Law - Criminal STATESMANSHIP AND ETHICS ASSIGNMENT

Statesmanship and Ethics in Public Administration

i, I'm Sean acres on the dean of the helm School of Government. And I want to take a minute to visit with you about statesmanship and ethics in public administration. Now, we don't often think of statesmanship in terms of public administration. But I'll tell you, it's a very, very important topic when we think about those who are leaders, political leaders, statesmen, diplomats. In the United States, we tend to immediately gravitate toward congressmen and congresswomen, senators, state senators, diplomats, and those that have been assigned, either elected or appointed to their offices. But what many of us don't realize is that the mass volume of actual application of public policy in the United States takes place at the public administration level. Let's talk for just a second about how that works. In any, any given legislative scheme. You've got a group of legislators who'd been authorized to create laws. Once they create those laws, you basically got a big picture that says this is the goal and this is how we're trying to accomplish it. It's the executive branch that exist to enforce those laws, to execute those laws, to bring those laws into the real world, to apply them to our day-to-day lives. And because the processes are so complicated, the geography is so large and the population is so large. We have very complicated structures for the executive branch to do that. And one of the ways that they've done that, that the executive branch has, has worked to apply those laws, is by developing a regulatory scheme. In other words, creating agencies whose job it is to apply the law. Most of the large bodies of law take it on themselves to create an agency for the executive branch in which to execute these laws. So if you think of it that way, you've got many, many, many times the number of governmental actors in the public administration realm than you do in the elected legislative realm. And each one of these have an opportunity to lead to be a statesman. Now, when we talk about statesmen and states women, what do we mean? What are we getting at there? At the base of that thought, at the base of that idea is a very noble concept of one serving out of a heart, do good for other people. Literally, putting it in biblical terms would be an act of vocation of a calling, not really a job. So it would immediately distinguish someone who is there for the service of others, who's truly there to solve problems of others. Someone who's there to be a shepherd as opposed to someone who's climbing a political or a career path. And then you have to ask yourself this, if we talk about statesmanship and ethics, the moment that we say the word ethics, we've implied something very serious. We've implied value judgments. We've implied that somewhere out there someone is making a set of decisions and they're having to ask themselves what's right and what's wrong? What's the most aesthetic? What's the most beautiful? What's the best way to accomplish a thing? And what's the most honorable way to accomplish a thing. Now, when we do that, the moment we ask those kinds of questions, we're attempting to apply a standard and we don't often think about it. But those basic standards of what's good and what's bad, what's moral, and what's immoral, they arise from worldviews. So when we talk about ethics, especially in the context of a course at Liberty University, it gives us the opportunity to talk about analyzing these things from a Judeo-Christian worldview. Because in the West, the vast majority of the decisions and the values and the substance of our laws arose from some general presuppositions that came directly from a Judeo, Christian worldview. The things like the value of life, the value and integrity of the person, the value of freedom, the value of liberty. All of these things arise from a general presupposition, presupposition, world you thought that these things are in and of themselves good. We also had ideas of things that are what we call malum in, say bad in and of themselves, that the abuse of the innocent is bad in and of itself. For example, stealing is bad in and of itself. For example, lying is bad in and of itself, for example. So when we talk about ethics and statesmanship and you put those things together, this is what you find for the public administrator. That public administrators are not just there, just to look at the numbers. They are policymakers. And as policymakers, they have the opportunity to approach that job from one of mission and of calling to apply the exact same standards and values that shape the American Constitution and shape the ideas of the founders. All not just to promote themselves, but to meet the needs of those that God has placed in their charge. I've enjoyed being with you today and I look forward to being with you in future videos.