Ethics and Public Policy

This policy brief examines shared knowledge, transparency and accountability to improve enabling state-society relations on COVID-19 resilient building governance and takes into account the impact on third-country nationals (TCNs) in Austria, Finland, Czechia, and Lithuania. Existing research pointed to state-society relations as decentralised multi-stakeholder governance in public service reform for sustainable resilience building societies. However, the governance faced budgetary constraints and low public sector performance management. Although the relational governance shows certain public authorities have failed and/or ineffective to administer and achieve a range of public policy goals, there is still little policy study research in Nordic, Baltic, Central Eastern European - CEE and Central Western European countries explaining the improvement of state-society relations model on COVID-19 resilient building societies and its impacts to TCNs’ in the selected entities. Based on a qualitative cross-country oriented research approach with fewer country comparisons, primary data from the authors of this policy paper research, documents, published and unpublished scholarly texts are collected and analyzed with document and content analysis techniques. The findings indicate insufficient shared-knowledge for responsive decision to local concerns, lack of diverse interests groups’ consultations, and quality service delivery often not transparent that infringe the core values of trust, public accountability, mutual responsibilities, and citizens’ participation in effective public service relational governance implementation and impact TCNs and ethnic minorities peoples’ COVID-19 crisis-related resilient in the selected entities. This policy brief recommends shared-knowledge for open access to relevant information, mutual corporate responsibilities between government, public and private organization policy for public interest, diversify migrants communities involvement in policy consultation for open democracy, rebuilding of bureaucrats’ professional capacity to ensure commitment and increase public service staff, and legislation to set specific working ethics and values compatible with public interest that combine honesty, integrity, transparency, accountability, and fair equal treatment of citizens (especially from heterogeneous minorities subgroups) in the formulation, implementation, and delivery of public care to sustain COVID-19 resilient building societies. Not meeting these marginal policy adjustments and recommendations may intensify the reinforcement of public service distrust and corruption, deepen political and /or social inequalities, jeopardize open democracy, and impair sustainable COVID-19 resilient building societies.

Does it matter that almost all juries in England and Wales are all-White? Does it matter, even if this result is the unintended and undesired result of otherwise acceptable ways of choosing juries? Finally, does it matter that almost all juries are all-White if this has no adverse effect on the treatment of non-White defendants and victims of crime? According to Cheryl Thomas, there is no injustice in a system of jury selection, which predictably results in juries with no minority members, so long as this result is not deliberate and does not adversely affect the treatment of minority defendants and victims of crime. My view is different. In and of itself, I believe, something is wrong with a system of jury selection that predictably results in all-White juries in a diverse society, such as our own. Absent reason to believe that we lack a better alternative to current modes of jury selection, a commitment to democratic government and to the equality of citizens – or so I will argue – condemns existing arrangements as unjust, whether or not they have adverse effects on jury decisions, or on the ways in which our society approaches issues of race and crime.

What can philosophy tell us about ethics and public policy?  What can the ethics of public policy tell us about philosophy? Those are the questions that Jonathan Wolff addresses in his wonderful little book.  At one level, of course, the answer is straightforward – ethics is a branch of philosophy, so philosophy can tell us about the ethics of public policy, understood as a matter of deciding ‘what we should do’ in a manner that is institutionalised and collectively binding.  But at another level, as Wolff shows, there is something deeply puzzling about the idea that philosophy can tell us anything very useful about public policy and about the ethical dilemmas that it raises. Those dilemmas arise as a result of political constraints, struggles and resources which generally have little to do with philosophy and, for the most part, rather little to do with ethics.  In fact, as Wolff shows, philosophers have as much to learn about ethics and public policy as other people.  What they have to offer in return is less some nugget of pure gold, to be offered to a grateful public eager for enlightenment, than a few useful distinctions, qualifications and questions (201) which might help intelligent, conscientious, public-spirited people to decide some tricky, but usually unglamorous, questions of policy.  And that, basically, is what is so appealing about Wolff’s book: that it departs so strongly from what we might call ‘the philosopher as mouth of God’ approach to ethics, and situates itself in a variety of committee rooms, where tables are stacked with reports and statistics, enlivened only by the odd foray for investigative visits to a laboratory that does experiments on animals.

What can philosophy tell us about ethics and public policy? What can the ethics of public policy tell us about philosophy? Those are the questions that Jonathan Wolff addresses in his wonderful little book. At one level, of course, the answer is straightforward – ethics is a branch of philosophy, so philosophy can tell us about the ethics of public policy, understood as a matter of deciding ‘what we should do’ in a manner that is institutionalised and collectively binding. But at another level, as Wolff shows, there is something deeply puzzling about the idea that philosophy can tell us anything very useful about public policy and about the ethical dilemmas that it raises. Those dilemmas arise as a result of political constraints, struggles and resources which generally have little to do with philosophy and, for the most part, rather little to do with ethics. So what, exactly, should philosophers expect from an engagement with public policy?