Discretion in the Welfare State: Social Rights and Professional Judgment by Anders Molander

Author:Anders Molander [Molander, Anders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781315450469
Google: KclRDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32816859
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Concluding remarks

Understood in epistemic terms, discretion is a form of practical reasoning – the aim being to draw conclusions about what ought to be done in particular cases – where warrants are weak. There are intrinsic tensions between this kind of reasoning and the demands of comparative consistency which can be explained by the burdens of discretion. Discretionary reasoning may also rely on heuristics that bias judgments. For these reasons this kind of reasoning represents a normative problem at the core of welfare states. We have not devoted space to sloppy discretionary judgments because carelessness does not belong to discretionary reasoning as such, while the burdens of discretion as well as the use of heuristics do. Moreover, it is easier to do something about sloppy discretion. The most drastic measure is to fire those who are sloppy. It is much more difficult to do something drastic with the burdens of discretion and heuristics, without abolishing discretionary reasoning itself. Discretionary reasoning is reasoning with weak warrants, and there is not much that can be done about that. With regard to the burdens of discretion and heuristics, it is important to become conscious of them so that one can understand why persons, who are not careless, nevertheless, can reach different conclusions about a case and make cognitive errors. Becoming conscious is the first step, but it need not be the last step as we will attempt to show in Chapter 4, where we outline a set of accountability mechanisms.

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