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PUBLIC POLICY AS THE CONTINUATION OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY BY OTHER MEANS |
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| Authors: | William P. Branden |
| Affiliation: | WILLIAM P. BRANDON, PhD, MPH, i s an Associate Professor of Political Science at Seton Hail University. After earning degrees at Johns Hopkins, The University of London, Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and working for five years in an OEO-funded neighborhood health center, he taught health politics and policy a t the University of Rochester, where he had appointments in the Preventlve Medicine Department in the medical school and in the Political Science Department. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to spend 1982–83 at the Hastings Center Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences. His philosophical interests are represented by fact and value in the Thought of Peter Winch: Linguistic Analysis Broaches Metaphysical Questions, Political Theory (1982). His most recent health policy piece, Evaluating Health Planning: Empirical Evidence on HSA Reguiation of Prepaid Group Practices, appeared in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Low in Spring, 1984. |
| Abstract: | The paper suggests that the oldest and newest glsubfieldslg of political science—political philosophy and public policy analysis–share important features lacking in those areas of the discipline that have modeled themselves after the natural sciences. Both are incompatible with the belief social sciences can be "value-free" and both are legitimate academic pur- suits that aspire to systematic and rigorous analysis of significant questions or problems. Fundamental considerations link the two enterprises. (1) Public policy analysis as currently practiced i s based largely on economics which i s the instantiation of a particular moral philosophy. (2) Logical problems in the basic assumptions of applied economics and policy analysis require the kind of fundamental reexamination to which moral philosophy can contribute. The second section uses three health policy examples–tax expenditures that promote the purchase of health insurance, euthanasia, and long-term institutional care for the elderly–to show how moral philosophy can help in policy analysis. The third section, an examination of Graham Allison's three epistemological models for understanding public policy, demonstrates that work in public policy also should stimulate philosophical inquiry. |
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