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JUSTICE, CONFLICT, AND ADVERSARY ARGUMENT: AN EXAMINATION OF STUART HAMPSHIRE’S IDEAS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR AMERICAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION MICHAEL W. SPICER Cleveland State University

ABSTRACT

This article draws on the ideas of Stuart Hampshire to examine the political practices of our culture as a basis for deriving a shared understanding of justice. It is argued here that such practices intimate a notion of procedural justice or “hearing the other side:” the idea that there is virtue in settling the various disputes that arise among us concerning our different interests and conceptions of the good, including our different conceptions of substantive justice, by processes of adversarial argument rather than force. The article also argues that, if public administration scholars and practitioners wish to foster procedural justice, then, they need to have an understanding of and appreciation for our constitutional practices of adversarial argument, as well as seeking other ways of promoting such adversarial argument within their own particular agencies and organizations.

How best to secure justice in our relationships with one another in society is a question that has arguably been central to political discourse since at least Plato. Moreover, it is also a question that, at least since the emergence of the so-called “new public administration” and “social equity theory” in the late 1960’s, has garnered some attention within the field of public administration (for recent reviews of this literature, see Wooldridge & Gooden, 2009; Guy & McCandless, 2012). Early writers in this area, such as David Hart (1974) and George Frederickson (1976) drew on the work of John Rawls (1971) to develop a theory of social equity that would be applicable to public administration. However, as Charles Abel and Arthur Sementelli argue, in their recent account of how the idea of justice relates to public administration, “any conception of

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justice” must “remain essentially contested” (2007, 13) so that “no theory can ever be a final account of justice” (27).

Nonetheless, simply because the meaning of justice is contestable does not mean that justice has no meaning at all. In fact, As Abel and Sementelli emphasize, drawing on the ideas of Wittgenstein, “justice is not a free-floating concept: the term cannot mean just anything at all. It is grounded in the particular social practices of a people, in their culture, in their traditions” (23). Consistent with the emphasis that Abel and Sementelli place here on the importance of our social practices in discerning the meaning of justice, this paper examines the political practices of our culture as a basis for deriving a shared understanding of justice. Drawing on the ideas of Stuart Hampshire, it is argued that such practices typically intimate, although obviously never perfectly realize, a notion of procedural justice or “hearing the other side:” the idea that there is virtue in settling the various disputes that arise among us concerning our different interests and conceptions of the good, including our conceptions of substantive justice, by processes of adversarial argument rather than force or violence. It is further argued that, if public administrators wish to foster procedural justice, then, they need to have an understanding of and appreciation for our constitutional practices of adversarial argument, as well as seeking other ways of promoting such adversarial argument within their own particular agencies and organizations.

THE CONTESTABILITY OF JUSTICE AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE GOOD

It is useful to begin here by observing again, as noted above, that justice is an essentially contestable concept in that individuals in any particular society may be expected to entertain a variety of different and often conflicting notions regarding its exact meaning. These conflicts about the meanings of justice arise not, as is so often supposed by some observers, simply because human beings are often loath to embrace a notion of justice that would harm their own particular economic interests. Rather, such conflicts also arise because any notion of justice is inevitably tied to a particular moral viewpoint or particular

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conception of the good that men and women happen to hold in a particular culture and time. As Hampshire puts the matter, “justice and fairness in substantial matters” will always “vary with varying moral outlooks and with varying conceptions of the good” (2000, 4). Because of this, especially in modern societies that are “morally mixed” or pluralist in character, we should not expect any sort of enduring consensus or harmony among our different notions of justice. It is more reasonable to expect there will be a “battle, not only of interests, but also of contrary moral ideals, passionately defended” and that these “contrary conceptions of the essential virtues and of the best way of life will also include divergent conceptions of justice” (1989, 73). In other words, we should expect “rival conceptions of justice … flaring into open conflict” (2000, 31). Hampshire notes, for example, that when liberals or socialists “criticize the distribution of wealth and of income ... as grossly and substantially unjust,” this can be seen as “part of a whole moral outlook and of a particular conception of the good” (2000, 27). Such critics, of course, for their part, can “expect opposition from conservatives who have another conception of justice that they can defend, and that is part of their conception of the good,” one that stresses “property rights and the autonomy of individuals” (2000, 27-28). Also, as a further example, Hampshire observes that “what counts as the just and fair treatment of foreigners” is likely to be “different for a cosmopolitan liberal, who recognizes the duty not to discriminate between citizens and foreigners more than is necessary for administrative reasons,” than it is “for the person who attaches very great value to the solidarity and historical continuity and the individual character of the community in which he or she lives” and who believes in the “right of a community to protect its national and cultural identity against the intrusion of foreigners into its intimate affairs” (1989, 73).

To look at this in another way, the meaning of justice must remain essentially contestable simply because of the wide variety of different and conflicting conceptions of the good that we as human beings in different times and in different places seem capable of imagining. As Hampshire puts it, “prominent among the essential potentialities of the human soul ... is [its]

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capacity for linguistic, cultural, and moral diversity” (1989, 30) and, consequently, “the description of ideal societies and ideal persons and ideal ways of life, and moral imagination ... vary vastly in form and content in different places, in different social groups, at different times in history, and in distinguishable cultures” (Hampshire, 2000, 20). As he notes, “particular conceptions of justice … have largely been formed by the same diverse imaginations that have formed different languages, different social classes, different social myths, different religions and different moralities” (1989, 55).

Given the conflicts that can arise among different conceptions of the good and of justice, societies face, then, an ongoing choice in regard to how best exactly they can resolve these conflicts. To put the matter in its simplest terms, they can seek to resolve these conflicts either by the use of force or violence or by more peaceful means. While, it is obvious, except to the most naïve, that the use of force in settling conflict should never be ruled out altogether, there are good reasons why different individuals and groups in societies, regardless of their own particular values or conceptions of the good, might find useful institutional mechanisms that aid them in the peaceful and non-violent resolution of their differences. This is because, whereas, as argued above, individuals and groups may disagree quite sharply in regard to their conceptions of the good, including their different beliefs about justice, there is likely to be much greater agreement with respect to the avoidance of those evils that are frequently associated with the use of force and violence either by governments or by warring groups and cultures to settle their differences.

Notwithstanding the very real moral differences that divide human beings, there also remain, after all, for most men and women who are not sociopaths, what Hampshire terms “the unchanged horrors of human life, the savage and obvious evils, which scarcely vary from culture to culture or from age to age” (2000, 43). These include “massacre, starvation, imprisonment, torture, death and mutilation in war, tyranny and humiliation” (43). As he notes, “whatever the divergences in conceptions of the good, these primary evils stay constant and undeniable as evils to be at all costs averted, or almost all costs” (2000, 43).

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These types of evils, as Hampshire argues, are different from “visions of a better social order” in that they are “felt as evils directly and without recourse to the norms of any particular way of life or to any specific set of moral ideas” (2000, xii). In light of these evils, it is not surprising then that, as Hampshire observes, “there is everywhere a well-recognized need for procedures of conflict resolution,” procedures “which can replace brute force and domination and tyranny” (2000, 5).

JUSTICE AND ADVERSARIAL ARGUMENT

For Hampshire, it our social practices of adversarial

argument, in particular our political practices, that have been most important in allowing us to avoid or at least lessen the use of force or violence in the resolution of conflicts among differing conceptions of the good and of substantive justice that arise between us. Such practices, of course, can take on a wide variety of different institutional forms in different cultures and, also, at different times in history. They have included, among others, for example, such institutions as parliaments, courts, and other assemblies or councils. However, what is common to most, although perhaps not all, of these various institutions is that they typically involve some sort of set of practices for adversarial argument that provide an opportunity for different groups to present and discuss their views on the issues that divide them, a set of practices that meets “the single prescription audi alteram partem (hear the other side)” (Hampshire, 2000, 8). As Hampshire states the matter,

In accepting any adversary procedure, the normal case is the man who from the beginning of his adult life finds himself attached to an ethnic group, a social group, a locality, perhaps a religious or moral group, and where each group is in competition with other groups for some degree of dominance in a single society. In such conditions of competition there are two routes by which a person or group may seek to gain its ends: by outright domination, involving force and the threat of force, or, alternatively, by an argumentative

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procedure within some institution (parliament, law court, assembly) that happens to have come into existence with its own recognized rules of procedure (2000, 17).

Notwithstanding, as noted above, the wide variety of

very different conceptions of the good and conceptions of justice that tend to divide us, the idea that we should settle disputes among these by means of practices or procedures that allow for adversary argument or “hearing the other side” is one that seems to command widespread and longstanding, if not actually universal assent. As Hampshire observes, “whatever a person’s moral outlook and conception of the good, and whatever his beliefs about issues of substantive justice, he knows that he will sometimes collide with others who make contrary judgments. Unless he is a hermit, he will find himself to some extent constrained by certain nearly universal habits of argumentative behavior that can be collectively called the habit of playing the game of argument according to the locally appropriate rules” (2000, 29). To the degree that these social practices of adversarial argument make possible some sort of a hearing for the different parties involved in moral conflict, such practices may be seen as providing an intimation of a sort of minimal norm of “procedural justice” or “fairness.” Hampshire clearly recognizes this when he argues that human societies need “a rock-bottom and preliminary morality of justice and fair dealing ... to keep a balance between competing moralities and to support respected procedures of arbitration between them” because without such a morality, “any society becomes an unstable clash of fanaticisms” (1989, 72).

However, it must also be recognized that the very character of the procedures for resolving conflicts that have happened to evolve within a given society at a given time is inevitably contingent upon its own particular historical experience. This must necessarily be so because, in order for such procedures to have gained our respect and for us to feel comfortable with them, they must become familiar to us as part of our accustomed practices of living. As Hampshire points out,

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Human beings are habituated to recognize the rules and conventions of the institutions within which they have been brought up, including the conventions of their family life. Institutions are needed as settings for just procedures of conflict resolution, and [these] institutions are formed by recognized customs and habits, which harden into specific rules of procedure within the various institutions--law courts, parliaments, councils, political parties, and others. The members of any society, and the citizens of any state, at any time and anywhere, normally expect that the conflicts in which they are involved should be settled in accordance with the rules recognized within that particular society or that particular state (2000, 54).

Furthermore, while acknowledging the usefulness of our social practices of adversarial argument, we should also recognize that the particular institutions and rules that we actually end up using to adjudicate conflict among ourselves will never be seen as perfect by all parties and that these institutions and rules will, themselves, be subject to a process of ongoing contestation and modification. As Hampshire emphasizes, “procedures of conflict resolution within any state are always being criticized and are always changing and are never as fair and as unbiased as they ideally might be” (2000, 26). From his perspective, we cannot expect any state to achieve “a perfect fairness in the representation of the conflicting moral outlooks within it” because “procedural justice tends of its nature to be imperfect and not ideal, being the untidy outcome of past political compromises” (31-32). We should not be surprised, therefore, that “the specific forms of argument and negotiation, and the arenas in which the conflicts are to be fought out, are often themselves subjects of dispute” and that they can be “expected to change as the untidy upshot of regular political conflicts” (2000, 28-29).

Moreover, it would be a mistake to conclude here that the notion of procedural justice necessarily springs from any basic human need for fairness or justice, rooted in human nature. Indeed, if anything, precisely the opposite would seem to be true.

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As Hampshire points out, we do not learn how to reason about moral issues, including issues of justice, in a Cartesian manner by means of “solitary meditation by the stove” (11). Rather, we learn how to reason by observing and learning from, at an early stage in life, the various social institutions or practices that we happen to have come to use, in our particular communities, in adjudicating and deliberating about the various conflicts that arise among ourselves. To use Hampshire words,

We learn to transfer by a kind of mimicry, the adversarial pattern of public and interpersonal life onto a silent stage called the mind … Viewed in this way, the mind is the unseen and imagined forum into which we learn to project the visible and audible social processes that we first encounter in childhood … A child observes the family scenes, the conflicts in which the adults around him discuss and decide, assert and contradict each other, and he soon finds no difficulty in a solitary imitation of these exchanges (2000, 11-12).

This explains why the very words we ordinarily use

when thinking or talking about making reasoned choices about what is fair or just, words, for example, such as “deliberating,” “judging,” “reviewing evidence,” “examining,” and so forth are appropriated from the various social procedures that we use to argue over conflicts between different individuals and groups in society. They are the same words that we use when thinking and talking about the activities, for instance, of courts, legislative assemblies, and tribunals. As Hampshire puts it, “we have to borrow the vocabulary that is to describe the operations of our minds from the vocabulary that describes the public and observable transactions of social life” (1989, 51). Furthermore, to argue that our practices of procedural justice help us to resolve conflicts among our differing conceptions of the good does not mean that procedural justice is, therefore, a norm to which we all must adhere in all possible circumstances. To claim this for such practices would be to claim far too much. It would, in effect, be to deny the very reality of the conflict among different conceptions of the good

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that we seek to settle through our institutions of procedural justice. We must, therefore, recognize that there will always be exceptional cases where we must sacrifice even procedural justice in the pursuit of some other good that we deem essential to us. Despite the great importance he attaches to procedural justice as a means of resolving conflict, even Hampshire concedes that there are, on occasion, circumstances where “considerations of procedural justice ... ought to be overridden in order that some other essential value ... may be protected, such as the avoidance of widespread misery or the preservation of life” (2000, 36).

Finally, to assert the importance of procedural justice is neither to deny nor is it to trivialize our notions of substantive justice. Rather, it is to deny the assertion that any particular notion of substantive justice, rooted as it is in a particular conception of the good, can command universal support. This includes Rawls’ theory of justice, which, however appealing it may be to some public administration scholars, must be argued for in particular cases, alongside other competing notions of justice. It follows that, absent the use of force and violence, given the conflicts that exist among our very different notions of substantive justice, questions involving the application of such justice must inevitably be settled, not in abstract terms, but rather in the context of specific conflicts in specific times and places and through locally accepted practices of adversarial argument.

The alternative to using our locally accepted practices of procedural justice to help us sort out these conflicts among our competing conceptions of substantive justice is, of course, the use of force and violence. While, as noted earlier, the use of force and violence as means of settling our differences cannot or should not be ruled out in all cases, history suggests that, far from furthering any of our particular conceptions of substantive justice, such force and violence can often, in fact, make the pursuit of these more difficult if not impossible. As Hampshire states the matter and also as events in a multitude of failed or failing states around the globe both in the past and present make abundantly clear, without our locally accepted practices of procedural justice,

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We should expect catastrophe. Conflicts will then no longer be resolved within the political domain but will be resolved by violence or the threat of violence and life will become nasty, brutish and short. Whatever one’s conception of the good, such anarchy will generally be reckoned a great evil, alongside starvation and near-starvation, disease, imprisonment, and humiliation (Hampshire, 2000, 98).

PROCEDURAL JUSTICE AND AMERICAN

CONSTITUTIONALISM

If we accept, following Hampshire, that it is our historical practices of adversary argument that can help provide some measure of procedural justice in dealing with conflicts among competing moralities or conceptions of the good, including competing notions of justice, then it follows that public administration writers or practitioners, who wish to seek justice in administration, would be well advised to pay attention to the particular customary ideas and practices of procedural justice in the societies in which they work and live. Obviously, in an American context, most prominent among these are the ideas and practices of American constitutionalism. James Madison himself clearly appreciated the dangers to a political community that were posed by clashes among differing conceptions of the good. He worried about “the effects of the unsteadiness and injustice, with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations” (Wills, 1982, 43). As he saw it:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning Government and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to cooperate for their common good. So strong is this

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propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts (Wills, 1982, 44).

Moreover, Madison understood the especially contentious and divisive nature of questions concerning distributive justice. Indeed, in his view, “the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property” and he saw the “principal” task of legislation as the “regulation of these various and interfering interests” (Wills, 1982, 44). For Madison, these various interests included not simply those who did and those who did not hold property, but also creditors and debtors, landed interests, manufacturing interests, mercantile interests, and others that “grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views” (44).

Justice, in his view, could only be secured by holding the “balance between them” but since, in a republic, “parties are and must be themselves the judges,” the “most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful party can be expected to prevail” (45). He noted, for example, that, whereas, from the point of view of justice, the “apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property” would “seem to require the most exacting impartiality; yet, there is perhaps no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party, to trample on the rules of justice” (45). This was because “every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets” (45). Since Madison believed it “vain” to expect that “enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good” (Wills, 1982, 45), he argued to check the political power of legislative majorities by means of what he termed an extended republic, one in which he believed there would be such a great diversity of interests and opinions that it would be difficult for any one group of citizens to impose their will by force upon the

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rest. Justice, according to Madison, could then be secured by a “multiplicity of interests” and a “multiplicity of sects” (264). As Madison put it, “extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other” (48). In Madison’s view, an extended republic was necessary to “guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part” (264). His belief was that “in the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good” (265). Furthermore, at the national level of government, Madison also sought to check power through a constitutional system of separation of powers. In such a system, he hoped that “those who administer each department” would have “the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others” so that ambition could “be made to counteract ambition” (262). His aim here was “to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other” (263). When viewed in terms of Hampshire’s notion of procedural justice, our Constitution can be seen here as checking the coercive power of government by providing multiple opportunities for settling conflicts among rival conceptions of the good though procedures of adversarial political argument in which different individuals and groups are given an opportunity to present their views on political disputes that affect them. Robert Dahl recognized this important aspect of our constitutional form of governance when he argued that our system of governance “with all its defects, ... does nonetheless provide a high probability that any active and legitimate group will make itself heard effectively at some stage in the process of decision” (1956, 150). As he notes, this is “no mean thing in a political system” (150).

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More recently, Robert Bellamy and Dario Castiglione have argued that the American Constitution can usefully be seen as “a complex of institutions and conventions that facilitate ... various styles of political dialogue ... appropriate to the management of particular sorts of social and ideological conflict” (1997, 615). According to these authors, the founders made use of “a whole series of measures,” including the separation of powers, diverse voting systems for different representative bodies, and federalism, so as “to employ politics to achieve not only the traditional constitutional goal of checking arbitrary power, but also to secure informed, consensual and fair decision-making” (616). Their scheme involved “the creation of counter-balancing centres of decision making that devolve power up or down ... in order to ensure that different values and interests get heard within the policy-making process” (616). That the founders themselves were quite conscious of providing exactly these types of opportunities for “hearing the other side” is evident, for example, in Madison’s argument that a system of representative democracy would “refine and enlarge the public views” (Wills, 1982, 46) and in Alexander Hamilton’s observation that the advantage of a reasonably “numerous legislature” would be that “the differences of opinion, and the jarring of parties” would “promote deliberation and circumspection; and serve to check excesses in the majority” (Wills, 1982, 358).

Of course, to assert the value to us of our constitutional ideas and practices of procedural justice in dealing with our conflicting conceptions of the good, as well as of justice, is, in no way, to minimize the substantive injustices, such as the protection of slavery and segregation and the mass relocation of native populations, which have occurred, sometimes, in the name of procedural justice and American constitutionalism. Nor is it necessarily to condone as just more recent governmental practices such as high-tech surveillance of citizens without judicial warrants, long-term incarceration of terrorist suspects without trial, and interrogation techniques that, at the very least, seem to skirt the line with torture. As argued above, no state, even those such as ours that emphasize the norm of procedural justice, will achieve perfect fairness in the representation of

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conflicting moral outlooks. The institutions of procedural justice will often, if not always, be the result of past shabby political compromises. The best that can be expected is what Hampshire terms “a continuing approximation to contemporary ideals of fairness in resolving conflicts, and new institutions that tend to redress the more blatant inequalities” (2000, 32). In this regard, all we can claim perhaps is that, by encouraging a process of continual adversarial argument among conflicting conceptions of the good, at the very least, our constitutional and political practices leave more open for us the possibilities for continual change in our moral outlooks. In other words, by allowing conflict, our constitutional practices of procedural justice also allow for moral change.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION What are the implications of the foregoing for American public administration? One important implication is that public administrators can best promote justice in the procedural sense, as Hampshire understands it, by both understanding and respecting our constitutional traditions of practice and working within them. David Rosenbloom, James Carroll, and Jonathan Carroll recognize this when they argue that public administrators should acquire “constitutional competence” because “constitutional government cannot function effectively without public management that embraces constitutional values” (2000, xvii). In acquiring and executing constitutional competence, public administrators not only can help themselves to stay out of court, but also make it more likely that different groups in society holding different and conflicting conceptions of the good, including differing and conflicting conceptions of substantive justice, will have an opportunity to have their views heard on administrative actions that affect them. This is not to suggest that the Constitution should be seen here as providing some sort of blueprint or list of principles that can somehow tell administrators precisely how they should act in particular situations. To the contrary, administrators must recognize that the founding of the Constitution itself consisted in a process of adversary argument among different and often

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inconsistent views of governance so that its exact meaning and implications for action are always subject to ongoing argument and contestation. John Rohr recognizes this agonistic aspect of our constitutional heritage when he suggests that, in seeking guidance for public administration from our Constitution, we should look to “the argument of the founding, rather than its outcome” (1986, 9). He further argues students of public administration should read Supreme Court opinions so that they become more sensitive to the “many conflicting interpretations of American values” that have existed and continue to exist within our society (1976, 404). Douglas Morgan, Richard Green, Craig Shinn, and Kenneth Robinson write, similarly, that “The American founders gave us a constitutional system that embraces contending principles of good republican governance. These contending principles reflect basic disagreement as to what is required to preserve a regime of ordered liberty ... The Constitution divides and checks governing power in part to keep the arguments perpetually in play” (2013, 85-86).

Beyond looking to our constitutional practices, public administrators, seeking justice in public administration, would also do well to consider other ways in which they might increase opportunities within their own agencies, organizations, and networks for adversarial argument regarding the different administrative issues that confront them. Administrators might, for example, actively recruit staff from a variety of different backgrounds and perspectives in order to encourage consideration of a broader range of points of view and values in administrative deliberations. Furthermore, administrators should encourage their staff to express their viewpoints within the organization by creating, as Rosemary O’Leary has put it, an “organizational culture that accepts, welcomes, and encourages candid dialogue and debate” and by cultivating “a questioning attitude by encouraging staff to challenge the assumptions and actions of the organization” (2006, 129). Finally, the foregoing argument would also indicate that there is merit in public administrators doing whatever they can to encourage the active participation in administrative decision-making of those groups of citizens as well as networks of organizations who are affected by their decisions.

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All of these approaches can be helpful in promoting procedural justice by getting administrators to “hear the other side” as they go about their business and, as a result, to pay more attention to conflicts among the competing conceptions of the good and of justice that are involved in the decisions that they are asked to make. For example, by pursuing these approaches, administrators seeking economic development in a city are more likely to hear the views of those concerned with protection of environmental values, the protection of homeowner rights, as well as the protection of traditional cultural values held by different neighborhoods within the city. Administrators seeking to promote security and order, whether locally or nationally, are more likely to hear the views of those concerned with the protection of privacy, due process, and other individual rights including those of minorities and the disadvantaged. Exposure to a broader range of views and values, in this way, can be helpful in getting administrators to recognize the reality of moral conflict in government action or what Stephen Bailey once termed the “bittersweet character of all public policy” (1964, p, 237). It can help administrators recognize, for example, that “welfare policies may mitigate hunger but promote parasitic dependence; vacationing in forests open for public recreation may destroy fish, wild life, and through carelessness in the handling of fire, the forests themselves. Unilateral international action may achieve immediate results at the cost of weakening international instruments of conflict resolution” (237).

It should be emphasized that fostering this type of adversarial argument within public administration, far from being unorthodox, is quite consistent with trends in the history of public administration practice across the past six decades or more. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 and subsequent legislation and court actions, for example, have resulted in much greater participation than previously by different individuals, organizations, and groups in administrative decision-making, as well as greater opportunities for them to mount administrative appeals and legal challenges to administrative actions (Rosenbloom, 2000; Bingham, Nabatchi, and O’ Leary, 2005). The effect of these actions, as Rosenbloom has observed, is that our “administrative procedures now more closely reflect

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democratic-constitutional norms for legislating and governing in general” (Rosenbloom, 2000, 43).

Of course, it must be admitted here that power, whether exercised by political leaders or administrative superiors, to advance their own particular interests and values, can often circumscribe and constrain practices of adversarial argument within administrative agencies. However, we should never underestimate the pleasure that men and women derive from engaging in processes of adversarial argument. As Hampshire points out, to view the reasons advanced in political argument as “always rationalizations” or just “mere decoration, designed to make the agent respectable in her own eyes and the eyes of others,” is not really plausible because it “overlooks the active interest that men and women observably take both in the process and in the procedures of negotiation” (1989, 175-176). As he notes, human beings often seem to take “delight in the rituals and procedures of argument, advocacy, and negotiation” and it is for this reason that “the desire to win an argument can be as intense as the desire to win a race” (1989, 176). In other words, those involved in politics often take the process of argument quite seriously and to suggest that power is important does not mean that argument is necessarily irrelevant

Nevertheless, in accepting and even encouraging the practice of this type of politics in public administration, we should, at the same time, remain realistic in our expectations concerning what it is that politics can or, for that matter, should accomplish (Spicer, 2010). We should perhaps be skeptical in regard to the aspirations of some social equity theorists that a more politicized and participative form of administration can somehow help us to “renew communal values” (Frederickson 1997, 220) and “realize the moral unity of a society come of age” (223). We should recognize that the practice of politics does not require any sort of deep moral consensus about the meaning of substantive justice, but simply a willingness to resolve our differences using politics rather than force. As Hampshire puts the matter, what makes political “negotiation possible is not a set of shared first-order moral beliefs,” but rather simply “a set of common practices” (Hampshire, 1989 188). He notes that “persons of political experience, looking at

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each other fiercely across the table, are not required to respect each other as entire moral beings: only as reasonable in negotiation” (188). It follows that public administrators who seek justice in administration should be careful, in dealing with other political actors, including citizens, not to assume or force a consensus where none exists and they should be attentive to the procedures that are used to structure political deliberation. This is especially true nowadays in light of the many different and conflicting conceptions of the good and of justice that arise in contemporary society.

Finally, what is perhaps most important is that, whatever particular conception of justice they happen to favor, public administrators should accept and even embrace the conflict and contestation that is characteristic of our political practices. Given the contestability of our different conceptions of justice, as well as other conceptions of the good, public administrators must learn to accept that conflict or inconsistency among our various beliefs is not an aberration or, to use Hampshire’s words, “the sign of a vice, or a defect, or a malfunctioning” (2000, 33), but rather that such conflict is perfectly normal and that there is virtue and even justice in seeking to resolve it by means of adversarial argument rather than violence or force.

Public administration education can assist here in helping to shape the way in which public administrators view conflict. In this regard, while not discarding the social sciences, we academics would also do well to educate our students in the disciplines of law, literature, and history. Law, including constitutional law, is helpful because it can provide an appreciation for the virtues of adversary argument and can show how “two reasonable and honest men can disagree on a determined question and thus judge differently” (Perelman, 1980, 165). Literature and history can extend our imaginations by allowing us to conceive of human beings with values or conceptions of the good, some of which are familiar, some of which are strange and some of which conflict with those that we happen to hold. James Harold has described here how the reading of fiction can help “contribute to the improvement of the moral imagination” by helping us to “imagine what it is like to be another” (2005, 255). Isaiah Berlin has argued that historians,

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in a similar way, exercise an “imaginative insight,” a skill in bringing before us a “revelation of a way of life,” in “bringing a past age to life” (1996, 25).

These fields of human thought are useful to public administration because they help remind us that conflict is something quite normal and that there is virtue in seeking to resolve such conflict by political practices of adversarial argument rather than violence. Conflict is normal not simply, as we are so often reminded, because of human weaknesses, but also because of the varieties of different conceptions of the good, as well as conceptions of justice, that we, as human beings, in different circumstances, seem capable of imagining. Education in law, literature, and history can help public administrators seeking justice understand that “we should look in society not for consensus, but for ineliminable and acceptable conflicts, and for rationally controlled hostilities, as the normal condition of mankind; not only normal, but also the best condition of mankind from the moral point of view, both between states and within states” (Hampshire, 1989, 189). As Hampshire points out, “conflict is perpetual: why then should we be deceived?” (2000, 48). By embracing this idea that conflict is inevitable, we can develop a better understanding of, and an appreciation for, the character of our political practices and the crucial role that they play in fostering our very different conceptions of justice in public administration.

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