receiving the emergency cash, that the beneficiary has some sort of address, if only an administrative one such as a shelter. This is to prevent beneficiaries applying for multiple emergency cash grants in different cities. In this case, the woman has been living in the street for months, without any contact with social services until recently, and has no address. Joanna is caught in a dilemma between two powerful values: the immediate needs of the client on the one hand and the administrative integrity of the welfare program on the other (Wagenaar, 2006).

Judy is a 34-year-old lawyer at the Department of Policy Implementation at the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service, or IND (Immigratie en Naturalisatiedienst). Her responsibilities include finding solutions for refugees applying for asylum, preparing answers to parliamentary inquiries, and translating new laws into operational procedures. Her work situation has three characteristics: immigration policy in the Netherlands is highly contested and therefore sensitive, the department is woefully understaffed, and the inflow of work is wholly unpredictable. Judy struggles with an unmanageable workload. She tries to plan her work, but “there are always questions in parliament, or some demonstration in the country, or a group of asylum-seekers arrives from a particular country and no one knows how to deal with them” (Wagenaar, 2004, p. 645). She describes how some of her colleagues have buckled under the workload and are on extended sick leave. But the work has to be done and she has taken over some of their tasks. “[T]he result is that I put in a lot of overtime. I don’t have to do that, but I often feel responsible that things go well here. So I spend more time here than my regular working hours” (Wagenaar, 2004, p. 646). She then describes how she is burdened by her partner’s complaints when she, regularly, comes home late. She understands him, she feels guilty, but she also feels that she cannot let her colleagues and the agency down. Judy is caught in a conflict between responsibility and loyalty to her partner.

Conflicts such as these are an inevitable, intrinsic part of the everyday world of public administration. Anyone with experience in public administration, or more generally with working life, will have no trouble coming up with her own examples. What the above examples have in common is that, as Martha Nussbaum (1989) succinctly puts it,

[i]n both the person involved, through, it seems no particular fault of his or her own, has been confronted by the world with a situation in which there are no harmless possibilities. Whatever choice is made, a genuine obligation is violated. (p. 7)

Administrative practice is fraught with value conflict. In their article on moral dilemmas in public administration, Overeem and Verhoef recognize the existence of value pluralism (VP), but, astonishingly, maintains that its relevance to administrative practice is non-existent. As they put it, “the implications of value pluralism for public administration (if any) remain open to debate.”

Reading Overeem and Verhoef’s critique of my analysis of VP in public administration, I had to think of the Reverend Edward Casaubon, the unfortunate fictional character in George Eliot’s magisterial novel Middlemarch. Eliot drew Casaubon as the emblematic self-deceived scholar who, locked up in his study and in his rarefied abstractions, pursues a project that is obviously misguided to everyone but himself. Without spelling out the latter, Eliot lets her readers draw this conclusion for themselves, aided by the masterful contrast between Casaubon and Dr. Lydgate, whom she portrays as a worldly, practical character, although flawed in his own way, who goes about his medical practice in a caring and perceptive way.

Overeem and Verhoef’s critique of my position of VP in policy analysis and public administration boils down to two points: (a) According to them, I misconceive VP. Contrary to how I construe it, Overeem and Verhoef argue that VP is a meta-ethical position that has little or no truck with “the practically oriented field of public administration.” And (b) even if we granted that VP might be relevant to real-world events, it would be impossible to infer from it the kind of “moral and ideological choices” or “remedies” that I suggest. According to these authors, this is borne out by my position, it being “inconsistent” with that of Michael Spicer another scholar who has analyzed the role of VP to public administration. In fact, according to Overeem and Verhoef, it is not even clear that “our moral situation is problematic” in the first place, let alone in need of remedy. ¹ All this is surely enough to justify the state of “theoretical confusion” that he ascribes to me.

Overeem and Verhoef argue that I am not aware, or do not acknowledge, that VP is a meta-ethical position that only describes how values relate to each other, the structure of our moral universe. Their argument is that “[s]uch a highly abstract idea [as VP] might seem to have little pertinence for the practically oriented field of public administration”. This analysis is puzzling. The subject matter of meta-ethics is indeed the nature, meaning, and validity of ethical terms, but it is obvious that any pronouncement about these issues has profound implications for the validity and meaningfulness of real-world ethical claims and the quality of value choices. By way of analogy, think of the relation between epistemological claims and the assessment of real-world scientific statements. As John Kekes (1993), one of my guiding lights in my original article, puts it, “[P]luralism is an evaluative theory because it is not an uncommitted [emphasis added] analysis of the relations of the types of values involved in good lives, but a theory motivated by a concern for human beings actually living good lives” (p. 10; I will return to this point later.). Yet, Overeem and Verhoef maintain that it is possible to talk about values in a noncommittal way. “VP is primarily a notion in meta-ethics, not in political philosophy,” they say. And “There is no clear reason why VP should have any consequences for collective decision-making, for the authoritative allocation of values, or for politics in any other accepted meaning of the term” (p. 22). ² When someone makes such obviously confounding statements, one begins to suspect that the contested issue must have deeper grounds. As indeed it has.

What Overeem and Verhoef have missed entirely is that I approach VP from a pragmatist, practice-oriented perspective. They think that pragmatism is a consequence of my analysis of VP, an “ideological” position that is tacked on to my analysis of VP; a clever way to deal with the puzzles and dilemmas that VP poses in public policy and public administration. This allows them to observe that Spicer and I propagate different ways of dealing with VP (political pluralism and pragmatism, respectively) and to conclude that these “remedies” do not logically follow from VP and are inconsistent among each other.

In my work on VP, pragmatism—or more precisely, a practice-based approach—is the starting point of my analysis of value conflict in policy and administration. I came to the issue of value conflict when I studied the everyday work of administrators (Wagenaar and Hartendorp, 2000, 2004, 2006). Conflict between values that were equally demanding or desirable was a recurring aspect of this work. I wanted to understand how these administrators navigated the difficult situations that they encountered. I listened to “practice stories” (Forester, 1999) about how administrators managed to arrive at decisions in such difficult situations that in the large majority of cases were regarded as sensible or decent by citizens and colleagues. I wanted to know how administrators interacted with each other in dealing with work-related issues. And what the emotional and identity costs were of their work (Wagenaar, 2002). I then discussed, and rejected, a deontic, or rule-bound explanation of these questions as promoted for example by Rohr, Frederickson, and Kass. ³ Instead, I suggested a practice-based approach. I characterized this approach in somewhat phenomenological terms as follows:

In a practice-based orientation towards administrative ethics, ethics is not seen as something distinct from everyday administrative behavior, Morality is embedded in the thousand of social interactions that, together, make up the work of public administrators. It is not something that hovers over such activities as an impassive final arbiter. Morality is not out there, called upon in situations of conflict or doubt, but instead is part and parcel of the lived experience of administrative practitioners. (Wagenaar, 2002, p. 109)

Dealing with value conflict, I concluded, is a form of practical judgment. In later publications, I provide a wider philosophical grounding for my position in, respectively, Wittgenstein’s notion of life-forms (Wagenaar, 2004) and pragmatism (Wagenaar & Cook, 2011).

In my original analysis, I use the work of John Kekes, who I felt is more precise than the inspiring but on this point somewhat fuzzy Berlin. Kekes (1993) explicitly defines VP in terms of its manifestations in the real world: values conflict when “the realization of one entirely or partly excludes the realization of the other” (p. 19). This is a statement about the empirical world; the world of ordinary human experience, and also the world of public administration and politics. I then proceed by presenting a transcript of an interview with a welfare officer who struggles with a difficult case, and discuss the transcript from both a rule-oriented and a practice-oriented approach. One of my conclusions is that value conflict is not monolithic. It ranges from relatively benign routine situations to the intractable conflicts where a decision—every decision—involves “dirty hands” or an inescapable sense of loss. It all depends on the situation at hand, on all the contextual factors that make a situation into the kind of situation it is. Thus, for example, incommensurability (one of the elements of value conflict) can be a serious problem that entails an impossible choice, while at other times, it is largely irrelevant.

How could Overeem and Verhoef have overlooked all this and misconstrued my argument so drastically? My guess is that they, like Eliot’s Reverend Casaubon, is an unwitting prisoner of his own assumptions. First demarcating and then occupying an abstract, rarefied space called “meta-ethics” and allocating a metaphysical object called “value pluralism” to it, deprives him of a way out, back to the everyday world of public administration where value conflicts originate in the first place. He literally paints himself into a corner. It is telling that he never uses a single example of value conflict in his article. Overeem and Verhoef are caught up in what the philosopher David Hildebrand calls the “theoretical starting point” (TSP).

In his important analysis of Deweyan pragmatism, Hildebrand uses this term to characterize the position of Dewey and his many opponents. The TSP is practically the default state of most philosophy and social theory. Dewey gave an uncharacteristically trenchant characterization of the TSP: “Modern epistemology, having created the idea that the way to frame right conceptions is to analyze knowledge . . . leads to the view that realities must themselves have a theoretical and intellectual complexion” (Hildebrand, 2003, p.181). Or, as Hildebrand (2003) puts it in the same vein, “The TSP declines to denote anything in experience that is not already a part of a language game, vocabulary or conceptual scheme” (p. 182). In other words, we erect a linguistic scheme and believe that the world is structured in accordance with it.

Dewey, however, approached philosophy from the “Practical Starting Point” (PSP). According to Dewey, we connect with the world through experience. The PSP assumes that we do not start with a linguistic or conceptual scheme and then derive experience from it. Experience is immediate and actionable (Jay, 2005). Although we can represent experience in language (or in pictures, models, music, gesture, etc.), this does not mean that experience is reducible to language (Hildebrand, 2003). Instead of giving primacy to an a priori conceptual scheme, PSP foregrounds experience and inquiry. From the PSP, values are not separate metaphysical objects. Instead, they are integral to experience and vice versa. They are animated when we are confronted with difficult choices (Putnam, 1989), and, in the world of “interpersonal relations and situations” they are as amenable to practical judgment as facts (Putnam, 1981, pp. 138-139).

“Inconsistency,” Overeem and Verhoef’s ultimate critique of my position, is as good an example as any to illustrate a practice-oriented analysis of VP. When we see, for example, that John gives one reason to Jill for why he was late for dinner, and, without any further explanation, a different reason to Frank, most people would agree that he is (a) inconsistent (with the same kind of certainty that he has blue eyes) and that (b) this is disagreeable behavior. Let us return to Joanna now. She makes it clear that she does not award emergency welfare to everyone who applies for it. Yet, she admits that she has no clear criteria to distinguish between these situations: “[S]ometimes it also depends. How do you interpret it yourself? How do you deal with the story?” (Joanna, in Wagenaar, 2006, p. 54). Is Joanna inconsistent? By describing the situation for the kind of situation it is—uncertain, lacking clear guidelines, characterized by value conflict—Joanna shows considerable moral awareness (Nussbaum, 1989). She also displays practical judgment. She acknowledges that her decision is dependent on her interpretation of the situation, but that does not mean that anything goes. She gives information to her homeless clients, but she also acknowledges the limits of that strategy as most of them reject it or are unable or unwilling to use that information to improve their life:

What I actually find more often is that people are . . . yeah . . . often satisfied with the way it goes. And . . . uh . . . they don’t want to be pigeonholed. They have a certain freedom and they don’t want a fixed address at all. (Joanna, in Wagenaar, 2006, p. 58)

Some of her clients, she says, have mental problems, but they avoid mental health services. Yet, she discusses with all of her clients questions such as, “[y]ou know, how do you want to continue? Do you want to go on like that? Or do you . . . uh . . . yeah . . . want somewhat more stability?”

I left the pauses, hesitations, and grammatical fumbles intact in Joanna’s quotes to show how she carefully and haltingly tries to find her way through the exceedingly difficult, challenging situations that her clients and her job confront her with. Her story makes it clear that she takes the situation very seriously. This renders her a morally aware person. She recognizes, in Nussbaum’s (1989) words, that “certain things in human life are not optional: a good person is bound to care about and attend to them, whether he or she wants to or not” (p. 9). We may disagree with some of Joanna’s decisions, and we may try to find good reasons for them, reasons that Joanna might even agree with, on second thought, but most of us would never, given the care, commitment, and sensitive judgment that she demonstrates, accuse her of inconsistency.

Eliot’s Reverend Casaubon became a symbol for a somewhat pedantic person who gets caught up in his search for definitive answers and abstract comprehensive systems. Tertius Lydgate, however, is perceptive, emphatic, and attentive to detail. In Eliot’s masterly moral universe, that does not mean that he comes away unblemished. Lydgate is also prone to errors of judgment (in his choice of partner, for example). But this is the precisely the point. When facing difficult situations, we realize that “certain things are not optional.” That, on pain of being called morally unaware or insensitive, we cannot be “uncommitted.” When faced with the kind of situations that Judy and Joanna face, we have no choice but to engage in practical judgment. (We could act blindly or avoid choice, but we have moral terms for such persons too.) This follows from the fact that we live in a complex, “multi-faceted” world in which we carry conflicting responsibilities (Nussbaum, 1989, p. 7). Practical judgment is a fallible process in such situations, and we often get it wrong, or what seems right at first turns out over time to be wrong, or vice versa. Acting on a situation, bringing our experience to bear on it, trying to understand it, is always provisional and full of risks. Wittgenstein understood that when he argued that rules do not provide sufficient guidance for describing, understanding, or acting; rules are always open-ended. Even to grasp something as “obvious” as a game requires that we be immersed in life-forms in which games feature.

This, to my mind, is what VP, in a Lydgatean sense, is about—in public administration, politics, and ordinary life. Sometimes, this is a source of concern, sadness, or even tragedy. But VP also enriches our life. Whoever reads the stories of Judy and Joanna cannot but be struck by their sensitivity, their awareness, by—for lack of a better word—their wisdom. By confronting the moral conflicts in their job, they enhance our understanding of the limits and possibilities of public administration. Their moral awareness increases our options for choice, enhances our understanding of self and the world that we work and live in, and leads to better actions. I deliberately used the ambiguous term necessity in the title to convey the double meaning of inevitability and requirement. We cannot do without moral conflict and the plurality of values and obligations that underlie it. And we certainly should not sequester them in a contrived abstract “meta-space.” Instead, understanding how we handle moral conflict well, in the sense that it enhances and sustains a flourishing, just and democratic society, is one of the central tasks of public administration (Wagenaar, 2011).