VIRTUTEA SI PRACTICA ADMINISTRAłIEI PUBLICE
The public administraton’s virtue and practice

Summary/Abstract: The division of labor and the differentiation of function in early societies produce a vocabulary in which men are described in terms of roles and fulfill. The use of evaluative words follows hard upon this, since any role can be filled well or ill and any customary mode of behavior conformed to or broken away from. But evaluation with a wider scope is only possible when traditional role behavior is seen in contrast with other possibilities, and the necessity of choice between old and new ways becomes a fact of social life. It is not surprising therefore that it is in the transition from the society which was the bearer of the Homeric poems to the society of the fifth-century citystate that good and its cognates acquired a variety of uses, and that it is in the following decades that mere reflect self-consciously about those uses. Greek philosophical ethics differs from later moral philosophy in ways that reflect the difference between Greek society and modern society. The concepts of duty and responsability in the modern sense appear only in germ or marginally; those of goodness, virtue and prudence are central. The respective roles of these concepts hinge upon a central difference. In general, Greek ethics asks, What am I to do if I am to fare well? Modern ethics asks, What ought I to do if I am to do right? And it asks this question in such a way that doing right is made something quite independent of faring well. Although Greek ethics can not offer a universal principle seen as a fundamental truth or a rule of conduct (the idea of virtue as a mean can not be used to solve problems regarding public responsability), it can be seen as a background for a pattern of normative ethics in the field of public administration. This normative ethics can specify the goals, the definitions and a common field of references, explanations regarding the practice of public administration. Even if the common public administrator does not need to guide his activity upon Greek ethics of virtues, the ethics of virtues is important and necessary when one can develop prescription for a coherent ethical identity for public administration.

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