Public Value, Values, and Public Services

What is a good life? The question has bedevilled philosophers across the ages. For Confucius, the good life is found in relationships and cultivating one’s culture, for Plato in understanding the essence of ideal forms, Aristotle’s good life is one spent reflectively gaining knowledge, whilst for the Christian life after death, the Muslim forbidding evil, reciting and the five duties, and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita emphasises good conduct and character, oneness with nature. Here, we focus on how good public services contribute towards a good life: security, healthy environment, transport, health, and education—Kinder et al. (2022) discuss the wide range of these services. Public service staff must balance citizens’ needs and wants with the resources available—the social and the economic. Overall, the accountability of public services is part of citizens’ assessing if they have a good life; perhaps interpreted as wellbeing, or meaningfulness, fulfilment. All of these are encapsulated in public value (PV) since as we will show, PV is made use of the values (plural) that citizens have, and PV aims to put subjective and objective valuations on the achievement of values-to-value (Vs2V).