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Until recently, contemporary political philosophy has had little to say about the normative quality of governance. Over the last century, the discipline has largely focused on questions that ask *why* government is justified, and often generated answers predicated on foundational or otherwise normatively basic distributive justice principles. The discipline has also investigated the *who* of government and other (infra-, trans- or supra-national) political organizations, debating who, if anyone, should have political authority, and the right to coerce citizens or who can and should legitimately intervene to protect or assist citizens when governments fail to do so. However, political philosophers have largely neglected *how* the moral principles that are supposed to guide governing and governance practices ought to function in the day-to-day life of governments and other public governance bodies. Consequently, we lack a research agenda to examine how specific government institutions should be internally structured, how they should be connected to and interact with other institutions and organizations or how officials should act when they are involved in implementing specific policies. In short, contemporary political philosophy is missing a public ethics of bureaucracy, administration, organizations, public service and executive institutions. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this general disciplinary neglect. For instance, some philosophers have addressed such discrete issues as the morality of professional roles (Applbaum 1999); the ethics of public administration (Thompson 1987), the obligations of the members of intermediate organizational structures (Herzog 2018), the ethics of “street-level bureaucrats” (Zacka 2017), the corruption of public officers responsible for policy implementation (Ceva and Ferretti 2018 and 2021), and how democratically grounded ethical principles can guide the design and implementation of various public policies within democratic polities (Wolff 2019; Lever & Poama 2018). However, a systematic research for an adequate public ethics for guiding governance activities is currently missing. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the relative absence of philosophical interest in the topic of governance, other disciplines and practitioners have moved into the domain. Political scientists, economists, lawyers, development specialists and public administration scholars have developed conceptions of good governance that have been deployed as normative standards in real world public policy (Bovens & Schillemans 2014; Boswell & Corbett 2017; du Gay& Pedersen 2020; Rothstein & Teorrell 2008). While such developments outside political philosophy are desirable, we think that one cannot fully nor adequately understand what governance is or grasp its normative underpinnings without a distinctive philosophical approach. As a result, this workshop tries to capitalize on relevant recent normative research within political philosophy to stimulate a public ethics turn within contemporary political philosophy. To do so, the workshop will focus on how specific moral and political principles – and the corresponding theories that articulate such principles – shape, guide and inform (i) the political and administrative activities of various public officials and civil servants working with or within political institutions, (ii) the design, reform and implementation of distinctive public policy programs, and (iii) the structuring, as well as functioning of specific public institutions.
We are particularly interested in contributions by junior and senior political theorists, political philosophers, social theorists and normative theory-driven public administration scholars that address at least one of the following thematic areas: (1) The ethics of public offices that are present within specific government and other public governance organizations. Here, we are particularly interested in how public officials and civil servants respond to morally and politically hard choices, how they deal with specific moral and political trade-offs, how they experience discretionary decisions or how they deal with or get involved in practice of official (as distinct from civil) disobedience. The topics that we expect to explore in this particular sub-section of the workshop are: (i) The justifiability and institutional/organizational implications of official disobedience; (ii) The ethics of whistle-blowing and other integrity-protective practices and mechanisms for addressing institutional corruption and/or administrative malpractice; (iii) The ethics of moral trade-offs (e.g. dirty hands or many hands issues) that civil servants and other public officials have to tackle in their standard professional activities. (2) The ethics of public institutions that are part of or are closely connected to governance practices. Here, we are primarily interested in exploring the question of what a well-functioning institution is and what institutional mechanisms should be in place to protect an institution’s integrity. Relatedly, we are interested in how accounts of how institutions ought to operate can be used to analyze the obligations and responsibilities that institutional role-occupants have to sustain by their action the functioning of their institution. The topics that we expect to explore in this particular sub-section of the workshop are: (i) Normatively informed design and reform proposals for dealing with integrity issues and other morally relevant professional norm violations within public institutions; (ii) Analyses of how public institutions can be structured and function in a way that promotes various public values and virtues (e.g. trust, solidarity, fairness, integrity, care, etc.); (iii) Analyses of how public government institutions should interact and cooperate with other public and private organizations (e.g. public procurement). (3) The ethics of public policies that are standardly applied within democratic polities. Here, we are particularly interested in the principles that are relevant or otherwise informative when it comes to guiding the content and manner in which specific public policies are designed and implemented, from foreign policy to internal security policies, and from language and education policies to waste management and healthcare policy. The topics that we expect to explore in this particular sub-section of the workshop are: (i) Normative discussions about how specific moral and political principles should be applied to different public policy areas and domains; (ii) Normatively informed policy design and policy implementation proposals, with a focus on policies that tackle systematic injustices (racism, sexism, etc.); (iii) Analyses of how different political theory approaches (liberalism, republicanism, socialism) can inform, regulate and modify the content and structure of various public policies. NB: The workshop proposal has the formal endorsement of the ECPR Political Theory Group *and* of the ECPR International Political Theory Group.
Papers will be avaliable once proposal and review has been completed.