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normative theory and policy evaluation Essay

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I. PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
An interesting question concerns the ethical obligations of people who do policy analysis research. Such research often involves ethical dilemmas that relate to:
1. Whether one's purposes should include prescription or evaluation, as well as prediction or explanation.
2. Whether or not to work to maximize the interests of a political party, special interest group, or only general societal interests.
3. Focusing on intended consequences versus all consequences.
4. Efficiency versus equity as policy goals.
5. Evaluation along versus evaluation plus diverse replication as an obligation. 6. Cost-incurring versus cost-saving in research.
7. Whether or not to share one's raw data.
8. Research validity …show more content…

2. Bringing up the bottom with regard to those who are least well off, as expounded by John Rawls.
3. Doing things that make everyone better off or at least no one worse off, as expounded by Vilfredo Pareto.
Benefits refer to whatever the society and/or its leaders consider desirable. Costs refer to whatever is considered undesirable. Benefits and costs can refer to monetary or nonmonetary effects. Benefits and costs are interchangeable concepts depending on how they are worded. Thus, high employment is a benefit, and high unemployment is a cost, but they are the complements or inverses of each other. It makes more sense to subtract
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costs from benefits in talking about overall goals than dividing costs by benefits. The subtraction criterion gives more of a net gain to one's original assets when one project is better on B-C, but another is better on B/C.
Other overall goals are also defective, such as (1) merely maximizing benefits without considering costs, (2) merely minimizing costs without considering missed benefits, (3) maximizing benefits subject to a maximum cost level, (4) minimizing costs subject to a minimum benefit level, or (5) maximizing change in benefits divided by change in costs. The fifth alternative is only a means to maximizing benefits minus costs. The third and fourth alternatives

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