Abstract
In seeking to insulate itself from the value conflicts of public policy formation, the field of public administration has traditionally relied on normative dichotomies including politics-administration, equity-efficiency, and fact-value. While permitting the adoption of an apparently value neutral stance based on methodological competence, and deferring value conflicts to the political system, the use of dichotomy has never been entirely successful in eliminating the normative implications of the field's role in policy implementation. Beginning especially with the work of Dwight Waldo, and continuing through the New Public Administration and beyond, the field has been challenged to acknowledge this role in formulating as well as in actualizing public policy. Within the contemporary dialogue of public administration, normative concerns continue as a part of the antirationalist or postmodern reaction to the field's traditionally rationalist grounding. Drawing particularly upon the work of Jurgen Habermas, various antirationalist public administration theorists have suggested a discursive approach to the resolution of public policy conflicts. Controversy continues, however, in the opposition between postmodern discursive perspectives such as those of Charles Fox and Hugh Miller and the corresponding rational discursive perspectives suggested in the work of Habermas. This paper seeks to move the dialogue beyond some of these current controversies by suggesting an integration of antirationalist normative thought and closely related ideas on the nature of personal moral growth. Building on these ideas, it seeks to link moral development and the discursive process through the notion that authentic discourse is both a cause and a result of moral maturity--a maturity that permits difficult normative problems to be appreciated not as conflicts between good and evil, but as tensions between conflicting goods. This paper considers the role of our governance system, and the place of its public servants, in fostering the moral transformation of our society. It suggests that the movement toward discursive resolution of public issue polarization does not depend solely upon an exchange of opinions but, additionally and importantly, upon the fostering of caring relationship--upon overcoming the barriers between the us and the them through both individual and societal moral growth.