Commentaries on “Public Value is Unknowable”: Valuing the Dimensions of Public Choices

• DOI: 10.1177/00953997211052596
• Author: Mark H. Moore
• Date: 01 November 2021
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211052596

Administration & Society

2021, Vol. 53(10) 1603 –1609

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00953997211052596

journals.sagepub.com/home/aas

Perspectives

Commentaries on

“Public Value is

Unknowable”:

Valuing the Dimensions

of Public Choices

Mark H. Moore1

To me, this is a very exciting paper because it takes on directly and power-

fully what I would describe as the “epistemology” of public policy analysis,

evaluation, and decision-making.

Nearly 40 years ago when public policy was emerging as an academic/

professional field of inquiry I published an essay titled “Policy Analysis v.

Social Science: Some Fundamental Differences” (Moore, 1983), in which I

raised some questions about the degree to which the methods and findings of

social science could ever provide a complete basis for predicting and appro-

priately evaluating the many large and small decisions about how to use pub-

lic assets to accomplish public purposes. At the heart of this was not only

worries about the completeness of social science knowledge, and the ability

of decision analytics to deal with dynamic systems of causation and multi-

attribute utility functions, but also the important philosophical and political

questions about what individuals and societies should (as a normative ideal)

and did (as an empirical reality) value both as individual and socially desired

“outcomes” of public policy choices, and in terms of their participation in the

processes of deciding how the assets of the state would be used in pursuit of

those new social states.

In the following decades, I tried to produce policy arguments that could meet

the standards of what are described in this article as “knowability”—which

1Harvard University, USA

Corresponding Author:

Mark H. Moore, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge,

MA 02138, USA.

Email: mark_moore@harvard.edu

1052596AAS0010.1177/00953997211052596Administration & SocietyMoore

research-article2021