| Description |
It may well be, given the unpleasant probabilities of our future, that social equity is an idea, whose time has come. That position is accepted herin and the main points to be discussed are: (1) that social equity, while most appealing, needs a fuler substantive ethical content; (2) that, because of this, its advocates have based their justifications and their prescriptions upon the extant American ethical paradig,; (3) that the extan paradigm (a) denies legitimacy to social equity but (b) is itself suffering from declining public confidence; (4) that a most promising alternative ethical paradigm has been developed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice; and (5) that his theory of justice can provide a powerful ethical foundation for (a) a substantive theory of social equity and (b) for a professional code for equitable public administrators. (For the purposes of this essay, the term equitable public administrators will be used to identify those public administrators committed to the idea of social equity.) (Description from Source) |