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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Legal profession
Ethics in Public Administration: Understanding Ethics, Corruption,
and Public Policy provides students with a timely and valuable
collection of articles, essays, and case studies regarding ethical
challenges, expectations, and opportunities in public
administration. The collection begins with an introduction to the
foundations of ethics in public administration and explores the
definition and meaning of ethics as a concept. In later chapters,
students read about the relationship between ethics and the law, as
well as the delicate interplay between ethics, public service,
public careers, and Constitutional practice. Additional sections of
the anthology examine corruption in government and the ethical
dimensions of decision making. Each chapter presents readers with
an ethical dilemma to spark critical thought and self-reflection,
an introduction to the featured readings, and a case study to
demonstrate the real-world implications of topics addressed within
the chapter. Providing valuable insight into complex contemporary
issues, Ethics in Public Administration is an ideal resource for
courses in public administration.
Normative Subjects alludes to the fields of morality and law, as
well as to the entities, self and collectivity, addressed by these
clusters of norms. The book explores connections between the two.
The conception of self that informs this book is the joint product
of two multifaceted philosophical strands, the constructivist and
the hermeneutical. Various schools of thought view human beings as
self creating: by pursuing our goals and promoting our projects,
and so while abiding by the various norms that guide us in these
endeavors, we also determine human identity. The result is an
emphasis on a reciprocal relationship between law and morality on
the one side and the composition and boundaries of the self on the
other. In what medium does this self creation take place, and who
exactly is the "we" engaged in it? The answer suggested by the
hermeneutical tradition provides the book with its second main
theme. Like plays and novels, human beings are constituted by
meaning, and these meanings vary in their level of abstraction.
Self creation is a matter of fixing and elaborating these meanings
at different levels of abstraction: the individual, the collective,
and the universal. A key implication of this picture, explored in
the book, is a conception of human dignity as accruing to us qua
authors of the values and norms by which we define our selves
individually and collectively.
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