Unknowability, Heuristics, and Ethical Imperatives of Public Value Creation

Various frameworks or models have been proposed to help guide public managers in public value creation. This chapter argues that they are heuristics designed to address the unknowability problem of public value creation, playing a similar role as many other heuristics in the public administration literature. However, the public value heuristics are not a panacea, and they suffer from insufficient attention to the ethical uncertainties inherent in the value creation process. Four alternative ways of incorporating ethics into public value heuristics are discussed: integrating public value heuristics (e.g., the strategic triangle) with ethics heuristics (e.g., the ethics triangle), identifying major ethical issues in public value creation, examining the cognitive ethical bias that public managers may encounter in value-creation decisions, and attending to institutional ethics that support public value creation.