Beyond Efficiency: The Logical Underpinnings of Administrative Principles
论文论证人们在选择政治和行政原则时，会隐含地承诺其他元原则，表面原则的追求可能损害其基础，元原则在冲突时必须优先。
In everyday political discourse, people invoke all sorts of principles to justify their actions. Among them are democracy, equity, efficiency, and It is our thesis that such explicit commitments necessarily bring with them certain others. Implicit within the choice of political and administrative principles are certain metaprinciples which underlie and give meaning to these By committing ourselves to one principle, we are also implicitly committing ourselves to all these others as well. I We may not intend to do so. We may not want to do so. But, logically, we have to do so.2 That is just the way that the logic of legitimating principles works. Saying that various principles are bound together in this way is not to say that the pursuit of the explicit principle leads inexorably to the satisfaction of that which is implicit. Quite the contrary. There is a real danger that the pursuit of the surface principle may, from time to time, lead to outcomes inimical to the more fundamental principles which it was meant to serve. Surface principles must not be allowed to eat away their own foundations in this way. Meta-principles must necessarily trump surface ones in cases of conflict if our actions really are to be justified by the principles to which we appeal. Our arguments apply with equal force to anyone and everyone who embraces any of a wide variety of principles. They obviously apply to legislators. But they also extend to every citizen with political preferences. And they also extend to civil servants who believe themselves to have no political preferences, but merely to be committed to certain formal values such as due process. Our argument is that all these people have committed themselves to political principles, whether substantive or procedural in nature. All must, therefore, be bound by the logic of those commitments if their chosen principles are truly to justify their actions.