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Acting on values: An ethical dead end for public servants

2004· article· en· W2071060665 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
John Langford

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Public Administration · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicEvaluation and Performance Assessment
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEthical valuesValue (mathematics)Civil servantsPolitical scienceSociologyPhilosophyHumanitiesLawMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract: This article provides a critical analysis of the values approach to public‐sector ethics, particularly as it has been developed in Ottawa. The central tenet of this approach is that a framework of core values can be used directly by public servants to solve ethical dilemmas or to justify more specific rules of behaviour. The author argues that this approach is conceptually flawed on a number of levels. Its advocates seem confused about what a value is and how to identify core values. They also seem tolerant of the existence of a large number of core values that are not clearly defined. This inevitably creates a situation in which there is substantial value conflict and no way to resolve such clashes. Finally, the values approach, at least as structured in Ottawa, subdivides values into groups, making a puzzling distinction between ethical and non‐ethical values. After examining these flaws, the article explores the need to pay more attention to consequentiality approaches for enhancing ethical behaviour that resonate with the ways in which public servants intuitively approach ethical judgments. Sommaire: Cet article fait une analyse critique de l'éthique dans le secteur public fondée sur les valeurs, plus particulièrement la façon dont cette approche a étéélaborée à Ottawa. Cette approche repose essentiellement sur le principe que les fonctionnaires peuvent se servir d'un cadre directeur de valeurs fondamentales pour résoudre des dilemmes moraux ou pour justifier des règles de comportement plus précises. L'auteur soutient que sur le plan conceptuel, cette approche comporte des lacunes à plusieurs niveaux. Ses partisans ne semblent pas trop savoir ce qu'est une valeur ni comment dégager les valeurs fondamentales. Le fait qu'un grand nombre de valeurs fondamentales ne soient pas clairement définies ne semble pas non plus les déranger. On se trouve inévitablement en face d'une situation de conflits de valeurs sans moyens de les résoudre. Enfin, cette approche fondée sur les valeurs, tout au nioins telle que structurée par Ottawa, les subdivise en groupes, faisant Line étrange distinction entre les valeurs éthiques et non‐éthiques. Apres avoir examiné ces lacunes, I'article explore la nécessité de s'intéresser davantage aux approches conséquentialistes pour valoriser le comportement éthique, qui font écho aux façons dont les fonctionnaires abordent d'instinct les jugements moraux.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScholarly communication, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.877
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.357
GPT teacher head0.501
Teacher spread0.145 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations24
Published2004
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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