Semiotic Analysis and Public Policy: Connecting Theory and Practice by Christopher L. Atkinson

Author:Christopher L. Atkinson [Atkinson, Christopher L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9781351205986
Google: GvaODwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 43211052
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Concluding Thoughts

In his illumination of the categorical imperative, Michael Sandel mentions false promises in the context of lying about paying back a loan. If no one ever paid back a loan, no one would loan money. Consider for a moment the premise that everyone suffers from ethical fading now and then – everyone has lied, even if the incidence is infrequent. The ethical problem is that a promise has been made, and not kept. To use Sandel’s explanation, making a false promise puts the interests of the individual above those of everyone else, and that is what makes such assurances objectionable (Sandel, 2009).

In the case of New York City’s code, the attention to prohibitions is at the expense of broader ethical development of city employees – a goal difficult to distinguish in either document. There are no attempts at carefully weighing ethical questions with means-ends tests, let alone discussions of the categorical imperative or the deontological nature of public service to serve the public interest. Instead, the system roughly states: The following behaviors are to be avoided, with some exceptions; if one has questions about a specific instance, the employee should request a review from the board which looks narrowly at the specific case. Ethical capacity is like any skill worth having, in that it requires work to develop; people with a strong motivation to succeed will seek out opportunities to grow their skills and align their goals with those of their organization (Hill, 2016). Nowhere in such a response is ethical development, the higher ideals of public interest, or individual-organization alignment a focus; we are left with punishment avoidance and a minefield of exceptions.

There seems to be some evidence of symbolic value above consistency and growth of individual ethical performance beyond simply abiding by prohibitions. Use of the word shall in law has been criticized as imprecise; because shall does not necessarily mean the same thing as must or will, use of the term undermines the structural integrity of any rule, and particularly an ethics rule, because it is counter to common wisdom, not to mention dodgy.

Applying this thinking to ethical codes, governments use the vehicle of polished, symbolic, and assuring words to pacify a public that is perhaps no longer listening or prone to believe the story being told anyway. A reason that the public is not willing to hear it is because government is privileging its “needs and desires…over everybody else’s” (Sandel, 2009, p. 121) in creating such codes in the first place. This is a subject debated in the literature for decades in public management, and will not be resolved here or anyplace else for that matter, but public-sector employees mostly do not do things because they are purely right or purely wrong. They do things because of the presence or absence of consequences for their actions, because of the presence of systems which ignore ethical capacity building in favor of simple compliance. The imperative is not categorical as much as it is hypothetical; even codes

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