ABSTRACT
Over three decades ago, John Rohr (1976) argued that, in thinking about public administration ethics, public administrators should consult what he termed our “regime values.” Important among these, for him, are our values of freedom, property, and equality. However, Rohr also acknowledged that the meaning of these values was never precise and always contestable and that they could only be understood by examining the way in which we have historically argued about them. It was, for this reason, Rohr argued, that the best way to understand our regime values was to examine the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. He noted how “in studying Supreme Court opinions, the bureaucrat will be exposed to many conflicting interpretations of American values” (p. 404), and how “concurring and dissenting opinions offer the bureaucrat alternative ways of looking at the same problem and thereby help him to avoid the danger of accepting dogmatic assertions uncritically” (p. 403). Rohr’s views reflect an essentially pluralist view of ethics and point to the
limitations and dangers of monistic approaches that seek to ground public administration ethics on the pursuit of any single regime value or, for that matter, any single understanding of the meaning of that value. As an illustration of how things can go awry in such monistic approaches, this essay will examine critically the neorepublican conception of freedom as nondomination that has been advanced recently by political theorists such as Richard Pettit (1999) and Quentin Skinner (1998). It is argued, consistent with Rohr’s views, that this single-minded conception of freedom can deflect attention away from the conflicts in values or conceptions of the good, including conflicts among our conceptions of freedom, that seem to characterize our moral and political experience.
