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Ethical Issues in Evaluation

Ethics in evaluation are focused on what it means for evaluators to “do the right thing.” Although there is considerable controversy about what “the right thing” means, in philosophy as well as practice, there is general agreement that ethical challenges are common in all phases of the evaluation process, from initial contracting to the reporting and use of the findings. This entry discusses various approaches to ethics and their implications for evaluation, ethical challenges in evaluation tasks, two sets of guidelines for conducting good evaluations, and emerging perspectives on ethics in evaluations.

Approaches to Ethics

The nature of ethical behavior has been debated for millennia. From these debates, we recognize that there are different branches of the field of ethics (metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics) and different criteria (virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequentialist ethics), all having implications for ethics in evaluation today.

Metaethics

Metaethics addresses fundamental questions about moral claims, including questions about whether it is even possible to have actual knowledge about ethics, about what is right and wrong.

Most evaluators would agree that claims about ethical behavior are often not just subjective preferences (e.g., that certain conflicts of interest are unethical) and so accept what is called cognitivism, contrasted with noncognitivism as the view that all judgments about ethics are a matter of personal feelings. However, most would also be of skeptical view, called centralism, that some universal principle (e.g., “moderation in all things”) can appropriately define moral behavior in all contexts, instead looking to apply the various ethical principles that best fit specific contexts (noncentralism; e.g., in the specific evaluation situation, it was wrong to exclude particular stakeholders).

Normative Ethics

Normative ethics presumes that it is possible to have standards of ethics that are prescriptive in distinguishing right from wrong (not just descriptive accounts of the standards that people do use), with debates on the appropriateness of the three major positions of virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequentialism.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics focus on the quality of an individual’s character, which requires some understanding of why a particular action was taken. For example, someone who shared internal documents that revealed illegal government behavior could be viewed as a virtuous whistleblower if the motive was to safeguard the public interest but would be viewed very differently if the motive was a revenge for being passed over for promotion.

Deontological Ethics

Deontological ethics addresses one’s duty and the rights of others. Immanuel Kant provides a major historical example, with his categorical imperative providing unconditional requirements for ethical behavior. More recently, John Rawls’s deontological approach defined moral acts as those that we would converge on if we were ignorant of, and hence not biased by, how they would affect our personal interests. This focus on personal duty and respect for the rights of others guides most efforts to delineate ethical standards and principles for evaluators.

Consequentialism

For consequentialists, behavior is judged by its consequences. John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham provide historical examples of this approach with the development of utilitarianism, with its goal of maximizing aggregate happiness. Modern versions include the Kaldor–Hicks criterion which, again, maximizes aggregate utility but operationalizes utility in monetary terms.

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