James Jones
POLS 546
Dr. Connelly
May 5, 2006
Do public officials and the public at large have obligations to future generations? Should the moral and ethical responsibility of public officials extend to future generations? These are central questions posed by Frederickson in chapter six of The Spirit of Public Administration. Frederickson begins chapter six with typical Frederickson utopianism as he quotes the Athenian Citizen's Oath. This normative idea of man does not take into consideration man's innate need for rationality, or the teleological philosophy of utilitarianism particularly associated with John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham. In the contemporary post-9/11 world, security, happiness, pleasure, dignity, and the like, trump the deontological ideals of fundamental principles of right and wrong. Issues of social equity and intergenerational equity create policy that may be good in a general sense, but is seldom good for everyone. The Platonic ideal of Eros, "a love for one who is to be," is a overly optimistic view of human nature. Based on finite and unequal allocation of non-renewable natural resources and a doubling of the world population, a population who will consume these non-renewable natural resources (contributing to massive movement of people across sovereign borders), Frederickson's ideal of intergenerational equity is not sustainable. We often hear about "social justice," "environmental justice," "immigrant rights," and other variations of the concept of social justice. The meanings of these terms are frequently obscured, often deliberately. Rather than expressions of rights under the rules of ...