Toward a Theory of Social Justice for Public Administration

Abstract

Three principles of Catholic social theory suggest three principles of justice for assigning basic duties in administrative praxis. They can be derived from the fundamental moral principles of public administration and the fundamental moral principles of capitalism as expounded by Adam Smith and elaborated by subsequent theorists: First, each person participating in an administrative practice, including those affected by it, has an equal duty to seek the widest efficacious distribution of benefits and burdens that is reasonable under the circumstances (distributism). Second, no administrative function or problem may be performed or solved in a manner that disempowers either the individuals or the group accorded goods or services (subsidiarity). Finally, all administrative functions or problems must be addressed in such a manner as to develop and maintain trust and confidence among administrative agencies and the people they serve (solidarity). These principles express justice as a composite of three ideas: dignity, opportunity, and responsibility.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.