POS 3263: Policy, Ethics, and Public Leadership – Spring 2019

The basic premise of this course is that public leaders, including those who work in the public interest in the private sector, bear a special responsibility to be ethical leaders. Recent events have highlighted the importance of such leadership, and the crises that arise when ethics are lacking in the public sector. Public leaders often face difficult ethical choices. Competition between competing values, such as efficiency and equity, are common, as are differences among elected officials, public managers and citizens about which values are most important in a given situation. Therefore, it is essential that public leaders understand the moral implications of their actions and are able to work through ethical dilemmas in a careful, reasoned and effective way.

Public leaders play a role in either making public policy, implementing public policy, or both. This added dimension offers a chance to critically examine the issues that face ethical decision making when those decisions will directly impact citizens at either the local, state, national, or even international levels. The politics of ethical public leadership will be included as an underlying factor that can have an impact in some areas and not others. At a basic level the values of a society are reflected in its government and policies, so to be able to define what we determine as ethical policies, we must first be able to evaluate the proper role of government and what we define as the good life. Understanding the shared values and responsibilities of society and how those values change over time bring into focus what we believe ethical leadership and government to be. This course explores those concepts and ideas through philosophical and theoretical perspectives as they are applied to the real world in which we live.

Current version of the SYLLABUS can be downloaded here. The syllabus is subject to change.