The World of Public Administration: An Ethical Perspective.
Ethics in Public Administration: An Overview.
In the realm of public administration, what is legal is not necessarily ethical. Whether we like it or not, public administrators always work within some kind of legal framework, and this legal framework may not necessarily fall under what we perceive as ethical.
Ethics, according to Nigro and Nigro, are statements, written or oral, that prescribe or proscribe certain behaviors under specified conditions. Furthermore, values, according to Redfield, are conceptions, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends. The values held by persons or groups can be most accurately determined through the careful observation of their behavior over time, or more specifically, by noting how he or she acts in specific situations. In the same light. for Richard Means, values involve deep emotional commitments to certain cognitive views of public objects. They stand behind rational social action and are the engines of human activity insofar as that activity is social. So, judging from these definitions, values and ethics go hand in hand, but these two concepts cannot be directly equated with each other.
George Frederickson discusses general assertions regarding ethics and public administration. First and foremeost, there is the classic question of whether persons in public administration are good or bad. From here, he differentiates a political person between an administrative person. The political person includes both elected and politically appointed officials while the administrative person is the merit-based civil servant and certain executives appointed on the basis of professional rather than political criteria. Judging from these definitions, we can clearly see that political and administrative persons are inherently different from each other.
