In Defense of Value Pluralism in Public Administration

Abstract

A response to Overeem and Verhoef's criticism of value pluralism, arguing that my value pluralist approach is useful in understanding the role that politics should play in how we think about, teach, and practice public administration.

Stakeholder Agency and Social Welfare: Pluralism and Decision Making in the Multi-Objective Corporation

“…These views thus are parties to a longstanding debate regarding the merits of monism vs. pluralism in articulating the basic goods and values that characterize existence. This debate (i.e., value monism vs. value pluralism) has animated a wide variety of fields, including philosophical ethics (see Heathwood, 2015;Mason, 2015, Dancy, 2013, and Haybron, 2011, for recent reviews), legal ethics (see, e.g., Wendel, 2000), political theory (e.g., Galston, 2002), cultural anthropology and cultural studies (e.g., Shweder, 2012), welfare economics (see, e.g., Fleurbaey, 2009), and public administration (Spicer, 2001;Overeem & Verhoef, 2014;Spicer, 2014).…”

On Value Pluralism, Its Implications, and the Nature of Philosophy

“…These comments by Galston and Crowder lend support to my own view, expressed in my earlier rejoinder, that "the normative implications of value pluralism taken alone are somewhat limited and mainly negative," but "this does not mean they are negligible" (Spicer, 2014(Spicer, , p. 1013. Moreover, Crowder's observation here that value pluralism implies "the need for a politics which accommodates and manages the imperfectability of human life" closely parallels my own views regarding the nature of politics, at least as we have historically understood it, and its relationship to value pluralism.…”

“…In this regard, my argument, which I readily admit is not terribly original, draws as much on my reading of Stuart Hampshire as it does on my reading of Berlin. This is why, as I argue in my earlier rejoinder, although "many of us recognize and appreciate the value of settling disputes by argument rather than by force," there is no "universal set of just procedures or universal rules for political discourses that are available to resolve the value conflicts that arise among us" and "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" (Spicer, 2014(Spicer, , p. 1016.…”

Value Pluralism and the Usefulness of Philosophical Theory for Public Administration

“…The first is that both authors continue to speak in terms of entailment. Thus, Spicer (2014) quotes his own statement that VP "at least implicitly for us, carries with it certain normative implications" (p. 1012) and Wagenaar refers to Chang's (1997) volume to uphold "the relationship between value pluralism ( . .…”